Yes, definitely. I think lighting is the next really big step. Folks have thrown thousands and thousands of polygons at the characters, and they’ve opened up the levels so we’re not constantly loading the levels every five minutes. So we’ve done a lot to expand the space where the action takes place, we’ve populated the space with more characters, and we’ve made those characters more high-definition. But our lighting model is still messed up. And again, going back to the Hollywood example, people would say, “That’s great—you’ve got a lot of actors and you’ve got this big set, but if it’s not lit correctly, what are you doing?” I think that folks will take different approaches to how they’re attacking this problem, but I think you’re going to see a theme amongst those who are making games, specifically those who are making game engines like us, Id, and Epic.

Right now, it’s getting to be a point of diminishing returns on the graphics side. But on the lighting side, there are still a lot of gains to be made. Games definitely follow those trends of technology that catch on. Once somebody has physics in a game and it works, about every game now has to have physics in it. Once Id introduced GL Quake, all of a sudden graphics acceleration became something you had to have. So hopefully this will be a really big advance that folks will see.

Will HDR become a standard for this kind of lighting technology? 

I think we’re going to see a lot of people implement it differently, both from how it manifests itself to the user as well as how they’re doing the magic underneath the hood. I think it’ll take a while for a certain method to be addressed as like, “These guys did it best.” You’ll always see people doing it a little bit differently based on what kind of game they’re trying to do. And the bottom line is that as long as everybody’s moving this forward, it’s good for gamers. Back when hardware acceleration came out, there was Direct3D and GL and a couple of other custom APIs that people used to do hardware acceleration. And while that caused some minor pains for gamers, at the end of the day it was good, right? Today, all games are graphically accelerated, all games look a ton better. I think this is going to be a similar type of phase that people have to work through, and at the end of the day somebody’s going to arrive at something that looks like a standard the way that Direct3D has become on the graphics side. But as long as people are moving this ball forward, I think it’s good for everybody, and it’s probably too early in the race to declare a winner.

Do you think next-generation consoles will be able to handle HDR technology?

Yeah. I think if folks want to see what’s going to happen on next-generation consoles, they should be paying very close attention to what’s going on with the PC right now. ATI is going to be the part in some of the consoles, and NVIDIA is going to be the part in some of the other consoles. And they’re deploying all the stuff they want to bring to those consoles on the PC right now to test out what works and what resonates with consumers. Right now is a real interesting time in the PC space because it’s somewhat of a predictor of what’s going to make it into those boxes in the years to come.