Originally posted by: dguy6789
the first step would be to get a moniter/video card that can go to a resolution so high that the human eye cant see the individual pixels. right now video cards can do 2048X1536 and thats pretty freakin huge, but if you look exremely closly you can see the jaggies, i am guessing myabe in resolutions above 6000xXXXX it will be hard to see jaggies. Then you would need trillions of polygons in even the most simple of models in the game, such as in a first person shooter, a guy's finger nail would be 3 trillion or so polygons. Think, that is jsut a finger nail, a tiny part of a model, which is a tiny part of the entire enviornment. We will need video cards with 500+ terabyte/second memory bandwith. But it will be fun.
I guess it depends on what you consider "real" looking.
But it doesn't have to be 3 trillion polygons for a finger nail.
What I consider real looking would be essentially what you already have when you watch a DVD on your computer. If you look close enough, you can see the pixels, but when you watch a DVD, or even a video tape, it looks real. It is real enough that it would be hard to tell the difference between watching a DVD on a 19" monitor, and looking through a 19" window at the same scene in real life.
Some of the scenes in the latest CG movies actually look very close to real. It is getting to the point where sometimes you see an image on tv and you can't tell if it is a photograph or if it is CG.
I think we will see CG movies that look almost real in a couple of years. Of course some of these scenes take hours to render. So rendering scenes with this much detail in real time in a 3D game is another story completely.
Basically my question is how long do you think it will be before our games are as realistic as movies.
I said 5-7 years for "realistic" games. But thinking about the amount of time it takes to render complex CG scenes now, it may take even longer than that. In fact, it may require a substantial leap in computer technology, beyond the traditional silicon/copper process used to make CPU's today. Something like quantum computing that can provide an exponential leap in the processing speed of computers.