| endimion said: hum yeah but with the exponential curve of the technology development it could happen faster than we think.... "when the PC version isn't a crappy unoptimised port from a console, I'll consider that news." well that's the other reason why I think the gap will get smaller too... we probably will see more and more that kind of thing happening..... especially if MS ends up dominating the market in a generation or 2 some genre like RTS some MMO and couple FPS will stay PC friendly, but i'm afraid that a lot of other things will just be port from consoles... especially if that market keep getting bigger and bigger.... |
It isn't only technology that need to progress but also the algorithms too. While it isn't necessary to get the algorithms 'perfect' it is important to get them so humans can't tell the difference, but they are usually still extremely complex. A few months back I implemented a raytracer that rendered 3d scalar fields volumetrically*. Now while this was done in software, it was still incredibly slow given I am running close to top end hardware. The algorithms to do this are almost 20 years old and as far as my supervisor could find (my research is graphics related) there are not any significant advances on that algorithm yet.
And as your mother has pointed out, realism also comes from physics and AI too. A lot of the graphics that actually passes as 'photorealistic' is actually still shots. Once you add movement into things it becomes much more difficult and humans are very adpet to noticing subtly. The original Final Fantasy movie was a brilliant example of this. While I don't have any references I can link to, I have read about people feeling awkward about the characters in the movie because while they looked 'real' they didn't function correctly, and this made people feel uncomfortable. This doesn't occur in cartoons because people can see that the actors aren't real.
You are correct though, these things might come sooner than expected. Breakthroughs occur all the time.
@your mother, I too am also interested in PC vs Console numbers, not only in users, but piracy percentage. Just for reference, a certain private tracker I know of has Bioshock on 360 being downloaded 4200 times. To put that in perspective, the average download of 360 games on that tracker is 300-500. Piracy is definitely rampant on consoles as well as PC.
*For those that are interested, the paper is "A Rendering Algorithm for Visualizing 3D Scalar Fields" by Paolo Sabella. It was published in Siggraph, Aug '88.
