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[Beerman462]

So listening to the latest Maximum PC: No Bs Podcast with Richard Huddy.
He was essentially asked this question and he said it will happen in about 5 years. This seems really optimistic. He also said that 16k resolution was the point at which you have beaten the human eye. I take this to mean that if you combined 16k resolution with "real" graphics it would be like looking through a window into a different world.

So I guess few discussion points.

Do you think we can reach graphics indistinguishable from real life in 5 years?

Is 16K resolution the highest we would ever really need to go?

How long till these two benchmarks are reached, possibly in a VR helmet?

 

[Lefein]

When we have 10K resolution VR headsets.

 

[Beerman462]

When we have 10K resolution VR headsets.

That doesn't answer anything in the OP...

 

[Ouren]

billions of "tiny little atoms"

 

[ItIsOkBro]

 

[Tagyhag]

I think it depends on a lot of factors. For example, some GTA 4 ENB screenshots look almost lifelike except for the foliage, but I've yet to have that same double take with human characters in any game. And I feel like we'll never get past that uncanny valley.

So environments? Definitely one day.

Human characters? I don't believe we'll ever reach that level.

 

[Vylash]

When studios are okay with making one game and then going bankrupt

 

[Shaanyboi]

At this point? Animation

 

[Trogdor1123]

Never I hope, i have no interests in games that are hyper realistic. Its defeats the point of them imo.

 

[Lefein]

When studios are okay with making one game and then going bankrupt

Or graphics engines make it really REALLY easy to create ray-traced assets somehow.

 

[thekonamicode]

I guess it depends on what you define to be "reality".

 

[Beerman462]

Looks good, but not good enough. I knew I should have added "No drive by posts of UC4"

 

[Keyser Soze]

Today?

 

[entremet]

I get real life enough already. I want stuff more stylized.

 

[SolVanderlyn]

This is good, but it isn't indistinguishable from reality.

5 years from now, I think, is the absolute earliest it could happen. But that's being really generous. I doubt it will happen for at least 10-15 years.

 

[Final Verdict]

We are very close, but not there yet.
Next gen baby!

(Also, how does this guy know what 16k graphics look like? Do 16k res. screens even exist?)

 

[georly]

At this point? Animation

Animation and lighting for sure.

Next would be good AI to make the NPCs seem like real people.

After that we can work on increasing resolution and poly count.

 

[Liha]

When Studios are okay with making one game and then going bankrupt

Damn I am already too late...

 

[ItIsOkBro]

Looks good, but not good enough. I knew I should have added "No drive by posts of UC4"

The only thing stopping me from thinking that that isn't reality is that I know it's an Uncharted game.

 

[phanphare]

never, please

 

[Tagyhag]

Never I hope, i have no interests in games that are hyper realistic. Its defeats the point of them imo.

I agree, but some games are hyper realistic on purpose, its good to have a bit of everything.

Either way, if we ever reach that milestone, only devs with insane budgets will try it.

 

[Buzzman]

Well, we're not getting to 16K in the coming 5 years, I can tell you that much.

 

[Beerman462]

When studios are okay with making one game and then going bankrupt

There was a good point made in another thread about how a lot of effects are faked atm and require more man hours vs a lot of graphics horse power. An example is lighting being faked vs just adding a light source that is accurately reflected/absorbed by in game geometry.

 

[TomShoe]

Remember this movie y'all?

 

[Correctomundo]

Have you seen reality? You made me do a spit take here.

 

[Beerman462]

The only thing stopping me from thinking that that isn't reality is that I know it's an Uncharted game.

Maybe as a compressed gif I can believe this. On a 50inch screen in real time....no

 

[Lefein]

That doesn't answer anything in the OP...

Sorry, let me be more specific.

It will always be a moving goal post. The way assets are rasterized in games will need to be completely rethought. The tools to make this work will need to be created and the processing power to actually animate and use physics calculations on top of collision detection for the whole thing will need to be created.

5 years is far too ambitious. We can barely see the road map for NVidia graphics processors past Kepler. The hardware is getting radically expensive to produce and CPUs are becoming more and more bottle-necked by X86 instruction set architecture.

I think, for a commercially viable industry to sustain these kinds of systems, it will take 15 years and by then, we will have a good enough manufacturing process in place to make 10K resolution VR headsets. My apologies for keeping my answer pithy.

 

[SugarDave]

Today?

Holy shit lol.

 

[Vulcano's assistant]

Simulations are what is still doing baby steps when it comes to real time.

 

[stufte]

in 5 years? No.

I figure once there is a movie with characters/environments that are indistinguishable from reality (imo, we're not there yet) add 15 years to that time and games *might* be there.

 

[JeffG]

Today?

