Old games intros

Its just cgi intro's did not have to run in real time, nor did they have to run on the hardware the games was running on. A single frame could take a day to render it didnt matter because it was being saved as a video
 
Its just cgi intro's did not have to run in real time, nor did they have to run on the hardware the games was running on. A single frame could take a day to render it didnt matter because it was being saved as a video

Yes, but my point is that today games have better graphic(at least from some of them) but in different style(you can easy say that old intros are prerendered cgi even though it graphic isn't mind blowing ).
 
style is all about artistic choice
more or less every graphical effect we use today could be achieved (maybe done a different way) back in the day as long as enough time and resources were devoted to it
 
It's interesting to track the progression in cinematics as well. Using Blizzard for example as they still have the best pre-rendered CGI in the business, IMO.

Compare the progression From Warcraft -> Warcraft 2 -> Diablo -> StarCraft -> Then we have a HUGE jump in quality moving to Diablo 2 -> Warcraft 3 -> etc.

And if we look at SC2: HOTS. The in game rendered between mission stuff is arguably better than what was achieved in much of the Diablo 2 pre-rendered stuff, and that still looks impressive to this day.

I wouldn't be surprised to see gameplay graphics on the Next Gen consoles and by extension PC to surpass the CGI quality of Diablo 2 and possibly even Warcraft 3. Which would be impressive as hell.

Regards,
SB
 
Old offline CG was not raytraced usually, that technique has only become viable in the last 5 years or so. Pixar has only made the transition through Cars to Monsters University, for example; ILM abandoned PRMan as their primary renderer with Pacific Rim, and Weta is still on PRMan as far as I know (several of my pals work as lighters there).

The first generation of pre-rendered intro movies began with Microprose F1 as far as I can recall; Strike Commander sticks out as one with more than a few frames of CGI and maybe the first Syndicate. Today's real time engines put all of that stuff to shame; even the hour-long and multi-million dollar CGI cinematics of Wing Commander 3 and 4 are looking unforgivably rough nowadays. Offline CGI has came a long, long way since the '90s, too.

There are two reasons, first is that technology has been advancing at an incredible rate, and second is that even movie level VFX has transitioned to PC desktop hardware nowadays. The workflow and software used in pipelines for video games and cinematic productions is converging incredibly fast; VFX uses displacement mapping and raytracing approaches to reach maximum quality, while games use normal maps and various approximations to speed up things. But the asset detail level is very close, the general techniques of HDR rendering, physically correct shading and such are very similar, and so on. Offline rendering can also afford to take enough samples to completely eliminate any kind of aliasing, whereas games have to balance that with the level of detail.

The convergence won't stop and eventually we'll reach a level of computing capacity where offline rendering won't offer any advantages that the general audience could notice. But that would take at least another 20 years IMHO, because there's at least two orders of magnitude of difference between the two or so, and the scale has to increase a lot before that difference becomes negligible.
 
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