Very neat image. The consensus of this thread so far, however, is that we won't be seeing this kind of quality anytime soon in real time flight sims. Allow me to insert my 2 cents worth in the form of arguements to the contrary.
The attributes of the POVray image that pop out are 1) smooth rounded surfaces, 2) reflections, and 3) high complexity (high surface count). Ray tracing inherently handles all of these easily but it is a slow technique that isn't likely to be ever used for real time rendering. Real time sims are based on software, or nowadays, hardware accelerated Gouraud shaded tesellated surface rendering techniques but there are tricks available that allow rapidly rendered images to approach ray traced like quality.
Current sims don't come anywhere near utilizing what modern 3D cards like the GeForce offer. AH doesn't even make use of the Transform and Lighting acceleration of the GeForce. Current GeForce cards can render 30 million polygons per second. That means at 30 frames per second each frame can have a million polygons. With more polygons you can make smoother aircraft renderings as well as add higher terrain complexity. I grabbed a frame from Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator II of a zero in the same orientation as the POVray rendering. It looks 'almost' as good as the ray traced zero (unfortunately, I don't know how to paste images into these posts). The scenery in CFS II looks even better than the scenery (ground) in the POVray image. Note: CFS II makes use of the GeForce hardware transform and lighting and I had all quality sliders at max to grab the image. Still the frame rate was very smooth.
If you check out Nvidia's web page you'll see many examples that make use of the various tricks to create realistic looking reflections and water. The water, waves, and reflections in the POV ray image could probably be done in real time with GeForce 2 card using these reflection mapping and bump mapping techniques.
The Nvidia page also has examples of 'worlds' with very high polygon count. One example is a flight through a field of grass: over 10,000 blades of grass are rendered in real time and each moves in the breeze. Each blade is made of many polygons so the card is rendering millions of polygons per second. Obviously this is only possible with the T&L hardware acceleration of the GeForce. This demo also includes realistically rendered reflective water (puddles).
So why doesn't Aces High have higher quality rendering? Well I can think of two reasons. First, the designers are, of course, aircraft fanatics and that shows in the fact that the aircraft, especially the latest ones like the TBM and Ju-88, are, in fact, pretty highly detailed. The designers are not, however, closet architects or geologists and therefore don't have as much interest in making complex buildings or terrain. The AH rendering engine is capable of much better terrain quality (as can be seen in several user generated terrains available for download). And, as mentioned above, MS CFS II has even more realistic terrain rendering. I am sure that much more complex buildings could be generated as well, but this is tedious and no one is asking for more complex cities (well... I would.. I buy boxed flight sims solely to fly around looking at the scenery).
The other limitation to rendered image quality is that the designers do not want to disenfranchise people that don't have the latest graphics cards and fastest CPUs.
In summary, available games take quite awhile to catch up with the capabilities of available graphics cards. When flight sims start to make full use of the abilities of current Nvidia GeForce and ATI Radeon graphics cards, then the resulting image quality could go a long way towards approaching the POV ray image starting this thread.
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