Dangling the Dollar -- VR/4K Vs. Photorealism

[babcat]

I will never play a VR game until I'm convinced it will have graphics that are near photorealistic. Animated, stylized virtual reality is an oxymoron. If a game doesn't look at least close to photorealistic, then it should be called virtual anime or virtual cartoon-land.

Right now, a VR version of Uncharted 4 running at a 8K resolution at an insane frame rate wouldn't look one bit more "real" to me than the same game at 1080P. The stylism remains the same at ANY resolution on a flat screen or in VR. For someone who would love to play a photorealistic VR game, the sight of a realistic background with stylized characters would totally break any sense of immersion.

I would like to say that I think with the power of next gen consoles we could come very close to reaching photo-realism. Already some screen shots of the Tomb Raider games have fairly convincing backgrounds (not always so) and in some zoomed in shots Laura Croft's face doesn't display an extreme amount of stylism. I think if the makers of Tomb Raider would make a 1080P NEO game with ZERO stylism, we would be reasonably close to a photorealistic game. Of course it wouldn't really be photorealistic. It would require lots of cheats. But it could look VERY good.

 

[Globalisateur]

I will never play a VR game until I'm convinced it will have graphics that are near photorealistic. Animated, stylized virtual reality is an oxymoron. If a game doesn't look at least close to photorealistic, then it should be called virtual anime or virtual cartoon-land.

Right now, a VR version of Uncharted 4 running at a 8K resolution at an insane frame rate wouldn't look one bit more "real" to me than the same game at 1080P. The stylism remains the same at ANY resolution on a flat screen or in VR. For someone who would love to play a photorealistic VR game, the sight of a realistic background with stylized characters would totally break any sense of immersion.

I would like to say that I think with the power of next gen consoles we could come very close to reaching photo-realism. Already some screen shots of the Tomb Raider games have fairly convincing backgrounds (not always so) and in some zoomed in shots Laura Croft's face doesn't display an extreme amount of stylism. I think if the makers of Tomb Raider would make a 1080P NEO game with ZERO stylism, we would be reasonably close to a photorealistic game. Of course it wouldn't really be photorealistic. It would require lots of cheats. But it could look VERY good.

Then you won't play many VR games. Because photorealistic VR games are going to be quite rare.

 

[babcat]

By the way, I found the following quote about the image I posted earlier in this thread.

"Finally, I’d to clarify that the technology we presented runs in its higher quality preset at 93/74 fps at 720/1080p respectively, in a GeForce GTX 560 TI (a two-year old mid-range GPU)."

This is a 1.26TFlop GPU lacking the efficiency enhancements of modern architecture.

A 4.2TFlop PS4NEO running a game utilizing this technology at 30FPS and using LOD when the the characters are farther away from the screen should be able to produce such near photorealistic graphics in real time in an actual game.

 

[MrFox]

At least games on Neo will finally look like Toy Story.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I will never play a VR game until I'm convinced it will have graphics that are near photorealistic

Your loss. But then you also refuse to play fun computer games because they don't look real either. You really are a Sad Sack, missing out due to shallow, stubborn views.

Animated, stylized virtual reality is an oxymoron. If a game doesn't look at least close to photorealistic, then it should be called virtual anime or virtual cartoon-land

Reality is defined in our heads as a spatial model derived from stereo sampling of light and sound sources, basically. If you present sufficient data to create this spatial mapping, you are creating a sense of reality. That's what virtual reality means. We can definitely have traditional photorealistic virtual reality if we keep the visuals simple (Mirror's Edge style baked GI), but VR people that are realistic and don't look gamey will not be happening for a while (still hopeful foveated rendering alleviates the graphical requirements, but animation and behaviour is going to be in the uncanny valley for yonks).

Right now, a VR version of Uncharted 4 running at a 8K resolution at an insane frame rate wouldn't look one bit more "real" to me than the same game at 1080P.

That's where you're wrong, unless you have an abnormal psychology. The moment your brain is getting the data feeds and is able to process them into a spatial model, it becomes reality and your brain responds accordingly. That's why people can get vertigo looking at stylised, half-1080p VR - the brain says, "hang on, this isn't a flat image on a screen but an actual space I'm inside. Holy crap, that's a huge distance below me according to the info feed from my optical sensors."

