Right now, and apart from IQ and render budget, how big is the gap between high-end videogames and state of the art CGI?

[Max|Payne]

I don't know what is the most technically detailed videogame character right now but how does it compare to, say Endgame Thanos or Blade Runner 2049 Rachael in terms of geometrical and material complexity?

Like the title says, I'm not comparing AA or render budget because, fuck me, that's never getting close in the foreseeable future, but really most everything else that will only get better as gaming hardware improves.

 

[Sailent]

For me, realism is more about light and shadows, not polycount and materials (these help as well). And we are "getting there" with the new RTX technology. I'd say we are 10 or so years away from "CGI" games.

 

[Max|Payne]

For me, realism is more about light and shadows, not polycount and materials (these help as well). And we are "getting there" with the new RTX technology. I'd say we are 10 or so years away from "CGI" games.

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Shit yeah, I kind of forgot about Ray Tracing, haha. That stuff is gonna be amazing as it matures further and becomes standard.

 

[Crossing Eden]

We're still not even remotely close outside of real time tech demos.

 

[baggage]

Lots of films have more complex simulations going on than is feasible to compute in real-time. Disney made a video 3 years back on it.

 

[Kenzodielocke]

Yeah we are far off still. Looo at TLK. It's simple though, rendering frames takes way more time for CG media.

 

[Murfield]

I thought it had less to do with budget and more to do with the GPU power needed, as CGI is not rendered in real time.

i.e. instead of rendering at 30FPS you render at 0.01FPS.

 

[Max|Payne]

I thought it had less to do with budget and more to do with the GPU power needed, as CGI is not rendered in real time.

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Yeah, what I meant is that CGI doesn't really have to worry about how long a single frame takes to render while in turn that is a constant struggle for game developers as they have to keep render times as low as possible.

 

[spam musubi]

I'm not sure what you mean by "apart from render budget" here. Render budget is the main reason why something rendered in real time doesn't look as good as baked CGI. If you remove that factor games can look as good as anything.

 

[Deleted member 41520]

For me, realism is more about light and shadows, not polycount and materials (these help as well). And we are "getting there" with the new RTX technology. I'd say we are 10 or so years away from "CGI" games.

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I think 10 years is pretty realistic

 

[jett]

Very fucking large.

 

[HStallion]

Pft movies don't even run at 30 fps.

 

[Exit Music]

That's kind of like asking, other than horsepower and aerodynamics, how much faster is a super car than a regular car?

 

[Gestault]

It's immense, unless you haven't really been engaging with much modern cg. There's some degree of diminishing returns that gives a surface-level similarity, but as excellent and consistent as real-time graphics can look, it's barely in the same ballpark. Ever more so when animation is taken into account.

 

[Max|Payne]

Ok, returning to my initial question, just how much more detailed is Thanos in Endgame compared to, say, Kratos in the new God of War? Gimme numbers on those polycounts and material resolutions.

 

[Deleted member 8752]

CGI is a moving target that will always improve and be better than the latest gaming graphics.

But real time video game graphics are already better than some early CG like Reboot and Toy Story 1.

 

[Evolution of Metal]

You should watch some UE4 vis demos to see where the cutting edge in terms of real-time graphics is. While it is possibel that someone is further in one aspect or another, the overall movie sequence from the troll should be the most advanced in the overall quality/features.

“Troll’ from Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films | GDC 2019 | Unreal Engine

During the “State of Unreal” GDC opening session, Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films revealed "Troll," a real-time technology demonstration using Unreal En...

www.youtube.com

The average movie rig is still way more complex than the game model. Muscle and fat systems which drive something like Pacific Rim monsters, hair for Planet of the Apes, facial animations of Disney character - way beyond games: both because of processing power and because nobody can afford it. You will see those monsters for minutes on-screen, and there will be a team of people working on a single character for a year.

It is not just processing power, the cost of building VFX is in manpower/runtime. Even if you had the infinite processing power machine for gaming, the game still needs at least 10x the runtime looking good with every angle without any manual post-effects or compositing.

 

[Exit Music]

Ok, returning to my initial question, just how much more detailed is Thanos in Endgame compared to, say, Kratos in the new God of War? Gimme numbers on those polycounts and material resolutions.

