Re:How close are we to truly photorealistic, real-time games?
by astrodust on Friday February 10, 2012 @07:04PM
(#3578066)
Fifty years? Not even.
288 hours means it takes 17,280,000ms to render one frame of footage. To render one on-screen frame of a game running at 60FPS you have 16.6ms to render the frame. This is a difference of about 2^20, or twenty doublings in speed.
Assuming CPU power can be doubled every 18 months, which still seems to be the case even if the power of individual cores is not increasing as quickly as it used to be, then you're looking at 18 times 20 months, or 360 months. This is fifteen years.
It's also the case that today's systems have a lot more than one CPU. If you take a consumer system that already has four cores and a GPU to boost performance even further, that could shave two to five years off the time.
288 hours means it takes 17,280,000ms to render one frame of footage. To render one on-screen frame of a game running at 60FPS you have 16.6ms to render the frame. This is a difference of about 2^20, or twenty doublings in speed.
Assuming CPU power can be doubled every 18 months, which still seems to be the case even if the power of individual cores is not increasing as quickly as it used to be, then you're looking at 18 times 20 months, or 360 months. This is fifteen years.
It's also the case that today's systems have a lot more than one CPU. If you take a consumer system that already has four cores and a GPU to boost performance even further, that could shave two to five years off the time.