Originally, only 'paintings' looked 'real'
e.g. cartoons
Over time, animators tried to get closer and closer to reality...
...whilst, at the same time, the gamer-writer's craft moved from pure machine code to assembler to peeking and poking
I remember seeing 'Einstein's face' and 'Marylin Monroe' on a Victor 'PC' with an Amber screen and thinking 'Wow! Graphics is finally here'
But, of course, that was still a 'painting'
For ages, computer games would have amazing 'paintings' on their packaging, that bore no resemblence whatsoever to the game inside
Gradually, however, game designers have made the 'offer' match closer and closer to the 'advert'
Physics and simulations are the next of these
Instead of a team of uber-gurus at NASA, Stanford or Oxford sitting around running non-graphical simulations of how a microcosm of the world would look if 'Rock 176565' were to bound on top of 'Rock 987678' from a height of 3.2 metres with a tailwind...
...we can now see that kind of stuff on the screen
In fact, we can see tens of thousands of these impacts
Same goes for water, smoke and a host of other pyrotechnic effects
Traditionally, these guys have been looking at CPU emulation
At some point, using an ultra-threaded, ultra-parallel graphics core (or four) makes sense
Add in procedural game development etc and you have the stuff of next-gen-games...
...where the 'content' looks way better than the 'advert'
BTW Nick: Just to confirm - ALL the best people are Geminis