Super Top-of-the-Range Graphics

[Anarchemitis]

As I have posted before, I don't beleive that immersive gameplay nessecitates 'Industrial Light & Magic'-level graphics, but gameplay and story that immerses you beyond the point that you don't much about the appearance.

But will it ever be possible to have movie-level graphics in a game? How far can resoloutions and raytracing go?

I imagine that there would be a limit until commercially availible superconductors come out, on account of distance:
You have a gaming PC with an entire Supercomputer-esque Rendering Farm that could do Crysis at 150fps with ease. You'd think you'd be able to activly render something as complex as, say Ratatouille. But you wouldn't be able to because the electric signals would be traversing so much circutry that it would have a significant impact on refresh rate. Each signal would be traversing possibly thousands of kilometers before actually being interpreted as a picture, never mind having to do so up to 20 times a second.

Do you think graphics can/will come farther for games? Should they?


(On a minor note, Ratatouille was the given rendering example because of the realistic food, fluids and particles that made it a very demanding render for every frame.)

 

[LordOmnit]

Considering that we have come from entire scenes that can only handle like eight or sixteen colors to said Crysis in video games then it isn't so hard to believe that the graphics will continue to progress to the level of Ratatouille in gameplay.
Although I think the problem will not lay in just the rendering of the graphics, since we can already do that obviously, but the mechanics of being able to producing a scene at those levels of graphics for input-sensitive games as opposed to a static series of pictures that are produced specifically as is as opposed to conditionally (and repeatedly as you noted).
But that will require the "hypothetical future computer from space" combined with the magical obsidian monolith and having some extra bits that cost any remaining fraction of your soul and savings that you have.

 

[John Galt]

Well, Moore's Law states that computers double in power every 18 months or something like that so eventually we'll be able to create life like graphics on computers but the only question is whether or not we'll have programmers and designers able to do so. But seeing how far we've come in the past thirty years, I have enough faith that we're in for some improvement.

 

[GrowlersAtSea]

I think some areas of the market will continue striving for better and better visuals (with their eyes on the ever-elusive photorealism) while others, probably in the end the vast majority of the market, will end up being content with something less.

PC Shooters, for example have always been pushing the limits, and will probably continue to do so for years and years to come until they reach a level that would probably astound us today. But in the end the PC shooter market is small compared to things like Warcraft or the Sims, and very small compared to the console market.

Platformers on consoles, and similar genres really have little need to get a whole lot better. There are things to be improved upon in the future, but the glaring things that stood out to any person in past generations like very polygonal objects or ugly sprites have all pretty much disappeared.

So I think some specific areas will continue the progression, but many others may only marginally improve in the future. This could overall be good though for the average gamer, since literally for decades the latest visuals have been one of the most important things to a game. If people begin to look past that, to gameplay and art-style, only good things can come of it. But time shall tell.

 

[PurpleRain]

Can graphics make a perfect circles yet? until they do then we still have a bit to go.

 

[Anarchemitis]

That I'm aware of, a geometrically correct 'perfect' circle is absoloutly unachivable for a computer via rendering, but with 2 Dimensional graphics that manipulate math instead of resoloution, perfect curves according to Biezer curves and circles and such are fiesable and have been used, but not th the extent everyone would recognize as 'perfect' graphics. The game I am speaking of is none other than Paper Mario. Mathematically speaking, Paper Mario has the best graphics ever devised on account of geometry as opposed to the limits of surface resoloution, gradients, particles and the like.

 

[defcon 1]

If we do make games look as real as they can get, artist will wants to go beyond with manipulating effects and such. Even if they do look real we may still require more power for different games to be as real. For example you can have a few cinematic enemies for shooter games but imagine trying to realistically render RTS games like Battle For Middle Earth or Supreme Commander where you have armies. I'm a believer in the fact we will always demand more power for crazier graphic techniques.

I gave thought to using render farms as a platform. In basic terms, I thought each node would process and rasterize a fraction of a frame then send it back to the primary node.

Can graphics make a perfect circles yet? until they do then we still have a bit to go.

NURBS can achieve mathematically perfect circles but bring wrath upon the CPU. Vector textures could be used to break away from resolution artifacts but they can't produce any good shading. Just stick with the high-res textures for now.

I still dream of the day games will run on quantum computers.