What features will you think will dramatically increrease image quality in games?

[theforce]

For some years now we haven't seen any dramatic increase in visual quality in games. Some attribute this to aging console hardware holding developers back or poor Vista sales hurting a quick transition to DX10.

The only major feature we got after DX9 was tessellation and that has barely been used in games so far. Despite that, the technology is promising when future graphics card will feature much more powerful tessellation capabilities.

We now also have physics being pushed from both Nvidia and a lesser extent ATI but for now the use of such technology is limited but l have high hopes that with the passing of time we will see interesting things being developed around this technology.

Now, what are the three features that you think will benefit games in terms of image quality and will provide the tools for developers to create games that look much better than what we have today?

 

[HW91]

ray tracing, the focusing thing with DX11 is pretty cool and hopefully devs will start making good textures

 

[Mr Krugga]

I wish PC games got away from console gaming. Crysis was released almost 3 years ago now. What was the best looking game back in 2004? What is going to be the best looking game by the end of this year?

 

[p0rks0da]

Graphics quality won't dramatically increase anytime soon. We will hopefully see some really innovative things come along when hardware is capable (flexible enough) of running software renderers, but that depends 100% on what the next consoles look like.

I've been doing a transcription of the video interview SemiAccurate did with Tim Sweeney and Andrew Richards (the audio was totally fubar), i'll post it up here when it's done, i'm still waiting on the last video at the moment (over a month since the last one was uploaded). Here is a very interesting quote from Tim i think it quite relevant to this thread:


"I really feel that we are close to the end of the line with DirectX, we're at this point of diminishing returns where if you give us 10 or 100 times better hardware performance we'll only be able to deliver graphics that are incrementally better, not actually have another revolution in graphics. If you see the artifacts in games they are all the same things, they're pixel aliasing, they're bilinear sampling artifacts on textures, they're all the artifacts with specular lighting which arise from DirectX.

By employing a new graphics pipeline from the ground up we can circumvent all of these limitations in DirectX and have a soup-to-nuts graphics pipeline, more comparable to a movie rendering pipeline than today's computer graphics pipeline."