

Epic's Sweeney on graphics tech: "the limit really is in sight"  - johnr8201
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-02-10-epics-sweeney-on-graphics-tech-the-limit-really-is-in-sight

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extension
Do we even know how to render reality? If we can do it at 1/2000th of real
time then somebody should have made a prerendered animation that looks real by
now, but I've never seen one. And if we don't know how to do it, how do we
know what GPU we will need?

~~~
regularfry
We know the rough bounds of the technical parameters of a GPU good enough to
fool a human. We don't yet know, for a large variety of cases, how to generate
_artwork_ that good in any better way than taking a snapshot of something
real.

That being said:

> somebody should have made a prerendered animation that looks real by now,
> but I've never seen one

 _How do you know?_ A friend of mine works on visual effects, and his show-
reel has quite a few shots where, if you didn't have before and after shots
side by side, you wouldn't know that a computer had been involved at all.

~~~
75c84fb8
> How do you know? A friend of mine works on visual effects

Any chance there's a link to it online? I'd love to see an example :)

Anyhow, the problem for me is less with still renderings, and more with
natural motion, like a human walking or talking. Also, I'd love to see a
realistic _splash_ as something falls into the water.

~~~
corysama
I can't find the effects reel for that modern CSI+disasters show I was looking
for... You'll have to settle for this: <http://youtu.be/aFHKwaW4Um8>

~~~
75c84fb8
Thanks. I enjoyed watching that.

------
_delirium
I've definitely found diminishing returns as a player, though that's a
somewhat different, more gameplay-oriented question. I'm personally more
interested, when it comes to graphics, in things more gameplay-related than
strictly graphical fidelity; things like destructible terrain, for example.
I'd even take a decrease in strict fidelity of the graphics for an increase in
gameplay-interactivity (Minecraft showing an extreme example of that
tradeoff). This seems to require deeper modeling of things other than strictly
surface meshes and lighting, like the interior of objects, their physics, etc.

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seanalltogether
"And we apparently don't notice frame-rates above 72 every second."

I'm curious what conditions he's referring to with those 72 frames. Is motion
blur built in for instance or are they static snapshots? 72 just seems a bit
low. <http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm>

~~~
mbell
You'll never get an absolute number for this as humans don't see in 'frames'.

I would assume his numbers would include motion blur as that effect is not
only important for 'smoothness' but also for giving a realistic feeling of
movement and rotation when translated to a stationary display. If the 'player'
spins around quickly you've got to blur it regardless of framerate or it just
doesn't look right.

~~~
corysama
I was recently egged into digging up hard numbers on this subject. Here's my
post:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/p4lrj/paradox_intera...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/p4lrj/paradox_interactive_developer_24fps_is_fine_for/c3n3oto)

Short version: Min to simulate motion:~10Hz. Min to stop noticing
flicker:~60Hz. Diminished returns on immersion:~72Hz. Limit on ability to
flick your eyes and still see temporal aliasing:~2000Hz

------
moonchrome
Graphics in todays games is poor in terms of realism. Content is simply made
of polygonal silhouettes - no modeling of anything internal, maybe in top of
the line there is some hackish muscle/bone animation system and artist tweaked
special case shaders to account for subsurface scattering in skin but nothing
generic. In order to get realistic content we are going to have to switch to
procedural modeling, there's no way to generate that much information manually
with the pedestrian tools we have. As for rendering, there is no global
illumination other than crappy techniques like precomputed light-maps or
ambient occlusion, maybe one bounce image space (IDK if this has been used in
a game). Even the materials use simplistic BRDFs. There is a lot of room for
improvements and a wide gap to close between realistic and current generation.
But in 20 years there's no doubt that it will be done.

------
shingen
I remember 15 years ago when plenty of graphics programmers thought the
industry was within reach of all the polygons you'd ever need on the screen at
one time. These are always a bit like the '640k should be enough memory for
anyone' declarations.

When Quake1 models were a couple hundred polygons, it was sometimes predicted
games would never need more than 5,000 to 10,000 poly models. There was a PC
game (name escapes me, had a cherub in it as the main character) from the late
1990s that talked up using "real time polygon tessellation" to deliver models
with thousands of polygons on the screen, derived from models built in Maya
that had tens of thousands of polygons in the original spec model. According
to the developers, it was almost photo realistic! Such is the braggadocio in
the gaming industry.

Now we're up to 15,000 to 50,000 in-game depending, and that's not nearly
enough.

~~~
swang
The game you're referring to is Messiah:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_(video_game)>

The tech you're referring to was to increase or decrease polygons based on the
power of the users machine. The big benefit to this tech would be that when
you got a new graphics card the graphics would scale up to match the number of
polygons generated for the models. Not sure about the photo realistic part but
I do remember them talking about how this tech was going to be the best
looking because of the increased polygon count.

Considering the jump graphics hardware has taken over the last decade, I don't
find Tim Sweeney's prediction that photo-realism within our lifetimes seems
like an impossibility. Barring some kind of physical limitation with the
hardware I think his assumption isn't that crazy.

~~~
shingen
Yep, that's exactly right. I remember at the time Dave Perry seemed to be
everywhere 24/7 pumping Messiah as something that would change gaming forever.
Back then the developer fights were common, with tech arguments between id
Software (Paul Steed instigating) / Epic / Shiny / whomever.

In the end, it didn't sell particularly well, it cost a lot to make, and it
had a lot of performance problems.

Have to wonder who thought a game about a cherub named "bob" would sell like
crazy.

