[whatshisface]

Movie CGI is already photorealistic. Minecraft is not. You can add an arbitrary (and exponentially growing) computational cost to your game by making the world more dynamic. The games we look at today as paragons of cg advancent are really just static meshes with a few small entities running around. Any step away from pre-baked, pre-compiled and pre-made content will easily consume as many years of tech advancement as you let it. (For evidence, look at how long a modern level editor takes to bake in something as relatively simple as lighting.)