Real-time graphics are not advancing

Despite all the hype over shaders and HDR, it seems to me that real-time graphics are at rather a standstill. Graphics are becoming more stylized, but I don't think that they are necessarily becoming more realistic. There is still a huge gap between rendered graphics and real video. I think graphics are going to stay on the same level as they are now for quite some time, and the only advances will be minute little hardware techniques.

i agree...

--Mike

Pssstttt I think you need to check out the ati tech demos then.
http://www.ati.com/developer/demos.html

Computer graphics have been at the same level of realism for the past 30 years.
It's just a bunch of dots on a flat surface, and they will look more or less believable depending on how far away you sit.

Not everyone thinks more realism=advancment.

Uhh?

Maybe your realtime-achievements aren't becoming more advanced but if i look at how games looked over the last couple of years then i can see a lot of improvements made.

You can use all the gfx-power which is available today for trying to get something as realistic as possible or tweak a certain style you want. Where is the problem?

These things take time and for sure you won't get a realtime raytracer card next week for under €100 or so...

I seriously need to disagree on that, compare doom1 to unreal3

i see nothing wrong with how graphics are advancing, they will never catch up to pre-rendered. even if we get holographic technology like in Star Trek the real-time will always not look as good as the pre-rendered for the fact that pre-rendered is made before hand and it only has to play back exactly the same way everytime while real-time will change depending on what the user does

They seem to be getting "realer" to me....

Well that seems pretty obvious to me. I mean, processors aren't getting that much faster right now and gfx have been almost photo realistic for the past 5 years, especially in pre rendered stages, how much more advancement can you get?

You know what's better than photo-realistic?
Pagapa-realistic.
Yah, there's no such thing as a Pagapagraph. I invented it.

If cameras just didn't work so well, real-time graphics would have been photo-realistic ages ago!
Those cell-phone digital cameras are a step in the right direction...

yeah i have noticed advnacements in cards and processors are not getting much faster recently

I don't think it has much to do with GPU's so much anymore as it does artists and content creators.

Obviously, from tech demos, Crysis, Unreal2007 etc... graphics cards are able to deliver more polygons and effects. How they are used is what makes all the difference.

Content will always be the "real" wow factor.

My 2.32342347938 cents,

Allan

Greater stylisation is an advancement. Realism is artistically and creatively dull.

Someone mentioned Unreal 3, which is kind of funny. I really, really doubt that the finished product will look anything like the previews that have been released. This is my point; These companies keep promising that their new product will feature vast graphical improvements, and then they release something that isn't really any more advanced. There have been some nice improvements in the last five years, but the last time I saw something that really amazed me was UT2003.

it's not somuch the style or the photorealism that i'm referring to... it's the presentation format... DOOM1 graphics or DOOM3 graphics, it doesn't matter...

... since day uno, we've been presented with a 2d representation of 3D graphics... lets put the viewer inside the game... VR is the real next gen!!!

dadaaaaaaaaa!!!


you heard it first here... or second, or third, whatever... regardless, you did hear it here...

:)

--Mike

no true 3D would be holograms like in Star Trek, VR as most people think if it is either the visors and everything is shown on 2 tiny screens which is not much different from playing a game on a TV

and then the direct mind interface which would be dangerous at first, if a connector accidently falls out of the user's head it could leave the user with major mental truama

so i say go with holograms because it is much more challenging to shoot a guy with a gun(even if is holographic) in your hand than it is with a mouse and keyboard

Nintendo seems to be stepping in that direction, not VR, but the immersion part with the Wii!

I wish a company would release a really good VR Headset and games companies took it seriously. I'm not talking silly gloves, just a top notch headset.

Then atleast it would be a better immersive experience.

Now if Nintendo released such a thing to go along with their wii controller, I reckon it'd be a massive hit.

ya got it all wrong Link... 2d screens close enough to you eyes, and the display linked to sensors that moved the projected view as you moved your head, would be no different from what actually see in the real world...

add to that a tactile feedback glove, so you can actually pick up that BFG, and a real sourround stereo audio headphones setup, and you couldn't tell whether or not it was real... or it was memorex...

i think what you're talking about is those shutter '3d' glasses... that aint VR by a long shot...

--Mike

hmm i guess i misunderstood what you meant by RV helmt, i played a few at an arcade and it did not do much

the only one i liked was the one for Beachheads becuase you jsut move your head and it moves but if you are sitting at home it is not a good idea for one of those, too costly to make it so you jsut run and you run in the game without making you hit the walls

a visor for the Wii would be pretty cool for any game played in FP view or a god mod game like sims or spore

Im gonna agree with Josh on this one, while they can put more on screen Graphics havent advanced all that much
but is that tech or the is that becuase becuase things are done pretty much the same way?
unreal 3 for example, great lighting..but the models end up looking like toys being lit.
There isnt enough data there to look "photoReal" even with the 2048x2048 normal map.

