Computer Graphics, From One Extreme End to Another

Computers are a completely new invention in relation to the history of man. But in such a short time of under a century, computers have made an unimaginably contribution to our lives and become integrated in such a way that was completely unforeseen.

One of the major ways we use computers is to play games on them, and because of this the evolution of computer graphics has exponentially increased its pace, starting from 8-bit character models to the game textures (or detail and resolution) of such degree that they are now photo-realistic thus making that virtual world you are playing much more immersive and enjoyable.

A short history of the major developments in computer graphics starts in 1998 where 16-bit depth with color and textures were developed. Then in 1999, multi-texture 32-bit rendering emereged. From there cube maps, texture compression, and antripsopic filtering. In 2001 programmable vertex, 3d textures, shadow maps, and multisampling. In 2002 early z-cull and dual-monitor capability was added. In 2003 fragment programs and color and depth compression. In 2004 flow control, and floating point textures, and valve texture control, in 2005 transparency antialiasing, in 2006 unifided shaders, geometry shaders, and in 2007 double precision.

That is to say, each of  these things are incredibly complex, but in an extremely summarized version, developers continued to push the definition and detail of what they were able to incorporate into games and improved on software and hardware in computers that would help to render these images efficiently and quickly.

A 16-bit images compared next to current generation photorealistic graphics

http://www.nvidia.com/content/nvision2008/tech_presentations/Technology_Keynotes/NVISION08-Tech_Keynote-GPU.pdf