I love watching people talk shop. (Off-Topic)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Tuesday, November 26, 2013, 22:32 (3802 days ago) @ INSANEdrive
edited by uberfoop, Tuesday, November 26, 2013, 22:43

so much incite

Yes, it's amazing what the angry flailings around in graphics wars old and new can incite ;)

Incidentally, I'm drafting up a potential NeoGAF thread OP right now, in which I'm planning on explaining why people saying "more rendering resolution after <such-and-such> distance isn't noticeable" are usually completely wrong. It's probably stupid console war garbage when all's said and done, but the electrical engineer in me cares too much about understanding of sampling frequencies and such.

Uberfoop - forgive me as I flail in possible ignorance, but isn't an alternative to what you just described physically based rendering? Am I right in thinking that

"Physically-based" does not describe any particular set of shading techniques. It just means that you're using the real-world characteristics of light as a basis for how aspects of your shading model work. How precisely real-world physics get applied (i.e. if you get reflections by literally accounting for multiple bounces of light rays) is another matter.
That said, screen-space reflections are maybe more likely to show up with "physically-based" models than real-time reflection maps are, since you can more easily justify screen-space reflections on the basis of light-bouncing behaviour. From the perspective of physics, rendering the image from another angle and pasting it on a surface is a bit of a hack (even though it's often more expensive and can give results that are more accurate).

So... what's the big deal with physically-based rendering? Smoothness of game development, mostly. When you're basing things on realistic models rather than on what "just looks right", you can get predictable results by setting up materials with realistic properties.
With a non-physically-based approach, you might do some funny business with a potato pixel-shader that makes potatos look very realistic under your game's noon-day sun... but then the character picks up a potato, walks inside, and suddenly the stupid thing is shining like some sort of messed-up eggplant. Regardless of how precisely your game approximates reality in the results, inaccuracies in the model relative to real-world behaviour make things less predictable. Generating new content can be more work, and you might have to tweak things more later on.