GAMES II: "I think we will see wider adoption of high-dynamic range rendering in 2005."

The trend is going to photo realistic games. Is there already a title available or in production which is close to that goal?

I believe we have the technology to make it happen today and it is evident that things look really good in demos like Ruby. However the games have to target lower end hardware too. There are titles in production which target R300 class hardware as minimum spec and my expectation is that these are titles that will look stunning.

Which new 3D features will we see in 2005?

I think we will see wider adoption of high-dynamic range rendering in 2005.

The shaders in Half Life 2 are about 50 executions long although ATI supports up to 1000 executions. How long will shaders be in next year games and what is the maximum you can use keeping playable frame rates in mind?

My expectation is that majority of the shaders next year will stay around 50-70 instruction range in games. The second question is interesting – with shader model 3.0 the way you count instructions has to change. The shader instruction count could be very long, but if you have branching you may only be executing a small portion of this shader on many pixels and execute the full shader on only a few pixels.

Regarding the frame rate performance versus quality: Will we see a real breakthrough in the near future leading the quality to the next level?

Quality and performance are inter-connected. In the near future, I believe the games that target the higher-end hardware will look stunning. However, I do not know how many such games will exist.