Future 4k gaming

[moonbogg]

So, it appears that "Ultra" hi-def screens are making their way just over the distant horizon and are headed right toward us. Whats got me excited is the idea that perhaps in the next decade, monitors will be so pixel dense that it will be like gaming on a massive iphone screen (retina quality display).
In future PC gaming, the resolution will be so high and pixel dense, that it will be difficult to distinguish a single pixel, effectively making the image on screen look more seamless and real than anything we have yet experienced.
I am also looking forward to the first ultra hi def capable GPUs and what the PC hardware landscape will evolve into. 1080p will seem like junk and will look like atari.

 

[Arkaign]

Yep, gonna be great. It's gonna be a pretty decent amount of time before it's feasible though. Given current jumps, I'd say at least 6-8 generations before midrange hardware can do it @ 60fps/4K. I think right now triple 7970GE could do it with AA disabled and some details turned down. I also think that AA might become a little pointless with 4K @ desktop display.

 

[moonbogg]

Yep, gonna be great. It's gonna be a pretty decent amount of time before it's feasible though. Given current jumps, I'd say at least 6-8 generations before midrange hardware can do it @ 60fps/4K. I think right now triple 7970GE could do it with AA disabled and some details turned down. I also think that AA might become a little pointless with 4K @ desktop display.

Totally. Thats a good thing though. Imagine the performance hit for 4xAA at that res. lol?

 

[KentState]

Pixel density is not the end all for realism. Until graphics become life-like in comparison to 1080i broadcast or 1080p blu-ray (which is heavily compressed) there is still a long ways to go.

 

[OVerLoRDI]

Looking forward to building 4k capable gaming rigs

 

[AlexAL]

Reading this thread my next generation laptop which I've yet to buy is obsolete already.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Agreed would you really need anti ailsing and such at 4k? Isn't that effectively as good as our eyes can see?
I'm still waiting to see truly round cannon/gun barrels. Why is it so damn hard?

 

[moonbogg]

Agreed would you really need anti ailsing and such at 4k? Isn't that effectively as good as our eyes can see?
I'm still waiting to see truly round cannon/gun barrels. Why is it so damn hard?

Res is too low currently. I look forward to perfectly smooth images on screen. Game artists can take their concepts to their true logical conclusion and we will see them exactly as their imagination invented them (pretty much).

 

[Subyman]

When making assets for the retina screen, you can still see the difference between a line with and without AA filtering.

 

[moonbogg]

When making assets for the retina screen, you can still see the difference between a line with and without AA filtering.

If thats the case, then GPU's will need like 10gb of ram or something, maybe more (I didn't do the math, I just pulled that from my dark and hairy place).

 

[tommo123]

Res is too low currently. I look forward to perfectly smooth images on screen. Game artists can take their concepts to their true logical conclusion and we will see them exactly as their imagination invented them (pretty much).

res doesn't matter surely? i mean watching a DVD versus gaming at 1600p is not going to make it difficult to tell which one is real or not. 4k res and it'll still just look like a game - just better looking than current ones.

game @ 1280x720 for all i care as long as the game looks closer to reality

 

[mizzou]

We already have 4k gaming, it's just with multiple monitors

 

[KentState]

res doesn't matter surely? i mean watching a DVD versus gaming at 1600p is not going to make it difficult to tell which one is real or not. 4k res and it'll still just look like a game - just better looking than current ones.

game @ 1280x720 for all i care as long as the game looks closer to reality

Exactly. Until they can match CGI at "low" resolutions, upping pixel density will only make it worse.

 

[biostud]

We need more tessellation + high resolution textures + better lightning, before higher resolution.

 

[Stringjam]

Agreed would you really need anti ailsing and such at 4k? Isn't that effectively as good as our eyes can see?
I'm still waiting to see truly round cannon/gun barrels. Why is it so damn hard?

We can have perfectly round gun barrels at 1080. It isn't a problem of resolution, it's a problem of poly budget. Most developers try to keep the poly count on weapons below 3000. You need a heck of a lot more than that to get a perfectly round barrel and scope.

A lot of the high-poly original models look almost indistinguishable from the real thing. It would be pretty cool to see them in-game....but things would crash to a halt.


Here's a nice high-poly SCAR:

And a big, yet very round barrel.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Thank you for the education above explains a lot.

 

[moonbogg]

We can have perfectly round gun barrels at 1080. It isn't a problem of resolution, it's a problem of poly budget. Most developers try to keep the poly count on weapons below 3000. You need a heck of a lot more than that to get a perfectly round barrel and scope.

A lot of the high-poly original models look almost indistinguishable from the real thing. It would be pretty cool to see them in-game....but things would crash to a halt.


Here's a nice high-poly SCAR:

And a big, yet very round barrel.

Wow. In that case, I look forward to more powerful GPUs

 

[snarfbot]

Tesselate those gun barrels, seems a no brainer instead of say subdividing concrete dividers...

 

[Cerb]

If thats the case, then GPU's will need like 10gb of ram or something, maybe more (I didn't do the math, I just pulled that from my dark and hairy place).

As res increases, AA will still be needed, at least for a good while, but the amount will become less, and contrast-based AA (like FXAA) will cause less perceptible blurring (IE, that effect is pixel-level, so smaller pixels will mean less of it your eyes). We'll just have the same sort of thing we have today, where decent AA for non-Unreal games takes 10-30% performance, and some small mount of extra VRAM. Really, no big deal, except on consoles where you can't turn that stuff on or off much of the time.

 

[kache]

We can have perfectly round gun barrels at 1080. It isn't a problem of resolution, it's a problem of poly budget. Most developers try to keep the poly count on weapons below 3000. You need a heck of a lot more than that to get a perfectly round barrel and scope.

