The Graphics Bell Curve

Almost like clockwork, game consoles have rolled out of the flood gates at five year intervals. In the past, this was a perfect timeframe. The gradual, but inevitable obsolescence would necessitate a change. The five year mark seemed to be perfect for this.

However, things are different now. Video game technology advancement has changed. While the increase in computer performance has not slowed, its effects on the game market have been mitigated by the technological requirements of making more advanced gameplay and graphics.

It used to be simple. It really was. To have a better looking game, all that you needed to do was have a higher quality model with more vertices, or a texture with more detail. Even a small increase in computer performance allowed you to implement improvements like that.

Take a look at the picture above. Here, we have four pictures of the same Earth model. Each version gets progressively better than the last. The two models on the top illustrate the old method of making better graphics. The medium quality Earth has four times the vertices and a texture of five times the resolution than the low quality model. The sphere of the Earth is more round, having less pronounced edges and the texture is much sharper. The medium quality Earth took only an estimated 2% more effort for the computer to render than the low quality Earth. These are incredible results.

Now, I could make an Earth with an even higher quality texture and have 1,000 times the vertices of the medium Earth, but the quality doesn’t scale up like you think it would. It would take a herculean effort on the part of my graphics processor to render the image, but the Earth wouldn’t look much better.

So, how did I make the other Earth models look so much better? It wasn’t by any brute force increase in texture quality, that’s for sure. I used a more advanced lighting technique, called shading, to make them. This lighting technique may look much better, but it has an enormous cost in terms of graphics resources. Instead of a 2% increase in resources, it took an 85% increase in processing resources to produce the High Quality Earth. Do you see the problem here?

It gets worse than that. The difference between the high and ultra quality models, as little as that difference is, took an additional 1,121% increase in the computer’s effort to render. This is because I used an even more advanced lighting effect called subsurface scattering. To be honest, with these scaled down pictures, I can't even tell the difference between the high and ultra quality images. Granted, these are extreme examples. The efficiency of the graphics can be drastically improved with tweaking to the lighting effects and improvements to the underlying graphics software. However, my examples illustrate the point, exaggerated as it may be.

So what does this show us? It illustrates the diminishing returns of more powerful hardware. While contemporary gaming PCs do have more horsepower than either the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3, the graphical difference between them is not so clear. The effects required to produce a drastically improved image are still out of reach.

Take a look at the image above. We have two video games, The Witcher 2, and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Which one do you think looks better? While static (and small) screenshots are not the best method of determining graphics, my trained eye will tell me that The Witcher 2 looks better. However, even I will admit that the inferiority of Uncharted 2 is only minor. In fact, so small is the difference that I think some people would choose Uncharted.

I have a surprise for you. The Witcher 2 is a new computer game, quickly becoming known for its need of powerful computer hardware to run on high graphics setting. On the other hand, Uncharted 2 runs on the Playstation 3, a piece of hardware released nearly five years before the time of this writing. Those five years have provided leaps and bounds in computer performance, but comparatively little in the way of tangible benefits for the games themselves.

So what does this all mean? It means that if the new game consoles were released in 2011, the end of the traditional five year console lifespan, it would be a disaster. The machines would be expensive, for both the manufacturers and gamers, and provide a disappointing advancement over the older generation.

In my next hub, I will delve into what the new consoles should be, as well as when they should be released.