2008: Life like Graphics?

[mathew952]

Now that their are 80 cores on thier way, and DX10, This will give the hardware needed to supply lifelike graphics, Imean, look at some of the snapshots of crysis!And the Core 2 quadro can render oblivion with 100FPS.
That, and I belive we have the hard ware allready, but it's mostly developers trying to save a buck and AMI and NVINTEL trying to say "well I've got 53 piplines. Oh yeah but that's usrped by my GDDR4.1. But my clock is dual core. but mine is quad, and It has a coaster! But mine has a really shiny fan!"
I'm not going to be anidito and buy the latest and greatest every 5 months. I'll wait until AMi finnaly says oh crap... I can't fit any more Ram on one chip without it bieng 36" long.

[|MaguS|]

wtf did you just say...

[Capt. Picard]

wtf did you just say...

One can see that he is still a boy in school and also quite new to forums. His communication skills are quite underdeveloped.

[NoWayDude]

(mag) :werd: :nono: :spank: :spam: :alc:

[CaptNKILL]

Now that their are 80 cores on thier way, and DX10, This will give the hardware needed to supply lifelike graphics, Imean, look at some of the snapshots of crysis!And the Core 2 quadro can render oblivion with 100FPS.
That, and I belive we have the hard ware allready, but it's mostly developers trying to save a buck and AMI and NVINTEL trying to say "well I've got 53 piplines. Oh yeah but that's usrped by my GDDR4.1. But my clock is dual core. but mine is quad, and It has a coaster! But mine has a really shiny fan!"
I'm not going to be anidito and buy the latest and greatest every 5 months. I'll wait until AMi finnaly says oh crap... I can't fit any more Ram on one chip without it bieng 36" long.
:rofl

[superklye]

Bigman? That you?

[Milk&Cheese]

the 80 cores that intel presented at the IDF is not for games. it's designed for number crunching. so unless you're doing scientific research it'll be useless to you.

i do see where you're coming from though. if intel & nvidia combine; there will be added competition & worse consequences of failure in both the CPU & GPU arena.

it's weird one of my business profs 5 years ago was talking about this exact thing happening. he didnt mention intel & nvidia. but he made it clear that the CPU makers would merge w/ the graphics providers and the sound providers would go out of business soon after because the new mergers would start their own sound division.

he was driving at companies like intel & amd eventually providing a complete PC. intel's almost there if they do merge.

[SH64]

Bigman? That you?
Kinda wondered the same ..

man what a headache reading this :o

[Marvel_us]

^^ Rofl!

[|MaguS|]

Kinda wondered the same ..

man what a headache reading this :o

Worse is when you come home from your cousins house with a hangover from the previous night and read this... my head is still throbbing...

[DataMatrix]

I sort of understood what he was trying to say, but soon hardware will no longer be the bottleneck, it will be the software.

[Zeta]

I sort of understood what he was trying to say, but soon hardware will no longer be the bottleneck, it will be the software.

I disagree. I do not think software will ever be the bottleneck. There is lazy/rushed progamming where you could squeeze more out of the hardware then you actually are. But this has always been the case and will always be the case.

[crainger]

I disagree. I do not think software will ever be the bottleneck. There is lazy/rushed progamming where you could squeeze more out of the hardware then you actually are. But this has always been the case and will always be the case.

Also. Developers are creating for an almost infinite amount of system configurations, including Consoles. So they have to be mindful of say using a shader that works fine on a 7 series card, but for reasons causes a crash on 6 series or ATi cards.

[borntosoul]

um guys, can you all lay off a little.

back on topic,

it will be a long time before we will see real life graphics, if you see some of the upcoming games like crysis theyre getting pretty good, so good infact that we probably need 5x the perfomance before you notice a mild difference, what i mean is that games are looking so good that we need a lot more power to make a small difference and its going to get harder as we get closer to real life.

[CaptNKILL]

um guys, can you all lay off a little.

back on topic,

it will be a long time before we will see real life graphics, if you see some of the upcoming games like crysis theyre getting pretty good, so good infact that we probably need 5x the perfomance before you notice a mild difference, what i mean is that games are looking so good that we need a lot more power to make a small difference and its going to get harder as we get closer to real life.


The power of computers is scaling with the complexity of the software it runs.

Look at games 10 years ago. A top of the line 1996 computer playing Quake at the framerates we have today was unheard of. It took years (and 3d acceleration patches) to make it run fast. Now, itd be easy to play a recent game on a top of the line computer at high framerates, though there are some exceptions (like Oblivion).

