True Photorealistic Graphics - when to expect? Maybe never?

[warham]

Hi,

I have been reading B3D since last E3 and now I decided to register because I want to discuss a topic which has been on my mind for quite some time.

First things first, english is not my native language. I learned it in school so please disregard any spelling mistakes you find. Second, I have no skills as a programmer, 3d artist or game designer whatsoever, I just like to play (pretty) games.

My topic is about graphics in general, concerning pcs and consoles alike, anyway I decided to put it in the Console Talk forums beeing the most frequented on B3D. Please move it to another section if it´s not appropriate.
--


My questions to you are:

When do you think can we expect true photorealistic graphics, animations and such things? A game that is on par with the real world?

What are the most important elements to achieve this?


In my opinion those are: polycount and lighting.

When I take a look at current games and those coming in the next couple of years, there are and of course will be some very nice looking titles.

Take a look at the infamous Killzone pre-rendered videos. I think most people agree that the game looks absolutely fantastic, and many people will be satisfied with that level of graphics. (nobody can say for certain if those target renders will be achievable or not on the current gen consoles like PS3 and Xbox360)

I think a lot of people hope that we will have real cut scene graphics with the next generation (like PS4), and sure as hell some even think we will have that with the current gen´s PS3. Well good luck with that!

As good as the game seems to look, it´s really nowhere near the "real world". It´s even nowhere near the Final Fantasy Movie from a few years ago or other sophisticated special effects in movies.

What kind of hardware would we need to get realtime graphics like the Final Fantasy Movie? I can only guess, but I think those machines will have to be at least a few hundred times faster than what is available today.

I don´t know how many polys a typical scene from that movie sported, but I guess it was well over 100 millions, plus all the necessary effects like lighting, physics and whatnot going on. Multiply that with say at least 60 (meaning 60 frames per second in REALTIME) and voila!

Even if say in 20, 30 or 50 years we will have computers with that vast speed to produce realtime enviroments really on par with that movie, that will still be nowhere near the real world!

How many magnitudes more powerful computers will we need to have absolutely photorealistic environments?

Imagine a MMORPG or offline RPG with say thousands or even hundred thousands of characters in one scene, each modelled with millions or even BILLIONS of polygons, plus the whole environment ? And what about a real AI, modelled after the human brain for each and every one of those characters?

Will we ever have that brute force power to create a real world simulation? And even if such computers will be possible in time, will these systems be affordable to everybody, like consoles and pcs today?

One thing is certain for me: the evolutionary development we have today will NEVER be able to deliver what we all really want. To upgrade the specs every couple of years by adding a few mhz or a couple of more cores here, a few shader pipelines more there. It´s nice and all, but ultimately a dead end.

We will need some compeletely new stuff, like quantum computers for example. Unfortunately they are nowhere to be found, although I keep hearing about those damn things since 1995 or something.

So what is your take on this topic? Will we ever have a virtual world on par with the real one? Will such a thing ever be possible with conventional computer technology? If yes, when will that be?

With Playstation 3? 4? 5? or 5000?

greets
warham

 

[Bad_Boy]

Me personally, I think we wont hit photorealism until the next generation after ps3 and xbox360, UNLESS its a racing game. Games like GT4 and Tourist Trophy already look photorealistic in some respects when playing in actual gameplay.(and this is last gen)

Polyphony truly has the best lighting down imo, which adds to the photorealism. Like you said, polycounts and lighting is key.

But for first person shooters, and the other types, you really have to focus more on polycounts, textures, animations, physics, lighting, much more than racing games. and I truly feel we wont say "omg that looks real" on FPS's and adventure games until the generation after ps3/360, or maybe 2 generations. Even killzone's cgi trailer, as amazing as it looked, doesnt look photorealistic.

Note, Im not saying those games wont look amazingly great this generation, I'm just saying they wont look "real". Intresting thread though.

