No More Graphic Improvements for Games?

It seems that videogame graphics has currently hit a ‘tipping point’, so to speak. Since the first computer game created, up to the ancient 16-bit games and finally to today’s Crysis, games have evolved most prominently in the aspect of graphics. As gamers, we appreciate it. The advancements in graphics (and also physics simulation) paved the way for more intriguing games.

But all that beauty in the graphics costs a lot to game developers. Even with today’s technology, it still requires a human being’s hard work to model those realistic characters and landscapes in a game. Before, you just colour up some pixels and call it a day. Now, they have to deal with how each surface would reflect light, draw even the smallest details most gamers won’t even notice, and even develop a secure, yet engaging online environment for a single game.

Not more that 10 pixels for a mustache in 1990

It all costs money. A lot of money, that some of our current generation games today costs as much as a Hollywood movie. That, in turn, translates to more expensive games for us. Another issue is that when we plunk down our cash for the latest game, there’s only so much of us who truly enjoy the full value of that game. By paying up for the game, we also paid for the extra features of the game, like 3D sound positioning and also the aforementioned highly detailed graphics. But most of us will end up playing the game with normal speakers/headphones that doesn’t support those fancy audio tech, and tune down the graphics settings for a decent framerate, thereby not witnessing the full glory of the game. This goes for consoles as well. You’re paying a group of people to develop a game that would look good in Full HD and surround sound, but do you have the gear for all that?

She does.

I’d say for the next few years there won’t be much of an advancement on videogame graphics, compared with what we had like 5 years ago. When Doom 3 launched it was THE game to beat (graphically) and it was beaten indeed by Quake 4. Crysis has been today’s game to beat but it has been ages now and no games are coming in close. Not even the hardware could catch up. But think about it, Crysis itself is indeed a very beautiful game. Another step above that might already be Pixar-quality. Imagine how many millions was invested to produce a Pixar movie, and how many more will you need to make it an interactive game.

Render THIS.

If you didn’t know, we also already have stereoscopic 3D vision for games now. You need a special monitor and a special IMAX-like glasses for that, but then developing 3D games would be much more expensive.

And you’ll look retarded

Now consider the engines. There was a significant graphical improvement between Half Life 2 and Lost Coast (after around 1 year, when High Dynamic Range made its debut) but after that, nothing much up to today’s Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead. The Unreal Engine 3 looks the same up until Gears of War 2. The graphical improvement of certain games like the Need for Speed series were possible due to more powerful graphics processing, but no new technology was introduced. And finally, DirectX 10 was a very small improvement over DirectX 9.0c (9.0c was much better than 9.0a) and the same was suspected for the upcoming DirectX 11.

Half Life 2: Lost Coast

Left 4 Dead

Let’s jump to the hardware side. The PlayStation 3 was touted as being a “10-year console” and today it finally made sense. It does pack serious processing power but the future doesn’t need more. Remember, it’s GPU is based on 2006’s GeForce 7800GTX! Even the new PSP Go! doesn’t have any graphical improvement over the PSP. Same goes to the DSi over the DS. Before, for graphics processors, the big step was when the two shaders was combined into today’s unified shader, but that’s it. Today we have more stream procs (shaders), higher ROPS, more VRAM, higher clocks, but in the end even the Radeon HD 4000 series is basically a faster HD 2000, the same goes for Nvidia as well. Moreover, CrossFireX and SLI still don’t do justice for its price. The only big step was the introduction of CUDA for the Nvidia chips, but that doesn’t affect gaming capabilities.

Sales of Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360

And suddenly it wasn’t all about graphics anymore. The Nintendo Wii beating both Xbox 360 and the PS3 sales was a huge surprise. It did that with an innovative motion-control scheme and games that are more fun to play, even if they are graphically inferior. That was THE change in the gaming industry. Nintendo had shown that motion-control was key, and that’s why in 2009 we only witness new motion-control schemes for both the Xbox 360 (Project Natal) and PS3, rather than any processing power upgrades.

And again, you’ll look retarded.

So it’s clear in 2009 that the future of our games will be more focused on how do we control our games, instead of how to make it look prettier. Sure there are much room for graphical improvements for handheld devices like the PSP, DSi and even mobile phones (which we hopefully will get to see improvements from the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 and Nvidia Tegra), but for the high-end hardware (PS3, Xbox 360, and high-end PCs) there won’t be much new stuff to talk about.

Just my 2 cents