A 4.2TFlop PS4NEO running a game utilizing this technology at 30FPS and using LOD when the the characters are farther away from the screen should be able to produce such near photorealistic graphics in real time in an actual game.

It's a demo dedicated to producing a single head! How do you get from that to a whole game being photo real in ~10x the processing power? You're saying the difference between rendering one head and a whole environment full of people and realistic lighting and physics and behaviour and animation and simulation is 10x??

 

[babcat]

"Your loss. But then you also refuse to play fun computer games because they don't look real either. You really are a Sad Sack, missing out due to shallow, stubborn views."

I've played more than enough animated, stylized video games in my life. I have zero interest in playing more. This isn't about me being stubborn, it is about knowing what I want and refusing to accept anything less.

"Reality is defined in our heads as a spatial model derived from stereo sampling of light and sound sources, basically. If you present sufficient data to create this spatial mapping, you are creating a sense of reality. That's what virtual reality means. We can definitely have traditional photorealistic virtual reality if we keep the visuals simple (Mirror's Edge style baked GI), but VR people that are realistic and don't look gamey will not be happening for a while (still hopeful foveated rendering alleviates the graphical requirements, but animation and behaviour is going to be in the uncanny valley for yonks)."

That is not reality. Reality is someone placing a VR helmet on your head while sleeping, paralyzing your body, and waking you up to a scene of you being in the hospital surrounded by doctors and nurses claiming you had a stroke in your sleep and are suffering from paralysis. If you can talk and discuss the issue with them for several moments without noticing their skin looks so plastic and fake that either you are in a VR simulation or aliens with plastic face masks have taken over the world, that is virtual reality. To be blunt, virtual reality means that that there is (at least in a visual sense for now until we have holodecks that can project force beams) so little difference between reality and what you see that you can't tell a noticeable difference. Now, if from birth you were raised in a VR environment that was stylized -- lets say the Uncharted universe -- then you would accept it as reality because you would have never seen the real world. But if you've lived in the real world all your life, a game that is stylized cannot be mistaken for reality! You might get a sensation of falling, fear, or excitement -- but some part of the higher reasoning centers of your brain will always know it isn't real (even if you medulla oblongata is fooled).

"That's where you're wrong, unless you have an abnormal psychology. The moment your brain is getting the data feeds and is able to process them into a spatial model, it becomes reality and your brain responds accordingly. That's why people can get vertigo looking at stylised, half-1080p VR - the brain says, "hang on, this isn't a flat image on a screen but an actual space I'm inside. Holy crap, that's a huge distance below me according to the info feed from my optical sensors."

And you're brain will also recognize that the people and faces don't look "right." You will know that the space and surroundings around you are artificial.

"It's a demo dedicated to producing a single head! How do you get from that to a whole game being photo real in ~10x the processing power? You're saying the difference between rendering one head and a whole environment full of people and realistic lighting and physics and behaviour and animation and simulation is 10x??"

One reason that demo takes up so much processing power is because the face, at ultra high detailed, is pointed directly at the camera. As the character moved away and some level of LOD could be applied, the computing requirements would be reduced. Having a huge face on the screen is the WORST CASE when it comes to GPU requirements. Having a half dozen characters further away, maybe some of them with their heads turned, would present a lesser burden.

Now, as I have said before, the characters in video games today are the most un-realistic component. The brain senses a lack of realism in people much more easily than environments, because we are so trained to look at faces. A modest upgrade to the surroundings in modern games and these advanced faces would present a big step towards photo-realism. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be VERY GOOD.

 

[Nesh]

I will never play a VR game until I'm convinced it will have graphics that are near photorealistic. Animated, stylized virtual reality is an oxymoron. If a game doesn't look at least close to photorealistic, then it should be called virtual anime or virtual cartoon-land.

Right now, a VR version of Uncharted 4 running at a 8K resolution at an insane frame rate wouldn't look one bit more "real" to me than the same game at 1080P. The stylism remains the same at ANY resolution on a flat screen or in VR. For someone who would love to play a photorealistic VR game, the sight of a realistic background with stylized characters would totally break any sense of immersion.

