Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney believes that photorealistic game graphics isn't just feasible, it is inevitable.
"We're only about a factor of a thousand off from achieving all that in real-time without sacrifices," he said. "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."
Moore's Law states that the number of transistors that can be put on a single transistor chip doubles roughly every 2 years. This can be translated to doubling the computational power every 2 years.
Sweeney explained that graphical realism is a function of "completely realistic lighting with real-time radiosity, perfectly anti-aliased graphics, and movie-quality static scenes and motion". All these challenges, he added, are merely a matter of brute force computing power, but the larger challenge - realistic human intelligence and behavior - is much farther off.
"A state-of-the-art game like the latest Half-Life expansion from Valve, Gears of War, or Bungie's stuff is extraordinarily unrealistic compared to a human actor in a human movie, just because of the really fine nuances of human behavior," said Sweeney.
"We simulate character facial animation using tens of bones and facial controls, but in the body, you have thousands. It turns out we've evolved to recognise those things with extraordinary detail, so we're far short of being able to simulate that."
