How powerful does a PC have to be...

I'm looking at the game The Secret World, and I wondered, how powerful does a computer have to be for the in-game to look as good as the cut-scenes?They can always make the cut scenes so realistic looking, they way it's done in movies, yet the in-game always gets toned down because it just seems computer can't handle it. Or can it? Is it that maybe you'd have to be Bill Gates rich to be able to afford one?How powerful does a PC have to be...
Don't know about that game, but in many games the cutscenes are pre-rendered, so they look great on all computers. Some games do cutscenes in-engine, so here the specs of your computer have a say on the quality.How powerful does a PC have to be...
That's because everything you see on screen in game is based on information given to your computer in real time, which means your computer has to draw out the scene 30+ times per second to give you fluid video. The cutscenes are just video files that your computer has to playback, predetermined data. Those are probably just rendered on a workstation computer at nowhere near real time rendering. As for movie style CGI, that's usually done on a large computer grid, or mini super computer that has lots of CPUs working together at once, even that can't render the scene in real time.
Cut-scenes are pre-rendered. Rendering can take between a few minutes for a low end cutscene to 2 weeks for a CG movie.The low end use workstation PCs ie:The mid range use workstation clustersThe high end use huge rack based clusters like this one which is Pixar's currentUnless you have a few $1,000,000 to spend on a render farm you're not going to get cutscene visuals at a playable framerate.
[QUOTE=''markop2003''][/QUOTE]Righto, Render farms are enourmous. For example, the realistic water fluid dynamics used in Pirates of the Carribean 3 took a render farm hundreds of hours just to compute a few seconds of footage. The processing power that it takes to create the imagery used is immense, but the processing power to display it is very little. Now that video game graphics are improving, we are seeing fewer and fewer pre-rendered cutscenes which add for a more fluid game experience. This also allows for changes in character costumes or appearance to take place in real time.Some games (Mass Effect for example) have improved the art of an in-game cutscene to a near masterful point. Some games, such as Dead Space or Half Life 2 have scripted cutscene-like events happen in real time that look amazing. Other games (ie. Fable II) just haven't caught up with the standards of today. (Fable II had atrocious, mechanical in game cutscenes.)