Who would've thought?

[linthat22]

You know, when 3Df/x's Voodoo1 came out, I thought, "It can't get any better than this." But you know, years go by and technology keeps getting better and better, to tell ya'll the truth, I can't see the difference in games from post-Voodoo1 to pre-Now, graphically. I still think Shadows of the Empire still kicks ass in the graphics department. Even though some people can tear apart scenes frame by frame, doesn't that kinda take the fun out of stuff? Don't ya'll think that the next big step will be photo quality graphics? That seems to be the next logical leap, just like smooth textures.

 

[OpenGL guy]

You know, when 3Df/x's Voodoo1 came out, I thought, "It can't get any better than this." But you know, years go by and technology keeps getting better and better, to tell ya'll the truth, I can't see the difference in games from post-Voodoo1 to pre-Now, graphically.

Whoa... Run Quake 3, then run glQuake and tell me you can't tell the difference graphically

Even better, run the Team Fortress mod for Quake, then run TFC in Half-life, even that was a decent improvement in graphics.

 

[Geeforcer]

Well, let's take a look at some shots, shell we?

Jedi Knight 1, V1-era

Jedi Kinght 2, present

 

[Gollum]

I can understand what you're getting at I think, especially that smooth texture point, it was the single most important part of 3D accelleration for me over the first months, followed by transparency, hehe. The wow of having seen filtered textures, 16bit color, transparency, reflections, decent polycounts and higher than 320x200 resolutions is hard to beat. Before 3D acceleration, 3D games use to be a pixel mess with low resolutions, 256 colors, lots and lots of aliasing, shimmering, in great lack of any effects worth mentioning. Not saying the games were bad, far from it (System Shock is still a classic for me), just that the graphics were very ... DOS ...

The following steps were smaller than that first one (non-accellerated to accelerated), but you can easily spot a dramatic improvement in graphics quality of games today vs. games of the Voodoo1 area. It just isn't the same wow-effect anymore I guess. True per-pixel shading and lighting will do a pretty similar thing once it gets used more widely IMO. Up to this day, most games are still using very cheap, fake looking lighting and shading, its about time that changes...

 

[OpenGL guy]

True per-pixel shading and lighting will do a pretty similar thing once it gets used more widely IMO. Up to this day, most games are still using very cheap, fake looking lighting and shading, its about time that changes...

I think Doom 3 will raise the bar on lighting in games... and it's about time

 

[Gollum]

I agree, it truly looks like Doom3 will be the first game to really go down that road, for that alone JC deserves an award...

 

[Jerry Cornelius]

Im still waiting for a crude from of real time ray tracing.

 

[Natoma]

What I find encouraging is the following quote from Carmack:

Nvidia is the first of the consumer graphics companies to firmly understand what is going to be happening with the convergence of consumer realtime and professional offline rendering. The architectural decision in the NV30 to allow full floating point precision all the way to the framebuffer and texture fetch, instead of just in internal paths, is a good example of far sighted planning. It has been obvious to me for some time how things are going to come together, but Nvidia has made moves on both the technical and company strategic fronts that are going to accelerate my timetable over my original estimations. My current work on Doom is designed around what was possible on the original Geforce, and reaches an optimal implementation on the NV30. My next generation of work is designed around what is made possible on the NV30.

Taken from nV News btw..