From laggard to leader, game graphics are taking us in new directions.

It has been a long journey from the days of multicolored sprites on tiled block backgrounds to the immersive 3D environments of modern games. What used to be a job for a single game creator is now a multifaceted production involving staff from every creative discipline. The next generation of console and home computer hardware is going to bring a revolutionary leap in available computing power; a teraflop (trillion floating-point operations per second) or more will be on tap from commodity hardware. This leap in power will bring with it a leap in expectations, both on the part of the consumer and the creative professional.

The seeds of the present revolution were sown a long time ago. Everything we do in games started with the telling of a simple story: man against man, man against nature, man against himself. A kid sits down in front of a television and fends off waves of identical invaders marching down the screen toward his inadequately defended base; this story was told a million times in the 1980s, as was the kid's story about himself: "I got the high score of 8,000 points, and there's my initials!"

There's more to telling a story than those simple scenarios, and technology has always had a role to play. Every time our story got better, we needed better hardware. We needed more colors, more memory, better sound, better controllers—and we needed faster processors.

In the early days, characters were represented as simple bitmap images known as sprites (see figure 1). Today, a game character is no longer a simple pixilated image. A main character is typically composed of 1,500 to 10,000 geometric primitives and uses somewhere between 100 kilobytes and a few megabytes of textures. Characters have complex animation rigs with driving bones, constraints, attach points, physics setups, and hundreds of unique animations (see figure 2).

In the early days, we looked at the work presented at a fledging conference called SIGGRAPH (1973), and we thought, "We're going to do that one day." Things really started to change when consoles made the leap from 16-bit processors to 32. Up until then, machines had gotten better and better at moving sprites and backgrounds around; the planar view into flat worlds sported more and more elaborate characters and interactions. A few high-profile consoles pushed this paradigm to the ultimate limit, moving, rotating, scaling, and compositing huge numbers of enormous sprites.

In the end, these consoles fell flat on their faces because of a single innovation present in the competition: hardware-accelerated 3D. Inexpensive graphics cards for the PC and the dedicated polygon hardware in the first Sony PlayStation sounded the death knell of the old paradigm. At last we cut the camera loose, showing our characters and scenes in the round. We looked at SIGGRAPH proceedings from 10 years before and thought, "You know what? We can do that." We used to gauge our progress in terms of how many years we lagged SIGGRAPH; today that gap has closed: We now write papers for SIGGRAPH.

The next generation of consumer hardware is nearly upon us. It will be characterized by supercomputer performance. Multiple CPUs will together provide a teraflop; there will be dedicated multiprocessing GPUs (graphics processors)—also running at about a teraflop; floating-point pixels will enable superior image compositing. These systems will be 100 times more powerful than the current generation of gaming consoles. Today's game systems expend around 10 GPU cycles per vertex on average; the next generation will be able to expend 100 or more. This amount of processing per pixel will allow shading effects as complex as those we see in special-effects-rich feature films or animated films such as those produced by Pixar Studios.

Current-generation game systems average total character and scene loads measured in tens of thousands of triangles; the next generation will dedicate that much complexity to single characters and much more to the environments. We will see multiprocessed rendering pipelines, sophisticated materials, and nearly seamless intercutting between live action or prerendered sequences and interactive content.

Our stories will have the potential for the same depth and sophistication as is expected today in a film or television show. In games, we bring something new to the party with our ability to influence the unfolding of the story, modify the point of view, and selectively reexperience in new ways sequences that particularly intrigue us—possibly in ways not even foreseen by the original crafters of the experience.

This article explores the graphics revolution and some of the concepts that will take us into the next generation of game systems. I look at the influence of cinematic realtime rendering, the promise of advanced lighting techniques and high-dynamic range images, the uses of the rendering pipeline, and the future of multiprocessor-based rendering and advanced geometry.

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