Most impressive PC game graphics (in demo)

[Malo]

There are some great flora mods for Skyrim which include thicker more realistic grasses and some far more detailed and varied plant life that aren't all 2d a2c messes. Leaves are understandably still not geometry and it will probably be at least another 5-10 years before that is feasible. I can imagine then something like Speedtree will have advanced to the point where they're procedural generating types of leaves in with geometry.

 

[homerdog]

With the flexibility of modern graphics hardware and upcoming APIs which allow better access to it, I wouldn't be surprised if some smart folks figure out a much better way to do leaves and grass in the next couple years.

 

[zed]

I can imagine then something like Speedtree will have advanced to the point where they're procedural generating types of leaves in with geometry.

The above trees screenshot from me is from an app of mine called qualitree (on HD I must run it again for the first time in years, just gotta go through dll hell)
Anyways. Nothing is cached WRT geometry, this is crazy OK and stupid for performance.
What it does is every frame rebuild the tree from its skeleton,
Advantages
- animation of geometry is free.
- LOD is perfect. You can go from 1000 leaves on a tree (and get closer) so its showing 100,000 leaves and you will not see the difference at all, i.e. no LOD pop, because evrything is contructed each frame it goes from 34,756 leaves to 34,790 leaves next frame etc, same with branches etc

IIRC I used to have about 100 trees before memory would play hassles, this is in the days when 128MB memory was a lot (I remember someone gave me an expensive & loud gf5900 128mb gfx card & it had more memory than my pc at the time)
I may make an webgl app that lets users construct their own trees, and create a forest in the browser, hmmmm tempting I should be working on this game, but this interests me more