Love it or hate it, James Cameron’s Avatar set the new benchmark for how good computer graphics can be. No matter how you felt about the plot, there’s no denying how awesome Pandora and its inhabitants looked like on the big screen. And if that’s something you’d like to see more of in your games, then you won’t be disappointed when the Xbox 720 and the Playstation 4 come out.
Geomerics is already prepping up their middleware engine Enlighten for the next-crop of gaming consoles. In a recent interview by Cinema Blend, Geomerics co-founder Dr. Chris Doran shares some interesting things regarding next-gen graphics and their engine:
“Enlighten already runs on current generation hardware. So you can imagine that on next generation hardware Enlighten runs without touching the sides! We have already proved this out in our GPU implementation, developed in collaboration with NVIDIA, which is an order of magnitude faster than current consoles.”
One of the things that people are really excited about is all the significant upgrades to the GPU of the Xbox 720 and the Playstation 4. Doran mentions that all this additional power that the next-gen consoles will be bringing to the table can lead to a significant increase in the graphics quality bar:
“What can developers do with all this extra power? With Enlighten there are a number of ways we expect to see the quality bar lifted. The first is the simplest one: the resolution will be cranked up, giving even more fidelity in the lighting. In addition, new runtime technologies make ever greater levels of dynamism possible on new hardware. Dynamic objects (such as vehicles or characters) will interact with all aspects of lighting, and we will see even greater levels of destruction (and indeed creation). We are adding in new specular effects for additional ‘shinyness’ on objects, all easily affordable on new hardware.
“Where the graphics quality bar will end up is unclear, but I am confident that the lighting itself could get close to Avatar quality. Then the question moves onto other aspects of content creation. Is that level of modelling detail feasible, and will the animation, physics, and AI all be equally plausible. And finally, will the game be any good! ”
And that is absolutely correct. There are other aspects that shouldn’t be neglected such as the story and the gameplay mechanics. No matter how pretty a game is on the Xbox 720 and the Playstation 4, if it doesn’t tell a good tale or has horrendous controls, it will still end up falling flat on its face. Still, the possibility of game graphics being as good as Avatar’s is something to look forward to.