Mr picklesworth has a good point, if photorealism was based on grainy washed out lowess phone cams,then we wouldnt be having this discussion

I remember 1 old VR game with a helemt in the arcade, it was rendered with flat colored polys@ about 15fps...gave ya one hell of a headache.

Sam

Gameplay, anyone?

I call bullshit! Look at something like Fight Night Round 3 ... nothing compared to that even close 5 years ago. Doom 3 was great 4 years ago when the technology was first developed and now Crysis looks even better. Heck, there's some console game by Naughty Dog for the PS3 which looks leaps and bounds better than anything out there. One game last year too on the PC which I think is head and shoulders above Doom 3 or Unreal Tournament 2003 is Battlefield 2 ... that game on full detail looks great. Graphics are moving ahead just fine. I used to think PS2 and Xbox generation graphics where great and now I have a really really hard time going back to them. Even last year they seemed good but now with the 360 out and top of the the line PC cards like the GeForce 7800 etc... 5 year old games look dated as hell.

Gfk: I'll have one of those, thanks :)

I totally agree with halo. Graphics are not that advancing anymore.I doubt there will ever be a jump again like from Doom to Doom3.

Seems to me the tools/pipelines are basically in place to create 'photo-realistic' scenes, but that the processing power isn't there yet.

Same here. Bullshit flag thrown.

Graphics are progressing nicely. Compare this years games to 2 years ago and there is a substantial improvement in the realism. Not only has hardware improved but software has as well.

I track my traffic to my website pretty closely and always see a small spike coming from blitzbasic.com when I post. Some of that traffic turns into sales. Looks to me like this post was intended to do the same. Of course, I just be cynical... :)

The very idea of making a photo realistic scene is what is the problem. It destroys creativity. There is absolutely 0 skill involved in making a brick look like a brick, It simply costs time, Anyone can do it.

There is however skill involved in creating a truely interesting and New look to a scene. And realism has nothing to do with this.

We are shooting ourselves in the foot with this realism hype. It really doesn't mater how realistic your brick looks, it will *never* be real. Ppl need to just realize this and give it up. Start being creative again and make somthing that's truely inspiring as opposed to yet another 3-month-in-the-making rendition of a slab of concrete.

I've seen unreal 3, and yes... it does look like that. But the screens that were posted very early were 'ingame' but not at a decent frame rate. Those were staged in the engine with lots of lights running at 6fps.

Ding ding ding! we have a winner.

I spend all day long every day creating digital content. Some of it is realistic, like the things I need to create for Digital mattes or realistic special effects. Other work is pure artistic (cartoon work for example) and lets me push things as far as I want to, and explore new ways of making things look.

I see the same things in games. The push for absolute reality is fine for some things, but after you get most of the way there, the last little bits will kill you and drag you down big time. People know what reality looks like, so recreating it can be very difficult, especially with humans, where you get that "zombie" look to them.

Imagine if instead of trying so hard to create reality, the effort was put into making something that looks and plays great. Imagine playing a baseball game, but instead of playing a photo realistic MLB game, where you have almost but not quite real-life players. Now compare that with what could be done with a new 3D version of Baseball Stars 2. The characters would be bigger than life, their jaws full of chew,... crazy characters with Massive upper bodies and spindly legs. New shader technology would render all this with nice SSS effects on the skin, and since you are not dealing with reality, that last little bit does not matter. The characters look a lot more alive, because you have never seen people that look like this.

Probably a bad example, but just my .02

Pongo: totally agree. Believability and immersiveness is key I think. People love cartoons not because they're realistic, but because they're funny and we can relate to the characters in a way we never can almost-realistic-CG-characters.
Uncanny valley is spot on.

I what Halo is really lamenting is not that graphics have stopped improving, but that each new improvement smaller and smaller compared to the previous one.

Take HL2 for example.

I recently considered getting a $400 video card, because I wanted to see HL2 in all it's glory.

But then I came to my senses. I looked at screenshots that compared how the game looked on a $150 card, at 1280x960 with no antitaliasing and no anistropic filtering, and then I looked at how it looked on a $400 card with all the bells and whistles on.

And you know what? It really didn't look THAT MUCH BETTER. So I decided to go with the $150 card which could run it pretty well, but not with all the bells and whistles. It can handle HDR and antialiasing. But maybe not at 1600x1200 with 16x anistropic, and the highest texture detail.

