im getting old.
ive seen the beginning of graphics (pong) and watched them get better and better over the years. while all of this has been going on a new thing called CGI popped up in movies. currently Avatar comes to mind. Im curious as to what everyone thinks as to how long it will take for gaming graphics to catch up to the equivalent of the CGI of avatar? how powerful of a computer will be needed to run a game with graphics that good at say 1920x1080?
Im really hoping to see this before im gone.

I'm very doubtful such a thing will happen before any of us here are gone, even the youngest ones (which I'm far from).

At the level of detail seen in Avatar or even recent Pixar films which are much less detailed than Avatar (being cartoonish), even the most powerful modern computers take minutes to render just a single frame of the entire film. Since for a game to be playable I would say there need to be at least 30 frames rendered per second, it will take quite a long time to get from minutes to 1/30^th of a second.

Someone in the games industry (I forget who) said that games are generally about 5 years behind CGI, or something to that effect. So in theory we should be seeing Avatar level graphics in 3 or 4 years. However, as Extra Credits said, we have, at most, 2 traditional console cycles left, so we'll probably be playing those graphics in a totally different way.

It would take many hours to do a single frame of a normal computer game of today on a 20 year old computer. Minutes to milliseconds is nothing

Epic Games http://www.gametrailers.com/video/debut-trailer-samaritan/711467. Although this is not raytraced like the movies but instead rasterized, which give the visuals less accurate lightning. That's the big difference between game renders and movie renders, raytracing vs rasterization.

Also, I expect that the graphic cards will support hardware raytracing in a couple of years. It's something that will come for sure. Only question is, when?

I'll give it 15 years maximum.

Could be. Maybe I am wrong. That is, I hope I am. :shrug: The easiest thing to misjudge is the speed of future computer development.

Holograms. You will feel the blade....and smell the stench.

If by 2 traditional console cycles you mean 2 more console generations before we see this, With the way next gen consoles have been released so far, that could be at least 10 more years before anything like this is realistically possible

doesnt computer speed double every year though? or something like that?

Well for comparison we went from http://i.imgur.com/0u1af.jpg to http://i.imgur.com/sUHmC.jpg in just 16 years.

You do know that holograms would be neither palpable nor smellable, don't you?

Never underestimate the power of technology. There will be 'emitters' on a special system...

That's just a rough estimate.



Yes, well, doesn't say much about future though. Direct extrapolation is fine, but can be wrong.



Those won't be called "holograms", however.

They'll get so good, we'll have to buy new graphics cards!

:lol:

On topic I'm expecting 10 to 15 years for games to look like Avatar, which is to say, reality...

have you seen the Unreal Engine 3 demos?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgS67BwPfFY&hd=1

(this is only 720p resolution)

I dont know. dont think the http://pc-history.org/tandymod3.htm would work to well. :brokencomputer:
:rofl:

Frankly though, I don't give a crap about how realistic the graphics get. What I care about is how realistic the AI will get. Although it may not seem so at first glance, the first extremely tough step which will enable further blossoming of AI development is natural speech synthesis. So long as the only thing an NPC can say is a line which has been pre-recorded by a voice actor there really isn't much AI can do actually, no matter how advanced. Consequently, in order for natural speech synthesis to have any significant impact on development of AI, natural language processing needs to be fairly well developed. It doesn't look like it, but we're actually moving forward in that regard - Google Translate works hundred times better than any machine translator did less than a dozen years ago. Yes, translating some text written in language A to language B is far from understanding that text, but it is not entirely unrelated. I believe the future of AI should definitely be sought in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network. That tool is far more powerful than it's given credit and I'm sad to see that game developers seem to keep avoiding it like a big can of worms. (Well, at least they seem to be avoiding self-adapting artificial neural networks. If any game has ever featured artificial neural networks as the basis of the AI it was certainly static (non-adapting).)

nice demo. but was it in game footage of someone playing? ive seen some really nice cut scenes from alot of games but thats just movie graphics, not real time game footage where its being built in front of you. know what i mean? im sometimes not very clear.

yeah, that's in-game

be careful what you wish for. the last thing i want is to turn on my computer and start a game just to have the game say i dont feel like playing right now.

Skynet. :bowdown:

As long as I can tell it to shut up and let me play or go make me a sammich cuz the wife doesn't want to, It'll be all good

Star Trek holo decks FTW...

I wish movies would lay off the CGI.

But I think they will be amazing for videogames.