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CG on your PC
It's been 13 years since 'Toy Story' was released, but PC game graphics still can't match Pixar's breakthrough film. What's holding back gaming graphics, and could features such as ray tracing make games look like films? Ben Hardwidge investigates 3D in film and games to find out if we'll ever play a game that looks like 'Wall-E' in real time.
It's the start of 2033; high-res movies can be downloaded in nanoseconds, 128-core CPUs are considered underpowered and Duke Nukem Forever will definitely be released before Christmas. Whether you'll be donning your virtual reality suit after parking your flying car is debatable, but you can guarantee that the graphics in games will make Crysis look like 3D Monster Maze. Games are constantly adopting the 3D techniques used in films and Intel is talking about real-time ray tracing, so are we on the brink of film-quality CG effects in real time? We spoke to industry experts in both fields to find out how close we are to cinematic gaming.
FROM SPY HUNTER TO CRYSIS
To gain some perspective, it's worth looking at how radically games have evolved over the past 25 years. EA's senior graphics training manager, Sanjay Mistry, who previously worked in the film industry on movies such as 'Goldeneye' and 'Lost in Space', remembers the early 1980s well. 'Photography was a very mature medium,' Mistry commented, 'and you had CG, which was an up-and-coming area. But then you had games, which were very embryonic. The games of that time were pixellated, monotone and made up of primary-coloured environments, and that was it.'
Mistry has a point. CG films have progressed from 'Tron' to 'Wall-E' in just 25 years, while games have advanced from Spy Hunter to Crysis. Mistry argues that the differences between photography, CG and games aren't nearly as striking as they were then, and that games are catching up. However, there are still many areas in which 3D in films and games differ from each other, and it will take a long time for games to catch up completely, if it ever happens.
Read the rest of our special feature on CG and how it affects the games industry by clicking on the sections below.
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- 01 - Hardware Restrictions
- 02 - Count Those Polygons
- 03 - Ray Tracing
- 04 - Subsurface Scattering
- 05 - Particle Systems and Physics
- 06 - The different talents and backgrounds of the people involved
- 07 - Using CG tools in game creation
- 08 - Will games ever catch up with film?
- 09 - Virtual animals
- 10 - Capturing HDR lighting
ray tracing is very static, ie you have to determine movement and cameras as well as light intensity etc. Plus CG companies like Pixar use render farms to make their films which greatly speed up the process - and we're talking around 1200-2000GHz of proccessing power! and still each frame takes a while to render. Considering that most monitors run at 60-85 frames per second, a game matching that rate would take a helluva long time to 'draw' so the game would be unplayable. The only way real-time ray-tracing would come about is if the graphical quality came down a couple of pegs, so no smoke, no particle effects, no water animation etc. so I doubt we're going to see Crysis-quality graphics from real-time raytracing any time soon. Maybe in another 10 years
Comment by EdArch at 1:29pm 13th July 2008
By the time games end up having graphics like the beowulf films we will have moved onto 50 core cpu's and 20 GPU graphics cards. Pc's will be the size of dinner plates and I will be hopefully working at Stargate Digital (I wish)!!! lol
Comment by Nickuk1987 at 11:55pm 11th July 2008
The problem with ray tracing for games is that you can't get the visual effects you might want as there's no room for manouver with ray tracing.
Comment by l3v1ck at 4:41am 10th July 2008
A good way to see the evolution of CGI graphics is by watching how Pixar titles have improved over the years. There is a Blu-ray disc with a compilation of short movies that comes with Ratatouille. It covers much of the history of the company, and although some of the films are as bereft of humour as they are of quality shading, others are a right laugh. In the first video (1984 I think) the trees are very static and flat. Look at the foliage in Crysis, Age of Conan or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and you'll see that games are way past what CGI was capable of 20 years ago.
Comment by OB_Writer at 4:57pm 9th July 2008
Well being a gamer and someone with an interest in CGI I'd say that the world of CGI whether pre-rendered or realtime is a fast moving one. The games of today look better than the CG of yesterday. Of course CG will always be miles ahead but games someday could look like the CG we have today. I don't think the people 20 years ago would have believed what the CG or video games do look like today, and it might be the same for us
Comment by mrjimmyos at 1:06pm 9th July 2008
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