Since the earliest games of Ping Pong and Pac man, graphics have evolved quite a bit. The technology in which to render them has also evolved into complex and speedy graphics processing units. From primitive software acceleration to the current hardware and software acceleration, graphics have become more efficient, more complex, and most importantly, more beautiful than ever before. Just take a look at official screenshots from the Doom press release from 1993:

Now compare these screen shots to those from Doom 3 released just this year (click for larger picture:

As you can tell, the texturing, shading, smoothness, appeal, and color are much improved in Doom 3 to say the least. This just shows how far we have come in a little over a decade. We can expect to see graphics continue to improve at a higher rate than from 1993-2004. By 2006, we may start seeing graphics such as those able to be rendered with the Unreal 3 Engine.

However, these improvements don’t arise on their own without the aid of a few tricks, if you will. Bilinear and Trilinear Filtering are excellent effects produced by video cards today.

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