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It's interesting the effect new graphics have on how old graphics are seen. I remember when Resident Evil came out on the first Playstation, at the time, I cons

It's interesting the effect new graphics have on how old graphics are seen. I remember when Resident Evil came out on the first Playstation, at the time, I considered certain game elements like fire and water indistinguishable from reality. Now it looks like pixelated garbage and I ask myself how I could have ever thought that.

jamroom 6y ago
Oh man - the same here with me - when I first got Morrowind there was an option you could enable in ATI (now AMD) cards at the time that made water look "real". I was able to enable that and was blown away - I was like "well that's it - doesn't get any more real than this". Having loaded Morrowind recently I could not believe had bad it looked lol. Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now?
- johnwheeler 6y ago
  > "well that's it - doesn't get any more real than this" > Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now? Yes - well said. That's what I was trying to convey in my comment.
  - lwansbrough 6y ago
    I think Epic’s UE5 demo is really really close to reality in terms of lighting and geometry. Next 10-20 years will probably see the same technology being brought into larger and larger environments with more moving parts. Then there’s the more obvious stuff that isn’t done well even today: skeletal animation is still lacking and feels unnatural, physics systems are still very approximate and constrained - often times most things are indestructible in games, fluid dynamics are still very slow/limited. Human models still don’t look real though, and the voice acting never quite matches the mouth movement or body language. I do really feel like we’ve crossed the uncanny valley when it comes to natural scenery rendering. But a lot of what makes things feel real are still missing from games.
    - heipei 6y ago
      I agree, it's so close that it's actually being used as an interactive movie background with a big-ass 360-degree screen for dynamic scene and lighting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjb-AqMD-a4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjb-AqMD-a4
      - formerly_proven 6y ago
        IMHO it looks fake. The lighting is way off, it quite literally looks like they're standing directly below a big diffuser - which they are. The background looks like a poster with one of these diffraction parallax effects. It's very cool tech. But it doesn't look real.
        jiggawatts 6y ago
        The camera angles in that demo were off axis. Take a look at The Mandalorian series, almost all of the outdoor scenes were shot using the video wall technology. I've worked in computer graphics and I didn't realise the sets were fake until after I finished the whole series.
        manigandham 6y ago
        The behind-the-scenes context is making it visible to you, but you've probably already seen films and TV using it without even noticing.
- pvg 6y ago
  Maybe the water stood out since Morrowind was an ugly game even in its day. All the Elder Scrolls games have a well-earned reputation of looking like they're populated by cardboard mutants. Reminds me a bit of the old Infocom ad: http://www.retroadv.it/images/03082019/Home_Computer_Magazine_Vol4_01_0017.jpg http://www.retroadv.it/images/03082019/Home_Computer_Magazin...
  - int_19h 6y ago
    Morrowind was complicated. The characters were ugly, and animations especially horrible. But the landscapes were considered very beautiful by the standards of the day.
- noja 6y ago
  When you compared it recently did you use the same monitor, cable (analog or digital), and resolution?
- int_19h 6y ago
  It was one of the first prominent uses of pixel shaders in the game, coinciding with NVidia (not ATI) releasing GeForce models that supported them. It was so noticeable because it was such a huge increase in quality compared to what passed for water in games before - usually some kind of blue-grey translucent texture. For the first time, pixel shaders produced water that was clearly an attempt to imitate water IRL, not the cartoonish representation of it.
- Budabellly 6y ago
  For me, it's fidelity of human facial animation that has a long way to come. There are teams doing a great job of it [1], but the labor/skill required to bring one high hyperreal facial rig to a game or movie seems insane. I think companies pursuing AR/VR applications will lead here. ML creative tools stand to automate a lot of this imo. [1] random example: https://snapperstech.com/ https://snapperstech.com/
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  Hm. Many people here share their sentiments of perceiving older games (or current games) as being close to photorealistic. Personally it never felt that way to me. All games have obvious problems where they don't behave/look anywhere close to reality. If you remove the interactive element and only use somewhat massaged screenshots, then, sure certain elements are basically photorealistic and have been for a while. For example, landscapes look pretty darn realistic. Anything alive or even most man-made artefacts, not so much. Apart from graphics most stuff in games is pretty rough. Animations are generally bad and ways before reaching the uncanny valley of "getting close"; they're still in the "abstract representation of concept" detail level. AI is dumb (largely for [perceived] player-acceptance reasons). Sound is generally poor; some games still don't use 3D sound. Physics are "abstract representation" level again, some games still have fly-through walls and vibrating items. etc. etc.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
