Graphics and Power

[Pooky]

I was just thinking;

So currently the better graphics a game has in general you need more powerful computer hardware to run the game right?

What if they were to develop a way to display these amazing graphics that were not intensive on the power of the hardware? Now I'm speaking from an unscientific position; but I don't see why it isn't possible...

If they were to develop a new way of creating graphics and game engines, then possibly we would not need to buy new graphics cards all the time?

[Uberutang]

Well, they kinda do it on consoles. They optimize the code and find ways to use the hardware that is in there better.
Same thing with PC games and with Driver updates etc.

Don't know about you but having to spend 2k on a new GPU every 2 - 6 years is really not that terrible?
The 'every 5 years or so' motherboard and cpu overhauls is more of a bank breaker

I know PC gamers (myself included) often moan about 'console' ports, but the upside of that is that any newsish pc can run the games like a boss with all the bells and whistles, since the game is coded for 6-7 year old PC tech (consoles).


You can now play Doom in your browser. Something that took a decent pc to play in 1993, so things are progressing at a good pace

[Adoxographist]

Onlive streams your game for you so, all you buy is the game. Off site server does these "develop a way to display these amazing graphics" and you can play Assassins creed, deus ex on your netbook/tablet. Not available in South Africa yet tho, you have to be 1,600 km from their server.

[DCWarhound]

It's not just graphics,polygons in each mesh also plays a role as well as the textures applied.

You can for example make a realistic tire with lots of polygons that will need a lot of power or you can do some texture bump mapping to give it a similar effect.

They tried to do the bump mapping approach in BF3 but they had a pretty bad result on the rocks in the earlier versions.

Normally a tire mesh would look like this :


It's good for high poly meshes like this :

But they are going to cause allot of FPS drop when fully rigged and animated with other high poly meshes.