Will the pc be be the first to get real-life graphics?

[TheBigFatJ]

HappySqurriel said:

shio said:

HappySqurriel said:

Until we have (practically) limitless processing power all computer graphics (realtime or pre-rendered) will not be able to achieve photorealism ...

By the end of 2010, a PC using two or three graphics cards hooked up using SLi or Crossfire will probably be close to the quality of pre-rendered movies of 2000 to 2005 at high resolutions (obviously using rasterization); in 2015 a bleeding edge PC will probably be close to the quality of pre-rendered movies of 2005 to 2010 at high resolutions using ray-tracing.

Well, Crysis already has graphics better than several CG Movies from 2000-2005.

 

 

If you're playing Crisis at its maximum quality it does appear very similar to pre-rendered movies from 2000/2001 like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within; there are still areas where it is not quite as nice as those movies though, and it takes an insanely powerful PC to get that close.

Yes, but approach some of those objects and look at them.  A given piece of bark on a tree would take millions of polygons to render properly, but you'd be lucky to get more than one polygon per small section of bark and then some bump mapped texture to (poorly) approximate the detail.

If by real life rendering you  mean to say that it is indistinguishable from real life, then you need this level of detail.  If you mean rendering that is difficult to see the difference in at first glance from a very limited perspective and limited resolution the a much, much lower level of detail is needed.

For the first, it would be far more difficult to render one tree than an entire building with everything in it.