    Yeah... these comments are kinda weird. Hate to say it but maybe they should go outside more lol, computer graphics always looked pretty bad at me, even the clips in today's nvidia presentation looks really unnatural. That's not to take anything away from the technology and the massive advances it represents, just compared to reality it's still really far from fooling a human brain.
    - wiz21c 6y ago
      interestingly many of us feel that there's a huge gap between the past and now. But how many of us can actually verbalize what will change in the rendering of pictures in, say 3 years. For example, I can clearly see that ray tracing produces better results. But it's a bit harder to tell how better it is, to find the words that describes how better it is. Of course, one can say that, for example, photon tracing is more physically accurate. But still, what words can we use to describe how real (or not real) a still image is ("more realistic" doesn't count :-))
      - bonoboTP 6y ago
        Game graphics look sterile, too clean, sharp, plasticky. The real world is messier with less clear separation between objects, things blend together more, subtle shadows, surfaces are less uniform, there is more clutter, dirt, wrinkles, details.
- lacker 6y ago
  The biggest thing to me is that video games do not have very many independent objects, compared to reality. Go outside and look at the real world and you will see the ground has little pebbles and bits of mud and all this stuff that gets kicked around. No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will. Or for indoor scenes, there is no video game that accurately captures the experience of "picking up a living room with a bunch of toys strewn about".
  - makapuf 6y ago
    > No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will. Why not? With procedural generation and LOD rendering it's not impossible. Not that it's easy, but not impossible?
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      Presumably you're not a native English speaker. "will" here does not refer to the future, this is a subtle grammatical thing that I can't explain well, but it refers to presently existing games.
      - cyberlurker 6y ago
        Still, there is no reason I can think of that the game described couldn’t be created right now besides it not being a very fun/Marketable game.
        bonoboTP 6y ago
        But that's theoretical, the point is more how current games actually look, not what people could make potentially with today's tech. Also, some games are intentionally cartoonish as an artistic choice so photorealism isn't always the goal.
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      Everything has a cost, either computational or human. We've probably reached the point where human cost exceeds computational cost, which is to say that developing and QA testing such a feature would probably cost more money than it's worth. How many users of software would gain from such minutiae?
- Yajirobe 6y ago
  > Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now? How about ray tracing?. If we get real-time 60fps+ ray-traced computer graphics in games, that would blow what we have now out of the water
- outworlder 6y ago
  YES! Morrowind was my 'shader benchmark' for some time.
- jakear 6y ago
  As someone who is most definitely not a gamer but with coworkers and friends that get big into high cost gaming systems, here’s where I see the biggest deltas between real life and the screen: - Hair. Up until very recently hair was downright awful. Nowadays it’s acceptable-ish, but there’s still lots of room for improvement, in particular in natural motion of long hair. - Water. I spend a big chunk of my time on the water, so I’m probably more attuned to how it moves than most. Games just don’t have it down. In particular, I think a lot could be gained by embracing it’s fractal nature: in my experience, at every human scale (mm to dam and everything in between) very similar wave patterns exist, but games tend to have just a small fixed number of “wave-layers” at various scales stacked together. - Clouds. I can easily spend hours just observing clouds, looking at things like their shape, overall motion, internal motion, composition, edge behaviors, etc, and how they change over time. Game clouds are lacking in all these regards, particularly the time-sensitive nature of a cloud. - Foliage. In games I’ve seen, individual plants/etc. in isolation generally look really quite decent. But the second an physical object interacts with them, they very clearly don’t respond in the right ways. There’s a lot about how branches bend and leaves rustle and more that is lost. Additionally, in groups of plants it’s often clear that some small number of models are being reused, possibly with some generated randomness added. But the variety doesn’t come close to matching what one would really see. - Human faces and expressions. These are generally really bad, especially in normal gameplay (cut-scenes are sometimes better) Again, this is probably all just really weird stuff I notice because I spend the vast majority of my time outdoors and only see “HiFi” games being played very infrequently. I don’t think games are worse for not implementing these, but I am very interested in what they’ll look like 10-20 years down the road.
