Topic: Next Gen Graphic's CGI

Hey, I got an idea!!! How's about all the consoles throw away they're graphical wizards and make another 8-bit console?

for certain games but mostly he's right. gameplay matters more and you don't need better graphics than the wii's for most genres. still, they'll make them.

Except that the GC didn't have the best graphics last generation

I have NOT heard of that

Never give up the dream

Erm you all do realise that games consoles use "CG" now and always have? The question is when will games consoles be able to perform the graphical level of films like Avatar?

What you get on your games console and what you see at the cinema are produced in the same way. Perhaps specialist software for film CG is used in some cases, along with new and cutting edge techniques, but the main reason it looks better is simply because the machines are much more powerful and much more expensive than anything we have in the home.

At the moment I'd say games consoles are at least close to the level of CG we saw in films such as Terminator 2 and have easily suprassed what was seen in Tron and the early Pixar shorts. To get to the level of CG on a console that we see in the movies today? Who can tell - but Avatar quality on a console is a long way off yet. It's certainly not impossible, though - it's just a matter of processing power. To say we'll never get that level of graphics in the home is extremely short sighted - I mean you'd laugh at someone from the 70's now, having only seen Space Invaders, saying graphics like GTA4 could never be done. It has nothing to do with amount of time it takes to render a frame for a film - that render time becomes less and less as technology moves on to the point it can be done in real time. We might be talking decades before it happens, but it certainly will happen.

Ray-tracing is incredibly graphically intensive and with current processors, is not possible without liquid nitrogen cooling... So...don't count on it.

Also raytracing is a technique used in rendering - it's not the next step from polygons. It's basically to do with lighting in a 3D scene to add greater realism to objects - and it's nothing new.

Try to know what you're talking about before you try to talk about it.
Ray tracing is a method for rendering an image by tracing the path light takes. It's not the next step up from polygons and it's not new technology. Unlike previous light rendering methods, ray tracing can make accurate reflections and refractions but as a result takes a lot longer to render. It's in no way directly connected to polygons (that is, ray tracing won't replace polygons in much the same way that a bookmark won't replace books) or yet a plausible option for rendering video game graphics due to its slow performance.

There is a ps3 tech demo on youtube using 3 ps3's combined to create raytracing on a car.
Nvidia are making a car game i think that uses raytracing.
I saw the screenshots on pcformat.

Umm... CGI = Computer-generated imagery. So yeah, even the NES had "CGI graphics" since it was a computer which generated images.

Also ray-tracing is not the next step from "polygons". It most often is still used in conjunction with polygons, since it isn't a method for defining geometry in a scene. madgear is correct, all it's used for is lighting calculations. And it's too processor-intensive and is generally unnecessary for real-time graphics like those used in games anyway.

Using ray-tracing in a racing game would have minimal improvements (if any) over normal rasterization techniques. Ray-tracing only has benefits in scenes where there are lots of reflective surfaces or unusual materials for light to interact with. And the technique isn't a one-stop solution to all our graphical problems, since it has problems of its own.