Tim Sweeney Believes We Are 10-15 Years Away From Movie Like Graphics and Why He is Wrong
The biggest dream us gamers share, is one day playing a video game that features photo-realistic graphics. Since the dawn of the industry, gamers have guessed when we would see such a feat, and now one of the smartest guys in the business spoke about when he thinks we’ll actually experience it.
Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney, who is the mastermind behind the Unreal Engine, believes we are only about “10-15 years” away from visuals that will resemble real-life. He talked about his theory with gamasutra:
“We’re only about a factor of a thousand off from achieving all that in real-time without sacrifices. So we’ll certainly see that happen in our lifetimes; it’s just a result of Moore’s Law. Probably 10-15 years for that stuff, which isn’t far at all. Which is scary — we’ll be able to saturate our visual systems with realistic graphics at that point.”
However, before you start to celebrate and countdown the days when video games will start to look and act like real world, Sweeney believes A.I. is far off from achieving human like thoughts and actions.
“But there’s another problem in graphics that’s not as easily solvable. It’s anything that requires simulating human intelligence or behavior: animation, character movement, interaction with characters, and conversations with characters. They’re really cheesy in games now.”
While agree with him on the human behavior part , I don’t think video games are only 10-15 years away from photo-realism visuals. Obviously, the gap is starting to shrink a little between generations of systems.
Take the Xbox 360 for example, When it was first shown off to the public in 2005, many people were disappointed. While the graphics were certainly better than its original counterpart, the difference at the time was not astronomical.
When people first played the Dreamcast or PS2, jaws dropped — there was a huge distinction between those systems and the PSX and N64. There was even a greater difference in quality when the N64 came out, and people compared it to Nintendo’s previous system, the SNES.
What I’m getting at, is the technology gap between the successors of each system is diminishing. So in 2020, we could be theoretically be 2 full generations of systems ahead of where we are today. I believe the graphics we will be looking at the time, will be something similar to the films Monsters Inc or maybe even Finding Nemo, which would be awesome in my book. However, I just don’t believe it will resemble Wall*E, which even right now, doesn’t look photo-realistic.
So in the end, when Madden 2020 is released, I don’t think it’ll look like a real live NFL game. But it certainly won’t look bad either.
May 26th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
The graphical changes of games through the time is impressive, if you look at Mario Bros and Mario galaxy and doom and doom 3 you realize how good the graphics are now, games like the latest CODs or even Crysis or Far cry 2 look quite realistic. You only notice how far from photorealism we are is when they lunch a new imporved game or console.