 

[Jon Brittan]

I don't think it will be possible to get to truly "photo-realistic" graphics in the forseable future, certainly not for interactive, moving scenes, the poly-counts of "Real Life" are WAY too high. We're getting a lot closer, but that in itself makes you realise, honestly, just how far off we still truly are.

To be honest though, I don't know just how much we'd ever want to get to true photo-realism for most games and unless you can guarantee 100% glitch free phot-realism it might be best avoided altogether.
As I see it, if we have a beautifully rendered, but "artistic" game then it can look gorgeous, throw in the odd glitch here and there and we can filter it out because we know it's a computer game. The problem is, if it's photo-realistic it becomes a lot harder for the mind to tune out the odd glitches and I think you might find it would start to detract from the effect far more, so while on the whole the game may look massively better you might find the ability to become immersed in it disappears with the effect those glitches have in your mind...

Just my two cents anyway, but I honestly don't believe true photo-realism is within the next couple of generations...
Show me Toy Story in real-time, properly, not canned like some of the demos before, with an interactive environment and AI, first, if we still can't do that then we're nowhere near playable photo-realism.

 

[zed]

What kind of hardware would we need to get realtime graphics like the Final Fantasy Movie?

final fantasy isnt photo realistic same with lotr etc.
thus even today with powerful computers chugging away at a single frame for hours, photorealism is not achieved.
so photorealism is at least 50 years away (knew technquies will have to evolve, ie its not just a case of more computing power).

 

[flf]

"Photo Realism" isn't important. "Good enough" is important, and is judged against the expectations of the audience.

Today the graphics of Quake 1 or Unreal Tournament are certainly not good enough. They are far below what the audience expects to see. With each successive generation, the balance between detail and speed is balance in order to raise the bar a bit, which becomes "good enough" that people enjoy playing the game.

Perception means the difference between "looks great" and "looks like crap." When Myth was the flagship 3dfx title, it "looked amazing." Today we snort with derision at any game that looks this simplistic. (Okay, let's ignore for a moment that there are games with great gameplay that have simplistic graphics... we're talking glowing generalities here.)

Sit down your parents in front of today's games and they'll say, "That looks like a movie!" or "It looks like a picture." (I'm assuming that many of you have parents that didn't grow up with computers, so it's all still "magic" to many of them.)

To them, LOTR *is* pretty much flawless... they don't know what to look for to see the CGI artifacts.

It could very well be that the trees 100 yards away from me don't actually have individual needles, because I can't see the detail from here. What matters is what my eyes sense, and the scene my brain expects to see. If the result of what I see meets my expectations, then it's real enough.

Of course, there will always been pedantic purists who insist on re-creating nature inside a computer. And, yes, doing so will eat every processor cycle for the forseeable future.

 

[warham]

Me personally, I think we wont hit photorealism until the next generation after ps3 and xbox360, UNLESS its a racing game. Games like GT4 and Tourist Trophy already look photorealistic in some respects when playing in actual gameplay.(and this is last gen)

Polyphony truly has the best lighting down imo, which adds to the photorealism. Like you said, polycounts and lighting is key.

I agree Polyphony did some amazing things with the limited hardware available. GT5 will surely be amazing, but unfortunately the current next gen is still quite limited

what I don´t understand is why do most developers (who try to create realistic looking games) not concentrate on "realistic" lighting? imho it is the most important thing on the way to realism, then comes polycount..

a good example is alan wake..the polycount is not too high but the lighting is awesome, at least imho

I don't think it will be possible to get to truly "photo-realistic" graphics in the forseable future, certainly not for interactive, moving scenes, the poly-counts of "Real Life" are WAY too high. We're getting a lot closer, but that in itself makes you realise, honestly, just how far off we still truly are.

To be honest though, I don't know just how much we'd ever want to get to true photo-realism for most games and unless you can guarantee 100% glitch free phot-realism it might be best avoided altogether.

