Photorealism in games? Not for a while yet

[Magnakai]

Have you seen the screenshots here?

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3140119

To my mind, it's the next level from what we're used to.
I mean, look at Malcom: http://www.1up.com/do/slideshow?page...86&mId=1846919
It's by no means photorealistic, but it's believable. It's somehow skirting around the Uncanny Valley, as this seems pretty realistic but doesn't bother me at all...

[Ady]

None of this means anything if the in-game physics don't match the graphics.

[Tom Salter]

Realistic physics is much easier to do than realistic graphics. Problem is that to demonstrate realistic physics, you need to do it in realtime. Realistic physics in a video just isn't convincing enough.

And at the moment it takes too much CPU power to do realistic physics, so it's not ever demonstrated in games yet. But it's pretty much there, resigned to research papers until we have the powaire to do it in realtime.

[EvilBoris]

Photorealism is great for some games but when every game looks photorealistic then it becomes boring. That's what's going to happen in eventually, IMO - everything will be so close to realistic that nothing stands out as unique anymore

its true, all racing games look the same now, because they are all real cars driving around real tracks

[EvilBoris]

And at the moment it takes too much CPU power to do realistic physics, so it's not ever demonstrated in games yet. But it's pretty much there, resigned to research papers until we have the powaire to do it in realtime.

we are almost there, the worlds first stand alone physics card is coming out soon

http://www.ageia.com/technology.html

[Soi]

I think progress in game graphics is interesting when compared to that of art.

I mean, the first human art was cave drawings, which were poor renditions of real life things (just like original pixelated Mario was a poor rendition of a plumber). After cave drawings, the trend was for art to become more and more realistic (just like we are seeing with games now). This was obviously before the invention of photography, and so life like portraits were highly desired.

Then, impressionism blew the art world away with artists daring to be abstract again. People like Monet shocked the world with pictures of fields that, while clearly looking like fields, weren?t trying to be realistic. From impressionism came all the wacky stuff that gets labelled ?modern art?. The art world left realism to photos and concentrated on more creative things -a realistic still life is just copying after all.

Games as a medium were invented long after the impressionists reminded the world that art could be abstract. Hence, we have always had games that take the real world and make it abstract (both by design and as a result of hardware restrictions). Games are now striving for realism because there is no ?photo equivalent? to games (except perhaps watching a film, but they are becoming more virtual by the year). Like the poster above, I see realism in games as a milestone that needs to be cleared. Once it has been, and realism is trivial to implement, game designers can focus their energies on creating wonderful worlds for us to enjoy.

[Bassman]

I suppose one way to achieve photo-realism is to take the path taken in Mobile Train Simulator+Densha Da Go on the PSP. However it is all very well using video footage in game when there is no possibility of deviation from a single view (or insuffucient to make it noticeable). Factor in a car racing game and you are suddenly presented with an (almost) infinite number of variations in the view caused by car position and car orientation at which point a straight video is not really the answer and the number of video frames required to present all possible views would require a huge amount of space.