A lot of the high-poly original models look almost indistinguishable from the real thing. It would be pretty cool to see them in-game....but things would crash to a halt.


Here's a nice high-poly SCAR:

And a big, yet very round barrel.

Wow, nice.
We're so far away from photorealism still.

 

[destrekor]

Yep, gonna be great. It's gonna be a pretty decent amount of time before it's feasible though. Given current jumps, I'd say at least 6-8 generations before midrange hardware can do it @ 60fps/4K. I think right now triple 7970GE could do it with AA disabled and some details turned down. I also think that AA might become a little pointless with 4K @ desktop display.

It would be doable with Two flagship cards, no need for three.
Unless you want constant 60fps at highest settings, might need more horsepower.

I play some games at 6060x1080 (triple 1080p + bezel correction) using 2x 560 TI 2GB cards. Granted, with that hardware, I have to play BF3 with mostly low and some medium settings, certainly no AA.

That works out to be roughly 6.5million pixels. Reaching 4K resolution would be like adding another 1080p monitor to my setup. On my 560 Ti 2GB SLI setup? Even BF3 at low settings at 4K probably would be fairly unplayable. 670's in SLI? Quite possible, perhaps medium settings, with some on high. Very unlikely Ultra settings would produce a constant 60fps, but I'm not even sure what they are truly capable of on my Surround setup, so I cannot really project an estimate on 4K.
Two 680s (ungodly expensive setup) could probably produce a consistently smooth multiplayer experience with terrific visuals, not sure about Ultra settings though.

If I got a 4K monitor, it wouldn't be anything less than a 30" model though. I just cannot imagine the rest of the computing experience on that resolution, even with that size of monitor, let alone something like a 24" monitor (my monitors are 23").

I would definitely argue the pixel density on a 30" display (or smaller), if it's 4K, would definitely render AA unnecessary. And with advances in post-process AA, any additional AA needs would be satisfied with even the most minimal application of post-process AA. It would be ideal if such AA was provided correctly to be introduced to the rendering PRIOR to any UI being added to the image (like cursors, minimaps, character names, other text, etc).


So with that, I don't think we're far at all, if one wouldn't say it is possible TODAY, from a pleasing 4K gaming experience. We just need the displays to start shipping, and it would be enjoyed by an appreciative crowd. The present cost of entry to render most modern engines at that resolution, even at low or medium settings, would push away quite a few people (either due to cost or the requirement to settle for low quality), but it could also be treated quite a bit like "but can it run Crysis?".

To see BF3, at Ultra, on a 4K display? I'd drool, and drool some more.



Or... have I projected a bit wrong, here? I was assuming based entirely upon pixel count of my display setup compared to a 4K pixel count. But there could be a key difference that impacts rendering quite a bit differently: FOVs and aspect angle.
a 4K, single monitor with a 16:10/16:9 aspect ratio... would it be vastly different from, say, 4x1080p monitors rendered horizontally?
Things like shadows, especially Ambient Occlusion, might they have a far larger rendering space to be addressed for a single higher resolution monitor, compared to the same pixel count rendered on a spanned 1080p resolution of the same pixel count? That is, a single AO shadow on the single monitor would require 4x the number of pixels to be calculated... would that be different from having 4x the number of shadows rendered, each with 1/4 of the pixel coverage of the single monitor?

I don't have the grasp on rendering requirements to really understand if it would be the same or not.

 

[Bateluer]

Its not the display. Its the graphics chip driving it.

 

[reallyscrued]

Lots of weird information in this thread.

Resolution is not the end-all of realism. If the gaming industry would stop pussy-footing around and release next gen hardware already, maybe then we'd have an advance in actual realism. Recently, we've been using tricks to make things more realstic; FarCry3's outer world is like a big JPEG wrapped around the game, it's disgusting. They just moved resources closer to your screen and added 100 shader effects. Bleh, at 4k, it will still look unimpressive.

Agreed would you really need anti ailsing and such at 4k? Isn't that effectively as good as our eyes can see?
I'm still waiting to see truly round cannon/gun barrels. Why is it so damn hard?

Huh? 4k at what screen size? How far away are you sitting from the screen? And that's got nothing to do with the assets that make up the game environment. When you watch movies at 480p, at the round objects in the movie polygonal all of a sudden?


My predictions:

We'll have near-lifelike Racing games within the next 2 generations. Games with simple assets (10 or so cars on a looped track) are always the first ones to look great and even now, we are very far along and some screenshots can be mistaken for life-like.

(but notice all the resources were used up on the models of the cars. They know that's where your eyes are going to first go, but look at the grass and road texture. They look like they could have been lifted from an N64 title. Clever graphical game design.)

Next 3-5 generations, first person shooters will look life-like. 'Crysis with mods' will be the standard amount of fidelity people can expect from AAA titles and your grandmother will walk into the room while you're playing your PS5 and ask what movie you are watching.

5+ generations - sandbox games will look lifelike. Grand Theft Hovercar will make your eyes bleed.


All 4k is gonna do is ensure that when you're playing these games on a 72 inch OLED, it won't look like a blurry mess.

 

[Stringjam]

Wow. In that case, I look forward to more powerful GPUs

Exactly. I would rather play with a GPU capable of rendering those models real-time on a 1080 display than the current games we have being rendered on a 4K display.

A low-poly tree on 1080 is still going to look like the same, crappy low-poly tree on a 4K display.

 

[gladiatorua]

I don't expect anything from 4k for at least 10 years. Except the fact that I will be able to play on ultra settings on a moderate hardware and 1080 or slightly higher resolution.
Couple of games per year that can really pull it off, surprise ugly textures that lurk even in current AAA releases... And the whole trend of interesting games moving away from AAA scene. And smaller studios and indies can not afford to polish their graphics to 4k standards.