when will video games look exactly like filmed movies?

this will happen someday.

the question is when.

and what sorta system do you envision this to play and create such 100% realistic environments?

 

Too early to say.

 

i don't want that to happen anyway. too much realism takes the fun out of it.

and when/if it does happen, i will happily be playing EE, AOE2 and CoD1 with other like minded individuals.

 

If you mean completely photorealistic, to the point where you couldn't tell the difference between it and reality, it probably is too hard to say, as Howie says.

The reality is, even with pre-rendered CGI, we still haven't quite gotten to the point where we can completely mimic reality (especially with humans). We're certainly getting closer.

Once we hit that milestone, it will be easier to predict when we'll get to a point that it can be rendered in real-time.

As some people have pointed out though, for example, the new Ratchet and Clank game shows we're at a point where, in real-time, they can make something that looks not too far off from the rendered Pixar movies.

 

remember when we counted with stones, yeah about between then and now. About that long.

On a more serious note within the next 15 years i think we'll see a huge improvement with graphics and physics capabilities but definitely not movie quality, at this point in time its impossible to tell what the system to run those games would be.

 

When you can hire actors to walk around with guns and let you shoot at them, then you will have FPS games that look like movies.

 

haha, stones. I laughed so hard when a soccer reporter came on the other day and said a player weighed about eight stones. I thought he was referring to pounds or something when he said "im from the old system".

 

Technically it is capable of being done now (and have been for a while), but playability, control, and user interface are all difficult things to work into games that have those looks.

 

In the words of Bender: "Reality is what you make of it."

 

No point making a guess unless you're adept with crystal balls, astrology and have the foresight of a prophet. If it does get to the point where games mimic films in realism then I believe the video games industry would have evolved into something like today's silver screen industry. I'm not sure that would necessarily be a good thing.

 

the real world is too chaotic to model. Even for our eyes/minds.

The truth is even our mind cannot compute everything that goes on the in the world, perception takes over and computes everything so our meager psyche can interpret it.

 

I would say... within the next 3-10 years games will become photorealistic and be running something like 400fps+ on our 128 core video cards, and 1048 core CPUs. All running on my Ultra gaming notebook that's 5 inches wide with a 60 inch physically scalable screen, and so thin it can acually cut paper if you rub a sheet across it's side. 0.000001ms latency for all online games with GFWN(global free wireless networking ) @infinite upload, infinite download speeds..

 

Generally speaking, never. The real world is awfully complex, and we're nowhere near being able to reproduce it visually.
Of course we can reproduce individual images or possibly simple scenes, but as I understand your question, you'd have to be able to move around freely in a photorealistic world, see it from all angles, with everything dynamically placed.

And for that, the answer is never. The complexity is just too great.
And funnily enough, complexity analysis is something computer scientists learn early.
If there ever was an exponential-complexity problem, this is it. And for the rest of you, that basically means it can't be solved. Not this side of the end of the universe, anyway.

For what it's worth, NVidia estimates that in another 10-15 years, we'll be able to render a photorealistic human being. But they're basically talking about a single still model in a static (or nonexisting) environment. The problem with the real world is that every single object you see somehow affects the lighting on everything else. So while rendering a single photorealistic model might be possible, two is tricky, three is suicidal. And the real world consists of a lot more than three objects.

 

Never is an awfully long time...

 

That would just be scary, pc games would become even more addictive!

 

Ah that would be me...
Let me take out my crystal ball and give me a second...
Mmmmm... Interesting... Now if I look at the stars and planets...
Yes yes....
Ah of course!

18/08/3065

I have spoken!

Seriously though, I mostly agree with Jalf. Though I'm hesitant to say "never". It'll never happen in our life time but who knows what kind of technology will exist years from now.

 

Yes. It is.
But I still stand by what I said.
The point is quite simply that exponential-complexity problems keep being a pain in the butt, no matter how fast your computer is. You'll always be very limited in how large scenes you can deal with. Perhaps you might be able to make a photorealistic prison cell one day (which have very simple lighting and not many objects lying around). Perhaps, one day, you might even be able to put a small red baloon into the cell as well. And maybe, 5 years later, you'll be able to have that *and*, say, a small bird sitting in the window. But the problem is that each added detail, no matter how small, makes the entire scene a hell of a lot more complex. Adding the bird doesn't just mean you have to render one more objects. It means yet another lighting source for all the existing elements, and that light is further reflected between all the objects infinitely, it means shadows fall differently, it means that everything just became a hundred times more complex.

I think "never" is a fairly accurate estimate.

 

Of course with computers but what if you can hardwire your biological brain into a blue gene like of computer? It will basically be like matrix because your own brain is the gpu computer sets only the rules and areas.... single player ultra realistic will not be a problem and possibly availible in 50 years, i see only difficulty running to brains together on same scene place...

 

games were not meant to be a reality, rather a distortion of it. if they make such a big deal out of playing violent games these days, and all the resulting consequences, what's gonna happen when something that real will appear on the market. u will not be able to tell a difference between a game and reality. would u seriously want that? i mean, it'd be cool to see how it works, but i dunno if i wanted to engage in that kind of game. a sports game, i see why not, but something involving killing/crashing, etc. is just plain scary...

