9781422272916

The better the GPU, the more realistic a game’s graphics will appear.

vortex. The whole fire vortex looks like a fire tornado and only lasts a few seconds. Fire in video games also only lasts for a few seconds. At least for now, it is displayed in short brief bursts. Despite fire being the most difficult effect to program, researchers at Stanford have created algorithms to make fire look real based on vorticity. They have algorithms to depict a gas fire (with lots of smoke), paper on fire, and even an oil fire on top of water. Due to hardware limitations, there are no raging forest fires because there is simply not enough processing power to handle programming graphics to represent all the physics required to make fire look real. Even Nvidia’s Quad SLI system with four standalone GPUs doesn’t have enough “firepower.” However, players have a high demand for fire in video games, so maybe hardware will catch up soon.

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SCIENCE IN GAMING