2008: Life like Graphics?

[borntosoul]

I see what youre saying, and I agree that itl take more work to get an increase in visual quality (which is sort of related to what I said above), but I dont think hardware will have any trouble keeping up at all. As long as software developers create the need for more power, the hardware industry will supply it.

i agree, deffinetaly both hardware and software gotta move up together, if we had 100x more power right now there would need to be a big increase in investment on the software side to make great use of it - though im not saying it wouldnt be handy to have that power right now :). i think we are moving at a good pace on the hardware side of things, with quad cores and G80 comin soon - thats faster than anytime i can remember. especially on the cpu side of things. even better probably than the P4 speed vamps - u know the time when the p4 made sence lol.

[brady]

I'm really hoping that in the next few years we will see a push toward direct projection of real-time 3d into my eyes through my optical nerves. You would simply attach a modified usb cable directly into your brain and then there would be no need for a monitor. Also you could use a good percentage of idle brain power to accelerate graphics and physics. Of course when more complicated games come out and your brain isn't up to the task, you'd just be out of luck. Unless we can develop a safe brain upgrade. We'd also need to be able to create a transferable image of your current memory and load it onto the new upgrade brain. Unless you just wanted a fresh install.

[Capt. Picard]

I'm really hoping that in the next few years we will see a push toward direct projection of real-time 3d into my eyes through my optical nerves. You would simply attach a modified usb cable directly into your brain and then there would be no need for a monitor. Also you could use a good percentage of idle brain power to accelerate graphics and physics. Of course when more complicated games come out and your brain isn't up to the task, you'd just be out of luck. Unless we can develop a safe brain upgrade. We'd also need to be able to create a transferable image of your current memory and load it onto the new upgrade brain. Unless you just wanted a fresh install.

Imagine playing games on a network or going on to the Internet. In the end well just be like nodes in a giant matrix. Hell it'll be just like The Matrix.

[zer0]

yeah, imagine going BSOD! :D

[Bman212121]

I'm really hoping that in the next few years we will see a push toward direct projection of real-time 3d into my eyes through my optical nerves. You would simply attach a modified usb cable directly into your brain and then there would be no need for a monitor. Also you could use a good percentage of idle brain power to accelerate graphics and physics. Of course when more complicated games come out and your brain isn't up to the task, you'd just be out of luck. Unless we can develop a safe brain upgrade. We'd also need to be able to create a transferable image of your current memory and load it onto the new upgrade brain. Unless you just wanted a fresh install.

Heh, why would we want a brain? That thing would only slow our games down with its limited capabilities. I bet it can't even handle 1080p! (nana2)

[Zelda_fan]

They've been saying this "lifelike" graphics crap for years. You can't simulate reality - period. You can get close, but they'll never get 100% photorealism.

Some of the still shots in Crysis look somewhat photorealistic, but the animations aren't even close.

imho devs should concentrate on making games better (and sometimes that means upping the graphics a notch).

[Zelda_fan]

I'm really hoping that in the next few years we will see a push toward direct projection of real-time 3d into my eyes through my optical nerves. You would simply attach a modified usb cable directly into your brain and then there would be no need for a monitor. Also you could use a good percentage of idle brain power to accelerate graphics and physics. Of course when more complicated games come out and your brain isn't up to the task, you'd just be out of luck. Unless we can develop a safe brain upgrade. We'd also need to be able to create a transferable image of your current memory and load it onto the new upgrade brain. Unless you just wanted a fresh install.

I'd never attach a USB cable to my brain.

[Acid Rain]

They've been saying this "lifelike" graphics crap for years. You can't simulate reality - period. You can get close, but they'll never get 100% photorealism. Remember those words, as I have a feeling you'll be eating them. ;)

[Richteralan]

Remember those words, as I have a feeling you'll be eating them. ;)

I don't think so ;)
Don't be too optimistic as you'll see numerous of obstacles and impossibilities ahead ;)

[Belarnion]

To simulate reality perfectly without realism degradation you need another reality just as big to put the simulation in. ;)

[ricercar]

Mark my words: the next generation graphics card demos are going to feature a real-world woman, not a fantasy faerie or pre-adolescent's vision of a martial-artist. Face, expressions, mocap, and hair, the G80 and RV whatever demonstrations will model a recognizable human being we've seen before, not an artificial data set.

