The Future Of Graphics

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Soldato
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I was having a think last night and haivng just posted in this thread, I thought I'd create my own, This one is about graphics and how they will continue to evolve .

For those of us old enough to remember them we had aSpeccy 48k, and used to play such games as Booty, Commando, Skool Daze and Elite. They were all great and as in my case I used to marvel at some of the later speccy games graphics. Jumping forward 25 years and we're playing games like Mass Effect 2, Far Cry 2, Bioshock 2 and they look incredible, and I often think how amazing it is how far game graphics have come.

Now my question is how far do you think gfx will go? given the advancements in graphics in the last 25 years will we see Avatar (Film) like graphics within the next 25 years, full Virtual Reality devices that will give almost complete imersion in the game's world? Or will we reach a sticking point with graphical processing power & will we reach a point were it will be impossible to power such demanding PCs from a home electrical source?
 
Cloud gaming will take care of the last point.

Graphics will get better and better until it becomes photorealistic, and able to handle huge environments. That will take a long time!
 
I personally think we are at the higher end of the of the graphical development curve to which there has to be a horizon before it comes realism. This is no more evident when you look at how games changed over a two year period 6 six years ago compared to the last two. Sure both DX10 and 11 have brought many new features but the visual experience is no more than refinement over previous generations. My opinion, and it's only that, when the curve has been reached, we'll look at game content rather than how they look.
 
Forgot about Booty!

First game I ever bought for my Amstrad CPC464 (full colour monitor) :D

Will still have it somewhere and when I last booted my the old girl about 10 years ago, it still worked.
 
If you want to see the future of graphics then take a look at the 3dmark 11 demo video.

Watched this last night and I have never seen anything look so good. The images were film quality. It is of 2 deep sea submersibles viewing a wrecked deep sea drilling platform.

I was blown away by how good it looked. At some points I was convinced it was an actual film and not a pc rendering this.
 
Photo-Realism graphics are already near possible but just not on home machines since they lack the power to do render them.

Within the next 10 years I think games will approach realistic graphics for high end titles.
 
What sucks is that by the time games feel like real life, with convincing 3D / VR possible in the average home, I'll probably be too old to care about games.

Though think of the possibilities ;)!
 
PapaLazaru said:
Forgot about Booty!

First game I ever bought for my Amstrad CPC464 (full colour monitor) :D

Will still have it somewhere and when I last booted my the old girl about 10 years ago, it still worked.
Click to expand...

CPC 464 was my 1st also. Beast of a machine. Funny having to wait up to 40 minutes sometimes for a game to load from a cassette tape!
 
The software is definitely there for photo-realism graphics, it just takes time for the hardware to catch up. Within the next 20 years though... Possibly. Maybe not completely commercial by then, but it will be available.
 
we are a long way from photo realistic, don't forget avatar is not generated in real time...

it seems to me that as the power of gfx cards increases there is deminishing returns in terms or how real games look.. ie doubling the power of the card does not make a game look twice as real...

I'm sure in time it will be totally realistic assuming we dont have ww3 and all the expensive factories that churn out the chips get destroyed...

but realistic is decades away..

avatar cheated and the character animation is of real people not computer generated, so we still lack the computing power / technology / software to properly animate the real world..
 
Smit said:
Photo-Realism graphics are already near possible but just not on home machines since they lack the power to do render them.

Within the next 10 years I think games will approach realistic graphics for high end titles.
Click to expand...

Do they then become interactive movies rather than games?

Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. Games generally involve mental or physical stimulation, and often both. Many games help develop practical skills, serve as a form of exercise, or otherwise perform an educational, simulational or psychological role.

Mentions nothing of visual experience.
 
Problem is as things approach photo real they become really creepy and unnatural.


If everything it noticeably off (like avatar/final fantasy movies) real it looks much more real.
 
Admiral Huddy said:
I personally think we are at the higher end of the of the graphical development curve to which there has to be a horizon before it comes realism. This is no more evident when you look at how games changed over a two year period 6 six years ago compared to the last two. Sure both DX10 and 11 have brought many new features but the visual experience is no more than refinement over previous generations. My opinion, and it's only that, when the curve has been reached, we'll look at game content rather than how they look.
Click to expand...

The current consoles have a lot to do with it. Current pc hardware could (and should) be treating us to much better visuals and gameplay if only it were still the lead platform for the big developers.
 
Bear in mind atm photo-realistic CGI in movies needs so much power that it takes them a day just to render one second of footage iirc. So we're a fair bit away from doing that in real time yet!
 
I'm wondering whether game content and photo realism is a good thing to be honest. I mean do you really want your FPS horror genre with photo realism and geniune physics model and new input devices on your body feeling every gunshot/slash wound??? Do you want the murders in them to really look that real???

it might play havoc on the mental health of the easily impressionable/susceptible.
 
Graphics aren't that bad at the moment, we're just got a long way to be until we get to the other end of uncanny vally. Real gamers don't care about graphics anyway. ^^
 
I think that we will be approaching a peak in graphics in several years time, I think we will get to a point where graphics are near to photo-realistic but the harware available to even the most enthusiatic of gamers won't be able to keep up.

I think of it similar to when Crysis first came out, games will come out that push graphics just that bit further forward, but basically no-one will have the hardware to effectively max the game out and witness how good it looks for a few years.

Graphics will probably always keep improving, but i think we will be in for longer waits for the hardware to catch up and actually be available at decent prices.
 
What you've got to remember is there are various ways, even now, of rendering real-time 3D scenes. We've all enjoyed the massively adopted polygons wrapped in bitmaps approach, but we're now seeing the long term limitations of churning out scenes based on this approach. We've stuck with it too, promoting features that alleviate some of the growing pains, think bump mapping etc, to get more detail for little extra work from the hardware.

I'm not massively up to date on the scene, but I would be surprised that as our current approach plateaus we don't see different approaches rear their heads. Then again, we now have our new medicine, tessellation, to help us get through.. and the entire industry is built on one approach, so any move is going to be very very very very slow.

25 years is a long time, but I don't see real-time photorealistic 3d environments happening without a dramatic change in the technology (power/cooling/space) or approach. A breakthrough could happen tomorrow, or never..
 
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