  - vimy 6y ago
    Regarding clouds, have you seen videos of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020?
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    I think these days it mostly comes down to human effort in development and not hardware limitations. You could spend hundreds of hours modelling faces or putting accurate physics on a fern but it doesn't add too much to the game and costs too much to develop. What I think will be a huge boost is proper raytracing. You can see animated movies and blender renders look stunning but they take minutes per frame.
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  >Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now? My vote would be cloth simulation and clothing clipping. I've yet to see a game that comes even close to doing this realistically. Imagine what happens to your sleeves when you lift your arms above your head for example, or how the plates of a suit of armor naturally slide over each other. In every game I can think of, clothing is rigidly attached to the underlying skeleton and it just stretches/clips as the character moves. I guess fidelity of everything else has gotten much better, because I recently started noticing this and now I find it very distracting in any game that has in-engine cut scenes involving character closeups.
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  Game physics are still absolutely horrible
bobthepanda 6y ago
Part of it is also that modern TVs and monitors are much higher resolution than their predecessors. One interesting point of reference is the initial switch to HD in the 2000s; I remember there was a bit of panic in the beginning because news studios had to adjust studio lighting and makeup; flaws that were not perceptible on a CRT were all of a sudden extremely noticeable blown up on a 48" flatscreen.
- keanebean86 6y ago
  30 Rock did a skit about HD cameras. Close to the end of this clip: https://youtu.be/zoXfQupV5n8 https://youtu.be/zoXfQupV5n8
- Nokinside 6y ago
  Dogs and cats suddenly started to watch TV when refresh rate and resolution increased.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Presumably the TV size increase when we went from CRTs to plasmas and LCD panels around the same time was a big factor.
  - EamonnMR 6y ago
    Is this real? Would make a fascinating study.
    - atom-morgan 6y ago
      Based on anecdotes it seems like it. Older generations always seemed to think pets had no idea what was going on when viewing a TV to the point of ignoring it. I'm assuming their body language suggested so. Nowadays people open up koi pond videos on phones and let their cats play with it. But like you mentioned, it would be interesting to see a study on it.
      - tpmx 6y ago
Narishma 6y ago
Probably because low-resolution graphics look better on CRTs than on flat panels.
- Const-me 6y ago
  This. When people are saying something is photo-realistic, they aren’t comparing to reality, they’re comparing to photos or videos as viewed on the same display. By some metrics, even extremely expensive modern hardware is very far from reality. Pretty much all games show Sun occasionally, to reproduce same luminosity at 1m distance you need kilowatts of light (assuming 180 degree viewing angle; the surface of 1m half sphere is about 2 m^2 and the flux of visible spectrum is about 550w/m^2), these levels are simply unsafe for home use. For example, such display is going to ignite or at least melt a keyboard if it’s too close. Similar for dynamic range. Reality has extreme dynamic ranges, i.e. both very light and very dark areas on the same scene. At least modern hardware generally delivers realistic resolutions, and color accuracy.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    > At least modern hardware generally delivers realistic resolutions, and color accuracy. I don't know, look at some flowers... most screens can't show their colors. Stuff like the intense, super-saturated reds and purples are basically impossible to get right in sRGB, with very obvious artefacts, yet in real life there are no artefacts, there is texture, detail and color, where the picture only has a smear of four different reds. P-3 and Rec.2020 might reduce the issues there, as would 10 bit color.
    - Const-me 6y ago
      > Stuff like the intense, super-saturated reds and purples are basically impossible to get right in sRGB I agree, but professional monitors are close to Adobe RGB, and have been for decades. Adobe RGB is close to DCI-P3, and not much worse than BT.2020. P.S. Doesn’t help with red/purple though, Adobe RGB extends sRGB mostly in green direction.
    - ksec 6y ago
Nokinside 6y ago
I had the same experience with VR. I had opportunity to test Varjo VR-2 Pro ($5,995.00) https://store.varjo.com/varjo-vr-2-pro https://store.varjo.com/varjo-vr-2-pro and now all consumer VR products feel like total crap.