100% glitch free would be a must have of course, I don´t think thats going to be a problem in the (far) future

final fantasy isnt photo realistic same with lotr etc.
thus even today with powerful computers chugging away at a single frame for hours, photorealism is not achieved.
so photorealism is at least 50 years away (knew technquies will have to evolve, ie its not just a case of more computing power).

yeah I wrote the same thing, Final Fantasy not beeing nowhere near the real world (well maybe except some close up shots of the old guy, he looked pretty good)

btw if I remember correcty in 1993 or 94 I saw a making of the first jurassic park movie, those dinosaurs sure looked amazing (and still do today)..the guy in the making of said something like the t-rex was modelled with 12-15 million polygons(i´m not certain about the exact numbers)..looked pretty photorealistic to me, though we can´t know for certain since there are no real dinosaurs to compare to

hours or days for a single frame, thats the point...so to be able to render 60 or more frames per second, we would need some awesome computing power..how bout the earth simulator?

no seriously, are there any promising new and revolutionary technologies on the horizon? what about ATI and Nvidia? I mean do they have some long term plans at all? like graphics accelerators in 20-30 years?

 

[Bigus Dickus]

"Realistic" lighting takes a looootttt of computational power. "Close enough" is always a moving target, depending on our expectations and the hardware capabilities at the moment, and even on that sliding scale "close enough" still chugs the best graphics chips out there.

For some perspective, turn from video footage to photorealistic still images, which IMO are getting really damned close to being photorealistic in many cases (depending on what is in the picture... since our brains are so highly evolved for recognizing faces, for example, it is still extremely difficult to make a rendered face that we can't fairly easily spot as an imposter). These still images (and you can google for them and find a ton of great examples) take hours and hours of computer time.

New techniques are being developed that allow photorealistic lighting, depth of field, shadows, etc. with less computational power. Also, general computational power is steadily increasing. And finally, more efficient means of hardware acceleration of the new techniques makes graphics chip implementations faster than software renderers used for these still images and movies. So while we might be several orders of magnitude short of being able to render a truly photorealistic frame in a mere fraction of a second instead of the current hours (or days...), we will get there in a matter of years. My guess? A decade or three, depending on whether we start hitting limits on process technology or alternatively develop a breakthrough process paradigm shift that further accelerates transistor count and clockspeed.

However, that's really just talking about a still image. To animate it properly, in a dynamic environment, also will require significant advancements in physics etc. I assume that this will not be the limiting factor though.

One thing I think is sorely lacking from pretty much all discussions on multiple entertainment media fronts is the third dimension. There have been some attempts at it, with varying success (Jaws3D, IMAX, shutter glasses, etc.), but there doesn't seem to be a push to get it into the mainstream. Higher resolution seems to be first on the list, and I can understand that. After another step past 1080p, we will be "close enough" to the limits of our eye's resolution that we should turn our attention to using further bandwidth and storage capacity (talking about video media here mostly, and games logically follow) to 3D delivery. Actually, I think that should happen after 1080p instead of going to a super HDTV first.

The difference in experience between IMAX and a normal movie is staggering, IMO. Much more so than between SDTV and HDTV, or stereo and surround sound, for example. The upside is that this is primarily a display technology and storage/bandwidth problem. For games, the engines should adapt easily to this type of display.

 

[ERP]

Flight Sims are really close, and have been for some time, but it's a much simpler problem.

 

[Ady]

Flight Sims are really close, and have been for some time, but it's a much simpler problem.

That's true. It really does depend on the game and what type of enviroment needs to be created.

 

[Skrying]

Flight Sims are really close, and have been for some time, but it's a much simpler problem.

We must be playing MUCH different flight sims. Any of them that even lets you get within a few hundred feet of the ground look very very bad.

Can you point me to a flight sim that lets you get to the ground and not look like shit?

 

[Nom De Guerre]

I am fairly confident someone here will answer the following question of mine. I will probably post my thoughts on why I do not wish to have "realistic looking" games some time in the future (more philosophical-based than anything else). Anyway, my question :

Why do we have the term "photo realistic" instead of "realistic"?

 

[DOGMA1138]

because it describes only the visual aspects of the game. a game can be photo realistic, meaning it looks like it was captured via a video camera. but the game play it self doesnt have to be realistic.