And I'm happy with my decision. I got a card with no fan on it, that can run the game at a res which looks just fine. I would have been dumb to waste my money just so I could have some better antialiasing. I only buy one FPS a year IF THAT. This card will run DNF just fine whenever it finally shows up. So it suits me just fine.

So if 16x anistropic and 1600x1200 with 8xAA doesn't really make the game look that much better, I can see how Halo might think that things aren't getting better.

So will we ever be amazed by a new game? Well, I found HL2 pretty amazing, but that is because I don't buy many games. I haven't played all those WW2 games that have come out in recent years. So HL2 was way better looking than whatever it was I played last... And I actually can't remember what that was. Um... Maybe Far Cry.

But if you kee playing every game that comes out... Well, I suspect you're gonna have a hard time being impressed. Maybe when these new physics cards get up to speed and integrated into the 3D cards themselves then you'll start seeing some amazing stuff like being able to blow holes in the ground and having thousands of bits of dirt fly everywhere and pile up. Combine that with displacement maps, and zbuffer shadows, and high polygon foliags, and maybe that will be something to marvel at again. But keep in mind doing all that cool stuff requires lots and lots of art resources. So you've got the problem of having to wait a long time between those impressive looking games.

Actually the thing that impressed me the most about HL2, was the character animation - Alyx in particular.

Nice looking scenery is all good, but digital actors who have fluidity and can portray nuanced emotion is more important to me.

First, I am talking about graphics realism, so the people who are arguing about "gameplay" and how much they love cartoons can go elsewhere.

I have seen Unreal Engine 3 in person, and it's not that great.

The first generation of FPS games were limited by polygon count and texture memory. That limitation has been mostly removed, to the point where more triangles aren't really going to make an improvement. I guess it's good that the technology has stabilized somewhat, but it comes at a time when games are being sold solely on their graphics. I think this is partly why we are upon a major crash in the industry.

At the same time, this does level the playing field a bit for smaller developers, which means more competition.

about the creators and artists thing, look at Metroid Prime. it was one the gamecube yet it had some of the best graphics of the year and had the best gameplay and best creatures and enemies. Anyway ever see Metroid Prime itself? that thing is so awesome in design and then Meta Ridley

and then the great games on the DS and GBA, it takes a lot of skill to make something so cool looking with the graphics of a N64/PS1 like the great levels in New Super Mario Bros. and Metroid. then the up coming Zelda Phantom Hourglass

also on the GBA Golden Sun 1 & 2 had great battle effects and was so fun and addictive that i stopped playing my consoles for a week to just play that

I always hated the thought of photorealistic graphics and I still do anyway. I still seem improvements in graphics but I'd rather see video games that look like video games rather than real life. That part of the idustry which strives for nothing but realistic graphics and shooting may indeed crash ... I really couldn't care less.

HDR and Bloom makes me sick.. I call it over exposed, and thats not something you'll see in real life, movies or pictures (if you've done it right).
Highlight is fine, but filling the entire wall with white (255,255,255) makes me go blind.

realtime graphics have come leaps and bounds in a short time, and are getting better real fast. Realistic graphics have their place, in sims and things.

But there is so much more that you can do, its just going to take some time for the fad for realism to wear off.

I'm amazed at the cool stuff you can do with a good engine, I think maybe Leadworks just needs to play with a more modern engine.

With a decent engine, and the right art pipeline there is a huge amount of potential. At the moment with Ogre and the new version of the Ofusion exporter. I'm pretty overwhelmed with how much you can do and how intuitive much of it is if your used to 3DS max.

The tricky thing today is that most artists arent the most capable coders, and creating shaders from scratch can be a real nightmare. especialy when you get into the more comples ones.

On top of that it takes a lot more time to produce the cutting edge graphics. New lighting techniques can enhance the look of your models effortlessly. But there is still a ton of depth to the materials that require a lot of learning.

I think the main reason that many games don't push the boundaries of realism as much as they could, is in part because the average gamer still has a somewhat dated computer. And the time and therefore cost to produce the graphics is multiplied with many of the new techniques required.

Also shaders are often one trick shows, and it takes a lot of work and disciplin to make good use of them. You can get graphics compatable to pre rendered stuff, but there are alot of constraints put on you by the tech, and it takes quite a lot of effort for everything working together.

Photo-realism in what type of application then?

photorealism is great for certain types of sims, unfortunately you can't interface with it well enough. Making most sims, even car ones pale in comparrison to a spirited drive around town. Especialy with the terrible AI the more realistic looking ones like Gran Tourismo has.

Another problem with realism is that the more real artwork becomes, the more obvious the flaws, and the more critical we are.