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A lot. If a high quality game character model is 100,000 polygons give or take, a ten year old cgi movie had a character with 13,000,000.

https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/the-making-of-transformers-2-618865/2

 

[Deleted member 40102]

CGI ? I would assume after next gen so 2027 or 2028 around that time.

 

[Max|Payne]

CGI is a moving target that will always improve and be better than the latest gaming graphics.

But real time video game graphics are already better than some early CG like Reboot and Toy Story 1.

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In most respects, yes. Overall polycounts and AA is still a huge gap, even with those early CGI movies.

The thing about modern videogames is that they're really really good at giving the impression that they're doing more than they're actually doing.

 

[brokenswiftie]

Animations are also pretty far down from CGI movies in games
Basically, everything is better in movies geometry, textures, GI, AA, animation and more
A single complex frame of Monsters University can take like 29 hours of CPU time to render, games have to render at least 30 of them in a second

 

[Deleted member 18161]

I'm not sure what you mean by "apart from render budget" here. Render budget is the main reason why something rendered in real time doesn't look as good as baked CGI. If you remove that factor games can look as good as anything.

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Lol yeah that confused me too.

On point I would say it depends who you ask. People that are interested in the technical side of games / CGI there's still a long way to go but if you show certain games to Joe or Jane Walmart they will say games look largely the same as CGI.

 

[Michaelandavinci]

Ok, returning to my initial question, just how much more detailed is Thanos in Endgame compared to, say, Kratos in the new God of War? Gimme numbers on those polycounts and material resolutions.

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Kratos in the new God Of War actually looks better than Endgame's Thanos and this is more to do with art styles than horsepower and the fact that SSM are crazily talented bunch; just a notch below Naughty Dog when it comes to technical efficiency though.

 

[DavidDesu]

I think 10 years is pretty realistic

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I feel this too. Look at something like Detroit or TLOU2 when it comes to characters. Still artificial looking but getting there. Imagine the huge leap that's coming with next gen consoles and I see something like Detroit made for next gen will have truly indistinguishable moments from time to time, if animation and everything else is at a top level. The generation after that (10 years).. yeah I can see it possible to be playing games that are verging on Blade Runner cityscapes or CGI rendered humans that look truly convincingly real. It will take time and cost a lot to make games of that level, but it will be possible with the technology that will be around in 10 years time that is affordable for consumers.

Edit: Hell I truly expect some next gen games will be there to be honest. I never expected games of the visual fidelity of Detroit or TLOU2 this gen!

 

[Jiraiya]

Kratos in the new God Of War actually looks better than Endgame's Thanos and this is more to do with art styles than horsepower and the fact that SSM are crazily talented bunch; just a notch below Naughty Dog when it comes to technical efficiency though.

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Kratos as is would look horrific placed in endgame. Nah...

 

[Max|Payne]

Kratos in the new God Of War actually looks better than Endgame's Thanos and this is more to do with art styles than horsepower and the fact that SSM are crazily talented bunch; just a notch below Naughty Dog when it comes to technical efficiency though.

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Lol, there's always someone "missing" the point of the thread.

This is only about the nitty-gritty technical aspects, not about which looks better or art direction.

 

[Alienous]

I feel (in my non-expert opinion) that we're 2 console generations away from a real time Thanos that would look indistinguisable to a regular viewer.

It's not just a processing power thing - technologies continue to make visuals like that more efficient to produce. We'll probably be seeing visuals like this before the end of the next console generation. I don't think there's a huge gulf after that.

 

[Exit Music]

Lol, there's always someone "missing" the point of the thread.

This is only about the nitty-gritty technical aspects, not about which looks better or art direction.

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Well, hopefully you have your answer, OP. The gap is massive in pretty much every objective metric.

 

[Max|Payne]

Well, hopefully you have your answer, OP. The gap is massive in pretty much every objective metric.

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I always knew the answer was "super huge and not really closing down anytime soon", I simply wanted to see some numbers and pictures/videos, lol.

 

[spam musubi]

Lol, there's always someone "missing" the point of the thread.

This is only about the nitty-gritty technical aspects, not about which looks better or art direction.

