jmke

How would you describe to a layman the work that goes into building a new graphics engine?

In the old days, there was a clear set of milestones that were ticked off with each new generation – 3D perspective, texture mapping, 6DOF, polygonal characters, colored lighting, shadows, etc. In between major changes, there is always the push for more; more colors, more pixels, more triangles, more frames per second, and more depth complexity.

Games today look incredible, and there are few things that we can’t do a pretty good job of rendering with the available techniques, so it is much more a question of balancing and trading off the development process against the fidelity of the product. We have to be reactive to hardware trends, and there are still large bodies of work in the offline rendering world to consider, but I don’t feel huge pressure to radically rework our graphics architecture right now.


http://bethblog.com/index.php/2011/0...-john-carmack/

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jmke

Thank you consoles for limiting game development; if PCs where the top dog, we would have a Crysis 3 killing GFX engine from JC this year, but now it's all about making an engine to fit the console hardware

booh

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