I would like to say that I think with the power of next gen consoles we could come very close to reaching photo-realism. Already some screen shots of the Tomb Raider games have fairly convincing backgrounds (not always so) and in some zoomed in shots Laura Croft's face doesn't display an extreme amount of stylism. I think if the makers of Tomb Raider would make a 1080P NEO game with ZERO stylism, we would be reasonably close to a photorealistic game. Of course it wouldn't really be photorealistic. It would require lots of cheats. But it could look VERY good.

I tried Playstation VR today for the first time.
They had monitors showing what the players were playing on VR and the game didnt look special visually. But oh my dear lord. When it was my time to try it, it was a whole new experience. The most immersive experience I have ever had.
I can say with utter confidence that over reliance on photorealism for VR is overestimated. If a game has Uncharted 4 level of graphics on VR it would simply be awesome. It WONT look more real, but it WILL feel more real because your brain thinks YOU are the one experiencing the environment instead of some virtual character on a screen.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I have zero interest in playing more. This isn't about me being stubborn, it is about knowing what I want and refusing to accept anything less

That's the very definition of "stubborn"....

If you can talk and discuss the issue with them for several moments without noticing their skin looks so plastic and fake that either you are in a VR simulation or aliens with plastic face masks have taken over the world, that is virtual reality.

You're randomly redefining the term, and ignoring the affect VR actually has on real people.

But if you've lived in the real world all your life, a game that is stylized cannot be mistaken for reality! You might get a sensation of falling, fear, or excitement -- but some part of the higher reasoning centers of your brain will always know it isn't real (even if you medulla oblongata is fooled).

Except it does. People get disorientated stepping into VR and then coming out. Brains are wired to accommodate the data feeds. Change the feeds and the brain adapts (if it can do so gradually enough to not reject the transition). As an example, the world is projected onto the retina upside down. Our brains adapt to that as we learn to see. If you then wear glasses that turn the world upside down, the brain eventually adapts and corrects that. Remove the glasses and world as seen through normal eyes is upside down because the brain changed to fit the data feed, until it rewires itself again.

Oh, and as a remarkable example of the brain's incredible capacity to parse data, blind people have been able to see through video cameras connected to the tongue, because the brain is able to determine the signals passing through the tongue's nerves are visual data and processes it accordingly. So the 'reality' as you put it is that the person is 'feeling/tasting', but the experience is seeing because reality is just the interpretation (along predefined biological norms) of sensory information (not going too far into philosophy and whether reality exists at all!)

Provide sufficient data feeds to show the brain the world is made out of flatly lit polygons and the brain will adapt so the sense of reality and 'presence' is manifest around this data.

As an aside for good conversational etiquette, please use {quote} tags when quoting.

 

[temesgen]

IMO photorealism takes a back step to having better animation and some sort of procedural derivation of NPCs and more realistic AI.

Having 5 photo realistic enemies attacking which are exact copies would not be very convincing, however having 5 enemies that move realistically, display behavior which is coordinated yet has a personality to each character (violent, one scared, one cussing and talking incessantly for example) and visually presenting some uniqueness similar to what you see at a school where everyone wears a uniform; some wear shorts others the slacks, some are neatly pressed and others are ruffled, some shirts tucked in nearly another has it hanging out, all that adds to the immersion far more than simply resolution but I'm not sure that sort of tech is within reach regardless if we're rendering in 480p, 1080p or 4k. . .

 

[milk]

Oh, and as a remarkable example of the brain's incredible capacity to parse data, blind people have been able to see through video cameras connected to the tongue, because the brain is able to determine the signals passing through the tongue's nerves are visual data and processes it accordingly.

Babcat should get one of those for gaming. Under such low resolutions, for once the fidelity of game graphics would be indistinguishable from the real world.

 

[Globalisateur]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photorealism

Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium.

 

[Clukos]

Graphics is only a part of achieving photo realism. We are almost there, e.g. two screenshots from Driveclub photomode (which could be a generation or two ahead in terms of fidelity in real time gameplay)

Humans are a completely different case, animation is still not there yet even in the most expensive CGI films, in terms of real time graphics shading is still too expensive for all the subtleties of the human skin/lighting interaction. And then you have priorities, games focus first on solid gameplay experience (stable framerate, response etc.) then on graphics, if something is too expensive it has to be cut.