Many games have great scenery, but wooden characters with limited movement and behavior that looks all the worse for the realistic environments they inhabit.

We really need other areas to develop as far as the graphics, AI being an important one in my book. Its the weakest link now that Physics is getting to be half decent.

Once they GFX become 99% realistic, they'll start trying to make them unrealistic again.

Do you want them to? The hardware is improving for sure, but come on, haven't we had enough rushed, buggy games with ubercool graphics yet?

Im not to bothered about photorealism, thats what real life is about, if i wanna drive in a real looking car i will, outside.
Now, if we could get graphics like these awesome looking cg movies such as shrek 2, robots, over the hedge etc then that would really be fricking amazing.
That in my opinion is what computer graphics are about.

It seems that the guys who want uber realism are mainly these who play war/violent games and i think that says everything ;-{

what if you wanted to fly a real 747, or F-14... could you just go outside and fire up the ole oilburner...

just like i asked earlier... what if you wanted to visit the underground tunnels in the photos above, sure... just jump on a jet to Russia and go visit em...


what if you wanted to go into orbit aboard the shuttle... just go outback and light the fuse and jump in, right...

there are some experiences that you just cannot do in real life, that virtual reality allows you to... and for me, the realer the virtual experience, the better...

--Mike

There's one big thing missing from these thigns though. Real feedback. As Evak mentioned. In a real car you can *feel* the rear wheels loose traction, and you respond to that... etc.

Same goes for a 747/F-14. You don't get the feedback. Sure, the screen goes red/black when you dive/climb, which is cool. I wouldn't want *that* really simulated!

I want an all-encompasing VR machine to program, that'd be ACE! :D

well yeah... force- feedback joysticks can only do part of the job... if the user was directly connected to the wheel by a vr glove which had tactile feedback based on the 'geometry' in the 3D world, which not only controlled, but reacted to the forces in the virtual world... then that would definitely be the best...

--Mike

Absolutely. Don't forget the seat!

Halo

Nice troll.

Just my thoughts...I saw a lot of marketing at the GDC where I had to squint and look hard to see the revolutionary effect they were telling me I was supposed to notice, to the point of being ridiculous. Everything was about "the subtle interplay of ambient light" and such nonsense.

At the same time, character animation has gotten better, but more canned. HL2 has some great character animation, but when they made Day of Defeat:Source, they just said "screw it, those animations are too much work to make". I really dislike the trend of games playing like interactive movies, with long cutscenes and special animations for one little occurance, like when Alyx jumps up and climbs along the side of a building.

Here's an example. The only difference I see is there are some white pixels on the ground and rock on the right. And the one on the left hurts my eyes:

hey Josh... your site is down again...

--Mike

"halo" is right with those pictures.

I remember people spouting on about this when that demo was released and I was squeaking about how I didn't notice anything and I think it was "jfk" that explained to me that it was very subtle stuff.

@halo - have you played Oblivion with HDR? In the main city, some walls are bright to start with, but with HDR they're blinding me. Same with many dungeons.
The parallax normal mapping really doesn't look good other places than flat walls - stones in the wilderness look awful up close.

Um, the problem with the HDR screenshots is that HDR is supposed to be a dynamix animated effect.

HDR is awesome when done well. Most PC games havent bothered much, but the 360 has a few games that show off some decent lighting effect. I don't think the average PC has the right hardware for developers to put the extra effort in PC games like they do on consoles. Maybe next year when GF 6/7/8 are all PS 3.0 or higher and you can get a 6600GT for $80 we will see proper usage of new graphics effects.

Games that looked something like shrek should be possible, even the original Xbox shrek game looked pretty neat, shame about the crap gameplay.

@Red

Well obviously you can do those things but like cygnus said you cant really in a computer program.

Games are escapism for me and the less realistic the better.
Moving a car, shuttle, boing 747 around onscreen would be the same as it was on ps1, graphics won't make i any better, not until we can FEEL IT proper.

ps don't know of any shuttle/boing 747 games/simulators on ps1 :)

i don't understand what you mean sinu...


that depends what kinda game you're playing... doesn't it...

i mean, sure if you were playing some kinda fantasy game, like Harry Potter's Day In The Country, then definitely you'd want witches and flying goblins and spells and all that sh, errr stufff...

but, wouldn't you want your war games or flight sims to be just the opposite... as real as it gets... hey, wait a minute, didn't somebody trademark that phrase already...


sure it would... but, going along with what you see as more real than real (was that from the Tyrell Corp)... most of your sensory input comes in from your eyes, ears, and hands... better graphics for the eyes... stereo 3d surround audio for the ears... and tactile force feedback joysticks or gloves for the hands...

the behind will just have to follow the others for a while...

what was the last VR headset you view your virtual reality from... judging from what you've just said, i'd venture to guess that you hadn't experienced such VR yet... if you did, you'd be singing a different tooon about what you can and can't do with a gomputer generated set of stimulii in the right amounts...

