How long before games reach Avatar's quality?

R

rahavsmt

Gawd
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Jul 16, 2004
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I've seen the movie and the special effects and animation are top notch. How long do you guys think before we can create that level of 3d world in games? My guess is 20 years.
 
Unless you want 10 Kw PSUs and 50 core GPUs, it won't happen that soon. The only other way would be some technological breakthrough in processors.
 
at least that long. Think about it. We haven't reached Jurassic Park levels but we have surpassed The Last Star Fighter by a good ten years.
 
We have gotten to the "Real pretty to look at but crap for story" stage.
 
Crucible1001 said:
Unless you want 10 Kw PSUs and 50 core GPUs, it won't happen that soon. The only other way would be some technological breakthrough in processors.
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GPUs already have much more than 50 cores

Edit: Btw, it's pretty hard to compare the two since movies are prerendered, but video games are rendered in real time. With current technology, it won't be for a while.
 
A long time, but think about it....

Look at the budget for Avatar, now imagine havign to do that level of detail in a game on a longer scale (in terms of scenes/gameplay).
 
I doubt we will reach it in the lifetime of anyone who may be reading this. I say this because if you look at a lot of the games today, better graphics doesn't mean a worthwhile game. And I feel at some point the focus will come off of graphics and go into content (not graphic-related content). Perhaps when they develop some way for us to interface with the computer beyond mouse/keyboard/monitor that is just as universal.

I havent seen Avatar or played the game, but if you really think about it...if we had true 3d worlds with ultra-realistic graphics.....a mouse+keyboard interface seeing it through a square you stare at just ain't going to cut it. We haven't even gotten to the point where a game can allow ANYTHING to happen in it and deal with it in a meaningful way. Fully destructible environments so far have been anything but fully destructible, and what you could destroy doesn't look correct once it's destroyed...the pieces couldn't be re-assembled into the object (assuming it were possible). Some games don't allow you to swim, some games don't allow you to dig.....cut down trees......climb trees..... etc. Everything has it's rules and all, but most "3d game rules" are there because they can't possibly account for any and all actions taken in their game...so they restrict them. So you end up with paths you can't venture off of.

Personally, I could stand having crappy graphics if it were something interesting and revolutionary...but too many games today are pretty formulaic with prettier graphics.
 
If the insidious disease Consoleitis continues to spread,it will be a long,long time! More and more developers are going for the quick and easy bucks,pumping out games that are limited to the capabilities of the consoles and don't push the envelope of enthusiast equipped PC's.Games like Crysis are few and far between.
 
Look how far we have come since the orignal Quake or Duke Nukem? In less then 20 years we went from that to crysis looking effects. In 20 more years we will easily playing avatar looking games!
 
Look how far we have come since the orignal Quake or Duke Nukem? In less then 20 years we went from that to crysis looking effects. In 20 more years we will easily playing avatar looking games!
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I do not think that you can linearly extrapolate everything in life.
The real question is do you need real life graphics in order to enjoy game. And the answer is no. I would like to add that real life graphics are very nice to have but not the ultimate objective of the gaming world.
 
michael.pa2 said:
If the insidious disease Consoleitis continues to spread,it will be a long,long time! More and more developers are going for the quick and easy bucks,pumping out games that are limited to the capabilities of the consoles and don't push the envelope of enthusiast equipped PC's.Games like Crysis are few and far between.
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Unfortunately, that statement is quite true. While PCs now blow away the 360/PS3 specs wise, the consoles are what the developers pay attention to. If you were a developer, wouldn't you rather dumb down your graphics for the consoles but still make more money than from a PC exclusive? And the Wii is more technically lacking but has the most sales. I'm betting the next generation of consoles will have a small jump in hardware just like from Gamecube to Wii.

The next generation of consoles are still a while away and our PCs are tapping our feet waiting for them to catch up. For instance, Epic Games says they are prepping Unreal Engine 4 for the next generation of consoles, not PCs. So we could probably run it already but just waiting for the damned consoles to catch up. :mad:
 
As stated you would need immense power. I dont know what program/engine they used or created for this project but I am sure they were processing on some massive amount of hardware!
 
I'd say a good 15-20 years. Also, to the person who said not in our lifetime, how incredibly short sighted. You are aware of the law of accelerating returns aren't you? If not, go look up stories from the late 90s about the human genome project, and see what they're saying about it

edit: by 15-20 years, I mean true lifelike, can't tell the difference, photo-realistic graphics. While avatar is good, it's certainly discernable from real life..
 
Hmmm, apparently not everyone's seen the alpha-alpha-beta of Crytek's Far Crysis 3?
 
