The Tech Challenges to Photorealistic Games

[Guest]

Some predict photorealistic video games within a decade, but other say the required ray tracing tech simply won't be possible in that timeframe.

The Tech Challenges to Photorealistic Games : Read more

 

[KelvinTy]

Even for pre-rendered cut scenes, the quality totally depends on the developers. Take ME3 for example, they have the ability to render things in much higher resolution, yet, the 8bit background graphics is more like it's from '02 or '03.
Having the tech and not using it is the biggest problem, not the tech itself.

 

[dark_knight33]

But even SVOGI, if it's true SVOGI, is too demanding for commercial gaming devices; the technique would require a machine of at least 1 teraFLOP capacity. For perspective, that's 40 times more powerful than the Xbox 360.

The GeForce GTX TITAN:

Delivers 4.5 Teraflops of single precision and 1.3 Teraflops of double precision processing power.

Doesn't the Xbox 360 look like the poor cousin?

Truth: Consoles are what's holding games back.

 

[dark_knight33]

Also, TG's comment system sucks.

 

[xomm]

Yeah, the statement claiming 1 TFLOP is too much for commercial gaming is kinda dated. The Xbox One, PS4, and most $150+ graphics card have that kind of power.

 

[mirrormirror666]

this article is so full of horse shit. ray tracing is not the holy grail of graphics. ray tracing does not offer TRUE PHOTOREALISM. ray tracing is just much better than rasterization but you still have to do plenty of trickery in order to recreate some optical effects ( like caustics ) which only come naturally with path tracing.

path tracing is a simpler (but yet more demanding algorithm) which also offers global illumination, while ray tracing does not. global illumination is very important in having photorealistic graphics.

with path tracing you don't have to resort to tricks to implement various effects like you have to do with raytracing.

and path tracing is not a SHORTCUT like the article mentions. path tracing is a full algorithm which solves the illumination equation in the full, it's also a so called "unbiased" algorithm. Last but not least, path tracing was not invented by that obscure company called "caustic", it's a well known algorithm.

Don't let the marketing guys trick you, ray tracing is just a jump forward, the final solution is path tracing.