 

[mjtdevries]

I wonder what you all think about the ATI Toy Shop demo.
http://www.ati.com/developer/demos/rx1800.html

That gets pretty close doesn't it?

And the Parthenon demo shows that huge amounts of polygons aren't necessary a bottleneck either. That demo uses 15 million.

If you then realize that you 'only' need 75000 polygons and a coupl of of 4000x4000 textures to get a realistic humanoid....
I assume most people would be happy with games where the npc's had faces like this:
http://www.daz3d.com/galleries/index.php?id=7137&sec=
http://www.daz3d.com/galleries/index.php?page=prod&prod=1098
You can actually get quite similar results with just 25000 polygons.



But...

...the biggest problems with people is hair. Especially long hair is almost impossible to get realistic. (in these images it is usually post-work in photoshop)
Even in the Final Fantasy movie they tried to avoid hair as much as possible.
Especially since it has to move realistically.

For example, this doesn't look too bad:
http://www.daz3d.com/shop.php?op=itemdetails&item=4146&cat=12
But it would fail miserably in a game, because it is a static mesh with some good transparancy textures on it, and because it doesn't move properly it would look terribly unrealistic.

 

[AlexV]

Hmm, tough question. I`d argue that true photo-realism is not required, as even movies nowadays tend to fumble with lighting and other visual aspects in order to produce an artistic image different from what we see each and every day with our own two eyes.

About getting that realistic humanoid...dunno, I think that`s wishful thinking. Realistic skin is a huge pain to do, as light interacts with it in a very complex way, that`s hugely painful to model even for offline renderers, so you can imagine what it would mean to have it realtime. Things are improving, yes, but a good SSS approximation(don`t think it`ll be done by the book in real-time for a long period, if ever) is a must in order to get realistic humans, IMO. And then you have to animate your creation, and that`s where everything falls apart...animations are so crap these days, and they`re so slowly evolving:|

A photo-realistic landscape would be easier to achieve, at least at a safe distance, IMO. It`s more straightforward. But I digress. What I think should be crucial in order to get better and better approximations of reality on our screens is a real concern for doing more accurate lighting. Once we get a good lighting model up and running, one that is generally applicable(I know, I dream), we`ll be cool to deal with the details. But I haven`t seen a good lighting model in any game...hope that will change

 

[Moloch]

Well what would be the point?
real life usally looks boring.

 

[alexsok]

Well what would be the point?
real life usally looks boring

Good point, I agree. But approaching the level of photorealism offered by reality would go a long way towards paving the path towards that same level of quality in other fantasy based games with the same visual flair.

When will we get there? I doubt any of us will be alive when that happens, since I'm yet to see any game or tech demo that demonstrates at least one aspect of the real world that is rendered flawlessly and is completely lifelike.

Then again. It might not be happening EVER. I mean think about it. They promised Photorealism since the days of Geforce I and they keep doing so and will keep proclaiming the same thing every generation and the only difference has been in polycounts (that incidentally shifted to shader programs that run complex bumpmapping and parallax mapping routines that do away with poly counts), so nothing has changed since the Geforce 1, it just got more streamlined into the market and cascaded into the lower-end (which as a result, gave an overall push to the image quality and upped the ante).

Don't expect it anytime soon.

 

[Nom De Guerre]

Well what would be the point?

The singular goal of all IHVs would be to come up with hardware that allows realism. The singular hope of ISVs and gamers would be for the IHVs to realise their goal.

If you disagree with this, perhaps you're in the wrong hobby and public forum...?

real life usally looks boring.

Arguable and therefore possibly may be so for you and many others. But that's not the point. Whether real life is "boring" graphically or not, that is.