--Mike

{just skimmed this, but...}

I saw Pixar's "Cars" last night. Two things struck me:

(1) During the 'drive through the canyon' scenes I stopped watching the two cars having their playful, flirtatious romp through leaves and puddles and watched the effort and detail that had been put into rendering the trees, clouds, terrain, etc. at the periphery of the screen. I don't even know whether it was CGI overlaid on high-def film footage or not. (But I bet it was all rendered in a computer.)

(2) Voice aside, you could tell that the Hudson Hornet was Paul Newman, because the amount of precise and controlled acting expressed through the car's blue eyes was so familiar.


One day games will do this in real-time

I want to see Pixar's Cars too. However, the people at the cinema always laugh when they see me as I watch every film alone - which seems to amuse them.

we are at childhood baby steps for graphics. Yes, comparing what we had in 1995 and now, it seems like great progress, but we are in the dolldrum years.

We are spoiled by the pre-rendered movies these days. A scene, in the latest Cars movie, would take about 20 hours to render. Now, it did not say how long the scene was, but it is not even close to a movie.

Lets assume it takes 30 seconds to render 1 frame of a movie. In today's Moore Law, that means we need about 16 years from now to be able to render Cars in real time at 60fps. Drop few years with some tricks and shortcuts, but still, at least a decade from now. Oh, and they needed a 32GB RAM for the rendering machines.

And, I would imagine that the video card ram would also have to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 32 - 64GB of RAM.

So, I wouldn't count on something too breakthrough. Tweaks here and there. And also, all of those tech demos, thats is all they are. They can't be used in real games usually because that demo takes full load of the gfx card with no room for more levels, hud, etc.

EDIT: If you come out with good 3D VR graphics with resolution of at least 1280x960 that wrap 180 degrees just like your eyes, you can hold off on more ram and polygons. The feeling of being there inside will blow people away. Oh yeah, make it below $1000 so we can afford it.

That HDR effect is just one really tiny addition to HL2/Source Engine ... it's not fair to single just one effect out like that and use it as an example of graphics not advancing. I mean seriously we're talking only a matter of months between the non-HDR version and the HDR version. Compare Half-Life 1 to Half-Life 2 ... not Half-Life 2 ... to the patched Half-Life 2 only 3 months later.

If you play the Lost Coast demo they released, the lighting effects and glows are really nice and add a lot to the experience. If you're not noticing it, that's probably a good thing. It's not meant to be in your face. If it looks more realistic, your brain will accept it and move on. You really only notice lighting when it's done badly.

Besides any of that, there's only so much that can be done on today's monitors. A white pixel is the brightest you can get. That's it. We're at the maximum. You'll never be blinded by a flash of light or shielding your eyes to see something because it can't get really bright like it does in real life. HDR and other effects are a great step towards realism but they can only go so far due to the delivery medium.

Looking at HL2 Episode 1 Valve doesn't necessarily use the HDR as a realism effect.
For example, in the reactor core scene, they used HDR to express how bright it is in a way that is absolutely impossible without HDR. (And as a result, it looked really cool).

That says it the best. The technology is probably going to stay stable for about the next ten years, with minor improvements, and of course we'll be able to put more stuff on the screen at any given time.

Also HL2 is only shader model 2 tech, hardly cutting edge. Most AAA games havent really touched SM3 which is for current gen cards.

Just have to be patient and wait for the consoles to pave the way and the PC to catch up when there is a big enough userbase with the hardware.

anything that uses shaders higher than 2 are mostly there as a afterthought. Just like Doom looks 90% the same on a GF3 as it does on newer cards. The exception being little spot effects that aren't really all that noticeable in screenshots.

There's a ton of mileage left, some of the problems are that the tools have to catch up with the hardware, so that artists can make proper use of the technology.

Oh how could i be this wrong? Leadwerks is right. I've just played H.E.R.O. on my Radeon 9800PRO and it really doesn't look any better than on my C64, if not even worse... ;O)

@taumel: tried downgrading your video drivers to VIC?

For anyone who has seen HDR in realtime, they would know why it's nice to watch!

Having just upgraded from a Ti4200 to a 7800 GT OC 5 months ago, I can honestly say that I would miss HDR in some games if it weren't there. The experience of HDR in lost cost, HL2 (ep1) and in oblivion was great!

HDR can't be measured by a still image, you need to see the full dynamic effect. As the camera shutter opens and closes with different light amounts. As the lighting changes when you go from the inside of a building to the outside.

