So my question is while we know in what direction the graphic card industry will go in the next 20 years in terms of more realism, better shadows, textures etc etc, why can’t we produce those results today?
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When I was like 15 years old (I am 29 now) people used to speculate how graphics in games would be in 10 years down the line, most of it has turned out to be true. So why do we have to wait for such incremental changes every year?
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There’s lots of pieces to the puzzle, and there’s no single thing you can do to make everything magically better. At this point pretty much everything has been invented, and it’s the matter of gradual refinement and improvement.
There’s also that you can’t go too fast, because huge changes are risky. For instance Intel tried to radically redesign computers with the Itanium and the idea just flopped. Modern computers are instead an evolution of an ancient design, improved a bit generation by generation. Intel thought they’d do something fresh, while AMD bolted on 64 bits to an old design and that turned out to be what worked. It didn’t require all software to be rewritten and it worked more than well enough, so it sold.
There’s also many different parts to the system — some people work on better memory, some on better GPUs, some on better buses, etc. Each of those gives some gains, but alone is limited in how much benefit it can offer. It would make little sense to say, put 32 GB RAM on a Voodoo card, it just doesn’t have the horsepower to make use of it anyway.
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