Photo Realistic Games, When?!?!?

leSLIe

leSLIe

Fisting is Too Mainstream for Me
Joined
Oct 18, 2004
Messages
13,980
So video cards continue to get faster, better and more expensive, so much time do we have to wait to see some breath-taking photo realistic games out there eh? i´m running out of dough here ! :p

posted in the wrong forum before :eek:
 
No one is able to give you a satisfactory answer because, well, we can't look into the future.

Still, I would be surprised if we have not reached that level by 2017, considering what games looked like in 1997.
 
when that comes out then how can they improve realism??? lol wow thats a stupid question. allow yourself to do stuff you couldn't in "reality"
 
Jimmy the Greek said:
When Blu-Ray becomes more popular, b/c the extra space will allow for more dynamic FMV games.
Click to expand...

why blu-ray and not HD-DVD :) hehe

scenery in games is becoming more and more relistic... that alan wake game looks to have some pretty realistic scenery in it

so from there it can only get better

and yeah someone said look at games from the late 90's

DUKE 3d
dukenuke_screen005.jpg


and today
Crysis
931665_20070109_screen001.jpg


who knows what it will look like in 10 years

it can only keep getting better :D
 
When individual textures ranging in the 100s of megabytes can be successfully used.

When 3d objects get perfect varied colouring down. Skin isn't 1 colour, or a combination of 1-2 colours... It's 1000s of different colours, influenced by thousands of individual geometrical trinagles (pores) that change our perception of them.

When girls in-game are actually worthy of drooling over (Oblivion anyone? lol).
 
I think we need texture to become more clean and clear when you view them up-close, and we need ray-tracing (Something like that, I recall it makes highly realistic shadows).

I'd say around 5-10 years
 
does texture compression really cripple the texture quality?
 
What's the defintion of a photo realistic game? Is it supposed to be no difference between it and a photo? Isn't UT3 and GOW photorealistic?
 
with photo realistic i meant a quality of picture that when u look at it, u dont know if it´s real or computer made ;)
 
according to John Carmack were about 4 years from Lord of The Rings in-game-real-time graphics
 
You can also have beautiful looking characters... but if they do not move realistic then there is no point... which is another hurdle
 
And that gets into the whole "uncanny valley" thing. The closer we get to real, the more noticeable the slightest imperfection becomes, especially with human game characters. That may prove an impossible barrier to cross. Gollum was extremely good in LOTR, and if that level of graphical quality and animation is available in interactive content soon, it would approach photorealism for sure. But LOTR could sidestep the uncanny valley by virtue of the fact that the bulk of its CGI characters were non-human in some way. Even Gollum was cartoonish in ways that helped to distract from his lack of realism. And he had the advantage that his actions were scripted--the apparent realism of his interaction with his environment could be fine-tuned frame by frame, a luxury interactive games do not have.

I like Carmack's ideas about mega-textures. That may help improve realism dramatically in the long run. But of course, one drawback to ANY texture-based environment system is that textures can only scale down, not up.
 
Ray-tracing: Lighting won't look right without it.
Mass application of Translucency: Most things in this world will let light through if you cast enough light, Final Fantasy: Spirits Within didn't look good since the model had a plastic sheen on them.
Procedral Generation: There's no point in trying to have to think up a texture and shape for every object in the world.
Physics: Every blade of grass must respond to wind etc.
 
Your absolutely insane. Graphics today are almost remarkable for its time. In 10 years sure it will be probably 10 x better. But if you actually want something that is pwnzorroflcopterkitten good. That all upto the Graphic designers. Your demand for better then what is it now, requires many years of work.

BTW awesome photos posted. absolutely insane.
 
I think basic photo-realism in terms of textures in games might be as little as maybe five years off. Getting really close to some textures or zooming in on them will probably be a give away for a while though after that, but looking at environments as a whole, they'll probably look very impressive. So, in single frames of games (like what were seen earlier in this thread) things could probably almost fool people relatively soon.

However, I think the real hurdle is not with still images, but with environments and movement of characters. As was said, characters like Gollum have been rendered pretty convincingly with computers in movies, but Gollum is only vaguely human (yes, I know, he's one of the River-Folk, basically Hobbits from near the Anduin, but he his movements and design are kinda spider-like). Having actual human beings, with hair and clothing and movement being made to move, and all move in a life-like manner will be a real trick. We all see dozens, hundreds, many of us even thousands of individual human beings every day in our lives. We instinctively know how they move and how they look, you can almost immediately recognize a limp, someone with unusual proportions, or something else out of the norm. When people start expecting to see photo-realistic characters and movements in games, they'll probably be able to identify imperfections and feel they stand out more, as someone on the previous page mentioned, the Uncanny Valley idea.

Some of the movement issues can probably be solved with extensive motion capture work, but the devil is always in the details, small facial movements, hand movements, etc..

With all that said, I kind of expect that in a good ten years that top of the line games will probably be starting to be able to make people look and wonder when in motion, and still frames will probably be extremely impressive and probably would be able to fool many people without a really close look for tells.

We'll see though.
 
how about when u zoom in on textures that look good at a certain distance but look like a zoomed-in Jpeg when you look closely? is that up to texture resolution? how can that be fixed?
 
I would like to say within 5 years, but it depends on texture artists, and wireframe design. besides, they cant just automatically skip to real-life imaging when the technoligy isnt completely out for it yet.
 
when my computer screen has a higher resolution than my eye can make out. anyone ever looked at a hi-res medical or scientific screen? secks, but slow.
 
Well there's several issues here, processing power and storage, which as we know is growing at a predictable rate. We can predict roughly how many more polys we can push each new generation, how much the textures increase in size/complexity etc.

