Quote from: njeneb on September 13, 2009, 11:31:48 PM
It definitely will benefit. The trend I have noticed though is that the more a computer can do in a second, the more people ask it to do. So any app you like now will have more stuff to compute. Look how much faster Terragen 0.9xx renders now. When I first played with it in 2001, the computer I used was 900mHz. The renders were much slower. Now think what Matt might introduce in Terragen 7. By the time that comes out, Terragen 2 renders may be almost realtime.
Terragen 7: at the current rate of development many of us would be in our seventies at least I would think; At any rate technology will if current trends continue to develop at an exponential rate until the rate of development renders Moors Law obsolete; and continue to develop until the Singularity is reached.
At that stage then, machines may well have developed self awareness, this in its self posses ethical questions that society has not beguine too reason let alone answer: a section of society that has beguine too, is the Science Fiction community, but as a collective whole the mainstream has not beguine to answer these questions.
Real-time computing is an active area of study in the CGI community and much has been published on research connected with this; form what I have seen it is a question of economies of scale and time of implementation: as in all things there must come a point where real-time computing in CGI hits the Law of Diminishing Returns.
CGI will always face the catch 22 of always been capable of much more than the current state of the art in technology will allow; this maybe mitigated once desktop quantum computing becomes available, and more over such computers are programmable enough to allow for such applications as Terragen to run on them.
With such a radical new technology such as quantum and optical computing it is certain that new programming languages would have to be developed and the training and other documentation for then made available: more over it would be some time before these technologies would become both widespread and affordable for every day use in the consumer market, also you need to factor the time needed for programmers to learn these new languages.
Regards to you.
Cyber-Angel