Are the graphical elements of gaming starting to peak?

Admiral Huddy

Admiral Huddy

Admiral Huddy

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How can anyone who has played Far Cry2 not be impressed by its stunning seamless graphics. The awesome terrain, draw distance, textures and shadowing are pretty realistic in terms of what we have ever seen before. But is the technology starting to peak?

When you look back on older games, such as original Far Cry, the graphics now seem some what dated which is to be expected but it wasn’t that long ago really. In those days, the games hardware requirements pretty much dominated your upgrade path and both HL2, FarCry, to name a few, really tortured pretty much everyone’s hardware at the time. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

For example, my 2 year old graphics card can easily play all* the latest titles at their highest settings, including FarCry2. Therefore, any upgrade to newer card since would be a complete waste of time.

Surely, there has to be a point where by the games themselves have little or no more room for graphical improvement and I think we are starting to see this.

Discuss.

*excludes Crysis

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dunno really but nearly every game with photo realistic graphics is garbage :D


this is why i play call of duty uo more now when i want enjoyment than the later games.even though i can play any game out at high details.most have no or limited gameplay.this is what should be looked at more than visuals.
 
Admiral Huddy said:
Physics yes but I'm refering really to presentation of the image.
Click to expand...

No graphics still have along way to go. Just look at the quailty difference between pre-rendered cut scenes and in game graphics.

Whether they really need to improve another matter. Low graphics haven't hurt the Wii and WoW sales.
 
People say this every generation.

Graphics have an immense way to go before they become photo realistic and we will need to switch over to ray traced graphics before that can happen.
 
totally I want my cgi to look cgi.

Games have a long way to go.

Think of smeagol in LOTR or Terminator. That's the level I would hope they can achieve.

Of course it will require a leap in processing power but it will come eventually.
 
As i said elsewhere, the way in which we create graphics may have to change in the not-too disatant future to accomodate for the extra development time, but we are not near the end of what's possible.

I view it in a similar way as engine development occurs now; a company makes an engine, a very long, expensive and painstaking process, makes their game but then gains extra revenue by selling the engine on. You then get an influx of games developed on that specific engine that took much less time to make but look nearly as good if not better. I think the same will happen with textures and maybe even thing like character models.

A company could develop a set of photo-realisitc textures that take huge amounts of man-hours to make, but then sell them on to games developers where lighting and effects can be applied. Imagine, instead of the next unreal engine release we get the next texture pack release that will be applied across several games thus reducing development time significantly.
 
There are a lot of techniques typically found in CGI begging to find a way into the video game world. We are actually at a pretty exciting time when it comes to real time immersion, we have a long way to go.
 
As Kree says, the next major step will eventually be raytracing. Whilst the current 'next gen' games looks amazing at times, I remember thinking the same thing about HL2 and Far Cry.

The current architecture of GPU's just isn't made for raytrace processing unfortunately, but the time will come.
 
Graphics are starting to reach the limit of our TFT's... maybe.
Next stage, Holograms! WOOT

Seriously though, they havent peaked while they are still 2D imo.
Serious work needs to go into 3D gaming.
 
Still some way I hope from photo realism, (Once games become too photo realistic it may become a bit creepy!?).

I still think there is a lot more to achieve yet in physics, animation, AI routines etc.
 
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