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Comment by transfire | Hacker News Reader

Photorealism in video games is around the corner, brothers.

Photorealism in video games has arrived. It's arrived at least 6-7 times, depending on how you count console generations. Even 16-bit consoles were called photorealistic in their day, and then their successors were, and then THEIR successors were, and so on. It's almost as though we're asymptotically approaching a carefully-chosen marketing-driven goal that can never actually be reached, but towards which we can continually make (ever-tinier) steps.

> Photorealism in video games has arrived. It's arrived at least 6-7 times, depending on how you count console generations.

That's a very good point. Seems to me that it applies equally well to movies: the first 3D animated movies were thought photorealistic in their day, but nowadays they look pretty dated.

What you say may be true, but there's a difference between 16-bit photorealism and the photorealism possible today, and the difference is that it's possible to find rendered images that are hard to distinguish from real life today. In the 16-bit era? Not so much.

To give some examples, take a look at these images created in Blender:

http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/24-photorealistic-blende...

its important to remember that path tracing for photorealism is considerably more expensive than raytracing. its like raytracing every pixel hundreds, thousands or even more times, and doing some extra work on-top.

Thanks for that link - there are some absolutely fantastic images in there.

Most of those are pretty evidently distinguishable from real life...

The issue here - and the point being made - is that we are already at the stage where many CG images can fool even close observers, and we've been here for some time.

We've been passing around these "CGI OR REAL?!!!!" images for a few years at least, and when they are first created people really can't tell the difference, but yet somehow when people get used to the tech and revisit these images a few years down the line they look obviously synthesized.

Ditto older movies like Jurassic Park, whose cutting edge CGI of the time were convincing even when viewing frame-by-frame, but to savvy eyes appears downright obvious today.

So clearly "photoreal" is something we haven't reached yet. IMO the indicator that we've reached "true photoreal" is when an image rendered 5 years ago still holds up to fresh eyes.

One of those images was created in 2007, and still holds up as photorealistic for me (though admittedly I'm not viewing it on a large monitor).

I'd be interested to hear your take on the 'giveaways' on each of those images. I can see some on some of them, but not on all of them.

Up until the PS2 things were so far from any sort of realism, this thing was an emotional appeal for the virtual reality desire in our brains. But yes, the PR argument is shallow pornographic tease for the consumer brains. I may be too jaded but realism has almost no appeal since long ago, I now 'drool' on limitations and how old games with so many crippling constraints were able to give you timeless memories. The only value of more rendering capabilities is the equivalent of video games magazine centerfold.

ps: I remember first time I ran Half Life, my computer was so slow I had to run in 320x200 with zero option, it was a pixel soup yet it sucked my soul. Rainbow 6 managed to lock me down for hours too. I understand the desire for more possibilities, but we've reached this level long ago, I'd say with the 2nd massive-city GTA.

In fact the graphics processor in the PS2 (and some PS3 units) was called the "Emotion Engine"[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_Engine

It surely made developers feel a lot.

I'd say it's arrived - TODDYHANCER Staw Wars Battlefront v1 just rolled out a few weeks ago -=>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGuizdaLR8k

What does the mod do? I can see severe sharpening and maybe a lut/grade over it?

I've experienced photorealism in games, even on last-generation hardware - but only in certain scenes. The PS3 / Xbox 360 open-world crime-drama game Sleeping Dogs, for instance, genuinely looks like a movie in certain areas, on foot, at night, when the weather cycle has gone to rain. On the other hand, driving, during the daytime, in the Central district looks more like a Dreamcast title.

The big challenge I see is not photorealism, but consistent photorealism. In the Sleeping Dogs example, the game's engine is optimized for its iconic scenes of rain-slicked Hong Kong backstreets, but the tricks it uses don't hold up well in other contexts.

I think you're right, that the question isn't "is this game photorealistic?", it's "in what contexts can this game achieve photorealism?"

For a long time, the game industry focused on higher resolution, more polygons, and higher framerates. I think now maybe there's more emphasis on textures, lighting, and physics. The trouble is, if you don't have a physically-accurate global illumination solution or physically-correct reflection, refraction, and shadows, there are many contexts in which "photorealism" is unattainable. For instance: shining a flashlight around a dark room, seeing your reflection in a shiny car, turning lights on and off and opening and closing doors in a dark building at night.

Well the thing is, photorealism actually can be least - or at least we can imagine what reaching it would look like. A Start Trek-style holodeck, completely indistinguishable from real life, would be true photorealism. I highly doubt we'll reach that point in any of our lifetimes, but that's where we'll eventually end up, if gaming technology continues to improve indefinitely.

Year 2006: Photorealism in video games is around the corner...

Year 2016: Photorealism in video games is around the corner...

Year 2026: Photorealism in video games is around the corner...

I think there are cases where we are there now: http://www.gamesradar.com/star-wars-battlefront-photorealism...

No we are still not there and will not be for a long time. But with time we will get closer and closer.

No we wont, its no longer paying off to invest that much.

Write a bunch of new shaders - nobody notices anything. Write a good procedural content generator- suddenly applause. The gfx-race is over- it died a horrible death on the plateau beneath uncanny valley. Its a real shame, cause the technology invented is just so neat- but that is how it is.