Knowing Jen Hsun, NVIDIA will give us a babe-licious TV sex-star or Playboy Playmate. For NV30, he didn't seem to understand why NVIDIA couldn't release demo Dawn without any clothing. Only when the female members of the marketing team rebelled, did Jen Hsun relent.

[Intel17]

They've been saying this "lifelike" graphics crap for years. You can't simulate reality - period. You can get close, but they'll never get 100% photorealism.


Yep. Even offline rendering, where you can spend hours, perhaps even days, rendering a realistic scene, they can never quite get it right. Also, the most realistic of the offline renders are still just confined to a few objects.

[Daneel Olivaw]

To simulate reality perfectly without realism degradation you need another reality just as big to put the simulation in. ;)True but your statement doesn't take into account the limits of human perception. Considering that, a simulation can be realistic (to us) without having the complexity of reality.

[Noobvidia]

I was reading an article (can't remember where) about there being a certain point when graphics and images of the human form become so realistic, they become disturbing rather than entertaining...it might have been about life-like robots though.

I can believe that. That Adrianne Curry image on the other page is kind of eerie.

[CaptNKILL]

I can believe that. That Adrianne Curry image on the other page is kind of eerie.
Thats because shes very wierd looking. If they had a more attractive model it probably wouldnt be eerie at all.

[Nv40]

life like graphics is a general term ,we only can see it in games in a very smaller scale..
ALAN WAKE , AFRIKA. with limitations. games will look like movies the day CPus are fast enough ,with enough memory to handle everything that acelerators can do today.
The solution is THat intel and AMD make their CPUS dedicated for gaming . just like SOny/IBM did with CELL but in a much bigger scale.


Jacob- And ten years from now do you vision that we will see... GPU's handling graphics, and PPU's handling physics, CPU doing A.I. and that kind of thing or do you think we will see some kind of blend of the 3 technologies or maybe 2 of them?

Sweeney- Looking at the long term future, the next 10 years or so, my hope and expectation is that there will be a real convergence between the CPU, GPU and non traditional architectures like the PhysX chip from Ageia, the Cell technology from Sony. You really want all those to evolve in the way of a large scale multicore CPU that has a lot of non traditional computing power as a GPU has now. A GPU processes a huge number of pixels in parallel using relatively simply control flow, CPU's are extremely good at random access logic, lots of branching, handling cache and things like that. I think really, essential, graphics and computing need to evolve together to the point where the future renderers I hope and expect will look a lot more like a software renderer from previous generations than a fixed function rasterizer pipeline and the stuff we have currently. I think GPU's will ultimately end up being... you know when we look at this 10 years from now, we will look back at GPU's being kinda a temporary fixed function hardware solution , to a problem that ultimately was, just general computing.

Indeed..
Graphics acelerators will be obsolete in the future ,once you have very powerfull cpus with enough cache and enough memory and performance to handle game graphics in realtime. SLI or quad sli will not be very usefull in the future as games use more and more physics ,AI ,and geometry and you dont have a monitor that can display ultra extreme resolutions. The dream of many engine programmer is to remove the check list featuritis that Apis like DIrectx or OpengL will always have. and allow them to use their full freedom ,instead of faking lighting/shadows with Direcx9/10 used instead indirect ilumination ,RAdiosity in realtime and profesional post processing software ,just like today movies are done ,but this time in realtime.

[OWA]

I was reading an article (can't remember where) about there being a certain point when graphics and images of the human form become so realistic, they become disturbing rather than entertaining...it might have been about life-like robots though.

I can believe that. That Adrianne Curry image on the other page is kind of eerie.
Yeah, I read something about that also. The one I read was talking about a movie. They said they could actually make the characters more realistic looking but found that it freaked people out.

The Polar Express was kind of like that. The characters look kinda dead or something because their eyes seem hollow (not alive).

In Toy Story 2, I think it was, there was a scene where the fat guy with a beard was laying on the couch and when I saw that for the first time, it took me a while to convince myself it was CG.