Thank you for posting this! I really love how rendering works and how far we have come. Control is still one of the most beautiful games I have ever played and I was only able to experience the max settings with all of that turned on via GeForce Now. It is unfortunate that buying the hardware to see the full extent of these graphics is so expensive. I don’t game enough to justify the cost of building a new desktop with top of the line hardware.

My degree is Computer Science and I dabbled a little bit in animation in Highschool before that. Unfortunately, I am way out of the loop now days and didn’t get the chance to explore Computer Graphics much farther than about semesters worth of class (I was on a quarter system for context).

I still find the subject fascinating and the math behind it is quite complex. Optimizations have to be designed and put in place as the computations required are extensive, so shortcuts behind the scenes are made so a game is playable. You can get some amazing still images and videos as you just render it once, but real time is an entirely different problem. In fact, a lot of shortcuts are putting pre-rendered, or mostly pre-rendered, textures and assets in games. This is where my knowledge starts to wane, though I still get the gist of it.