I'd say 5-10 years --- not 20.

You won't need a server farm. Intel promised 60 core CPUs by the end of 2011 and already have engineering smaples of 48 core cpus. Get a couple 48 core CPUs and a dual or quad processor motherboard and you have as much processing power as an entire server farm! --- That's only a few years away!
 
We'll never reach that level since the world is going to end in 3 years.
 
Ryan711 said:
I'd say a good 15-20 years. Also, to the person who said not in our lifetime, how incredibly short sighted. You are aware of the law of accelerating returns aren't you? If not, go look up stories from the late 90s about the human genome project, and see what they're saying about it

edit: by 15-20 years, I mean true lifelike, can't tell the difference, photo-realistic graphics. While avatar is good, it's certainly discernable from real life..
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I guess time will tell, but I don't think it's short-sighted on my part to look at the last 5 years and see how little games have changed. Sure from Doom era to now there's a huge difference, but looking at other factors such as money involved and the stagnation of the technology I believe demonstrates quite well what we have to look forward to.

For a company now to put out a game that could considered as real as they can make it graphically and still playable, I'd venture we're talking 100 million minimum and likely much more. Then on top of that the game has be a sales record destroyer for anyone else to even bother trying to 1-up it. And this has to be included on consoles. The current consoles have been around 5 years, and from what I gather the next gen consoles won't be out for a couple more years. So we'll say 7-8 years where game designers to remain profitable (in their eyes) have to make games that run good on these consoles.

Next consoles will come out in probably 2-3 years....stick around another 8-10 years.

Anyway, my point is, there is no monetary incentive for game companies to rush forward technologically. Even computers are taking little baby steps each new generation of GPUs, and the cost of every new step is a brand new 400-500 dollar video card. The manufacturers are milking the slow progression just as much as the consoles developers are.

But I guess in 20 years most people's eyesight will have failed enough that games do look as real as everything else around em...kinda blurry moving shapes.

Just think of it like drug companies finding cures for major diseases, once they solve it.......how do they make money on it? Once game companies get to the point where your eyes can't tell the difference and it's so common place they are using it the tech to make games.......what's next? More real than real?
 
Avatar would look significantly worse without the ridiculous level of Super Sampling AA. Devs don't seem to understand this, but sub-pixel detail is very, very, very important.

Archaea said:
I'd say 5-10 years --- not 20.

You won't need a server farm. Intel promised 60 core CPUs by the end of 2011 and already have engineering smaples of 48 core cpus. Get a couple 48 core CPUs and a dual or quad processor motherboard and you have as much processing power as an entire server farm! --- That's only a few years away!
Click to expand...

Those server farms spend many hours on each frame. Unless you like really slow paced games, that's not going to cut it.
 
Well it seems the point I was going to make has already been talked about but I'll put in my 2 cents anyway.

In response to the OP question, I think that it could be closer than you could think... if consoles didn't exist. At this point in time the video game industry is dominated by 5 year old hardware and since consoles are where all the money is at they get the games first and PC second. The games made to push the envelope of the PC platform are few and far between ie. Crysis. Unfortunately we might be seeing PC exclusives ( minus MMORPG's) vanish more and more in the future. That is why as a PC gamer I get excited about new console hardware, not because I want to buy them in fact I couldn't care less to own one; but once new hardware comes out that means that the crappy console ports will in fact have somewhat better graphics that might push PC systems a tad (albeit at high resolutions 1920x1200 not 1368x720p and then upscaled).

My ultimate goal would be that people get educated about their games not really running in native 1080p, games not running 60 fps, having awful controls in fps, paying more money for games/accesories. I would like to get more people moved over to the PC platform and I hope platforms like Steam can make the transition more streamless.

All in all the console dominated world is controlling the level of graphics we see in games and granted there will always be those people who enjoy what a console brings to the table but I think they're more and more game enthusiasts who have outgrown the 5 year old console and console limitations as a whole who would benefit from the PC platform. I don't see the PC becoming the dominate platform any time soon( minus the popcap games and mmorpgs ) but even if we could just even it out a little, it would be a huge plus.
 
Here's the thing:

A videogames are rendered in real-time, movies are not.

With movies, you may have a farm of servers spending an hour or more on a single frame of a movie, simply because of the sheer level of detail.

A videogame needs to run at a minimum of 30 frames PER SECOND.

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I'm going to use some really shady math to prove my point.

Lets suppose it took ten computers an hour to render a frame of Avatar. In one hour, ten machines produced a single frame.