Its an experience you need to see in realtime to appreciate.

I think that "graphics realism" reached the stage of diminishing returns a long time ago. It isn't as if there is little investmentment in it - quite the opposite. I imagine that visual effects (both artwork and programming) are where the vast majority of the multi-million dollar budgets spent on some games go.

A possible reason why there is a trend away from purely-realistic art styles is that 3D graphics have begun to fall into the Uncanny Valley - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley .

I like that theory. However, I think the Uncanny Valley probably applies more to tangible objects. Graphics representing inanimate objects don't suffer from this. I think the complaints in this thread are just straight BS. It might be a matter of diminishing returns but it's still hard to go back to Gamecube, Xbox, or PS2 games after playing Xbox 360.

I wholely disagree there. I've never been impressed with the X360, but there's not been anything out to push it yet.

I was having a whinge the other day regarding a racer i saw on it that had huge mipmapping factors, and it looked no better than GT4 [edit: Worse than GT4]. I've never played an X360 for longer than about 3 minutes due to either load times, or lack of originality.

I look at it waiting to see improvements. They will come, but until then I'm pretty happy with my GC games which look pretty sweet and don't need to be patched after release to work properly :)

True, no one wants to go back to PS1 days, or 3DO. I don't think anyone here suggests that. It is that today, there are no more breakthrough things in regards to 3D Cards. More speed, more memory, and few effects hard coded is nice, but not breakthrough.

I don't like the fact the every 6 months a new card comes out for $600. If the industry held itself to one card per year, perhaps it would give developers time to exploit the cards potential AND give time for manufacturers to invent more than just faster RAM or SM5.0. Oh, and give us some chance to save up money for it so we don't feel jipped 6 months into a purchase.

@retro.hack
I used the driver with the codename Frodo, doesn't need .NET either!

I've seen some great 360 stuff myself, some of the games blew me away for graphics. Next gen graphics can be subtle though, and mipmaps probably won't go away any time soon since your basicly adding more complex layers of textures and using more Vram to render the same polys in modern engines.

So instead of using 2 or 3 textures per triangle, you might be using 2 - 4 passes with 4 texture layers in each pass.

Normal maps typicaly have to be quite high res without compression to look clean as artifacts reduce quality immensely with compression. It all gets expensive fast.

Yup, it was You who said that Xbox hasn't really had any real Next-Gen games yet...

Wasn't it a Far-cry video I saw with that ultra-realistic water? That looked nice on X360 thinking of it! .. Mmm!

You need to see Fight Night Round 3. I played it on a HDTV back to back with Need For Speed Underground 2 on Gamecube and the Gamecube game was unbearable in comparison. Fight Night on 360 looks better than Toy Story ;) There's a few games on 360 that really are Next Gen. Playing it for short periods of time at the store doesn't give you the real picture too because often times the screens aren't capturing the detail and graphics are subtle but really noticeable once you get into it for a while and then try to go back. The attention now is in the details not the initial wow factor.

I will give it a chance when it's settled in more.

1) My screen is almost new and I'm not buying a HDTV anytime soon.
2) Fight night had nice spit ;) Whats good about that game is the controls...
Why Oh Why did you chose NFSU? That game tries to look nice whilst using a masked floor, making it horrible to look at :) I already sold that game back to the shop. :)

Look at POP:WW for some nice visuals.


Oh i'm not claiming that GC is as good as X360, i've just not been blown off my feet yet :D

This thread is not advancing.

retro.hack:

You feel that way because the most common use of HDR and Bloom is on "overkill" setting. I know what you're talking about.

BUT, HDR and bloom are visible in real life and when modestly used in games, they look excellent.

Look at midday sunlight bouncing off a car for real-life bloom.

seems to me that next is a bit disappointing so far
I found unreal engine hard work in that it was hard to make things look good without lots of faffing around.

Having said that epic are doing a great job on gears of war

I must say I prefer style over complete realism. Only idiots think photos are the ultimate in realism.

A couple of comments,... I skimmed a bunch so sorry if it's a big repeat.

1. "Nobody wants to go back to 3DO, and PS1 graphics",... This is true particularly because that first generation of 3d was absolutely horrid. I'm perfectly happy to play my PSP or PS2 after playing an XBOX 360 That step down is not enought to ruin the experience, since the PSP and PS2 are quite capable of displaying realtime 3D.

2. If graphics technology were to improve 100X overnight, I doubt we would see much of a change, given the point we are at right now. It all comes down to artists that need to create this stuff, and they are not hitting as many limitations as in the past already. More polys is not going to help much after a point, neither is more texture memory.