The power of computers is growing faster than the games for the most part (hence the ability to run at higher resolutions and add other external effects like AA and AF), the catch is that you have to be ON the cutting edge of technology to take advantage of it. You cant say "games are outgrowing computers" while youre running a 1 year old graphics card. Being behind a year on a piece of hardware in 1996 meant you probably had to play the newest 3d games at 320x240. Now, it means you have to drop allllll the way down to 1280x960.

Really, some games have their performance problems, but for the most part, top of the line systems are more than capable of playing any recent games at smooth framerates at high settings.

With the G80 and Quad Core CPUs coming out in the next few months and the next big jump in graphics quality coming right after it, I think things are going to match up nicely.

I dont see technology hitting a wall for an extremely long time, if ever.

I think the abilities of the developers will hit a wall before the hardware can no longer get any faster. Eventually, they wont have any artists willing to construct hundreds of millions of individually modeled blades of grass to make for the ultimate in natural and realistic environments, even though the computers will be capable of rendering trillions of polygons per second.

I think one thing that will happen eventually (maybe decades from now) is that textures and models for generic things will be phased out of the developement cycle. Things will be modeled with the correct properties down to a microscopic level so that they look, sound and "feel" the way they should. All the materials needed for a game will be like this, whether it be bricks, cloth, soil, tile, or molasses. They'll all be developed seperately and licensed out to software developers for use as real materials in their games or programs.

There are already examples of this that cover larger things. Like FaceGen being used for faces in Oblivion, Speedtree for forests and weather simulation, Havok physics, or things like Miles sound engine which allows different plugins for EAX, Direct Sound or A3D...

So, its already moving that direction, but I think eventually everything will be like I said. Game developers will merely make the ideas and the unique features, while all of the perfectly realistic weather effects, physics, sound physics (some day, most sounds will be created real time by physics, not recorded and played) and materials that dont need programmed anymore will be licenced from 3rd parties. Game developers will get to be creative without having to waste rediculous amounts of time on artwork and features that have already been perfected.

So anyway, what that has to do with all this is that computers will eventually get so fast that developers will no longer need (or want) to improve these things, so pre-made "standards" will be made and most components of games will be licenced and reused, leaving developers to make more complex games without having to have multibillion dollar budgets and thousands of workers.

If it happens, I expect you guys to come find me and give me a cookie. :p

[jolle]

Im not really expecting much out of Quad cores for gaming.
Id prolly get one sooner or later as I do alot of rendering, as I did with my current Dual core, but for gaming I think the uses will be pretty limited.
G80 sounds like a real beast tho.

[Milk&Cheese]

everything you mention will happen eventually.

it's already happening now though with the nintendo wii. the graphics & sound hardware is essentially exactly the same as the gamecube & the tools for developers have been around for years. the only restriction is imagination. it's graphics dont look photorealistic, but that's never been a factor of fun. if it was then old nintendo & sega games would have been boring.

in simple terms, the market for game creation tools will grow and the complexity of constructing games will shrink. however there will always be exceptions where a game will come out to showcase tools which will then be sold to consumers & game developers.

imo w/in 80 years there will be a breaching point where immersion becomes high enough where human senses cant tell the difference between any improvements & the next trend that will start would be VR scenarios. it's why people watch reality (yes we all know it's not real) tv. they want to live vicariously in a fantasy world for a couple hours.

[borntosoul]

The power of computers is scaling with the complexity of the software it runs.

Look at games 10 years ago. A top of the line 1996 computer playing Quake at the framerates we have today was unheard of. It took years (and 3d acceleration patches) to make it run fast. Now, itd be easy to play a recent game on a top of the line computer at high framerates, though there are some exceptions (like Oblivion).

The power of computers is growing faster than the games for the most part (hence the ability to run at higher resolutions and add other external effects like AA and AF), the catch is that you have to be ON the cutting edge of technology to take advantage of it. You cant say "games are outgrowing computers" while youre running a 1 year old graphics card. Being behind a year on a piece of hardware in 1996 meant you probably had to play the newest 3d games at 320x240. Now, it means you have to drop allllll the way down to 1280x960.

Really, some games have their performance problems, but for the most part, top of the line systems are more than capable of playing any recent games at smooth framerates at high settings.

With the G80 and Quad Core CPUs coming out in the next few months and the next big jump in graphics quality coming right after it, I think things are going to match up nicely.

