After 2007,there have been incredible progress in game animation and grafics.animation-i know something about todays techniques.but grafics i am just amazed.i want to know which one is the main reason for this super first progress of game grafics.hardware or new rendering algorithm or something else.i need it for my inspiration.i already have questioned in several forum.no exact answer.give me answer or any link.please.

[Edited by - Jahid57 on July 7, 2010 12:32:07 AM]

There is no single answer. A lot of the techniques were discovered pre-2007. They have just become more feasible in a real-time environment due to better graphics cards. Another would be the amount of man power dedicated to graphics now, since modern videocards can do some amazing things, gamers expect those amazing graphics in their AAA games.

It becomes a mixture of what can you do and how can it be done with the tools provided. There is an article here on gdnet that does water as a post processing effect, how many people would think to take what would typically be rendered completely with a mesh and some pixel shaders, and move it to a post processing shader that doesn't need to do thousands of vertex calculations. It is all about figuring out an approach to a problem that has been solved before, but it must be approached in a different manner.

A combination of several factors i think, the Internet is accelerating basic research in all fields, game hardware powerful enough to utilize same technology from movies directly (ie Natural Motion, normal mapping, etc..), better use of parallelism, the game industry has grown to the extent that dedicated trade schools are graduating competent developers, leapfrogging the learning curve or early generation of developers, I'm sure there are others factors too.

-ddn

but there can be one main reason.grafics quality difference in 2006 and in 2007 is huge.difference?why?
Hardware used in 2007 started to sold in 2005.i mean dual core processor,pci gpu etc.than hardware is not the answer.than techniques?which technique that can be,that make enable those new developers to make better grafics than ea games,rockstar done in 2006.
Look at the grafics difference:
cod3 vs cod4
farcry vs farcry 2
gta vice city vs just cause
thanks,a lot for all those answer

JonConley touched on this a little bit but...

Over the past handful of decades, people have been doing a lot of research for graphics techniques that were NO WAY possible in real time (at the time they were thinking them through).

Lots of the original articles on lighting and such are from like the 1970's for instance :P

As computers have gotten faster, more things from the past have been become more possible and people have been able to implement these older ideas in real time graphics.

It could be that we've just kinda hit a hump where lots of things have become possible due to hardware getting above a certain line that we've been waiting for for a while (ie it had to happen sometime, and now is that time).

Something else is that in the past couple years, the money to be made from video games has SKY ROCKETED into a major money maker (like movies can be).

Because of this, companies spend more money on games, hiring more people and smarter people, and as a result more impressive things are being done.

About 10-15 years ago, a PC game could be made by a couple guys working together in their basement for 6 months.

Now days, that is wayyy more rare and the average cutting edge game has like 100 people working on it, all makin somewhere between 50-100k a year and projects last for more like 2-3 years, or even up to 5.

much more is possible with that kind of a team compared to 2 guys working in a basement :P

Thats my take on it anyhow