[citation][nom]nottheking[/nom]I honestly feel that while Tesselation is significant, it is being overblown. The biggest advance in 10 years? You have any idea what we've seen since 2002? At the beginning of 2002, while DirectX 8.1 was out, we'd still not seen any games make use of pixel shaders; the first two major titles were Halo and Morrowind. Since just seeing basic reflections and bump-mapping, we've advanced to high-end normal-mapping being the norm, specular-mapping adding realistic shiny surfaces, displacement-mapping stacking onto bump-mapping for far more realistic surfaces, bloom, then HDR. Then, of course, there's all the other effects, like advances in both anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing: until 2002 AA consisted solely of supersampling. 2002 saw the introduction of the first new technique, multi-sampling, on both the GeForce 4 Ti and Radeon 9500/9700 cards. Then we went from x4, to ATi's x6, then combining super- and multi-sample to handle transparent edges, and then yet more attempts to handle transparency AA, then post-process AA... This is 100% false. A texture doesn't magically take up less space just because it's on the console. Texture and framebuffer usage is utterly identical between both PC and console versions of the same game, provided the settings are identical. This is why console games are starting to look really dated there: their VRAM size limits their texture resolution severely.[/citation]
you need more ram on a pc because of the os and all the other crap running than you would need if the os was only there to get you to the game.
and you are looking at 10 years ago to today, 10 years ago we didnt hit the diminishing return barrier that we have hit today.
we already have most if not all the necessary tools to make a real life, real time, graphics, and short of the voxle unlimited tech being feasible, which im not sure it is for movement, tessellation is the only advancement that will significantly increase game graphics for the next 10 years and i stand by that statement. we already are unable to tell the difference between double the polly count, but we will see a difference if we increase that polly count 10-100 times, something tessellation will do. the next console generation will be built around it, and the final graphical things that i notice constantly inside of games, the pop in of a higher polly model will finally go away.
the only other thing that will be as big of a game changer is opencl type physics engines. but thats not about makeing the graphics better, thats about adding to the worlds believability.
i also want to point out that i never use aa when i play games, granted i went from a really old gpu, to a 6800 ultra, to a 5770hd... the old gpu couldn't handle aa, the ultra could play any game at a decent framerate at my old monitors native resolution, and i currently haven't found a game that my 5770hd cant handle at 1920x1200, and the few that cant play well, i take shadows off completely if its possible. as for water effects, i think that we went backwards... look at gamecubes wave race, and many other older games, the water actually moved, now, the movement is all faked.
but like i said, thats less to do with graphics and more of a physics problem now.
i should also mention, for full disclosure, that many older games that i played and still play, i would rather play them in the software engines than through an accelerated engine.
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