Lets take a videogame running at 30fps. In one hour of continuous play, one machine will have produced 108 000 frames in an hour. Ten machines, in theory, will have produced 1 080 000 frames in an hour.

Moore's Law tells us that, theoretically, processing power will double every two years. To figure out how long it will take to have that kind of processing power in a single machine, we need to solve for 2^x = 1 080 000

The solution is roughly 2^20. Remember that it doubles every TWO years, so we need to multiply our solution by two. 20*2 = 40. In theory, it will take 40 years, assuming that we double our processing power every two years.

---

Realistically, I'd say 6-12 years. Also remember that the visual fidelity of a CG rendered movie is not always predictive of what videogames will look like in the future. Take a look at the original Toy Story. In some aspects, visuals are beyond the quality seen in that film. In other aspects, visuals still lag behind.
 
movies and video games are too hard to compare in terms of graphics. they're completely different.
 
Crucible1001 said:
Unless you want 10 Kw PSUs and 50 core GPUs, it won't happen that soon. The only other way would be some technological breakthrough in processors.
Click to expand...

There will be. It's called the SPASER (surface plasmon amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). The first spaser was only 44 nanometers thick, which is 40,000 times less than the thickness of a human hair strand.

Snip/ can be made almost on the atomic level, nanoscale.
Snip/ has the potential to replace the transistor.
Snip/ work thousands of times faster than transistors.
Snip/ are resistant to radiation.

http://www.gsu.edu/37879.html
 
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I think we'll see games with an open and amazing 3d world like Avatar's probably in 40 years. Maybe it'll require DirectX 35 or something LOL.
 
Aaron11 said:
I think we'll see games with an open and amazing 3d world like Avatar's probably in 40 years. Maybe it'll require DirectX 35 or something LOL.
Click to expand...

Man I really hope the lockin to Windows via DirectX disappears by then.
 
Killing2Live said:
Well it seems the point I was going to make has already been talked about but I'll put in my 2 cents anyway.

In response to the OP question, I think that it could be closer than you could think... if consoles didn't exist. At this point in time the video game industry is dominated by 5 year old hardware and since consoles are where all the money is at they get the games first and PC second. The games made to push the envelope of the PC platform are few and far between ie. Crysis. Unfortunately we might be seeing PC exclusives ( minus MMORPG's) vanish more and more in the future. That is why as a PC gamer I get excited about new console hardware, not because I want to buy them in fact I couldn't care less to own one; but once new hardware comes out that means that the crappy console ports will in fact have somewhat better graphics that might push PC systems a tad (albeit at high resolutions 1920x1200 not 1368x720p and then upscaled).

My ultimate goal would be that people get educated about their games not really running in native 1080p, games not running 60 fps, having awful controls in fps, paying more money for games/accesories. I would like to get more people moved over to the PC platform and I hope platforms like Steam can make the transition more streamless.

All in all the console dominated world is controlling the level of graphics we see in games and granted there will always be those people who enjoy what a console brings to the table but I think they're more and more game enthusiasts who have outgrown the 5 year old console and console limitations as a whole who would benefit from the PC platform. I don't see the PC becoming the dominate platform any time soon( minus the popcap games and mmorpgs ) but even if we could just even it out a little, it would be a huge plus.
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the problem is we are talking about video games, no matter how the demographic changes, they are still video games, something people do in their spare time, usually to have fun or relax, and most people especially today are wanting to do this from the comfortable couch on the big HDTV with surround sound and with a group of friends with wireless everything and simultaneously

while i am aware that some if not all of that is able to be done with pc gaming, pc gaming will never reach console gaming status, ever....if anything they will merge

its all about money, plain and simple, there's no return on the investment of dumping assloads of money into developing the ultimate pc game when the people who you are trying to attract, for the most part, are late 20 early 30 something, single or married, maybe with one kid people who love to be socially accepted and want to be able to have that multiple people playing wirelessly from the couch without any of the fuss that inevitably comes with trying to make a pc do such a thing....when they can buy a $500+/- console setup and be done....and as far as "educating" them on 60fps and upscaling....dont waste your time, its meaningless, nobody gives a shit how it works, just that it works, if a game is looking good on the big screen and playing good, i dont care if it's running at 640x480 at 1fps in the background....as long as it works

what we are seeing is pc and console gaming merging, by the time next gen consoles are out i would expect the majority of gaming to be on those consoles because thats where the developers are going to put their money

why do you think places like Steam and D2D are selling liscenses to games that were $40-$50 two months ago for $5-$20? something is better than nothing, and pc gamers aren't buying pc games like they used to, blame it on the consoles, sure, but your blame would be mis-aligned because you see....its the consumer who has done it by buying into the consoles the majority of consumers have spoken, they want the simpleness and ease and comfort that consoles allow at the price and with the features they want, they are not running out to buy uber (expensive) PC's to play games on in the corner of a room with a keyboard and mouse while all their friends stand in line to give it a go.....

