when will we start to see better graphics and ray tracing ?

garyfl

garyfl

garyfl

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been wondering this for a while.

obviously games and 3d environments have come so far since the likes of doom 1 and even quake 3 to such extremes as crysis and the like. but when will we start to see REAL photo realistic graphics and lighting, proper shadows etc.. lush environments with rich weighted physics. something i particularly cant wait for.

been doing research and stats say this sort of thing wont be around for another 5-10 years i quote "a decade".


feel free to discuss this topic, be nice to get a little convo going about what you expect to see and any insights as to what is already around, could do with learning something new :)

bonus points for any posted ray-tracing pics or graphically edged games at high resolutions.
 
Theres the odd game that you can think "that looks almost real". Dirt 2 on the rally sections at times i think that quite a lot. Was wondering how much more real it could look.
 
I think its about time something started to appear, theres been steady improvement but it does feel like things have slowed since consoles became more popular, theres been no need for high end graphics cards for a few years now as a mid range one with a reasonable system will play most stuff at high settings, they either can't do it or won't, i suspect progress has just slowed now which is a shame.
 
ray tracing is the holy grail, and the one thing that seems to be further and further away. the amount of power needed to fully ray-trace a complex scene in real time is just totally out of reach. id say even 10 years is pushing it
 
It takes hours to ray trace a fairly simple scene. To get 60FPS they need to be 864000 times faster. (based on a 4 hour render) If you go by moores law then in 10 years computers will only be 32 times the speed they are today. Therefore it can't be done without taking shortcuts.

(this argument obviously has flaws just something to think about)
 
i imagine that if you go back about 10 years or so they'd be saying similar things about "the next 5-10 years".

As for ray-tracing, it's not the be-all and end-all of graphical quality. It has its great merits, but most implementations (not real-time) will still use rasterisation for part of the rendering. A 'mix' seems to be the best way to go for graphical quality at the moment.

As for games, it is often said (and i would agree) that CryEngine 2 provided the closest-to-realism graphics yet, but obviously that's nowhere near 'photo' realism. Consider the processing power required there, and how systems 3 years on are finally tackling this beast (optimisation debates aside).
Then consider that we're essentially modelling an infinitely complex system, and the more complexity we discard in favour of attempting to render this system at at least 60 times per second, the further from 'photo' realism we go.

That said, the technologies are improving all the time. Considering the progress made in the past 10 years, I wouldnt be surprised to see huge leaps and strides in the next 10 years, as CPU/GPU technology develops and interbreeds, along with physics/graphics processing APIs.


It's worth remembering though that currently the cost of producing a high (graphical) quality game is very large. The time investment is huge, so unless there are serious methods to cut development time for the same results, I wouldnt be too confident in developers going 'all out' for photorealism for some time to come.
 
I saw a video posted on this forum a while back called "Infinity Graphics" or something like that, it gave me hope that we might see more realistic graphics sooner than we think.

Anyway it was a convincing video.
 
Purely from what John Carmack will be bouncing around with in the next few years, the Tech6 engine (successor to the Tech5 which is yet to debut in retail) will have some kind of hybrid of ray tracing / raster techniques. Whilst he said previously he wouldn't be starting any more engines from scratch and Tech5 would become a base to be improved upon, it is still probably pretty fair to say Tech6 will still be pretty far out. Also wouldn't be too unreasonable of an assumption to say Tech7 may then be purely ray traced, but then of course you are talking the best part of 10 years away.
 
Eames said:
I saw a video posted on this forum a while back called "Infinity Graphics" or something like that, it gave me hope that we might see more realistic graphics sooner than we think.

Anyway it was a convincing video.
Click to expand...


do you mean the unlimited detail ? ive seen that on youtube, 3d environments made with point plan data
 
RageQuit© said:
What can ray tracing do?
Click to expand...

Ultra realistic lighting and shadowing. Which current graphical effects manage well enough visually, you have to remember that their lighting and shadowing are separate and won't be 1:1 in accuracy (that being the quality of the lighting may far out weigh the quality of shadowing), sub effects of lighting such as reflection, refraction, caustics, crepusculars etc are again separate and won't match other each other in accuracy. Ray tracing encompasses all this and more under one algorithm, just happens that is quite harsh on the computational requirement.
 
didnt nvidia manage real time ray tracing with 3x 480's in sli ? i think they got 2.4 frames per second.

so were probably 10 years away from real time ray tracing
 
Graphics aren't the be-all and end-all. I'd rather have better AI than better graphics.

Also, the better graphics become, the more Uncanny Valley kicks in when dealing with characters. At the moment no game characters look realistic enough for thi to be a problem.
 
Eames said:
I saw a video posted on this forum a while back called "Infinity Graphics" or something like that, it gave me hope that we might see more realistic graphics sooner than we think.

Anyway it was a convincing video.
Click to expand...

Please ignore that video, it is full of rubbish and definitely not the way foward.

Anyway, ray-tracing is still a long way off - certainly lighting solutions used in games might start to use more ray-tracing elements but to implement a full realtime ray-tracing lighting engine we'd have to sacrifice too much scene detail so it wouldn't be worth it.

I'm slightly non-plussed by the OP though, just because ray-tracing is a long way off doesn't mean that graphics won't greatly improve in the meantime. When we have next gen consoles with tesselation support built in like dx11 cards then we'll have a nice improvement. :)
 
It already takes developers 2 or 3 years to create a game that has about 20 minutes of gameplay. Even more realistic graphics will just push the costs of games ever higher and we will be even less likely to get a decent length game.

To be honest it's not like most games need photorealism. We all enjoyed games years ago that by today's standards would look bad even for Gameboy graphics! :p

So the question I am really interested in is when will we start to see better stories and gameplay in games? :)
 
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