I dont see technology hitting a wall for an extremely long time, if ever.

I think the abilities of the developers will hit a wall before the hardware can no longer get any faster. Eventually, they wont have any artists willing to construct hundreds of millions of individually modeled blades of grass to make for the ultimate in natural and realistic environments, even though the computers will be capable of rendering trillions of polygons per second.

I think one thing that will happen eventually (maybe decades from now) is that textures and models for generic things will be phased out of the developement cycle. Things will be modeled with the correct properties down to a microscopic level so that they look, sound and "feel" the way they should. All the materials needed for a game will be like this, whether it be bricks, cloth, soil, tile, or molasses. They'll all be developed seperately and licensed out to software developers for use as real materials in their games or programs.

There are already examples of this that cover larger things. Like FaceGen being used for faces in Oblivion, Speedtree for forests and weather simulation, Havok physics, or things like Miles sound engine which allows different plugins for EAX, Direct Sound or A3D...

So, its already moving that direction, but I think eventually everything will be like I said. Game developers will merely make the ideas and the unique features, while all of the perfectly realistic weather effects, physics, sound physics (some day, most sounds will be created real time by physics, not recorded and played) and materials that dont need programmed anymore will be licenced from 3rd parties. Game developers will get to be creative without having to waste rediculous amounts of time on artwork and features that have already been perfected.

So anyway, what that has to do with all this is that computers will eventually get so fast that developers will no longer need (or want) to improve these things, so pre-made "standards" will be made and most components of games will be licenced and reused, leaving developers to make more complex games without having to have multibillion dollar budgets and thousands of workers.

If it happens, I expect you guys to come find me and give me a cookie. :p

captNKILL you missed my point,
the more detail you have onscreen the harder it is to see a difference in quality. so as graphics become more complex its gonna take a whole lot more power to see differences in quality from one to the other. thats basicaly what im saying. in most cases that last 20% is always the hardest to achieve and costs the most money and graphics is no different.

[a12ctic]

.

[Bman212121]

I was actually thinking the same thing about the future also. If you saw the Flight Sim X rendered pics, that is what they want to shoot for with DX10. I'd consider that pretty lifelike. http://nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=77741

What I'm wondering is how much of a boost a quad core CPU will give when running a game that is optimized to take advantage of at least 2 cores + running a G80 Quad SLI. From what I've read, there is a lot more overhead running Quad SLI so having 2 extra cores to run that and other background processes would allow a multithreaded game to run at the best speed. It wouldn't suprise me that you could run the upcoming titles at 2560 x 1600 with 32x AA 32x AF and still have decent frames. So if that happens games that were created with really high detail should be able to look quite lifelike.

[CaptNKILL]

captNKILL you missed my point,
the more detail you have onscreen the harder it is to see a difference in quality. so as graphics become more complex its gonna take a whole lot more power to see differences in quality from one to the other. thats basicaly what im saying. in most cases that last 20% is always the hardest to achieve and costs the most money and graphics is no different.
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.

[Bman212121]

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 have to agree with that 100%. There will always be another way to increase speed. What I've always wondered is at what point will the hardware become enough that you won't need to upgrade nearly as often since it can run all the software. Most general apps right now don't need a C2D to run them.

I think it's a conspiracy between hardware and software. ;) The software guys purposely make their stuff so complex that the hardware guys have to come up with new stuff to run it on. That way you have to keep buying both at a raid pace. Why does word and paint need a C2D?

[CaptNKILL]

Well, hopefully Windows Vista will help out with that a little.

Itl push things along by giving more "eye candy" to the average user and requiring better hardware. This should (in theory) raise the bar quite a bit for minimum specs for new systems.

I dont think its a conspiracy, its just how technology works. The software guys dont want their products to look outdated compared to the competition, so they make them more complex with features that will take advantage of future hardware. Hardware guys develope faster and faster hardware to power all the latest software (including in progress stuff, like current directX 10 titles) so that they arent outdone by the competition.

They all want to make money and move technology along. All we have to do is give them the money and use the technology. :p

[Bearclaw]

Bigman? That you?
HAHAHAHA.,

[mathew952]

Well, I knew making a bold statement like that would come up with most people disagreeing and posting messages about me giving you head aches, But I'd like to thank those who analyzed what I had to say, and then responded with full answers, as opposed to " :D LOL You is Joking ROFL(nana2) ". I'm just begining, I'm a newbie. Please don't be as harsh a the people who play runescape.