I'd say we're maybe 15-20 years from providing the technology that can handle textures so high res that we're fooled by them (in real time, in an interactive environment)

I think the bigger hurdle will be providing content, (e.g.) so we can have 50Billion poly source models mapped onto 10Million poly real time models in X many years, but who the hell is going to make a a model THAT complex?

Advancement in tools to generate content is the bigger step I think we'll need to overcome, we'll need the ability to generate live like foliage, trees, rocks. A lot of this might end up coming from simulations to natrually create this sort of thing.

Why make a batch of rocks, plants etc, when you can just simulate a beach with some large rocks, some waves which weather in a simulated manner, then just run the simulation at 10 thousand times the speed of real time and simulate the restructuring of the rocks, cliffs, spread of plants etc

Why build a tree with each individual branch when you can run a simulation which is programmed to show how trees grow and adds random elements and generates tree's from seed to sappling, to full blown tree.

Generating man made objects will always be harder although I have no doubt things like 3d scanners might just be easier to use in the future, find a lamp, scan it in with its texture, and have a computer generate the mesh + texture coords for it.

I hope Im around in 50-60 years when we're thinking about this kind of stuff :D
 
Crysis looks photorealistic enough for me... heck, battlefield 2 looks photorealistic too, at least to me anyways.
 
Compared to how games WERE (I started on Jedi Knight II on a PCI Radeon VE), they certainly have gotten better. I think that "photorealism" is such a subjective term, so prone to people's personal opinions on the matter, that there won't be a "settled" point at which EVERYONE is satisfied, at least not for a while. Are Oblivion's graphics better than Wolfenstein 3D's? HELL YES. Is Oblivion photo-realistic? Depends on opinion. I say not quite. Is it completely world-real (i.e. not just looks right but acts right physics and lighting wise)? No. How far away is that? Depends again on what your definition of the term is...
 
PWMK2 said:
Photo realistic = looks like real life. At least, that's how I've always heard it said. Never heard of "photo real" before, LOL.
Click to expand...

You just said looks "like", so not actually real, but close to it. And to say that those pictures of Crysis are far from realistic is an extreme exaggeration. Keep in mind, that CGI movies from 5 years ago don't look as realistic as Crysis.

Screencaps of Final Fantasy Spirits Within:
final-fantasy-movie-photo1.jpg

Final-Fantasy-Movie-0008.jpg


That movie was made with thousands of hours of rendering, using a cluster of computers, and the graphics we're able to generate today, in real-time are better or at least close.
 
The fact is, we simply dont have the tools at this point to make a truly photo realistic scene.. Software takes longer then hardware to evolve, IMHO, adding more clock cycles or shader pipelines is often akin to throwing money at a problem, which as we all know doesn't work :)
 
5-10 years.

Things have changed so drastically in the last 10 years. In fact lets look at some of those things..

The video card of 1997, the Voodoo Rush:
* 3dfx Voodoo Rush™ chipset
* 8MB EDO DRAM onboard, with 2 or 4 Megabytes of texture memory
* PCI 2.1 compliant
* True colour 180 MHz RAMDAC
* Max resolution 1600x1200 (24 bit mode)
* Vertical refresh rate (Hz) 56-200
* Maximum colors 16.7 Millions
* 3D standard supported: Direct3D, and in addiction OpenGL and 3Dfx Glide
* Connector 15-pin D-sub

The CPU of 1997 (Pentium II):

Klamath (80522)

* L1 cache: 16 + 16 KiB (Data + Instructions)
* L2 cache: 512 KiB, external chips on CPU module with 50% of CPU-speed
* Slot 1 (GTL+)
* MMX
* Front side bus: 66 MHz
* VCore: 2.8 V
* Fabrication: 0.35 µm
* First release: May 7, 1997
* Clockrate: 233, 266, 300 MHz

The RAM of 1997 was SDRAM, running probably around 66mhz in packages of around 16-32mb.

The game of 1997 was Quake 1.

Quake_1_screenshot_320x200_e1m3.png


Now lets look at today.

The card as of right now in 2007, the 8800GTX (taken from newegg, couldnt find a better source):


Interface PCI Express x16
Chipset
Chipset Manufacturer NVIDIA
GPU GeForce 8800GTX
Core clock 575MHz
Stream Processors 128
Memory
Memory Clock 1800MHz(effective)
Memory Size 768MB
Memory Interface 384-bit
Memory Type GDDR3
3D API
DirectX DirectX 10
OpenGL OpenGL 2.0
Ports
DVI 2
TV-Out HDTV / S-Video Out
VIVO No
General
Tuner None
RAMDAC 400 MHz
Max Resolution 2560 x 1600
SLI Supported Yes
Cooler With Fan

The CPU:

Brand Intel
Processors Type Desktop
Series Core 2 Duo
Model BX80557E6600
CPU Socket Type
CPU Socket Type LGA 775
Tech Spec
Core Conroe
Multi-Core Dual-Core
Name Core 2 Duo E6600
Operating Frequency 2.4GHz
FSB 1066MHz
L1 Cache 32KB+32KB
L2 Cache 4M shared
Manufacturing Tech 65 nm
Vista Ready Yes
64 bit Support Yes
Hyper-Threading Support No
Virtualization Technology Support Yes
Multimedia Instruction MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4, EM64T

And the RAM is obviously a variable in 2007, but we're talking anywhere from 400-1100mhz effective, and people generally have 512mbs-2gbs of it.

The game is Crysis (low res pic because this is a forum site after all)

Crysis-island.jpg


But hell, if you cut it in half and go in 5 year intervals, even that is pretty damn amazing how far we advanced.
 
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