 

[eastmen]

Graphics is only a part of achieving photo realism. We are almost there, e.g. two screenshots from Driveclub photomode (which could be a generation or two ahead in terms of fidelity in real time gameplay)


Humans are a completely different case, animation is still not there yet even in the most expensive CGI films, in terms of real time graphics shading is still too expensive for all the subtleties of the human skin/lighting interaction. And then you have priorities, games focus first on solid gameplay experience (stable framerate, response etc.) then on graphics, if something is too expensive it has to be cut.

Also digital effects in movies is still only being rendered at 2k resolutions because of cost. With 4k being in homes now perhaps it will finally get pushed up to 4k . But cost is a big deal.

Taking say scorpio with all its 6tflops of power and making a 640x480 game with photo realistic (or whatever the graphical fidelity it can achive at that res) may be impossible due to the costs of models , animations and textures

 

[DieH@rd]

Also digital effects in movies is still only being rendered at 2k resolutions because of cost.

Not only that, some recent movies that were filmed in 4K/5K were edited in 2K, so everything got downscaled.

 

[eastmen]

The detail that comes out in high resolution is a good thing, but does little to make a character look "real."

When I watch an episode of Star Trek at 480P, for example, it doesn't look "fuzzy" at all. It does lack some detail, but it also looks much more realistic than any current game at 4K.

To me, immersion is all about photorealism. A game that has stylized characters instantly looks fake to me.

Of course it looks fuzzy. Forget Star Trek. Take a modern movie of today . Say the new Star Trek movie. Now set up a black and white tv , a 640x480 tv , a 1080p and 4k tv . You can very obviously see the benefit of 4k . Take away everything else and watch a 4k tv with 4k content for a few weeks. Then go to a 1080p tv and you will instantly see the blury mess that it is com pared to the new 4k stuff. Take it further and make the tvs larger. How would you feel about watching a 480p movie on a 80 inch tv ? its going to look terrible .

This reminds me of friends who would laugh at me for wanting FSAA on my games. Oh I can't tell the difference they would say , your crazy for buying a new video card and blah blah blah. Then they get a card that does FSAA and turn it on and then as they get used to that quality they complain when they can't turn on the fsaa anymore .

What eastman means is that VR adds much more tonimmersion than graphics slightly closer to photorealism would, and high resolutions and framerates are required for VR to work properly.
Of course you are gonna say that to you realistic graphics are much more immersive than VR, even though its all speculative since no game has ever met the criteria you demand, and maybe you also haven't experienced VR either, so spare us please.

Right , all the photorealism in the world wont make up for the fact that your looking at a screen feet away from you. With VR your in that world and with the vive wands , oculus touch and move you can intereact with that world in a way pretty similar to how you interact with our world . That is the realism we want.

Today's VR isn't the be all end all. Resolution is really important in VR and I am assuming that HDR panels will also be a big help . But we are at the first steps and I rather they focus on moving the needle on resolution than on better shaders or textures. Of course that doesn't mean they can't move both. But I think we've been at a point where we have been stuck in the pc world on 1080p for a very long time now and so the need has shifted else where. With vr and 4k becoming affordable i'm hoping that they start to increase rops and tmus again to bring 4k+ rendering into the mainstream

 

[eastmen]

Not only that, some recent movies that were filmed in 4K/5K were edited in 2K, so everything got downscaled.

Yup !

Hopefully that changes very soon. But I am sure it will take an investment from the studios and as it is the CGI companies work on razor thin budgets. What I read about Sasuage Party and what it did to the CGI team is horrid

 

[milk]

What I read about Sasuage Party and what it did to the CGI team is horrid

Now I'm curious...

 

[Nesh]

Now I'm curious...

me 2
I want link

 

[eastmen]

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sausage-party-animators-pay-dispute-919640

the total cost for the movie was 19m so you can imagine the bullshit they pulled

 

[RobertR1]

http://www.develop-online.net/news/vr-momentum-slows-dramatically-on-steam/0223756

Speaking of VR, I'll be very curious to see how the sales continue after the early adopters. While the article paints a bleak picture, I still remain in the wait and see camp. I'm hoping to try a demo one of these days but based on what I've seen, there's a level of complexity involved that might become tiresome over time.

Having to put on the device itself, controllers in hand, space to move around makes it more of an event than a casual, pick up n game.

If anything, I'm more interested in VR for movies it ever comes to it. Much more appealing to me than 3D for movies.