Silly question about graphics

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10 comments, last by JoeJ 6 years, 10 months ago

Hi,

I will ask a silly question about graphics in games, but please don't laugh :D. If our pc's / laptops can support the realistic graphics from movies, how people are not able to make the graphics in games like in movies ? :D

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When you watch a movie on your PC, you're watching something very different from watching live in-engine gameplay. In movies, all those graphics are pre-rendered. All the computation that goes into generating a final frame of a movie can be done offline, on very powerful computers, and take a significant amount of time.

All the computation that goes into generating the final frame of a video game has to be done live, on commodity hardware, in less than 1/60 of a second.

Thank you for your answer. :)

When you watch a movie on your PC, you're watching something very different from watching live in-engine gameplay. In movies, all those graphics are pre-rendered. All the computation that goes into generating a final frame of a movie can be done offline, on very powerful computers, and take a significant amount of time.
All the computation that goes into generating the final frame of a video game has to be done live, on commodity hardware, in less than 1/60 of a second.


A secondary reason why games cannot look as good as movies is that some experts will look at every scene and decide if the footage is good enough. If it's not, some tweaks will have to be done (to the animation, or the camera, or the materials, or the lighting, or...). This is iterated until the results look good enough and match the intent of the director.
To expand on that a little, a movie only has to look good from one angle (or maybe a small number of camera angles in a complex shot).

A game has to look good from any angle that the player might pick. Since this is impossible to predict ahead of time, it is correspondingly impossible to make a single frame of a game look as consistently good as a single frame of a movie.

Wielder of the Sacred Wands
[Work - ArenaNet] [Epoch Language] [Scribblings]

it is not a silly question btw.

You might want to look up the terms:

Realtime graphics

and

Offline rendering

edit - or realtime rendering

-potential energy is easily made kinetic-

Thank you everybody for your replies. :P

And why do people want to make a game 100% similar to the real life?) So it will be uninteresting to play)

This is actually a very understandable question. People replied in different angles on the topic and I also want to elaborate.

I would love to see movie quality graphics in a game, especially with a VR set. It would be very interesting.

With todays technology, movie studios use "farms" to render those scenes. With "farms", I mean lots of high quality computers connected to each other and share th computational load. Even with this kind of hardware, rendering a Pixar movie may take up to months if I am not mistaken.

But gaming industry has some tricks and can achieve similar results with a lower computation capacity. So actually I am waiting to see exceptionally realistic games very soon.

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