liamcardenas 6y ago
That’s interesting. Even if I look at current state of the art graphics today I don’t think for a second that it’s anything close to indistinguishable from reality (not to say it’s not good or impressive).
- lopmotr 6y ago
  I guess he means how reality looked displayed on the TV screen. I think we did go backwards in that regard, at least for a while because resolution went up in some sudden jumps leaving the level of detail in the scenes lagging behind. But we're almost there now. I recently saw a dashcam video of a racecar on the news and wondered why they were showing a video game. It took ages for me to realize it was actually real but with some HUD overlays.
sillysaurusx 6y ago
It’s even harder to convince other people. Once you realize that we do not understand how to make graphics look real, the pattern appears everywhere. Yet no one will acknowledge it. Graphics — even movie quality graphics — don’t look anything like what a camera produces. The sole exception is when you’re mixing in real video with CG elements. But try to synthesize an entire frame from scratch, then put it next to a video camera’s output, and people can tell the difference. Also, screenshots are misleading. You have to test video, not screencaps. Video is processed differently by the brain. 10 out of 10 times, all the graphics engineers come out of the woodwork going “but actually we do know how! It’s a matter of using so and so calculations and measuring BDRF and” none of those equations work.
- pdelbarba 6y ago
  I think it depends on context. There are a lot of sim games where the environment is very controlled and forums are littered with people who can't tell whether the occasional picture is real or in-game. A forest is hard to render accurately but a plane in flight is pretty trivial
  - i-am-curious 6y ago
    Forests have pretty much been solved. Look at games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, forest looks amazing. The difficulty now is limited to finer details, like hair. Hair is still pretty much unsolved.
    - sillysaurusx 6y ago
      See? It’s almost deterministic. People really can’t accept that we don’t know how to do something. Plop a nature video next to your forest rendering and it’ll become apparent just how unsolved trees are. And everything else, for that matter. The precise claim is this: viewers should be able to identify a rendered video no better than random chance. If you conduct this experiment, you’ll see that real videos from actual video cameras wipe the floor.
      - 6y ago
jonplackett 6y ago
I think it’s something we learn. I remember as a kid my younger sister watching cartoons and realising she couldn’t tell the difference between them and live action. I think as graphics get more complex our ability to distinguish increases. But we’ll probably hit a limit in our ability to keep up sooner or later.
Razengan 6y ago
> I considered certain game elements like fire and water indistinguishable from reality. Now it looks like pixelated garbage and I ask myself how I could have ever thought that. Imagination. Same as the people who grew up with the original Atari and Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64.
agumonkey 6y ago
Something that hasn't changed to me is the mood. RE is still as gloomy and soul grabbing. The value is outside the pixel count.
giarc 6y ago
I remember when I first saw a DVD on a good screen. It was the first Matrix movie in a friends basement. I was so blown away by the quality jump from VHS.
- brokenmachine 6y ago
  I remember that too. Sadly, now when I look at a DVD, it's unbearably blurry. I suppose part of that is that we're now viewing on a much larger/higher resolution screen.
Shivetya 6y ago
I remember the progress from CGA to EGA; there was that odd bridge of Tandy 16 color; and then, boom, VGA, which looked so magical compared to what came before. Even when I did gray scale VGA on my IBM PS/2 50z it all just felt like a big jump had been finally taken. Then down the road came 3dfx with Voodoo and that to me was the next great leap forward. Each iteration has been leading to ray tracing which is the next great leap. Now just for screen tech to become as affordable as the cards that can drive them, the LG OLED we have is stunning but that is "just" 4K. just for fun, the story of 3dfx voodoo https://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/index.html https://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/index.html
- kjs3 6y ago
  Weeeeell...the first 'great leap forward' was the Verite V1000 and vQuake a couple of months before the Voodoo 1. Real 3D looking Quake with good frame rates! A bunch of us jumped on that bandwagon...and prolly shouldn't have. The V1000 was great for vQuake, much less so for anything else. By the next Xmas, we all had Voodoos.
djsumdog 6y ago
The nice thing about 3D graphics is you can play those old PS games on an emulator on a modern machine at a higher resolution. There's a law of diminishing returns of course, and the older textures will look blocky even after being upscaled, but it still looks better than the original hardware. I remember playing Final Fantasy 9 entirely on an emulator and how much better it looked compared to a "Real" PlayStation.