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Well your question as asked doesn't make sense from a technical perspective as I said, so please clarify what do you mean

 

[kvetcha]

That's kind of like asking, other than horsepower and aerodynamics, how much faster is a super car than a regular car?

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It's really closer to "how much faster is a fighter jet than a paper airplane."

 

[Max|Payne]

It's really closer to "how much faster is a fighter jet than a paper airplane."

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Paper airplane is taking away a lot of credit from the progress videogame tech has done.

Maybe WW1 era planes against the latest supersonic fighter jet?

 

[MegaSackman]

At least video games have surpassed most PSX and PS2 CGI era visuals.

I remember dreaming about games looking as good as Chrono Cross CGI and we are way further than that.

 

[Deleted member 51248]

Ok, returning to my initial question, just how much more detailed is Thanos in Endgame compared to, say, Kratos in the new God of War? Gimme numbers on those polycounts and material resolutions.

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Theres probably a low poly version close to Kratos poly count for building the animation, but the the rendered result you see in the movie would be higher res, driven by multiple displacement maps (like bump and normal but sub-divding and moving actual geometry) another thing cg has that has slowly been working its way into realtime is multi-tile udim uv map support where you can have dozens of high res textures plugged into a single material.

though another thing to consider is the render get touched up a ton in composting.

 

[kvetcha]

Paper airplane is taking away a lot of credit from the progress videogame tech has done.

Maybe WW1 era planes against the latest supersonic fighter jet?

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Fair.

 

[Crossing Eden]

Kratos in the new God Of War actually looks better than Endgame's Thanos

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God of War doesn't even have proper looking eye shaders compared to some of the games from this gen. Let alone being even remotely comparable to Thanos.

At least video games have surpassed most PSX and PS2 CGI era visuals.

I remember dreaming about games looking as good as Chrono Cross CGI and we are way further than that.

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Not even, we should consider that video games had a fairly low budget for CGI scenes during the PS2 era compared to entire films that were CGI. We're still not touching genuinely good CGI from that era. Let's use KH as an example:

To a trained eye all the limits of realtime rendering are still very apparent despite the massive improvements we've seen this gen.

 

[Max|Payne]

Theres probably a low poly version close to Kratos poly count for building the animation, but the the rendered result you see in the movie would be higher res, driven by multiple displacement maps (like bump and normal but sub-divding and moving actual geometry) another thing cg has that has slowly been working its way into realtime is multi-tile udim uv map support where you can have dozens of high res textures plugged into a single material.

though another thing to consider is the render get touched up a ton in composting.

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Would it be an educated guess to say that's stuff that might make their way to game engines in a few years?

 

[Crossing Eden]

Would it be an educated guess to say that's stuff that might make their way to game engines in a few years?

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Stuff already has technically. Not in AAA games but UE4 has been used for Star Wars. The thing about games is that, it's not just about making a character but also everything else.

 

[DmckPower]

I'm not sure what you mean by "apart from render budget" here. Render budget is the main reason why something rendered in real time doesn't look as good as baked CGI. If you remove that factor games can look as good as anything.

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Doubtful about that.

Big budget movies have huge teams working on them solely to produce that visual quality.

Its not reasonable to expect devs to match movie quality all while doing the work required to make the game part.

I believe there is a manpower/resources limit too.

 

[Jedi2016]

I suppose you're talking specifically about characters, based on the discussion. Remember that most visual effects in movies (even big spectacle films like Avengers) are of the more subtle variety, where most people don't even realize that there is CG in a particular shot.

There will be never be a time where games will "catch up". Because as rendering technology improves for realtime games, so does it improve for offline renderers. Thanos would not have been possible ten years ago. It will take us another ten years to catch up to Thanos in games, and by then movies will have moved on to a point far beyond what the PS6/7 is capable of. If you want to see games "catch up", you have to go back ten years or so. Bear in mind we've only just recently finally hit the "Games that look as good as Toy Story" level.

 

[Sulik2]

Would it be an educated guess to say that's stuff that might make their way to game engines in a few years?

