Epic CEO Anticipates 100% Realistic Graphics in '10 – 15 Years'

Speaking to Gamasutra, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney talked about how current technology affects Epic's plans. He mentioned how Crytek is focusing on high-end PCs, which he estimates "have about 10 times the graphics horsepower of a console today," but explains why his company hasn't taken the same route.

"The thing is, that market is about 2 percent the size of the overall next-generation game market -- PS3, Xbox 360, and mainstream PC," said Sweeney. "So there's a real hard business decision: if you go the route that Crytek goes, you can beat us in certain areas in graphics, but you're really sacrificing the larger market."

"We can scale down in performance by a factor of three by going to a low resolution, dropping some textures, and things like that. But to scale by a factor of 10 -- you can't design a game with 10 times the detail and then scale it back to something that looks decent on the consoles," he added. "You'd end up looking much worse than a console game that was just designed for the console specs. So they have real scalability difficulties there."

In the realm of "100 percent realistic graphics," Sweeney doesn't think that we're that far off from achieving the oft stated goal, giving an estimate of "probably 10 - 15 years" time. He anticipates the larger problem for realism, however, coming down to AI.

"There's another problem in graphics that's not as easily solvable. It's anything that requires simulating human intelligence or behavior: animation, character movement, interaction with characters, and conversations with characters. They're really cheesy in games now," described Sweeney. "A state-of-the-art game like the latest Half-Life expansion from Valve, Gears of War, or Bungie's stuff is extraordinarily unrealistic compared to a human actor in a human movie, just because of the really fine nuances of human behavior."

"We simulate character facial animation using tens of bones and facial controls, but in the body, you have thousands. It turns out we've evolved to recognize those things with extraordinary detail, so we're far short of being able to simulate that," he continued. "And unfortunately, all of that's not just a matter of computational power, because if we had infinitely fast computers now, we still wouldn't be able to solve that, because we just don't have the algorithms; we don't know how the brain works or how to simulate it."

While "perfectly realistic" graphics may come soon to consoles, Sweeney doesn't think that work will ever be complete with the Unreal Engine. "I don't think we'd ever be done," said the executive. "If you look at special effects or anything like that, even if you have perfect rendering, you might have the inner loop of the renderer which processes sub-pixel triangle primitives and generates perfectly anti-aliased graphics -- that might be completely done, but still, the tools and the functionality that lets the artist create the environment is infinitely improvable."