jamroom 6y ago

Oh man - the same here with me - when I first got Morrowind there was an option you could enable in ATI (now AMD) cards at the time that made water look "real". I was able to enable that and was blown away - I was like "well that's it - doesn't get any more real than this". Having loaded Morrowind recently I could not believe had bad it looked lol. Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now?

johnwheeler 6y ago
> "well that's it - doesn't get any more real than this" > Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now? Yes - well said. That's what I was trying to convey in my comment.
- lwansbrough 6y ago
  I think Epic’s UE5 demo is really really close to reality in terms of lighting and geometry. Next 10-20 years will probably see the same technology being brought into larger and larger environments with more moving parts. Then there’s the more obvious stuff that isn’t done well even today: skeletal animation is still lacking and feels unnatural, physics systems are still very approximate and constrained - often times most things are indestructible in games, fluid dynamics are still very slow/limited. Human models still don’t look real though, and the voice acting never quite matches the mouth movement or body language. I do really feel like we’ve crossed the uncanny valley when it comes to natural scenery rendering. But a lot of what makes things feel real are still missing from games.
  - heipei 6y ago
    I agree, it's so close that it's actually being used as an interactive movie background with a big-ass 360-degree screen for dynamic scene and lighting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjb-AqMD-a4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjb-AqMD-a4
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      IMHO it looks fake. The lighting is way off, it quite literally looks like they're standing directly below a big diffuser - which they are. The background looks like a poster with one of these diffraction parallax effects. It's very cool tech. But it doesn't look real.
      - jiggawatts 6y ago
        The camera angles in that demo were off axis. Take a look at The Mandalorian series, almost all of the outdoor scenes were shot using the video wall technology. I've worked in computer graphics and I didn't realise the sets were fake until after I finished the whole series.
      - manigandham 6y ago
        The behind-the-scenes context is making it visible to you, but you've probably already seen films and TV using it without even noticing.
pvg 6y ago
Maybe the water stood out since Morrowind was an ugly game even in its day. All the Elder Scrolls games have a well-earned reputation of looking like they're populated by cardboard mutants. Reminds me a bit of the old Infocom ad: http://www.retroadv.it/images/03082019/Home_Computer_Magazine_Vol4_01_0017.jpg http://www.retroadv.it/images/03082019/Home_Computer_Magazin...
- int_19h 6y ago
  Morrowind was complicated. The characters were ugly, and animations especially horrible. But the landscapes were considered very beautiful by the standards of the day.
noja 6y ago
When you compared it recently did you use the same monitor, cable (analog or digital), and resolution?
int_19h 6y ago
It was one of the first prominent uses of pixel shaders in the game, coinciding with NVidia (not ATI) releasing GeForce models that supported them. It was so noticeable because it was such a huge increase in quality compared to what passed for water in games before - usually some kind of blue-grey translucent texture. For the first time, pixel shaders produced water that was clearly an attempt to imitate water IRL, not the cartoonish representation of it.
Budabellly 6y ago
For me, it's fidelity of human facial animation that has a long way to come. There are teams doing a great job of it [1], but the labor/skill required to bring one high hyperreal facial rig to a game or movie seems insane. I think companies pursuing AR/VR applications will lead here. ML creative tools stand to automate a lot of this imo. [1] random example: https://snapperstech.com/ https://snapperstech.com/
formerly_proven 6y ago
Hm. Many people here share their sentiments of perceiving older games (or current games) as being close to photorealistic. Personally it never felt that way to me. All games have obvious problems where they don't behave/look anywhere close to reality. If you remove the interactive element and only use somewhat massaged screenshots, then, sure certain elements are basically photorealistic and have been for a while. For example, landscapes look pretty darn realistic. Anything alive or even most man-made artefacts, not so much. Apart from graphics most stuff in games is pretty rough. Animations are generally bad and ways before reaching the uncanny valley of "getting close"; they're still in the "abstract representation of concept" detail level. AI is dumb (largely for [perceived] player-acceptance reasons). Sound is generally poor; some games still don't use 3D sound. Physics are "abstract representation" level again, some games still have fly-through walls and vibrating items. etc. etc.
- KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
  Yeah... these comments are kinda weird. Hate to say it but maybe they should go outside more lol, computer graphics always looked pretty bad at me, even the clips in today's nvidia presentation looks really unnatural. That's not to take anything away from the technology and the massive advances it represents, just compared to reality it's still really far from fooling a human brain.
  - wiz21c 6y ago
    interestingly many of us feel that there's a huge gap between the past and now. But how many of us can actually verbalize what will change in the rendering of pictures in, say 3 years. For example, I can clearly see that ray tracing produces better results. But it's a bit harder to tell how better it is, to find the words that describes how better it is. Of course, one can say that, for example, photon tracing is more physically accurate. But still, what words can we use to describe how real (or not real) a still image is ("more realistic" doesn't count :-))