Sorry guys I think we're still a long long way away from the pinnacle. The more I think about it ... the more I like the "Uncanny Valley" theory. At first 3D was cute like a stuffed animal ... now it's awkward ... soon it'll really bring us there.

Good riddance... Who need graphical advancement? All it does is make games cost more to make, and require more hands. Name one GOOD thing graphical advancement has had.

'Name one GOOD thing graphical advancement has had. '

Right on sonny! The rot set in when they started using them new fangled coloured polygons over good, honest vector line graphics. Dagnammit!

Sorry man ... I like graphics. Going back and playing a good ... but dated looking game isn't as nice as playing a newer good looking game (sometimes). There is something to be said for good graphics ... aesthetics matter period.

Lol spoken like a true Amish Representitive :-P

Honestly though, it's the industry falling in on itself when people say that graphics have no place in games....

Look at the market, we have 50 big name companies developing 4-5 titles a year (thats just the big boys). few-to-none have a good story, or even satisfactory gameplay, they are just pushing out graphics because the casual gamer screams about how nice something looks. Or you folks go to E3 and oogle over the neat tech demos (IE "There is no way that's real time rendered, oh wait, it is?!!!").

The industry is hearing the cry for how real it looks, and how everyone wants more. It's not the fact that few are buying Doom3 that made an impact, it's because it sold a few copies which made developers and publishers say "see, they know where the money is at".

Now I am not one to sit here and say "you're all wrong" (like Red would), hell, I like the pretty tech demos just as the next fella. I enjoyed Doom3, I loved Halflife2, I still play oblivion, and I have a bad addiction to Forza Motorsports for Xbox right now. I will not say that Graphics have no place in games, cause they do, just not as dominant a percentage as the industry as a whole thinks.

My latest project has some heavy requirements. I need to push around 20-25k of polys. Thats not good art people, thats only 100 polys a model (I need the ability to have alot of stuff on the screen). I can't do any good lighting, I cant do any good physics, or AI, I want to, but I cant do to much because of the limitations just in showing what I need to show. Hell, if I could, I would love to bump each model up to 150-200 polys, and have them all parallex mapped, with shaders and the whole nine yards.. It wouldn't take much to do (as far as developing the art), but the machines wouldn't handle that. I would love to show that kind of detail, not as a selling point, but because I would love to take that sort of direction with art.

whoa, started babbling, time to be done with it :-)

That must be one hell of a surface count then Dark half ;)
10,000+?
Do they all have to be animated or could you merge some?

I agree that we consume(d) the Flashy tech demos and started this trend.
Plus Companys have begun to release "Visual target shots" long before games are even in alpha.
We see whats comming long before it ever gets here..so when it does , its just not as impressive as it would have been apearing from nowhere.
Like Josh, I remember seeing unreal 2k3 and being very impressed.
--

Most HDR seems to mimic the over exposure of a camera lens,(an effect vastly over used in the Fantasy Genre) heh

"Look at midday sunlight bouncing off a car for real-life bloom. "

This is true,but your Eyes quickly adjust to equalize as much as possible, This is still missing in most Hdr simulations, (I Think Project offset is supposed to simulate it)
others might aswell.

Sam

250 models roughly with those numbers. I use copyentity so that helps a bit. None of them are animated as the frame rate is complete crap on 250 animated models.



Yeah, oblivion and HL2 Lost cost did it well.

Well I think that we are reaching a point where we just have more power and not much more innovation. So since we have all this extra processing power it just is used in more objects onscreen at once and some graphic filtering.

I dont think graphics have advanced that far from the Half-Life2 days TBH they look nicer but dont make the game any better. Half-Life 2 looks amazing but once again it all down to ludicrously expensive cards to make the box shots.

Ive played it on my ATI 9600Pro and it looks as good as it does on me brothers X850 so im not fussing TBH.

I agree tho the increments are getting smaller and much harder to notice the only thing that lacks in much of todays games is the AI in the background, the bots still fall for tricks that no sane human would.

I have read somewhere that not less than 100.000 polygons are needed for a photorealistic 3d human model
If so real time graphic is still far away from photorealism

Especially after you get your eyes dilated and opt out on sunglasses upon exiting the building...
("Holy Bloom filter Bat Man!" was the first thing that came to mind when I got my eyes checked 2 months ago >.>)


What is that for, a nude figure, figure with clothing, both clothing & underlying body, etc?

It seems the more the graphics progress, the more the actual meshes themselves require work on to look more realistic.....sooner or later miniscule things like clothing that flaps & blows in the wind on your character is going to be a requirement as an example as to things people "expect" in next-gen games.

