When I asked Tim Sweeney, CEO and founder of Epic Games, he was less optimistic and said, “Many aspects of rendering are still very limited by shader performance, such as the ability to achieve a high frame rate at a high resolution, with geometry, lighting, and subsurface scattering detail as precise as your eyes can see. We could easily consume another 10× shader performance without running out of improvements.”
He continued: “There are a few details that are limited not by performance but by our lack of sufficiently powerful algorithms, such as rendering faces, face animation, body animation, character dialogue, and other problems that amount to simulating human intelligence, emotion, and locomotion. If you gave us an infinitely fast GPU today, we still couldn’t do humans that were indistinguishable from reality.
“Compared to past decades when we had no clear idea of how we’d ever solve those problems, nowadays we generally think that AI trained on vast amounts of human interaction data (which Epic will only ever do under proper license!) will be able to bridge the gap to absolute realism, possibly even by the end of the decade. I’m not sure how much GPU performance that will require. Perhaps not more than today’s GPUs.”
I really wish more people had this perspective instead of being snooty, self-righteous, nose-in-the-air ahole elitists!
