The Race for Real-time Photorealism

摘要

Ever since the emergence of three-dimensional computer graphics in the early 1960s, graphics specialists have dreamed of creating photorealistic virtual worlds indistinguishable from the real world. Product designers, architects, lighting planners, gamers and scientific visualization pioneers have craved real-time reality on a chip; hardware designers and algorithm writers have made spectacular progress, as one can see by looking over the shoulder of teenagers playing the latest games (facing page). But as we will see, the computational challenges that remain are immense. Implacable evolutionary progress has been made by software engineers in devising ingenious algorithms, and generations of hardware have been invented to traffic and execute the calculations, yet the sheer scale of the computational task keeps the goal of real-time photorealism at some distance over the horizon.