Game Designer Lost in a Graphics Engineer's World:

   Top 5 SIGGRAPH Predictions for Real Time Rendering

I'll be honest with you, I don't get a lot of what's said at SIGGRAPH.  In fact I spend most of my time on the art floor and at the future technology booths talking with innovators about their applications of the technology rather than the technology itself, so this year I asked the man I trust most in the world in matters regarding real time graphics - Giray Ozil, Graphic Engineer at EA - if he could whip up a top five list of the things he observed at SIGGRAPH regarding the future of games.  I also asked him to make it 'designer accessible' so all of you not steeped in the lore of graphics programming might get something from it too.  You'll find his list below, but before we get to it there's one thing that stood out to me...
 

Real Time Ray Tracing at the Nvidia Booth:
 

Yes, Nvidia had a five bounce ray trace running in real time at 30 frames per second at their booth this year.  Of course they did it on 4 GPUs with 4 gigs of graphics memory between them but still, they did it.  Real time ray tracing for the masses may yet be a ways off, but between this and Intel's announcement a few weeks ago, it's coming.

The tea pot's about to get shiny baby...

Giray's Top 5:

On the horizon for realtime graphics (based on Siggraph observations)
 

1.  Global illumination is a hot topic, it's a huge difference maker when creating photorealistic environments. There is still no standard method of approaching it. While we have seen major improvements for real time ray tracing algorithms, they have their own set of problems and are still light years ahead of being applicable to games. Some hybrid approaches that combine ray tracing with traditional rasterization are promising. In addition, realtime ambient occlusion is a feasible approximation of global illumination and we are definitely going to see this technique more and more.

2.  Using deferred or hybrid renderers as opposed to forward renderers is a popular trend.  The main advantage of it is being able to render a lot of dynamic lights. You can see it in games like GTA 4, Alone in the Dark and Killzone 2. I'm expecting more games using this approach and variations, since dynamic environments add a lot to immersion.

3.  DirectX 11 is in the works and it's promising. Unfortunately, due to the lack of PC exclusive AAA titles, I don't expect a lot of games to make proper use of it until the next cycle of consoles.

4.  Other areas I expect major improvements are crowd rendering and destructibles. I think there's still plenty of things to do in that domain.

5.  Nothing groundbreaking seems to be coming up soon. But as developers get more familiar with the current generation consoles, realtime graphics will of course evolve naturally. Remember the vast visual difference between the launch titles of PS2 and some of the last titles of last generation. We will see the same progress without a doubt.