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Maybe eventually, but with a significant lag. Toy Story 1 had ray tracing over 20 years ago and we are just getting it in real time now. Plus our ability to make transistors smaller is slowing down so processing gains over time aren't as big as they used to be. It will take a pradigm shift to get to where movies are now imho. Either something like quantum computing becoming real or shifting game rendering to super powerful data centers and streaming the game to get more real time rendering power. Home computing power isn't going to be able to get to current movie tech in real time even in 20 years based on current trends.

 

[Black_Stride]

Kratos in the new God Of War actually looks better than Endgame's Thanos and this is more to do with art styles than horsepower and the fact that SSM are crazily talented bunch; just a notch below Naughty Dog when it comes to technical efficiency though.

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Hol up?
What?
If you are talking "art direction" thats fully subjective.

But technically from an objective point of view...this isnt even a hot take, its just bullshit.
End Game Thanos and even CGI trailers of today are night and day.
Thanos is multiple levels beyond anything that can be done in real time......and even CGI trailers from Blur Studios and the like arent up to snuff with Thanos and the Hulk.

The micro details alone arent achievable in real time.
Even if you forced matters and put a relatively high poly model with all the microdetails added....either you would drop res or drop frames nothing "playable" would be achieved....and thats without building the "whole" scene.


In terms of real time rendering......we arent even close to cinema quality CGI.

 

[Max|Payne]

Toy Story 1 had ray tracing over 20 years ago and we are just getting it in real time now.

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Wait, I thought Cars was the first Pixar movie to use RT.

 

[spam musubi]

Doubtful about that.

Big budget movies have huge teams working on them solely to produce that visual quality.

Its not reasonable to expect devs to match movie quality all while doing the work required to make the game part.

I believe there is a manpower/resources limit too.

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While this is a fair point, there are medium budget movies with high quality CGI on a relatively smaller budget, that still has the benefit of having virtually no time constraints for rendering. And there are movies with huge CGI budgets that still end up having godawful CGI (like the Black Panther ending fight scene) so budget isn't everything.

Alien Covenant (trash movie, but visually incredible) had a budget of less than 100m.

A very simple example is the particle cloud at 1:45-2:14:



A particle cloud takes very little in terms of person-power to render as there is very little artistic license to it, but rendering that many particler in a real-time game would not be possible currently.

 

[blonded]

Well we've surpassed Black Panther's CGI at least

 

[kvetcha]

Wait, I thought Cars was the first Pixar movie to use RT.

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You are correct.

 

[Sulik2]

Wait, I thought Cars was the first Pixar movie to use RT.

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Ahh are correct, ts1 did something unique I thought it was eat tracing I will have to look it up. Still 13 years though.

 

[Psittacus]

Ok, returning to my initial question, just how much more detailed is Thanos in Endgame compared to, say, Kratos in the new God of War? Gimme numbers on those polycounts and material resolutions.

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But that's intrinsically tied to the compute budget. You could make a Kratos model that looks that good but you never would (unless you're Game Freak I guess) because you know you eventually have to render it in real time so doing so would just be a waste.

While this is a fair point, there are medium budget movies with high quality CGI on a relatively smaller budget, that still has the benefit of having virtually no time constraints for rendering. And there are movies with huge CGI budgets that still end up having godawful CGI (like Black Panther) so budget isn't everything.

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There are some guys in the industry that talked about this on their Youtube channel and claimed that the reason the final battle looks so bad is because the VFX house only got the footage six weeks before the deadline. So it kind of was time constraints.

 

[Crossing Eden]

suppose you're talking specifically about characters, based on the discussion. Remember that most visual effects in movies (even big spectacle films like Avengers) are of the more subtle variety, where most people don't even realize that there is CG in a particular shot.

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This is something that people sorely sorely miss. Like people complain about Black Panther getting nominated for a best visual effects award, but those same people have NO idea how much of that film is even comprised of CGI that they didn't actually know was CGI.

People don't seem to realize that it's not just about the CG spaceships, energy shields, power suits, and holograms.

Well we've surpassed Black Panther's CGI at least

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No, we haven't.

 

[Max|Payne]

But that's intrinsically tied to the compute budget. You could make a Kratos model that looks that good but you never would (unless you're Game Freak I guess) because you know you eventually have to render it in real time so doing so would just be a waste.

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Yes? That's not my point tho. I know there are differences and why they exist, I just want to know how different they are in terms of numbers and other technospeak.