Take alook at this picture and tell me, is this real or a computer generated image?

Those who have the gamers eye know its generated right away, those that don't play games will take a few extra seconds to figure it out, and I will comeback to those who don't play games later.

The image you see is of super model Adrianne Curry and has been generated from Nvidias latest card the GeForce G80/8800 series of GPUs, now I could give you a load of tech crap about Pixel Shaders and Floating Points, or a load of graphs and pie charts like this one.

Instead Im going to talk about how this effects us, you see the G80 is one of the biggest leaps in GFX technology in sometime, the G80 is like having 2 PS3's sitting on the card it's that frekking powerful. It's the first card to be built solely for DirectX10 the new graphics API coming with Vista. DirectX10 while adding new features is more about tidying things up which have been added to DirectX over the last few years.

So lets go back to the first picture and the point of this post, should we be worried as a gamer?

I think very much yes, the problem games are going to face in the coming years is how real is real, and who is going to decide enough is enough.

We all know its fake, we all know its virtual, some wont see it as that and some I mean not gamers, their only going to see how real it looks and should we be playing something this life like, and the more real it looks the more people will start to have opinions, and try to censor what we play.

Take the hassle Bully had in the states from the tabloid press, it's amazing to me that so called journalist are still not wise to Rockstar's tactics of bad press makes more sales, and that's why we love em and the fact they make **** hot games, anyway imagine having a game like Bully with that degree of graphics detail, its shocking when you think about it, it goes beyond it's cartoonish nature.

Just Imagine what's around the corner when your unloading a full clip into someone's face and you see every shocking detail as the face is being ripped apart piece by piece from the skeleton, or your bashing some guys skull in with a baseball bat and you see chunks of brain and his teeth falling out in such amazing detail, now im no prude I love gunning down mofos but I have to start to question playing these games when they go beyond the cartoonish nature and look to realistic, and if that does happen then games are in for a very very rough ride.

There will be a bigger backlash to games that use over the top violence with life like graphics, and for once this backlash from the uninformed will have serious weight behind it and rightly so, games will be getting ever closer to outright censorship, and damn it! artistic freedom is what makes games great, but designers need to think how there games will be received by the none gaming populace and it becomes even more important as we get ever closer to photorealism. They need to play it smart.(and I don't want to contradict myself)

It all comes down to us as gamers to voice our opinions, now most developers know the score and will never go to such graphic details, but there's always one willing to take it to the extreme to guarantee sales, so then we need to standup and say NO!, because the last thing we need is censorship and if that ever happend to games, it will be the end of what we love.

Sorry for the quick post, its the first thoughts that came to me when I saw the nice ladies pictures, apart from the obvious, and I know you would.