40 TFLOPS for Photorealistic Graphics Says Epic’s Tim Sweeney

The push for better and better graphics is as strong as ever, and this is true for gaming, movie production, VR/AR, scientific applications and so much more. The speed that new graphics cards such as the GTX 1080 can generate increasingly complicated scenes and resolutions over previous generations is unreal, and it seems like we’re making great progress. However, Tim Sweeney thinks we’ve still got quite a way to go before we hit the famous uncanny valley.

“You know, we’re getting to the point now where we can render photo-realistic static scenes without humans with static lighting,” Sweeney said in an interview with Gamespot. “Today’s hardware can do that, so part of that problem is solved. Getting to the point of photo-realistic dynamic environments, especially with very advanced shading models like wet scenes, or reflective scenes, or anisotropic paint, though…maybe forty Teraflops is the level where we can achieve all of that.”

It’s true, you don’t need 40 Teraflops to render a detailed and realistic scene, but when it comes to getting one to a playable standard, with interaction, gameplay mechanics, high frame rates and more, then things get a lot more difficult. I have to admit, 40 TFLOPS sounds like a good target to get all this, but keep in mind that the GTX 1080 can push 9 TFLOPS and that’s a 4K @ 60 monster, so just think what developers could do if they had access to almost 4.5x that amount of power! If you want to see that kind of power in the real world, keep gaming over the next decade.