it's over, and the sooner the majority of pc gamers quit wasting the developers time trying to satisfy a niche market (hardcore PC gamers who give a damn to know how many fps the game runs) by dumping resources into PC games that end up barely breaking even, the sooner they will be able to fully get behind the consoles, which will bring the hardware manufacturers (Sony, MS) to actually put some beefy hardware in them, and will finally see PC level graphics and uber FPS on a "console" platform, with a wireless keyboard and mouse if prefferred, and be able to do it all from the comfort of the living room couch, yes, the flip side to the "consoles are holding us back" is that if pc gaming was let die, the consoles you so much despise might actually be much much more powerful and more enjoyable and more flexible, you might actually *gasp* enjoy using one as much as your pc......because after all, a console is a simplified pc no more no less, just a closed system that serves one purpose, gaming....mostly anyways, why spend thousands of dollars over a 5 year period just to be able to show off ridiculous screenshots to e-friends of your insane resolutions? its purely ego driven and very anti-social conpared to console gaming

lets let a computer be a computer, to do work and tasks and research and make movies like Avatar, and let gaming go where it's heading anyways.....to the couch in everyones living room

i dont mean to sound like a console fan, because i started in the early 1980's on a 4.7Mhz pc playing bouncing babies on a mono monitor, i was into pc gaming pretty much from the word go, and i still occasionally play a pc game, but nothing comes close to the ease of use of a console, and the older you get the more you realize if its quick and easy and comfortable, it's better, even if it doesnt run a gazillionXgazillion pixels at insane framerates

its called growing up, embrace it
 
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Uh, I thought we already established that PC gaming isn't dying.

I know a lot of people who game on both their PC's and Consoles.

For a long time I didn't even own a console until I bought a PS3 for the exclusives.
 
i can say i dont know any single person at all that plays games on a pc...wait....one, i know of one, i only know his first name, talked to him three times when we were neighbors, he has no job and is a student who plays WOW all night instead of studying....

i don't know any single married adult with responsibilities that plays video games on their pc aside from the occasional poker game, but i know several that are known to pick up a 360 controller on the weekends

its about age bro, i would have to guess once you cross that 25-30 yr old mark, you wont know anybody playing games on $2000 pc's posting screenshots of stupidly high resolutions and details on the internet, they will either not play at all or they will be using a xbox or similiar from the couch, life happens, the few who continue are a very small niche group, not a demographic any company is going to want to throw millions of dollars at
 
Considering that Blizzard is probably one of the top earning game studios ever, and they only make PC games, I think that the market is still there. Valve isn't doing so bad either. (yes they port games to the 360, but they're mainly a PC developer)

And I don't plan on ever getting married or having kids, so I'll stay a PC gamer for life <3

But from what I've seen there are actually a lot of people over 30 who post here... so.. maybe you just don't know any middle age PC gamers. But they are out there...
 
im just saying, theres not enough money in it for it to continue now that consoles have come this far.....pc gaming wont die, but it will be a tiny tiny market compared to consoles and will eventually die off because the majority of people will spend their money on consoles, follow the money trail...and you will find that by the time we reach Avatar like graphics in games, we will be doing it on superpowered "consoles", the sooner the better
 
I'd be happier if gameplay was improved more than visuals at this point for most games.

Good looks alone do not a good game make.
 
Limahl said:
I'd be happier if gameplay was improved more than visuals at this point for most games.

Good looks alone do not a good game make.
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honestly, most of the games that have come out this generation that have good graphics, also have good gameplay. It's rarer to see a game that looks good but isn't fun to play. Thinking back of all the "best graphics" games I've played recently, they've all had gameplay to match.

As good as graphics are these days they could still be far better and I hope they continue to improve at a good rate. They go a long way in helping you to get immersed in the game.
 
Harkamus said:
Exactly why certain games on the Wii are so much fun.
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The Wii is fun when you're only playing 1) for small amounts of time and 2) not that often.

Motion control gets old pretty fast. It's more fun to play at your friend's place than it is to own one yourself.

You don't hear of hardcore Wii gamers because no one can play it for that long without getting bored.
 
Best part is.. that the movie was shot at the standard 24fps. If it WAS a video game, this thread would be a flame war about how shitty it runs instead of praising it.
 
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