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      Game graphics look sterile, too clean, sharp, plasticky. The real world is messier with less clear separation between objects, things blend together more, subtle shadows, surfaces are less uniform, there is more clutter, dirt, wrinkles, details.
lacker 6y ago
The biggest thing to me is that video games do not have very many independent objects, compared to reality. Go outside and look at the real world and you will see the ground has little pebbles and bits of mud and all this stuff that gets kicked around. No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will. Or for indoor scenes, there is no video game that accurately captures the experience of "picking up a living room with a bunch of toys strewn about".
- makapuf 6y ago
  > No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will. Why not? With procedural generation and LOD rendering it's not impossible. Not that it's easy, but not impossible?
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    Presumably you're not a native English speaker. "will" here does not refer to the future, this is a subtle grammatical thing that I can't explain well, but it refers to presently existing games.
    - cyberlurker 6y ago
      Still, there is no reason I can think of that the game described couldn’t be created right now besides it not being a very fun/Marketable game.
      - bonoboTP 6y ago
        But that's theoretical, the point is more how current games actually look, not what people could make potentially with today's tech. Also, some games are intentionally cartoonish as an artistic choice so photorealism isn't always the goal.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Everything has a cost, either computational or human. We've probably reached the point where human cost exceeds computational cost, which is to say that developing and QA testing such a feature would probably cost more money than it's worth. How many users of software would gain from such minutiae?
Yajirobe 6y ago
> Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now? How about ray tracing?. If we get real-time 60fps+ ray-traced computer graphics in games, that would blow what we have now out of the water
outworlder 6y ago
YES! Morrowind was my 'shader benchmark' for some time.
jakear 6y ago
As someone who is most definitely not a gamer but with coworkers and friends that get big into high cost gaming systems, here’s where I see the biggest deltas between real life and the screen: - Hair. Up until very recently hair was downright awful. Nowadays it’s acceptable-ish, but there’s still lots of room for improvement, in particular in natural motion of long hair. - Water. I spend a big chunk of my time on the water, so I’m probably more attuned to how it moves than most. Games just don’t have it down. In particular, I think a lot could be gained by embracing it’s fractal nature: in my experience, at every human scale (mm to dam and everything in between) very similar wave patterns exist, but games tend to have just a small fixed number of “wave-layers” at various scales stacked together. - Clouds. I can easily spend hours just observing clouds, looking at things like their shape, overall motion, internal motion, composition, edge behaviors, etc, and how they change over time. Game clouds are lacking in all these regards, particularly the time-sensitive nature of a cloud. - Foliage. In games I’ve seen, individual plants/etc. in isolation generally look really quite decent. But the second an physical object interacts with them, they very clearly don’t respond in the right ways. There’s a lot about how branches bend and leaves rustle and more that is lost. Additionally, in groups of plants it’s often clear that some small number of models are being reused, possibly with some generated randomness added. But the variety doesn’t come close to matching what one would really see. - Human faces and expressions. These are generally really bad, especially in normal gameplay (cut-scenes are sometimes better) Again, this is probably all just really weird stuff I notice because I spend the vast majority of my time outdoors and only see “HiFi” games being played very infrequently. I don’t think games are worse for not implementing these, but I am very interested in what they’ll look like 10-20 years down the road.
- vimy 6y ago
  Regarding clouds, have you seen videos of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020?
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  I think these days it mostly comes down to human effort in development and not hardware limitations. You could spend hundreds of hours modelling faces or putting accurate physics on a fern but it doesn't add too much to the game and costs too much to develop. What I think will be a huge boost is proper raytracing. You can see animated movies and blender renders look stunning but they take minutes per frame.
0xffff2 6y ago
>Makes me wonder - what are we "not" seeing right now that will make us think this way 10-20 years from now? My vote would be cloth simulation and clothing clipping. I've yet to see a game that comes even close to doing this realistically. Imagine what happens to your sleeves when you lift your arms above your head for example, or how the plates of a suit of armor naturally slide over each other. In every game I can think of, clothing is rigidly attached to the underlying skeleton and it just stretches/clips as the character moves. I guess fidelity of everything else has gotten much better, because I recently started noticing this and now I find it very distracting in any game that has in-engine cut scenes involving character closeups.
0-_-0 6y ago
Game physics are still absolutely horrible

