The Quick Advancement of Graphics Cards

Just in case there is somebody out there that hasn't realized it yet, I'll reiterate: graphics technology has come along nicely in recent years.

Byron down the hall got his brand new 256MB NVIDIA 6600 (now affectionately called "Beast") in the mail yesterday. As he played Doom3 and FutureMark, I was just floored by how much graphics has really come along recently. I remember playing Wolf3D, Duke3D, and Descent, which were at the forefront of bringing 3D (or 2.5D) to the average home user. Other than spawning new ways of gaming, these games also brought us closer to interactive realism in a fantasy setting. While we watched Toy Story in the movie theatres, we tried to imagine a day when those things could be done in real-time. With each passing generation of vid card and graphics engine, we expect more and better effects. Remember when the original Myst came out, and then not 5 years later, it was made into a real-time interactive game. Watching the FutureMark05 demos, I expect that these graphics will make their way into games within 2 years, while Byron estimates over 5 years (I realize that they are actually being rendered real time right now, but there are things like AI, physics, and sound that need to be handled by engines as well). Then there is Myst IV, which I predict will take around 5 years, and Byron says will take around 20 years. Personally, I think that I may even be too pessimistic with those estimates, but future graphics in games will no longer come down to processing power and engines, and will be more about artists, so these things could take a while to get out the door. This is where I point you to the Unreal Engine 3 page.

When it comes to these things, it would be nice to see OpenGL pull up its socks a bit. So far, OpenGL has remained a fairly stable standard, since SGI did lots of work on it in the 80's and 90's. MS came out with Direct3D in the mid-90's, and has been trying to play catch-up with OpenGL ever since. Games like Doom3 and Unreal Tournament 2004 are still done in OpenGL, and therefore are portable to Linux systems. With DirectX 10 (going to be called Windows Graphic Foundation [WGF]), MS will probably finally take over OpenGL in terms of functionality and capabilities. There is the new OpenGL 2.0, but that was more evolutionary than revolutionary. It would be a shame to see floods of games in WGF and none in OpenGL, resulting in no ports to Linux, just when the gaming scene on Linux was starting to get good.