You might soon [read a year or so] get to play film quality video games, if the work done by Williams College and Nvidia on a new graphics algorithm is anything to go by. Working in close collaboration, Morgan McGuire – Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Williams – and Dr. David Luebke say they have developed a new way to process computerized lighting and light sources, that will greatly enhance the quality of graphics processing, especially video games.
Video games need to compute images much faster than movies, making it an uphill battle for video game developers to approach film quality. However, with the new algorithm, this might soon be a thing of the past. What exactly does this algorithm do? Something magical and so confusing, you will probably not wonder why developers didn’t think of it before: instead of producing light effects by pushing light into a simulated 3D world and then pushing it back onto the pixels of the final image, the new technique completely reverses the process, and instead, pulls light onto the world, and then pushes it into the image. This is supposedly a much faster technique. We will have to take their word for it! The keywords here seem to be “pull” & “push”, “into” & “onto”.
The algorithm is best suited for faster processor speeds, and at rate at which graphics processors are speeding up, they will soon [read a couple of years] be more than 500 times faster than present day cutting-edge technology. Expect to see the new algorithm in video games within these next two years.