Battlefront just won a ton of awards due to tech they created for that game that makes the terrain look amazingly realistic. It seems like people still notice.

Have you seen the clothing of the man who fires?

Clothes is one weak point with real time CG today. Another is grass, trees.

There is a reason there is no green in those pictures, and they try to only draw people in rigid suits.

I didn't say for everything and in all cases, but there are cases where you can't tell. GTA V and Battlefront both can produce screenshots with tons of detail (including foliage) that are near imperceptible from reality.

Where games struggle today is hair, skin, and soft fabrics, but there are already good implementations for those that should show up in the next generation game engines.

This will always been an iterative process, but there are times today (and I honestly feel like this just became the case within the past year or so) where games look like reality.

Obligatory: http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/1/13692/1386568...

The funny thing in photorealism is that the amount of sharp detail isn't particular high. We easily consider 80's television broadcast photorealistic: none of the films and series aren't criticized because they looked to unrealistic and artificial. Yet a measly low-resolution broadcast with even more inaccurate and distorted chrominance channel can produce video that is for all practical purposes realistic. For still images, photorealism is even simpler. Even a painter can produce photorealistic paintings you couldn't easily distinguish from photographs.

The painter has the advantage that he's a human drawing an image that will be perceived photorealistic by other humans, so his own "is this photorealistic yet" function is the same as mine and yours, i.e. he can alter the image until it looks photorealistic, even if it is not objectively photorealistic.

I didn't have time to cover it in the video but ray tracing makes a huge difference for foveated rendering in VR. Maybe I'll write about it when I have some time.

Awesome. This is coming just as VR is reaching mainstream popularity. Coming up to an exciting time in terms of entertainment technology!

Intriguing, particularly if the lower-power claim here proves out.

So far nothing meeting the Oculus reqs (970 GTX or better) will fit in a SFF PC, much less a laptop. Part of that is physical size, but 100W+ TDP for a graphics card alone is never going to be acceptable to most people, if only because of cooling problems and fan noise.

The R9 Nano will fit into an SFF. The rest is obviously true.

You are talking about ray tracing the first hit and then shading the resulting fragments normally I'm guessing?

Photorealism in video games is already there in the form of path tracing: https://home.otoy.com/render/brigade/

Photorealism might be what everyone is looking for, but ultimately it doesn't matter. Many pretty games have come and gone in 5 years, but they've all been out-sold (and out-played) by Minecraft.

K. What about GTA V and Battlefront?

It's almost like there are many factors involved in launching a successful product.

This isn't anywhere close to doing a full scene with ray tracing, just some shadows and added reflections. The prettier looking demos are all static geometry. There's one demo with moving objects but all static meshes. No mention how expensive is the preprocessing that they do (building BVHs or other acceleration structures).

This may be a very interesting piece of hardware but it's not something that will revolutionize gaming over night.

Rasterization with post processing tricks may be "cheating" but it still subjectively looks better than any raytracing based technology so far (in anything close to real time). Raytracing is mainly interesting for shadows, which can't be accurately simulated with rasterization. There are pretty shadow mapping tricks but no "one size fits all" solution exists.

It arrives when path-tracing or at least some good GI (global illumination) approximation can be accurately solved in real time.

Ray-tracing has a pretty limited use for photorealism, unless you have a lot of shiny surfaces and such. It can't model diffuse light bouncing off surfaces.

> Ray-tracing has a pretty limited use for photorealism, unless you have a lot of shiny surfaces and such. It can't model diffuse light bouncing off surfaces.

You mean real time ray tracing as it stand now correct? Ray-tracing in a general sense can simulate photography as a whole, just not efficiently (for now).

Well, it can't simulate all effects from photography. Anything to do with diffraction can't be simulated by a ray, for that you need waves.

Micro effects are typically already simulated by shaders.

Ray tracing could in theory simulate interaction between a frequency of light and the frequency of of medium although the situations where that would be practical would be exotic.

Many use ray tracing and path tracing interchangeably and consider path tracing to be a form of Ray tracing (Old school RT would be called Whitted Ray Tracing).

Single bounce ray tracing isn't very interesting, what we want is real time global illumination such as with park tracing. For simple scenes this is possible on a gpu today, at least with low res and a reasonable amount of noise. If this chip can do with a million triangles what a gpu does today with a hundred, then it's very interesting (not saying it can).

Real time gpu PT today: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4lfGWr

I'm not sure exactly what you are replying to. The original poster said that ray tracing cannot simulate diffuse illumination, which is of course not true.

I think it's pretty much here:

http://www.pcgamer.com/star-wars-battlefront-graphics-mod-ma...

I'd use semi-realtime path tracers as a benchmark: https://home.otoy.com/render/brigade/showcase/

'Semi' real is a very long way from real time when it comes to ray tracing. Because of the exponential requirements for convergence, it is easy to impress people with interactive but noisy tracing. When you wait for it to converge however, the parts that take a long time to converge still take a long time to converge.

I meant the visual quality

Then why not go all the way and compare it to movie visual effects?

I'd love to see any progress in animation. Currently they just do motion capture and it still looks like crap (interpolating animation frames doesn't help the cause either).

So is the mainstream Linux desktop.

Ironically the demo is on desktop Linux... actually it's on a MIPS Loongson board which is interesting. I haven't been able to find one at a sane price.

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