The Technology is there, the problem is accessing it.
You need to be a friggen rocket scientist to program decent shaders. It's out of reach for most indie programmers.

That and the fact that there's several standards / incompatibilities makes the whole thing a real mess to deal with.

I'm an artist / hobby programmer, i can whip up a database program / simple small game in no time but i can't make heads from tales with shaders.

Thankfuly there's a few engines out there that have recognized that and they're coming out with a visual shader designer, Truevision with shaderboy, 3DGS is coming out with one and DarkBasic Pro as well.

DBPro is getting it lately, people are having problems with AI, boom ai pack, same with physics, full lighting solution and now a shader designer...

We need to see more abstraction like this in order to get back to creating games and not get lost in the game engines.

I know zealots will disagree but flip this around and you'll see what i mean.

Where would you be without your photoshop or 3dsmax or any gfx utilities, you know how to program but you probably can't draw a ful character or environment without those helper utilities, to me i can just take a few sheets of papers and animate a character the old fashion way, scan the images in and i have my animations.

Tools have evolved on one side, now the other side needs to catch up.

my 2 cents
Sash/

HDR overexposed:
http://images.google.no/url?q=http://jamisonroberts.com/share/oblivion/belda.jpg

good points Sash, Gene...

--Mike

Thanks Red :)

It's a fantasy game isn't it, maybe that's what stone structures look like in a fantasy world. :) And look, the character is warming his feet on them; these glowing surfaces serve a purpose.

The HDR boom will go over with in a year or so. Developers just overuse the effect so the masses will actually notice it's there.

retro: That's not a demonstration of overexposed HDR, it's a demonstration of what happens when you drop a texture with 255,255,255 into an HDR scene. Unless textures start using a 48 bit colour space, artists are going to have to be careful with their palettes.

@vinyl: well I agree with you, but since the texture looks fine without HDR enabled this is exactly what Im so much against. "We'll throw in HDR and everything will be just dandy"
They need to start working with these effects where they're needed and not just include them because they can.

100TH POST! Now how's that for real-time? :)

I agree with Shasnil about the DarkBASIC folks getting it with all their new packs. I think there are better solutions out there than DB though but at least they have the right concept going.

I've just been playing Call Of Juarez, and its the first cowboy type game that I actualy enjoyed. It's mostly down to the decent graphics and interesting setting.

My beef with modern tech is that everyone has done the scifi shooter to death, with metal and plastic everywhere, and a million zombies.

This game takes those graphics and sticks them in a wild west scenario and its cool :) A bit more subtle with the effects and also quite realistic looking.

Here's a different angle on this story...

Perhaps the graphics ARE advancing, however the development costs of creating something to utilize the available power doesn't justify the returns.

In other words, if the average consumer was willing to spend $200 on a game, and did so in a quantity that a $20 game typically sells, perhaps it would be a worthwhile investment and you'd be playing a game with pixar-level animation quality or better. Since the part of the market that actually has the hardware capable of rendering near photo-realistic scenery is in the minority, there's a lot of risk involved in targeting that audience.

graphics are advancing. If you follow any of the Siggraph stuff you'd agree. Just games aren't the 'bleeding edge' or forefront of real-time graphics as they use to be a few years ago. You have to look elsewhere to see what research is coming up with. Some are saying Unreal 3, HL2, Fight Night 3, etc look great... Man, if you guys see what some of the research projects going on around universities and at Siggraph it really makes you excited and hope some of it comes over to the game dev world in the coming years :o. Some of the stuff I've seen there completely eclipses what game graphics achieve today.

Mostly these games don't use HDR and it's just a post processing bloom filter which markting sells as HDR.

that scene looks fantastic... and i agree... even though i'm not a big wild west fan, the genre has been sorta overlooked... lots of room there for some great first person adventures...

--Mike

Well, the designers behind some of these driving games like Gran Turismo and Project Gotham Racing seem to have things down to a science to make things as realistic as driving sims can be. You gotta admit, PGR 3 brings Gran Turismo to its knees now, Sony has to do whatever it takes to get back at Microsoft now when it comes to high-def graphics in driving games. FPS games are getting on this route, too, but it'll take more time to get to be as good as driving games, if not better. Now Monolith seems to have realistic graphics in FPS games down to a science, even the person behind the trigger is a lot more realistic as far as graphical attributes. So there are companies out there that are getting RTGs into play, don't underestimate them...

yeah... that's true and all... but... could you imagine being part of that scene... inside the scene, via a VR setup...

that's what i'm talking about...

i don't need anything more real than those graphics... i just need a more immersive way to experience it than staring at it from the outside...

that's my big complaint with the lack of progress in real time graphics... lets make em real time and real sense...

--Mike