Nvidia's Crazy New Neural Engine Is Redefining Realism in Graphics
I think graphics technology has already "arrived" for the most part. There's tons of stuff that surpasses what Crytek did that blew away the industry 16 years ago, but a lot of that wasn't just technology, it's that they had world-class artists.If you go back to that game today, there's a lot you can nitpick, but I think the biggest problem that remains today is that it's still extremely labor intensive to make assets.At Planimeter, I worry more about asset creation turnaround time than anything else. I worry about it more than the tech we write, I worry about it more than fiction writing, or audio engineering. Just nothing else compares.It's the most expensive part of any game development pipeline, and yet industry-wide accessible photogrammetry is half-backed, and it also doesn't help hobbyists who do 2.5D or 2D work.So yeah, this neural engine stuff is superphenominal, for people who care about PBR workflows and photorealistic pipelines. This is obviously the most computationally complex work that can be addressed today, anyway, which I appreciate.But the people who can actually access and harness that tech is just so absolutely tiny. I guess I just care a lot about this one particular sector of the industry where you have these world-class bedroom professionals who become studio professionals and Unreal and Nvidia are probably the only orgs in the world who cater to them, but for some reason I have to put in a lot of effort to articulate why what we have today, despite being so much more powerful than what we've had 20 years ago is less accessible and less functional and less empowering than what we had then.I think it's primarily the labor factor in artwork, but also accessible engine tech today is actually worse than what we were using then, simply because no one really uses the id Tech family of engines anymore besides the most modern incarnations of them, and even to this day no class of engine compares to old versions of id Tech. Not even Unreal, by a long shot, despite having industry leading rendering capabilities. Everything else about that engine is half-baked or unusable.