The answer is yes. But not me personally of course, I’m a “consumer” like you in this regard.
I’ll re-spin this to computer graphics in general though. Technology will always progress forward and so there will always be something better in the future than what we have now. Eventually we’ll have life like graphics were you will not be able to tell the difference between real and computer generated. You can already see that in movies like Avatar. In those cases many many many computers are used to calculate the light and colors needed to display computer generated objects a picture at a time. In the future we’ll be able to do this in real time rather than having to stitch the pictures together later into a movie. When will this happen? Hard to say since technology can leap forward quickly or just sit there for a number of years.
Personally I use “games” graphics to display and interact with large ocean and climate datasets in 3D to better understand them. Things like GoogleEarth make that happen. Without today’s graphics cards we could not do this easily.
I don’t know a lot about computers but I imagine making graphics better would be closely related to the speed of the computer. If this is true then we might see a big leap forward in graphics once quantum computers become more usable. Quantum computers will be able to perform much faster than the silicon computers we have today, and be able to do many calculations simultaneously.
I’m not a computer scientist, but judging by how far computer graphics have come in my short lifetime of playing games my answer would be yes! Even when I look at games released just three or four years ago and I compare them to new release games the improvement in graphics is astounding. From what I understand, much of it has to do with how well graphics and games designers can render, that is, code for features such as colour, light and texture. However the more realistic the graphic, the more code it needs and in turn, the more computer power is needed to make the code run smoothly. That being said games being released on platforms that have been around a few years (eg. Playstation 3) are still showing improvement in graphics so it may be the case that the programmers are only just reaching the potential of the current hardware. But it can be pretty much predicted that games are going to get even more realistic, as hardware will become even more powerful (especially with things like quantum computing, like Renee mentioned)
In fact, graphics is a solved problem. We know how to do it. We keep throwing more CPUs and GPUs at it to make the graphics better and better. Did you see the movie Shrek? It came out in 2001 and it was the best graphics available at the time. It took render farms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_farm) months of rendering to make the pictures come out looking so realistic. The hair of the donkey, Fiona’s hair and the blades of grass were especially hard to model and render.
Now, we can almost render Shrek(2001) quality pictures on our computer in real time. We can have a game that is as realistic looking as the best movie graphics of 2001. In 10 years time, say 2020, we will have even better graphics available on our computers. The current research problem for computer games is not graphics, but making the NPCs (non-playing characters) intelligent in the way they talk, act, look and react.
Have you heard of the Uncanny Valley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley It is an interesting phenomenon. Everybody loves cute, stuffed toys. They don’t look like people, but they are cute. You make toys or robots be a more and more human like, they are still likeable and cure until you hit the uncanny valley when they look too much like humans, but not enough for us to think they are real and they become freaky and repulsive. It is a puzzling problem. One theory is that they are creepy because they look like humans, but they do not act like humans. Their eyes are unfocused. Their facial expression stuck. They are a bit like zombies with less blood, so people really dislike them.
The answer is yes. But not me personally of course, I’m a “consumer” like you in this regard.
I’ll re-spin this to computer graphics in general though. Technology will always progress forward and so there will always be something better in the future than what we have now. Eventually we’ll have life like graphics were you will not be able to tell the difference between real and computer generated. You can already see that in movies like Avatar. In those cases many many many computers are used to calculate the light and colors needed to display computer generated objects a picture at a time. In the future we’ll be able to do this in real time rather than having to stitch the pictures together later into a movie. When will this happen? Hard to say since technology can leap forward quickly or just sit there for a number of years.
Personally I use “games” graphics to display and interact with large ocean and climate datasets in 3D to better understand them. Things like GoogleEarth make that happen. Without today’s graphics cards we could not do this easily.
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I don’t know a lot about computers but I imagine making graphics better would be closely related to the speed of the computer. If this is true then we might see a big leap forward in graphics once quantum computers become more usable. Quantum computers will be able to perform much faster than the silicon computers we have today, and be able to do many calculations simultaneously.
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I’m not a computer scientist, but judging by how far computer graphics have come in my short lifetime of playing games my answer would be yes! Even when I look at games released just three or four years ago and I compare them to new release games the improvement in graphics is astounding. From what I understand, much of it has to do with how well graphics and games designers can render, that is, code for features such as colour, light and texture. However the more realistic the graphic, the more code it needs and in turn, the more computer power is needed to make the code run smoothly. That being said games being released on platforms that have been around a few years (eg. Playstation 3) are still showing improvement in graphics so it may be the case that the programmers are only just reaching the potential of the current hardware. But it can be pretty much predicted that games are going to get even more realistic, as hardware will become even more powerful (especially with things like quantum computing, like Renee mentioned)
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Yes.
In fact, graphics is a solved problem. We know how to do it. We keep throwing more CPUs and GPUs at it to make the graphics better and better. Did you see the movie Shrek? It came out in 2001 and it was the best graphics available at the time. It took render farms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_farm) months of rendering to make the pictures come out looking so realistic. The hair of the donkey, Fiona’s hair and the blades of grass were especially hard to model and render.
Now, we can almost render Shrek(2001) quality pictures on our computer in real time. We can have a game that is as realistic looking as the best movie graphics of 2001. In 10 years time, say 2020, we will have even better graphics available on our computers. The current research problem for computer games is not graphics, but making the NPCs (non-playing characters) intelligent in the way they talk, act, look and react.
Have you heard of the Uncanny Valley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley It is an interesting phenomenon. Everybody loves cute, stuffed toys. They don’t look like people, but they are cute. You make toys or robots be a more and more human like, they are still likeable and cure until you hit the uncanny valley when they look too much like humans, but not enough for us to think they are real and they become freaky and repulsive. It is a puzzling problem. One theory is that they are creepy because they look like humans, but they do not act like humans. Their eyes are unfocused. Their facial expression stuck. They are a bit like zombies with less blood, so people really dislike them.
Here are the top 5 robots from the Consumer Electronic Show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVLIx07KVHI Do you think they look like real people?
🙂
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Not my field either, but technology never goes backwards so I would agree with everyone else, graphics will only get better over time.
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