bobthepanda 6y ago

Part of it is also that modern TVs and monitors are much higher resolution than their predecessors. One interesting point of reference is the initial switch to HD in the 2000s; I remember there was a bit of panic in the beginning because news studios had to adjust studio lighting and makeup; flaws that were not perceptible on a CRT were all of a sudden extremely noticeable blown up on a 48" flatscreen.

keanebean86 6y ago
30 Rock did a skit about HD cameras. Close to the end of this clip: https://youtu.be/zoXfQupV5n8 https://youtu.be/zoXfQupV5n8
Nokinside 6y ago
Dogs and cats suddenly started to watch TV when refresh rate and resolution increased.
- tpmx 6y ago
  Presumably the TV size increase when we went from CRTs to plasmas and LCD panels around the same time was a big factor.
- EamonnMR 6y ago
  Is this real? Would make a fascinating study.
  - atom-morgan 6y ago
    Based on anecdotes it seems like it. Older generations always seemed to think pets had no idea what was going on when viewing a TV to the point of ignoring it. I'm assuming their body language suggested so. Nowadays people open up koi pond videos on phones and let their cats play with it. But like you mentioned, it would be interesting to see a study on it.
    - tpmx 6y ago

Narishma 6y ago

Probably because low-resolution graphics look better on CRTs than on flat panels.

Const-me 6y ago
This. When people are saying something is photo-realistic, they aren’t comparing to reality, they’re comparing to photos or videos as viewed on the same display. By some metrics, even extremely expensive modern hardware is very far from reality. Pretty much all games show Sun occasionally, to reproduce same luminosity at 1m distance you need kilowatts of light (assuming 180 degree viewing angle; the surface of 1m half sphere is about 2 m^2 and the flux of visible spectrum is about 550w/m^2), these levels are simply unsafe for home use. For example, such display is going to ignite or at least melt a keyboard if it’s too close. Similar for dynamic range. Reality has extreme dynamic ranges, i.e. both very light and very dark areas on the same scene. At least modern hardware generally delivers realistic resolutions, and color accuracy.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  > At least modern hardware generally delivers realistic resolutions, and color accuracy. I don't know, look at some flowers... most screens can't show their colors. Stuff like the intense, super-saturated reds and purples are basically impossible to get right in sRGB, with very obvious artefacts, yet in real life there are no artefacts, there is texture, detail and color, where the picture only has a smear of four different reds. P-3 and Rec.2020 might reduce the issues there, as would 10 bit color.
  - Const-me 6y ago
    > Stuff like the intense, super-saturated reds and purples are basically impossible to get right in sRGB I agree, but professional monitors are close to Adobe RGB, and have been for decades. Adobe RGB is close to DCI-P3, and not much worse than BT.2020. P.S. Doesn’t help with red/purple though, Adobe RGB extends sRGB mostly in green direction.
  - ksec 6y ago

Nokinside 6y ago

I had the same experience with VR. I had opportunity to test Varjo VR-2 Pro ($5,995.00) https://store.varjo.com/varjo-vr-2-pro https://store.varjo.com/varjo-vr-2-pro and now all consumer VR products feel like total crap.

