What exactly is so much better about prerendered stuff?

[minimoose]

Seriously, I don't get it. I'm not talking about movie CGI that makes peoples faces look completely real, I'm talking about game trailers in 2015 that just have an extra level of polish and above all better cinematography in the video I'll link below, the whole thing has great angles and shots, especially the part where they fire the flaming arrows, why isn't that level of cool in any actual games? What's so hard to render in real time? I feel like this is the main thing holding back video games from being amazing compared to movies and being taken totally seriously by everyone.

 

[thekeemo]

They arent rendered in realtime they can take upwards of a day to render for it to play back at 60 fps for a few minutes

[BoredErica]

Because it takes far more computing power? 

[minimoose]

They arent rendered in realtime they can take upwards of a day to render for it to play back at 60 fps for a few minutes

 

 

Because it takes far more computing power? 

I understand, but what exactly is being so hard to compute? A better placed camera angle?

[thekeemo]

I understand, but what exactly is being so hard to compute? A better placed camera angle?

details reflects AA all that basically ultra on steroids

[minimoose]

details reflects AA all that basically ultra on steroids

But some games, like Batman Arkham Knight have great reflections in real time, I don't notice a huge difference at this point with modern games.

[Virtual01]

I understand, but what exactly is being so hard to compute? A better placed camera angle?

 

In-game rendering takes a ton of shortcuts in order to be able to render nice looking images in real time. Pre-rendered scenes have no shortcuts and therefore take many many times more computing power to render, and flat out cannot be rendered in real time by any hardware. For example, pre-rendered scenes use way more polygons, all textures are loaded on all surfaces at the highest possible quality, lighting and particle effects are extremely advanced, every bit of fabric, strand of hair, blade of grass is individually animated, etc. You may not notice a huge difference but that is because the shortcuts that real-time rendering takes have become very clever over the years and are not that far off from the real thing.

[BoredErica]

I understand, but what exactly is being so hard to compute? A better placed camera angle?

Possibly ray tracing?

I know at least for Toy Story and the like, that's one thing that takes too long for games to do. It tries to emulate light more closely and have it bounce and so forth. Nvidia tried to do something similar with Voxel-based lighting, simplified and even then their GPUs were having a hard time in a small scene in just a tech demo.

[GoldSrc]

It takes a lot more power, I can tell you that much.

You will need from a few minutes to hours and even days (in some cases) to render a single frame.

The render quality of a game's engine is good enough, but if you really want quality, you need more time to do more complex physics and lighting calculations.

[PC POWER]

The line is beginning to blur as the technology improves, CG renders that utilize the full power of the hardware aren't as much different than in-game play as it was in the past.

[Camisto]

Its like running a live show compared to uploading a video later... They can edit out all of the defects and enhance the lighting and quality after.