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Comment by arayh | Hacker News Reader

Gamers have long been clammering about how they can't wait until in-game graphics match those of pre-rendered cinematics (that said, a lot of cinematics these days are no longer pre-rendered). Ray tracing is such an expensive operation. According to this quora, it took 29 hours to render a single frame of "Monsters University": https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-render-a-Pixa...

We're probably nowhere close to getting real-time Pixar-quality rendering in our games right now, but we've definitely made leaps and bounds over the last few decades.

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That's because it's a moving goalpost. Pixar keeps increasing the quality to take advantage of faster hardware and better algorithms.

We'll never be close to getting today's real-time Pixar-quality until Pixar rendering is good enough that they stop meaningfully improving it. What we can have is yesterday's Pixar quality rendering in-game.

That should be a new goal post: can it render a pixar film in real-time. e.g. Do we have a Toy Story capable card yet?

(Note: I know offline rendering and real-time raster rendering we use in GPU's are completely different methods. But there is a point where the raster trickery can catch up and match the offline stuff.)

Today's GPU are probably much closer to what Renderman was doing back when Toy Story was made than you think. They used an algorithm called REYES, which has nothing to do with raytracing and in fact can only barely be made to combine with ray tracing at all [1]. It was completely thrown out of Renderman only on the last couple of years for that reason.

REYES really is an early take on rasterization with tesselation, designed for hardware with extreme memory constraints. Although the actual tesselation algorithm works differently from GPU hardware tesselation, the basic idea of tesselating dynamically to the required level of detail for the current frame carried over intonthe hardware.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reyes_rendering

Exactly, look at the first Toy Story and compare that to something like The Witcher 3.

We've also long since passed the point where games have pre-rendered scenes that could have been rendered in-engine on high-end hardware.

The only tip-off I had that (some of) Nier Automata's cutscenes are pre-rendered was the drop to 30fps...

Actually, even till late 2000s most of pixar movies were based on rasterization (reyes). So you don't necessarily need ray tracing for that.

>Gamers have long been clammering about how they can't wait until in-game graphics match those of pre-rendered cinematics

Well, they do, you just have to look back X years depending on your criteria. Look at modern in game graphics v PSX cinematics for instance. It's not even close.

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