Well, maybe the player character will be moving fast enough on-screen (relative pixel speed), but nothing else really moves fast in the Gears universe aside from the Berserker. What I mean by fast is the relative on-screen speed, like the berserker zooming past your view and a player can't actually focus on it as a target for shooting.

edit9000:

Besides, motion blur would only really make sense in a small area around the camera. At a certain distance, an object can be moving at the speed of sound and not need blur because it's in focus. It's not the object's absolute velocity, but the pixel velocity that matters...

Well roadie running is just one instance where you character moves fast, but there are faster movements that the character (both yours and other characters on screen..atleast while playing competitive modes) do, tricks like wall bouncing, wall side cancel make the characters do really fast movements. Infact it probably makes much more sense to use motion blur here in this case than say something like Uncharted ,which happens have even slower moving characters and objects for the most part.

We don't need no sense in games where aliens/monsters come from holes instead of sky. :p

And the kicker whenever discussing realism in most any shooter, one can get shot multiple times and recover in seconds :razz:

They tweeted screen of their new foliage rendering implementation
http://images.eurogamer.net/assets/a...761771.jpg.jpg

File about Samaritan video.

http://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/GDC2011/Epic.pdf

Maybe with Nvidia GTX 580 levels its possible show real time at 720P 60fps or 1080P 30fps.

I think Crysis 2 on DX11 has already reached this level if not surpassed it in some way. But more importantly it only takes one 580gtx to max crysis 2 on dx11, this could bring hope to the nextgen consoles.
http://i53.tinypic.com/2psfzlu.jpg

Still Samaritan demo showed awesome tessellated smoke and blood, full body deformation and awesome reflections, but Crysis 2 is close as never any game was. C2 sometimes looks like CG, especially during cut-scenes.

Some of the stuff in C2 is better, some not. It's mostly about the content and Epic has some better looking stuff to show off their engine. I don't see the reason in comparing them like this.

*sigh*... the closer we get to realism... the more boring things start to look :-(

I've just been viewing vids on Deviant Art, and someone posted some footage from a Cosplay convention. Seeing the manga/anime style in real life, it just doesn't work as well. So a photorealistic renderer isn't the best solution for every game, by far! That said, once you can do phororealism, which you do want for racers and sports games, then you'll have the grunt to do every other style perfectly. It's a benchmark and so that's why it's showed in tech demos, but we shouldn't think that the future is just photorealism - only, if you want to get people's attention with graphics, showing some anime-style or avant garde paticles isn't going to get as much attention as showing something people can't differentiate from a photo.

I dunno, there are many movies that make a lot of strange stuff work. Some recent superhero stuff, LOTR on the fantasy front, Avatar... And nowadays game devs are regularly employing designers and artists from the same talent pool.

Granted, no movie is fully photorealistic, there's a lot of stylization in every one of them (except maybe the dogma stuff) but it's still built upon reality.

Yeah I want things to look interesting like they did back in Halo 1. Lol

If a game doesn't look interesting it's not because the tech is too good.

Fair point. I guess it's the situation of the cosplay persons as much as anything. The same designs in a proper Hollywood movie in proper surrounds would (does) work. Still, Final Fantasy X as a live action move still doesn't sit well with me!

Live action Hollywood films are actually photo unreal even though they look photoreal. The reason is simple, you still need to artificially place lights into the scene to get a certain look for the camera.

I really enjoyed the more stylised stuff in Hollywood these days actually. Stuff like Sin City, 300, and TV shows like Spartacus where the scenes are often completely computer generated with actors superimposed in the scenes.

I dunno, i just think i really like the more fantasy stuff in movies, TV and games and i get affraid when i see the most talented game devs with the best tech wasting it to make games look as real as boring reality. I'm not saying the games are boring, just that when i look at an engine like UE3, CE3 or Frostbite 2 i just think "what would it look like if they took a more surreal or stylised aesthetic and rendered it using all this fancy tech"... I'd personally feel that the result would be far more impressive than just making something look like real life, even though the latter would likely be technically more impressive. If say they rendered Mirror's Edge 2 with the new UE3 updates with the quality of the Samaritan demo, that for me would be incredibly more impressive than the Samaritan demo itself.

