ELI5- why can movies make CGI human faces and movements that look 100% real and normal but video games always look fake even with large budgets?
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Video games are rendered in real time, so the degree of realism is limited to the gaming hardware being used. Movies are rendered once, and can take as much time per frame as necessary to achieve the desired look. The shortcuts often used in games to get good frame rates (at the expense of visual quality) are not necessary when rendering a movie.
Some quick research suggests that movie rendering takes around 24 hours _per frame_, so almost a month of compute time per second of film (24 fps). Many, many cloud instances are used in parallel to render a digital film.
Also, from the perspective of fine-tuning specific motions, a movie is a single set of motions that is painstakingly refined to achieve the desired look. A video game, by definition, varies with user input. It’s not always possible to refine every game scenario and every transition between movements.
Lastly, think about budgets in terms of dollars per minute of content. Most movies run around 100 minutes, while games can be upward of 1000 minutes or more. More budget per unit time allows for higher quality everything.
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