HANDS ON GUIDE

08 - Will games ever catch up with film?

When can we expect greater realism from games?

WILL GAMES EVER CATCH UP WITH FILM?

So will games ever catch up with film effects in real-time? Simon Maddocks reckons that 'games will always drag a little behind because they have to be real-time' and he's undoubtedly right. However, he adds that 'in terms of games catching up technically with us today, I think so'.

Considering how far both film and games have advanced since 'Tron', it's clear that all sorts of graphical feats are possible in the next few years. When physics engines evolve sophisticated particle systems, when geometry is using subdivision surfaces as standard and when ray tracing is used for much of the light, games will start to resemble modern film effects. However, given that opening a single frame from a current 3D film scene is enough to kill a top-end workstation PC, there's a lot of progress to be made in gaming hardware to enable this in real time. Intel's Larrabee graphics chip could well be the start of something new, but it's likely that there will be a good few years of crossover between the industries involving rasterisation and ray tracing before the latter becomes a standard, if indeed it ever does.

Sanjay Mistry also comments that a lot of it also depends on whether games go down the 'realistic route or the believability route'. He offers the example of films such as 'Polar Express' and 'Final Fantasy'. 'These are films in which the humans and environments are supposed to look very realistic,' explains Mistry. 'But people in general are very critical of that because they can detect inconsistencies. The fidelity of the characters is excellent and they're beautiful, but the movement doesn't live up to the expected standard.'

'From a gaming perspective,' adds Mistry, 'we're looking at CG from a believability view. You can buy into believability, as there's artistic creativity there; your mind can still fill in the blanks if something doesn't feel right. You think, well it's a game at the moment, but that's okay.'

He raises a pertinant point. Do we really want games to look like films, or will that make us more critical of the graphics when the game doesn't look right? We're very forgiving of graphics in games at the moment, as we don't expect games to look photo-realistic. There's room for creativity when you're trying to create believability rather than realism, and that's a major part of what gaming is all about.

Nevertheless, with the progress being made in PC gaming graphics at the moment, there's certainly a lot to look forward to. It might be decades before you can play a game that looks like 'Beowulf', but it certainly isn't beyond the realms of possibility.

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