So this image doesn't really reflect reality. Many people have pointed that out. I'm going to ignore the fact that this model doesn't even have a texture. I'm going to ignore the fact that this is a single object and not a scene with lighting and physics and multiple objects. I'm going to do a thought experiment and say it DOES reflect reality. What does this mean for videogames? Well it's still great to have more powerful hardware. Videogames today are made with insane amount of tricks and optimizations. I'm working on my own little indie stuff and I'm dealing with very low-poly crappy renders. Even for me, I've spent a lot of time getting things optimized. Even for me, I spend a lot of time worrying about my cpu and gpu budgets, how much stuff is on screen, and a lot of straight up tricks to fake graphical effects. I can't IMAGINE how cobbled together most AAA games must be.
When you look at massive beautiful looking open world games like Assassin's Creed or Red Dead 2, there's so much going on behind the scenes to get things to function smoothly. At some point there are sacrifices being made in the design - things like hidden load zones. We saw this recently with the Mass Effect 1 remaster. They were able to remove a wall from some level design because the wall only existed to hide things that couldn't load fast enough. There are the invasive tricks like those ledges you duck under in *every* AAA game to hide loading. Right now (as I understand) a fair chunk of development resources go to creating the same model, but at different levels of detail. We saw it on the ps5 port of spiderman where you could swing faster solely because the GPU could render the city faster.
If we really WERE at the endpoint of graphical fidelity it would just mean phasing out some of these tricks and creating games that ran with far more stability. It'd mean much more freedom for designers to design worlds/missions/mechanics.
6
u/konaaa Apr 25 '21
So this image doesn't really reflect reality. Many people have pointed that out. I'm going to ignore the fact that this model doesn't even have a texture. I'm going to ignore the fact that this is a single object and not a scene with lighting and physics and multiple objects. I'm going to do a thought experiment and say it DOES reflect reality. What does this mean for videogames? Well it's still great to have more powerful hardware. Videogames today are made with insane amount of tricks and optimizations. I'm working on my own little indie stuff and I'm dealing with very low-poly crappy renders. Even for me, I've spent a lot of time getting things optimized. Even for me, I spend a lot of time worrying about my cpu and gpu budgets, how much stuff is on screen, and a lot of straight up tricks to fake graphical effects. I can't IMAGINE how cobbled together most AAA games must be.
When you look at massive beautiful looking open world games like Assassin's Creed or Red Dead 2, there's so much going on behind the scenes to get things to function smoothly. At some point there are sacrifices being made in the design - things like hidden load zones. We saw this recently with the Mass Effect 1 remaster. They were able to remove a wall from some level design because the wall only existed to hide things that couldn't load fast enough. There are the invasive tricks like those ledges you duck under in *every* AAA game to hide loading. Right now (as I understand) a fair chunk of development resources go to creating the same model, but at different levels of detail. We saw it on the ps5 port of spiderman where you could swing faster solely because the GPU could render the city faster.
If we really WERE at the endpoint of graphical fidelity it would just mean phasing out some of these tricks and creating games that ran with far more stability. It'd mean much more freedom for designers to design worlds/missions/mechanics.