Quote:
Originally Posted by Kiksar  As someone else mentioned, lighting is a huge portion of getting the look of a game right, and technically it's one of the things that has the most room for growth. Who knows when it'll be, but when hardware and game engines start being able to do real time ray tracing (in a practical scenario) it'll be a big step forward (but as is with everything else, it'll always be limited by quality of art). Bounce light, real soft shadows, and global illumination can't be too far off considering how quickly technology evolves, so I'm looking forward to it. |
You might be interested to know that ID Tech 6 is leaning toward an hybrid form of raytracing/rasterising technique. Apparently they are reaching acceptable framerates on a GTX280 Nvidia cards.
Here is an interview about it:
PC Perspective - John Carmack on id Tech 6, Ray Tracing, Consoles, Physics and more
Of course if the next generation of consoles are like the current one (as in way behind PC in term of hardware power), we are not going to see this before a long ass time on consoles.
Edit:
Here is a short video:
Hardware: Neue id Software-Engine mit Voxel-Grafik - Voxel-Unschärfe | Praxis | Hardware | GameStar.de 