Graphics in todays games is poor in terms of realism. Content is simply made of polygonal silhouettes - no modeling of anything internal, maybe in top of the li

Graphics in todays games is poor in terms of realism. Content is simply made of polygonal silhouettes - no modeling of anything internal, maybe in top of the line there is some hackish muscle/bone animation system and artist tweaked special case shaders to account for subsurface scattering in skin but nothing generic. In order to get realistic content we are going to have to switch to procedural modeling, there's no way to generate that much information manually with the pedestrian tools we have. As for rendering, there is no global illumination other than crappy techniques like precomputed light-maps or ambient occlusion, maybe one bounce image space (IDK if this has been used in a game). Even the materials use simplistic BRDFs. There is a lot of room for improvements and a wide gap to close between realistic and current generation. But in 20 years there's no doubt that it will be done.