I get the feeling that you (and possibly many others) have an "alternate real life", where things are much more colorful. Like in computer games. Are you saying you prefer the color and "reality" that computer games offer through a monitor to what you experience and see away from it? That is quite disturbing. Games like the "Serious Sam" series have been accorded graphical accolades from the industry and the public but its graphics are a distortion of reality -- we do not have absolute and a single color in a single leaf in a tree in real life nor do we have absolute contrats and brightness of colors in real life (like we see in "Serious Sam" and countless other games).

It would not be the fault of the industry if it/they manage to finally deliver graphics that mirror "real life that usually looks boring". If what I think you're saying is that you don't want games to look exactly like real life, then you have a point, in terms of being able to enjoy and alternate reality. And I wouldn't disagree with you -- I want to be able to distinguish the difference between the graphics of a computer/video game and that of real life.

That difference is what I call "entertainment".

 

[Moloch]

The singular goal of all IHVs would be to come up with hardware that allows realism. The singular hope of ISVs and gamers would be for the IHVs to realise their goal.

If you disagree with this, perhaps you're in the wrong hobby and public forum...?


Arguable and therefore possibly may be so for you and many others. But that's not the point. Whether real life is "boring" graphically or not, that is.

I get the feeling that you (and possibly many others) have an "alternate real life", where things are much more colorful. Like in computer games. Are you saying you prefer the color and "reality" that computer games offer through a monitor to what you experience and see away from it? That is quite disturbing. Games like the "Serious Sam" series have been accorded graphical accolades from the industry and the public but its graphics are a distortion of reality -- we do not have absolute and a single color in a single leaf in a tree in real life nor do we have absolute contrats and brightness of colors in real life (like we see in "Serious Sam" and countless other games).

It would not be the fault of the industry if it/they manage to finally deliver graphics that mirror "real life that usually looks boring". If what I think you're saying is that you don't want games to look exactly like real life, then you have a point, in terms of being able to enjoy and alternate reality. And I wouldn't disagree with you -- I want to be able to distinguish the difference between the graphics of a computer/video game and that of real life.

That difference is what I call "entertainment".

Well a lot of people like overdone bloom for example.. not realistic at all but people dig it.
I don't personally.
I really think oblivion is close to what I want in a DX9 game, onlything wrong with it (besides performance) is the overdone bloom.. really annoys the crap out of me.
I like how the outdoors have a lot of color to it and how vegetation moves, the hdr is pretty good do.. except for some places where it's blooming way too much.
The textures are lacking in many cases though.

 

[Nom De Guerre]

You didn't really answer what I actually really asked you based on your comment, which I don't necessarily disagree with when the comparison is with PC 3D graphics thus far - there is a certain "mindset" wrt PC 3D graphics and much of this has to do artists cramming a world into 15-30 inches of display, usually with overdone color intensities :

real life usally looks boring.

And so, again and in less words, if you think real life looks boring and if we had the hardware that actually gave us this boring-real-life-look, would you be disappointed? As an example : Have you played the console game "Shadow of The Colossus"? How much nearer or further to "real life" is it compared to, say, the best that the PC platform has to offer (pick one PC title)? What are the distinguishing traits (I can give my opinion if you wish it so)? IMO, "Shadow of The Colossus", with DX7-style graphics on a PS2, approaches "realism" far more than any title I have witnessed regardless of platform.

 

[borntosoul]

well ill put my AU5 cents in, graphics in games today are more of illusion so to speak. theyre made to look as REAL as current hardware allows - not much accuracy really. thats really how they do it. short cuts and tricks to get the best result possible. nothing wrong with that ATM because we are just looking for atmosphere and immersion.


now we are way short of film quality graphics and film quality graphics to be run in real time would need some serious power. high end pc x 10,000,000+( i pulled that number out of my butt)

look how far cg graphics in movies have come along in the last 15 years.
wonder how good they would be 5-10 years from now. probably cant tell the difference to real life.

we are many years (read 20+) away to get those type of graphics on our pc's or consols.
does it matter? nope! games are coming out all the time and we think they look great- like oblivion for example- yeah it couldve been better but it still does the job. then we will get ES V(oblivion2) for example 4 years from now and that will still amaze us even though its way short of photo realistic.