Are games ever going to have photorealistic graphics?

[garygnu]

The truth is “Reality!” is getting firmware updates just as quickly as video games are improving.

[Blaster_Master]

@Rubixcube

I don’t think it will be from a slowdown of tech advancement, rather I think it’ll be from diminishing returns from the improvements themselves. Once you’ve got a certain number of polygons and particles in a game adding a few more will only look so much better. Yes games will continue to become more impressive visually, but eventually we’ll get to a point where the average person probably won’t notice. At this point I think the major hurdles will be more dynamic lighting and water effects, and it looks like the next generation of engines will be working on those areas in particular.

I have to agree with this. Presumably we’ll continue to have improving hardware and rendering advances that at some point in the future we’ll be able to render in real time environments that are more and more difficult to distinguish from reality. It seems that for a while there as there was major advancement in graphics that game developers were more interested in trying to make their graphics hyper-realistic and they lost the sense of artistic design that makes the game interesting when those graphics become outdated or that help to cover up the flaws in the current state of the technology.

That’s where the approach of something like WoW is interesting. From a technical standpoint, it’s pretty far behind a lot of other games on the market, but it makes up for that with good aesthetic design. A game like Skyrim has far more realistic graphics, and it succeeds even more for very much the same reasons, because of careful aesthetic designs. Whereas some of the more modern FPS games I’ve seen, while surprisingly realistic, just are boring to look at

I like the comparison to movies as an end goal. Sure a movie with obviously outlandish ideas (fantasy, super heroes, etc.) can often get away with particularly grandiose effects where another movie may not, but even war movies, which one might think would benefit a lot from authenticity, have a particular aesthetic that is important to maintain.
I kind of got away from my point there. The thing is, there’s a massive fall off in terms of the amount of effort to create and processing power to render when compared to the result. We’re reaching the point where even doubling or quadrupling the processing power may have only barely noticeable improvements. Are people going to want to continue to shell out big bucks to upgrade their hardware every few years and to pay for more and more expanded art development? I think we’re getting really close to the point of diminishing returns such that we’ll start to see graphics pretty much plateau.

[Kinthalis]

I think you guys are nuts.

We are no where near the point of diminishing returns.

When games look like this during actual gameplay:

- YouTube

(Skip to 1:14).

We can talk about being close to the point of diminishing returns. Actually even then, there’s plenty of room for improvement.

You do know we film live action movies in you know, the real world. Do movies like the Lord of the Rings lack artistic quality because instead of cartoon Frodo it’s Elija Wood? Or because instead of polygonal-y trees with a flat green texture there are actual trees?

[VinylTurnip]

@Little_Nemo

I think we’re getting very close: Emily.

That’s pretty interesting, but even if I didn’t know it was animated I’d do a double-take at a couple of points. Something disturbingly Clutch Cargo-ish about the mouth.

[Jophiel]

@Airk

I would assert that both of these games would benefit from not being “realistic” so much as a sort of “superreal” that is actually LESS realistic. Gorgeous vistas, truly blighted landscapes, etc that capture the feel of realism without actually being there.

That’s true. And I picked two games by the same studio using the same engine so it’s even more pronounced. Really, I was just expressing that there’s a time and place for notably unrealistic but still appealing art styles and a time for much more “realistic” (even if artificially forced) styles.

TF2’s cartoonish style, for instance, gives me a much different feeling (mainly one of “Don’t take it so seriously and just have fun”) than the styles used in the latest generations of military based first person shooters. Both good with their place but not really interchangable.

(And the two are not always mutually exclusive, such as FO3’s retro-future aesthetic mixed with an attempt at realistic looking places/objects)

[Airk]

@Kinthalis

I think you guys are nuts.

We are no where near the point of diminishing returns.

When games look like this during actual gameplay:

- YouTube

(Skip to 1:14).

What? The creepy cartoony uncanny valley person? I was much more interested by cool art style on the demon just before that.

I guess you’re right, we have a loooong way to go.

