HiGame

At SIGGRAPH this week, both AMD and Nvidia are announcing various hardware and software technologies. SIGGRAPH is an annual show that focuses on computer graphics and advances in rendering techniques. At the show this year, Nvidia showcased the ways AI could be used to improve gaming or to create extremely realistic images, without the enormous computational horsepower that would be required to brute force certain visual standards.
This last bit is of more than incidental concern.

The problem is simple: If you compare a top-shelf character animation from 2017 versus the best hardware of 2005, you’ll obviously notice the difference. At the same time, however, you’re unlikely to be fooled into thinking that even the most amazing CG is actually a movie. Slowing silicon advances make it less and less likely that we’ll ever be able to simply computationally force the issue. Perhaps more to the point, even if we could, brute-forcing a solution is rarely the best way to solve it.

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