liamcardenas 6y ago

That’s interesting. Even if I look at current state of the art graphics today I don’t think for a second that it’s anything close to indistinguishable from reality (not to say it’s not good or impressive).

lopmotr 6y ago
I guess he means how reality looked displayed on the TV screen. I think we did go backwards in that regard, at least for a while because resolution went up in some sudden jumps leaving the level of detail in the scenes lagging behind. But we're almost there now. I recently saw a dashcam video of a racecar on the news and wondered why they were showing a video game. It took ages for me to realize it was actually real but with some HUD overlays.

sillysaurusx 6y ago

It’s even harder to convince other people. Once you realize that we do not understand how to make graphics look real, the pattern appears everywhere. Yet no one will acknowledge it. Graphics — even movie quality graphics — don’t look anything like what a camera produces. The sole exception is when you’re mixing in real video with CG elements. But try to synthesize an entire frame from scratch, then put it next to a video camera’s output, and people can tell the difference. Also, screenshots are misleading. You have to test video, not screencaps. Video is processed differently by the brain. 10 out of 10 times, all the graphics engineers come out of the woodwork going “but actually we do know how! It’s a matter of using so and so calculations and measuring BDRF and” none of those equations work.

pdelbarba 6y ago
I think it depends on context. There are a lot of sim games where the environment is very controlled and forums are littered with people who can't tell whether the occasional picture is real or in-game. A forest is hard to render accurately but a plane in flight is pretty trivial
- i-am-curious 6y ago
  Forests have pretty much been solved. Look at games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, forest looks amazing. The difficulty now is limited to finer details, like hair. Hair is still pretty much unsolved.
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    See? It’s almost deterministic. People really can’t accept that we don’t know how to do something. Plop a nature video next to your forest rendering and it’ll become apparent just how unsolved trees are. And everything else, for that matter. The precise claim is this: viewers should be able to identify a rendered video no better than random chance. If you conduct this experiment, you’ll see that real videos from actual video cameras wipe the floor.
    - 6y ago

jonplackett 6y ago

I think it’s something we learn. I remember as a kid my younger sister watching cartoons and realising she couldn’t tell the difference between them and live action. I think as graphics get more complex our ability to distinguish increases. But we’ll probably hit a limit in our ability to keep up sooner or later.

Razengan 6y ago

> I considered certain game elements like fire and water indistinguishable from reality. Now it looks like pixelated garbage and I ask myself how I could have ever thought that. Imagination. Same as the people who grew up with the original Atari and Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64.

agumonkey 6y ago

Something that hasn't changed to me is the mood. RE is still as gloomy and soul grabbing. The value is outside the pixel count.

giarc 6y ago

I remember when I first saw a DVD on a good screen. It was the first Matrix movie in a friends basement. I was so blown away by the quality jump from VHS.

brokenmachine 6y ago
I remember that too. Sadly, now when I look at a DVD, it's unbearably blurry. I suppose part of that is that we're now viewing on a much larger/higher resolution screen.

Shivetya 6y ago

I remember the progress from CGA to EGA; there was that odd bridge of Tandy 16 color; and then, boom, VGA, which looked so magical compared to what came before. Even when I did gray scale VGA on my IBM PS/2 50z it all just felt like a big jump had been finally taken. Then down the road came 3dfx with Voodoo and that to me was the next great leap forward. Each iteration has been leading to ray tracing which is the next great leap. Now just for screen tech to become as affordable as the cards that can drive them, the LG OLED we have is stunning but that is "just" 4K. just for fun, the story of 3dfx voodoo https://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/index.html https://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/index.html

kjs3 6y ago
Weeeeell...the first 'great leap forward' was the Verite V1000 and vQuake a couple of months before the Voodoo 1. Real 3D looking Quake with good frame rates! A bunch of us jumped on that bandwagon...and prolly shouldn't have. The V1000 was great for vQuake, much less so for anything else. By the next Xmas, we all had Voodoos.

djsumdog 6y ago

The nice thing about 3D graphics is you can play those old PS games on an emulator on a modern machine at a higher resolution. There's a law of diminishing returns of course, and the older textures will look blocky even after being upscaled, but it still looks better than the original hardware. I remember playing Final Fantasy 9 entirely on an emulator and how much better it looked compared to a "Real" PlayStation.