http://www.bertmonroy.com/fineart/text/fineart_damen.htm

wow, that's ridiculously impressive.

Imagine...some day video games will look like that

I had just seen that somewhere else not too long ago. The first pics look very real I think, it's pretty much only the sign on the station platform and the red building that give it away I find.\

And clarkma, by the end of this year and early next video games will be looking like this, if not very close (ie. UT2007 and Crysis).

OMG UT07 I cant wait

Yeah I know, I can't wait until it comes out now, that's one of the main reasons I'm buying an X1900XT this summer...I want it to look like this - 1, 2, 3.

holy shit

how will video games look like this? its not a 3d render, its a whole shitload of 2d images. granted, these images could be laid onto 3d surfaces, but its not like a train station he created in which one could walk around. everything was drawn in perspective.

I don't see why whether it's 2D or 3D there matters. The point is the amount of detail and realism in things like that, and that sort of realism isn't that far away for video games. Like looks at these Crysis screenshots below for instance as they're sort of modern day, where as UT is sci-fi sort of stuff. You can't tell me that those don't look amazing, and that's only running on DirectX9 hardware, whereas it was made with DirectX10 in mind, so it'll look even better on that - Crysis 1 & Crysis 2

Crysis is going to be fun =D

there a huge difference between hand drawing all of that stuff out and rendering it in real time... the lighting/shadows, reflections and depth of field are all a lot easier to make in 2d. creating an engine that handles this all frame by frame is a completely different ballpark. people have been creating incredibly realistic renderings of the natural world for hundreds of years now in all different mediums, but to be able to construct a program that can generate that level of realism at such a speed to fool the human eye into believing it is occuring with a sense of fluidity (60FPS) is something very different.

it's indeed VERY impressive but it's not 2000 hours impressive..

or atleast it just doesn't look like it.

I understand all that, but from what I understand when they said that games will eventually look like this, it's the amount of detail in it that they're refering to, and how real it is. All what I was saying is that these next gen games are becoming very realistic looking, and if you look a the Crysis screenshots you can see that (granted they didn't have FSAA on so there are jaggies). I know that you can do a lot more with things that aren't in real time as it doesn't require the same amount of computing power as it does to render a game in real time that looks the same. But, the point I'm trying to make is that I really don't think games are too far away from looking extremely realistic. Even if it's not this coming generation then give it a couple years and I'm sure we'll be looking at in game screenshots and having a hard time determining whether it's real life or not. Like look at the difference in the unreal engines, this isn't even over a 10 year period and look at how far they've come with this stuff (click on the image for the hi-res version):

The 3rd guy is missing his sun glasses. D:

They've been saying that since the 80s.

UT looks AWESOME!

But I thought HL2's graphics were pretty awesome.

http://www.overclockers.ru/images/lab/2006...lostcoast_b.jpg

With normal mapping and such they look good still. But the motion is all wrong, rag doll physics and the Mesiah and later breathing systems are always phony looking. Fabric that bends and the texture doesn't do weird things. It's motion and real looking stretching and bending. That's the tough one.