So i do agree with Shifty in the sense that "realism" is a great bench mark for showing what an engine can do. I just don't wanna play realism. I'd much rather be able to actaully play a game with the visual quality of a Square Enix CGI for example. That's the kind of thing that would make me swoon :-D

I do wonder though, how far would we be from that kinda thing?

I wonder wether one of the reasons why many A-tier devs avoid those totally unreal settings (pun not intended) is sales potential. With heavily stylised games you're running the risk of alienating a large segment of the market beacuse people won't "get" your vision. Everybody gets reality. Maybe with video games at this stage it is harder to achieve a really distinct look that won't automaticaly get you a "niche" label? Some games might be lucky enough to escape that and become a success (like Halo* mentioned above) but aren't they exceptions?

*and even then we see people criticise it for being too colorful, too "purple" having weird/funny alien characters etc.

I wouldn't call Halo an exception at all. Gear of War is also a game that isn't even remotely realistic. In fact it's far more stylised in it's artistic direction than most games, and is very successful. Fallout 3/NV, Oblivion, even GTA games pre-IV have all been more stylised than realistic.

In fact i think that if you remove modern era military FPS games (which wouldn't work as anything other than realistic), the majority of the most successful games out there are stylised in some fashion or form. Stylised doesn't always = cartoon or anime too. I consider mass effect a more stylised game. The Uncharted series has a far more stylised aesthetic than say Call of Duty, even though it's set in the real world.

So i certainly wouldn't consider anything that's not realistic as automatically "niche". I think that's a false premise. Overall in gaming it actually seems more like the realistic games are more niche in terms of overall sales success across all games.

In terms of rendering quality, the next gen shouldn't be too far off from that. Assuming the nextbox will have something comparable to a GTX560Ti. But I don't think we'll have animation in realtime being comparable to CGI any time soon. It seems hardly any studios are even trying.

A few of them do and i really respect them.

I love games with great animation, and i oftentimes think that animation is way more important to me than graphics in creating living, breathing and believeable game worlds. I look at stuff like the Last Guardian, and even though it looks nice graphically it isn't amazing, yet the attention to detail and subtlty of the animations just bring everything to life.

It's why i love stuff like Studio Ghibli's work :-D

Which is why I said they're stylized. There's also make-up on the actors, the kind of film stock they use matters, and they grade the final film, nowadays digitally but they've used to do it before with other methods (Se7en for example used a complex chemical process).

But they still film real stuff and that makes it grounded in reality.

The Witcher 2 is a great example of a beautiful game whose look is largely ruined by some of the most horrible animation this side of the original Xbox. They couldn't even include something so simple as a "walking up/down stairs" animation; instead Geralt just continues to run as normal and floats up or down the staircase.

Naughty Dog should license out their animation tech. They seem to have something figured out that nobody else knows.

That's the thing though, I don't think those games are really pushing it when it comes to "artistically crazy" things with the tech. They're more or less trying to replicate a realistic setting or an easily recognizable fantastic one - they play it fairly safe. Stylized, yes. Trying to create something original, unrealistic (maybe even bordering on bizarre) - no.

Check out Eternal Sonata if you want crazy beautiful and creative.

Thing is, people will accept stylised, very unrealistic stuff because they accept it as a cartoon (eg Roger Rabbit, any Anime, etc). As soon as you start heading towards realism, you give people something that alerts all their visual cues, which makes anything that's not perfect stand out a mile. Look at Dancing Baby or the Final Fantasy movie. They create something that looks close enough to reality for all the flaws to be instinctively picked up on.

We accept Jessica Rabbit as a character because she's a cartoon. We don't accept Dancing Baby because it looks creepily close to a baby that we all know and understand should look and act a particular way, but it doesn't.

There's a point where "close enough" to reality is worse that being totally unrealistic. You either have to be all the way to full realism, or every thing wrong on a "mostly real" image stands out disproportionately. And it gets more pronounced when you include movement that we automatically expect to see.

So I guess we go back to what Shifty Geezer mentioned earlier. Most developers trying to show off new engines/tech will focus on the holy grail of realism (as it is harder to get right) and any adventurous experimentation with more original look/settings will (hopefully) come further down the line.