When I saw him playing...god damn that was funny.

 

[Beerman462]

Sorry, let me be more specific.

It will always be a moving goal post. The way assets are rasterized in games will need to be completely rethought. The tools to make this work will need to be created and the processing power to actually animate and use physics calculations on top of collision detection for the whole thing will need to be created.

5 years is far too ambitious. We can barely see the road map for NVidia graphics processors past Kepler. The hardware is getting radically expensive to produce and CPUs are becoming more and more bottle-necked by X86 instruction set architecture.

I think, for a commercially viable industry to sustain these kinds of systems, it will take 15 years and by then, we will have a good enough manufacturing process in place to make 10K resolution VR headsets. My apologies for keeping my answer pithy.

I am both surprised by your return to the thread and the breadth of your reply. Most drive by "FIRST POST"s never bother to return.Thanks for your input.

 

[NarrowPath]

Today?

The answer of course is "both". It definitely looks real fake.

 

[Crossing Eden]

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/maleficent/
The film industry has already done this, (more like is capable of doing it but will showcase it very rarely because of the cost). It's just super expensive to do and the hardware available is not as good as CGI. There are tons of "tells" in an animated character that immediately stick out. So we have to get past that barrier as well. On top of the the environments, physics, etc. It's just not possible right now without sacrificing an awful lot of factors that would take up memory, like complex AI. So maybe by the end of this generation we'll start seeing something that's close to indistinguishable from real life.

^ CGI

 

[we.are.the.armada]

Yeah and the first one to do it might be a racing game, that'd be cool.

 

[Garrett Hawke]

A long time. Because photorealism is very hard to achieve in games; even stuff like Uncharted and TLOU which looks phenomenal is heightened/stylised realism. Which is why it looks so good. Going for straight photorealism is hard to make look good.

 

[grimlock442]

Ps5. Ps4 will come damn close.

 

[-MD-]

Hopefully never.

I get real life enough already. I want stuff more stylized.

^^

 

[Josh7289]

Never. And give up on it because it's practically an unattainable goal.

There's a good Errant Signal episode on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRTsl1jCqq8

 

[Otakumegane]

When people can make believable AI, better animation and natural environmental interaction.

Even the best poly model looks unreal if it keeps just running into a wall.

 

[FTF]

Not next-gen, but the gen after that. So like 12-15 years with say PS6.

 

[Portugeezer]

At this point? Animation

This, it's so strange now seeing games with amazing graphics, the animations always look weird. People say the UFC game has good animations, but uncanny valley makes them look weird. One example I noticed is when you slam someone, the animation goes forward so if you slam them into the cage instead of hitting the cage the fighters kind of hover/slide on the floor and the animation completes normally, rather than adapting and the attacker slamming the opponent directly below with no forward run up.

 

[bon]

We're gonna see a whole lot of uncanny valley this gen aren't we

 

[That Wont Fit In There]

This just tells me we're getting closer to playing CGI movie looking games.

 

[MBR]

I play games to escape reality.

But yeah, we're never going to be able to say "this looks and feels real". If VR becomes mainstream, that's the closest we'll get visually I think, but even then, it's not even going to be close.

For games to become "indistinguishable from reality", we'd need VR + PowerGloves + Treadmill + Smell-o-vision to become mainstream and affordable, but then you'll still feel that you're wearing them gloves, the VR helmet, you'll feel the treadmill instead of whatever the game is telling you you're walking on, and Smell-o-vision is Sci-Fi.

Never, not gonna happen, ever.

 

[Log4Girlz]

CGI isn't 100% indistinguishable from real life 100% of the time...sooooo

 

[Aon]

Practically never, as the amount of detailing it would take to create a realistic environment of any size would be far too expensive to ever make money off. Just looking around the room I'm sitting in right now, for example, there are three bookcases, each with ~280 books on them, each of which obviously has a unique spine.

Recreating even one of these to a degree indistinguishable from reality would be stupidly expensive, but this room wouldn't work if the standard videogame 'repeating books' bookcases was there, especially in a high resolution VR headset, where the the repetition would stand out even more.

I mean, perhaps some company manually licenses scans of existing book spines or creates a few thousand original ones, then when an artist places a bookcase it populates it with random books and applies wear to some of them. Perhaps it's a problem that can be overcome.

But as an example for the silly amount of detail it takes to recreate the mundane, photorealism feels intuitively impractical to me.

 

[Zabuza]

If games start looking like CGI I'll be more than happy. CGI looks better than real life.

 

[SturokBGD]

We already hit that point. You're playing it now. This is only a computer generated facsimile of real life. That's right, someone finally made a game that's more boring than a Ubisoft Montreal title!

 

[Spring-Loaded]

They already are.