You do know we film live action movies in you know, the real world. Do movies like the Lord of the Rings lack artistic quality because instead of cartoon Frodo it’s Elija Wood? Or because instead of polygonal-y trees with a flat green texture there are actual trees?

The amount of effort that went into making Elijah Wood look less like a real person is nontrivial.

[Jragon]

@VinylTurnip

That’s pretty interesting, but even if I didn’t know it was animated I’d do a double-take at a couple of points. Something disturbingly Clutch Cargo-ish about the mouth.

At one point near the end they show the real Emily they filmed for a minute. Her mouth is exactly the same, so it’s actually an issue with the model, not the tech. The problem with the tech is that it seems to just be a replication of exact real-world acting in digital form, if you’re going to take the expense to do that you might as well just make a damn FMV game.

[FoieGrasIsEvil]

@Kinthalis

I think you guys are nuts.

We are no where near the point of diminishing returns.

When games look like this during actual gameplay:

- YouTube

(Skip to 1:14).

We can talk about being close to the point of diminishing returns. Actually even then, there’s plenty of room for improvement.

You do know we film live action movies in you know, the real world. Do movies like the Lord of the Rings lack artistic quality because instead of cartoon Frodo it’s Elija Wood? Or because instead of polygonal-y trees with a flat green texture there are actual trees?

When are entire games going to look like the cinematic trailers/cutscenes? That’s going to be off the chain when they do.

[Kinthalis]

@FoieGrasIsEvil

When are entire games going to look like the cinematic trailers/cutscenes? That’s going to be off the chain when they do.

Who knows. That short sequence took a team of artists months to create, and I’m guessing it took a big fat server farm some time to render each frame.

We need tools and systems that streamline the development of complex animations, complex physics, complex interactions right off the bat. We can’t have a team of artists working for months for a 5 minute cut scene, that’s for sure. And we need hardware capable of rendering the scene in real time.

We’re probably closer to the latter than the former, but we’ve got a long ways to go to achieve either.

The next big thing studios are doing now are casting actors to do not just voice work, but to actually act out a scene. New tech is being thought up/used to capture as much detail of the acting as possible. This should improve the way characters move and act in games.

[RickJay]

@Kobal2

I doubt it, for one simple reason: reality has clutter. Lots and lots and *lots *of clutter. Also uniqueness, for lack of a better word - look at, I don’t know, a tiled bathroom closely and you’ll see that no two of these tiles are exactly alike. But in a video game, they will be because it saves computing power. And unless they pay level designers to go over every inch of a level to add bird shit, and dead ants, and a discarded shoe, random cigarette butts, make unique textures for every square inch etc… no computer-generated environment is ever coming close to the clutter and “asymmetry” of a real one.

When I opened one of the links in the OP, I thought exactly this before I got to your post. As the camera ascends the stairway through the arch in “Skyrim,” I actually thought “Those bricks look real, except for the fact that they’re all identical.”

The human mind’s ability to perceive and process visual input is staggering in its complexity, and it’s awfully good at picking out shit like that even if you’re not aware of it.

[Kobal2]

@Jophiel

Remind me to stay out of your bathroom.

Well, I am French, so…

@Airk

Games should aspire to film levels of realism, not to reality levels of realism. Of course, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, but mostly I think we need to focus on animation more than rendering right now - most game models actually kinda look like arse in motion right now, if you look at them in any sort of objective way. There are far more ‘realism’ gains to be gotten there than there is in “look how realistic and well rendered our mud is”.

True enough, but then again video games face a problem that movies don’t have to deal with (or at least, not as much), namely that the point of view of the player is going to linger on the background a lot more, and stay fixed on one point or scene a lot longer. In a movie it doesn’t really matter if a given set looks all wrong and cardboardy, or the matte painting is painfully obvious, or the props are shoddy, or the CGI is half-assed, when the shot only lasts 3 seconds before cutting to another angle with a loud cymbal crash or scare chord to keep your brain busy.

