When will video games catch up with animation movies?

FlyingPig

FlyingPig

FlyingPig

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I am not a fan of computer-animated films but the other day was forced to sit through one of these with the other half. I was actually quite impressed by how far the technology has come. It actually looks really, really good when compared to even the most impressive video games of today. See for example Rango:


I've been playing video games for over 20 years and I can't help but be a bit disappointed about the lack of progress in the last 5 years (graphically speaking that is, I agree gameplay is more important but hey, pretty graphics are good to have). Of course consoles have a lot to answer for, but apart from that, when do you think video games will be able to offer the level of detail currently offered in the likes of Rango? Is it just a matter of processing and GPU power? I hope companies like Euclideon can shake things up a bit, but I am not holding my breath...
 
Animation is pre-rendered. Video games have to be rendered while you play by the hardware. Only if the people who make animated films decide to stop making any technical progression will video games ever catch up, but for a video game to a specific level (Rango, in this case, or you could even look to something like Avatar), then of course anything is possible, though obviously by that time the level of detail in big budget CGI will obviously be miles ahead again.
 
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I would have thought the manpower to create all the models and textures required for a game rather than set pieces animation film would be a bigger hurdle than future hardware requirements.
 
You are far more likely to get that stand of gfx on a console rather than a PC, my reasoning is a console is a fixed point in time with hardware so the code can be highly optimised etc, a PC game while has DirectX has to be made in such a way to be compatible with a wide range of hardware.

I do wish Microsoft when 7 came out had said this is only 64 bit, we are not supporting anything old, Apple did this and got away with it

Kimbie
 
Games are generally released across all platform so until consoles catch up with PC we will never see advances that can see games as good a cgi.
 
when will PC's be kicking out avatar grade FX?

thats a hard one since avatar took bizare computing power to generate...

avatar like maybe 10 years (ie looks pretty much the same)...

thats my bet anyway
 
Nikumba said:
You are far more likely to get that stand of gfx on a console rather than a PC, my reasoning is a console is a fixed point in time with hardware so the code can be highly optimised etc, a PC game while has DirectX has to be made in such a way to be compatible with a wide range of hardware.

I do wish Microsoft when 7 came out had said this is only 64 bit, we are not supporting anything old, Apple did this and got away with it

Kimbie
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Well that has always been the case and still the PC looks better because optimised can only get you so far as the hardware is ultimately where the buck stops, if the PC hardware was no better than the Consoles then the Consoles would look and play better putting AF/AA aside, but its not because the grunt of the PC outweighs the optimization of the Consoles.

Shift on the Consoles looks good but on the PC its in a whole new class.
 
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edscdk said:
when will PC's be kicking out avatar grade FX?

thats a hard one since avatar took bizare computing power to generate...

avatar like maybe 10 years (ie looks pretty much the same)...

thats my bet anyway
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Probably a LOT longer than that.

Each frame of avatar took between 50-100 hours to render on a server farm that had 35,000 processor cores.

Games are required to render 60 frames every second. Or 30 if you're playing the slide-show console version. ;)
 
jimbob27 said:
Probably a LOT longer than that.

Each frame of avatar took between 50-100 hours to render on a server farm that had 35,000 processor cores.

Games are required to render 60 frames every second. Or 30 if you're playing the slide-show console version. ;)
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I did specify looks like not as good... :-P I wanted to add "as good as in 20 years" but initialyl it seemed too long then it seemed not long enough (considering the vast power required) then I gave up thinking about it
 
As great as progress used to be say 5+ years ago, now it's pretty poor, you only have to look at the jumps in performance gpu's are making each year, if i can still play most games on an 8800gt or a 260gtx and when the latest gen only offer smoother game play at high and ultra high settings something isn't right, i doubt we'll get avatar graphics for 30 years at this rate, i don't see things doubling any more but stagnating, we're not getting anything that looks a lot better just slightly more fps at higher resolutions.
 
Radiation said:
As great as progress used to be say 5+ years ago, now it's pretty poor, you only have to look at the jumps in performance gpu's are making each year, if i can still play most games on an 8800gt or a 260gtx and when the latest gen only offer smoother game play at high and ultra high settings something isn't right, i doubt we'll get avatar graphics for 30 years at this rate, i don't see things doubling any more but stagnating, we're not getting anything that looks a lot better just slightly more fps at higher resolutions.
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Exactly my thoughts. It's all very gradual progress, no revolution anywhere. I hope in the next five years we see some kind of breakthrough that changes this trend. The whole debate about new graphics cards is a big snooze fest for me, since what is there to be excited about? So we had L.A. Noire with its improved facial animations. Guess what, the rest of the textures are still as poor as 5 years ago (yes it was a bad PC port and maybe a bad example but still) and make me want to cry.

I wonder if anyone with more knowledge about this has written an insightful article about this stagnation.
 
jimbob27 said:
Probably a LOT longer than that.

Each frame of avatar took between 50-100 hours to render on a server farm that had 35,000 processor cores.
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so.. 171 minutes, 25fps, 50 hours per frame...

you're saying Avatar took 1461.04 years to render?
 
i really love what they did with physx in mafia 2 the best by far (smoke, cloth, fire, liquid etc) but why is this not the standard in games these days? they should all be running physics of that much high quality. the water in jaust cause 2 is outstanding! all this coupled with some proper HD textures and we would feel like were moving forward.
 
uv said:
so.. 171 minutes, 25fps, 50 hours per frame...

you're saying Avatar took 1461.04 years to render?
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If you'd rendered it on one node, and not in 3D - yes. One node in 3D would have taken 2922.08 years :P Their render-farm had 35000 nodes however so would have taken around a month of render-time.
 
Rhodri2311 said:
If you'd rendered it on one node, and not in 3D - yes. One node in 3D would have taken 2922.08 years :P Their render-farm had 35000 nodes however so would have taken around a month of render-time.
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we're going slightly off topic, but reading up on the rendering of Avatar is mind boggling!

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/12/22/the-data-crunching-powerhouse-behind-avatar/

Thirty four racks comprise the computing core, made of 32 machines each with 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of memory... ...For the last month or more of production those 40,000 processors were handling 7 or 8 gigabytes of data per second, running 24 hours a day. A final copy of Avatar equated to 17.28 gigabytes per minute of storage
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Jesus wept!
 
PaddyMC89 said:
Only if the people who make animated films decide to stop making any technical progression will video games ever catch up
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Pretty much my view, with gaming you have to render realtime whereas animations can be laboriously put together over many months. If you didn't mind getting 1 frame per day instead of 10 million frames per day (~120fps), then gaming could probably look a lot closer to animated movies.
 
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