[crtified]

I remember working in this field about 15-20 years ago. And separately, in my spare time, playing video games like Crysis. It was quite apparent even then, that video games were generally light years ahead at visualisation.

Back then, one could - using professional, multi-thousand-dollar software, and expensive services like land surveyors - painstakingly, manually build up a small-scale 3D scene encompassing an individual owners land. The result would look average/generic, and the rendering performance and navigation limitations would be abysmal.

On that same PC, one could then load up Crysis, marvel at the vastly superior output, navigability, and point-of-view realism - covering massive land areas - and think 'Holy Shiz, if I could just get my data into this, it'd be a revelation, industry-changing'.

It's great to see how things are progressing.

[Shorel]

This shows how insanely optimized game engines are, and game development in general.

All enterprise software is optimised in man/hours, as in the maximum amount of features for some given hours of work. Enterprise customers will then invest in the extra hardware, because "developers are more expensive than computers".

Games can't afford that, they need to run in many different kinds of shitty and good hardware, so it is optimised over and over, by very dedicated and underpaid developers. And they mostly code in C++. But games are sold by the millions, so it's a different market.