By comparison, even if the player is focusing solely on shooting the nuts off that alien in the middle of the screen, subconsciously he’ll still take in every detail of the scenery and how “wrong” it all is. Worse still in a game like *Skyrim or an adventure game such as L.A. Noire, where you’ll actually be concentrating on the mud to harvest potion ingredients or pixel-hunting for a missed clue.

• Which did awesome things in the facial animation department, BTW - but since the body animations were not as developed, the whole product was pretty weird. Still a good game but… weird lookin’.

[Telperion]

@Jragon

At one point near the end they show the real Emily they filmed for a minute. Her mouth is exactly the same, so it’s actually an issue with the model, not the tech. The problem with the tech is that it seems to just be a replication of exact real-world acting in digital form, if you’re going to take the expense to do that you might as well just make a damn FMV game.

It’s a proof of concept, so it’s not like the development process ends there. Probably more interesting for a game is the fact that you could theoretically add anything you want to the wireframe model and make it blend in, while still keeping the realistic facial animations. In the demonstration they’re using a texture based on the real model’s skin tone for comparison, but it could just as easily be metal or snakeskin depending on what effect you were looking for.

[FoieGrasIsEvil]

@Kobal2

L.A. Noire*

• Which did awesome things in the facial animation department, BTW - but since the body animations were not as developed, the whole product was pretty weird. Still a good game but… weird lookin’.

God that game was a disappointment to me. I bought it for PC not knowing that the PC version had its frame rates capped at 30fps, which rendered it awful to play, especially when you were driving in the police car when frame rates would drop to about 10-15fps.

I played for about 10 minutes and said screw it. Its still collecting dust somewhere.

[Quimby]

I think sports games are aiming for this and one day will achieve it so you won’t be able to tell if someone is playing a game or watching a game.

For other games, I am not sure things like aliens and monsters will ever look photorealistic because unreal things look unreal because they are unreal (is that genius or what? )

[FoieGrasIsEvil]

@Quimby

I think sports games are aiming for this and one day will achieve it so you won’t be able to tell if someone is playing a game or watching a game.

For other games, I am not sure things like aliens and monsters will ever look photorealistic because unreal things look unreal because they are unreal (is that genius or what? )

Sports games have come so far in the last ten years. Jesus, I don’t even have the latest iteration of MLB: The Show (I think I have 2010 for the PS3) and its the most amazing baseball game I have ever seen/played.

Ironically, as a former Madden junkie dating back to the Sega Genesis/PS1 era, I think that particular title has regressed in terms of gameplay, although it* looks* terrific. I can’t stand playing that game any more.

[clairobscur]

@Kobal2

I

The Crysis still shot is a very apt demonstration of this: look at that shack. Look how it’s all straight lines, clean & crisp textures, edges and flat surfaces when the real thing is all beat to shit, covered in rust and mold and water marks and whatever that white gunk is on the chicken wire fence.
And that’s just the man-made stuff. I have yet to see even a single believable tree in a video game. Not one.

Look at the grass in the Crysis shot - see how every tuft is exactly the same as the one next to it ? .

All you say is true, but if you had linked to the shots for some reason without telling that they came from a video game, I probably wouldn’t have noticed they weren’t real pictures. Indeed, if you look closely, the most telling is the grass. The rest can easily pass muster.

I must say I’m highly impressed by what we already have. And I once mistook the beginning of an add for some FPS for the real thing on youtube (obviously, it didn’t last till the end, but I spent several seconds thinking it was real war footage).

[clairobscur]

@Little_Nemo

I think we’re getting very close: Emily.

Fucking impressive! :eek:

[clairobscur]

@FoieGrasIsEvil

When are entire games going to look like the cinematic trailers/cutscenes? That’s going to be off the chain when they do.

For a long time (I’m thinking the 90s) the intro of a game sort of announced what the actual content of games would look like maybe 2 years down the road. The differences were striking.

Nowadays, it seems to me the difference between intro and actual gameplay is often quite slim (and the improvement over time not as striking, either).