 

^ Except simulation games V .

 

oh, hell yeah! that'd be tight, except for i wouldn't want to crash the plane or whatever the game simulates....don't want to die prematurely of a heart attack or something or crap my pants lol

 

^ Eject button included of course... and barf bag. Don't know how your gonna handle the crap problem though? Diapers might have to be on hand.

 

on hand? more like on ass lol i think we are a little off, might as well stop with this b4 we get cited lol

 

So... if games become SO perfect that it DOES look like real life (which i dont think it ever will), wont that mean they have to stop making GPUs since nothing can be more real than real life

 

but something still has to present that "real life", right?

 

Games are meant to be games and nothing more.

People play games to escape reality for a while, take some time off and have some fun, not to plunge into the real world again.

As BIG V pointed out people don't want to kill some one real or anything of that genre....imagine bringing CSS to real life quality...that would make me sick.

As for sport games..I would rather go play the sport my self...making the game look like real life would give already lazy folks a reason not to get out of the house since they can have the same visual experience inside.

I don't know about simulation games but I think the Wii is very innovative...it lets you control the game through your body and the games look like games.

Also...remember those people who go out busting caps in everyone since, or for that matter eating humans because they were under the influence of games such as GTA, Farcry, Manhunt....well those were just games, as BIG V also said imagine what would happen if we brought those games to real life quality.

 

its no different than killing and crashing in actual DVD movies though

 

well, in some cases no and in some yes. obviously its no better, but people know its fake, and in video games some people dont know if its real or not, because its fun in the game, its MUST be fun in real life (very poor logical thinking on their part, this is why i play games where i have to think, rather than run and shoot)

 

exactly, some people, for some unknown reasons to me, tend to take their game experience into real life... dunno, there has to be some kind of education and/or monitoring of some kind. i believe that a lot of responsibility lays on the parents to educate their kids on stuff like that, so it will not spill into anything more than just a game. as for dvd's, u just watch that stuff and not participate, imagine participating in something like that! coool lol

 

I'd give it another 10 years. The hardware required to run something like this is not quite knowable now. I imagine that we're talking about all solid-state (flash) with no hard drive and a very large pipe connecting to inter(sky)net. Just a screen with a stand or wall mount and all components built-in, no separate box.

Think I'm dreaming? Compare the quality of games released 10 years ago to games released today. Compare Quake II to Crysis on a tricked out machine. Now go further back. Compare the original Legend of Zelda (1987) to Quake II (1997) to Crysis (2007) and it's obvious that we are experiencing an exponential growth curve in computing power. The key word there is "exponential" - 2,4,8,16,32...until one day we make the (figurative) jump from 8,192 to 262,144 in 5 generations and everyone craps their pants.

I expect those 5 generations to take place in the next 10 years. It's the nature of the exponential curve that when you're in the middle of it, it seems as though things will never get any better (or worse), because you have no frame of reference. To say that something will "never" happen is to ignore past experiences in exponential growth.

The Singularity is near.

 

Nothing is impossible. . . Wouldn't be surprised if soon enough Concerts won't have the actual person there but a realism to where you could not tell the difference pretty much a Hologram but like that movie S1M0NE ( Simone )
Al pachino movie where the hologram wasn't actually a real person, though everyone thought she was b/c of the technology in 10-20 years


or we could just say the world is going to end in 2012 like the mayans i believe predicted HaHa ( i don't believe that though )

 

Sometime tomorrow around noon. Your guess is as good as mine. There's no real way to tell unfortunately. It's cool to think of when they will be. I don't know if I'll be alive to see it but definitely will be awesome.

 

Photorealism in tech is around, the real time part is what must catch up. I do not think 'never' is an accurate assumption when you consider that photorealistic graphics do not imply a perfect replication of reality.

Virtualizing reality, that may take almost forever, but a virtual representation of photorealistic reality can cut corners enough to trick the human brain into thinking it is real.

Second, quantum style computing would allow for the balloon, bird, AND a hawaiian man standing at a minibar serving iced martinis. When we move on to quantum-gravity computing, we can add the ocean and beach into the equation. Maybe the bird will even fly into the balloon.

Processing power using current technology will continue to improve in a predictable fashion such that Jalf's expecations are close to home. Different methods of processing utilizing more abstract concepts may provide the necessary power to circumvent the issue.

As such, there may be a point where discrete matter around us is used for on-the-fly processing. And what is better at predicting reality than reality?

 

If the entire knowledge of the universe was a 1kilometer, we know about a 1mm. (Using the metric system for the rest of you guys). That's how I see it anyways. We don't know jack ****.


All these truths we know about stuff, are simply what we, as human beings know. As we continue to involve, and our technology with us(assuming we don't blow ourselves up first)who knows what will happen.

I'm something of a combination of what Jalf and Storm believe on the subject specifically though. It could be five years, it could be five million.

 

fortunately that is simply a guess of yours