When it comes to gaming graphics on a technical level, Crytek's Crysis is still among the most impressive titles ever made. Crytek co-founder Cevat Yerli is therefore the perfect person to talk about the present and future of graphics in games, something he did during a keynote at GDC Europe [thanks Gamasutra].
For the first CryEngine, Yerli said his team wanted to buck the trend of FPS titles set in dank corridors, so the first Far Cry was in an expansive jungle. With CryEngine 2 and the first Crysis, the team created an engine designed to scale depending on the capabilities of the PC playing it so that "when you buy a PC in two years time, the game will look better." Crytek is currently working on CryEngine 3, which is designed to allow for impressive looking PC titles, while at the same time still functioning well on consoles.
For the near future, Yerli sees more parallel processors with GPUs taking on more general computing functions. Right now, Crytek is penning in 2012 or 2013 as the launch date for the next-generation of consoles, though he admits that trends may mean that the next step up in processor power may not happen. Yerli concluded by noting that different rendering models, APIs and hardware platforms might lead to real-time graphics equal to the oft-cited Toy Story standard.
We're sure that the next generation of consoles will have graphics that make our jaws drop, but it wouldn't surprise us if they are the last set of consoles as we know them.
