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I want to understand the reason, if you were running lets say some new 3d game i.e. battlefield 3, your 3d stuff would render so good and fast. With dynamic shape, lighting, and opacity. While photoshop can take easily an hour.

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Because when you're playing the game it's already "rendered" it just needs to load. Everywhere else it needs to be created and then displayed. – Johannes Jan 24 at 16:17
"real-time rendering is often done for 3D video games" – Muhammad Umer Jan 24 at 16:23
Muhammad, "real-time" rendering (with various settings) is offen done for 3D video games is not quite true. As Johanes sstated, the game rendering is already done. That is to say that all of the materials have been baked and saved out. In addition, most of the lighting in game is already baked into the textures. There's a big difference between rendering a scene in photoshop and a prebaked model/material/texture/light set in a game. In addition, Photoshop is calculating AO, GI,Refraction, Reflection, caustics, etc... almost all games do not do that in real-time. Cheers! – Kevin Bomberry Jan 24 at 20:51
Even where games composite things in real time, the layers already exist pre-rendered. Game designers have to wait a long time for their rendering too. Hopefully not as long as I do, since my machine isn't optimized for it ;) – plainclothes Jan 25 at 0:08

closed as off topic by John, Yisela♦, plainclothes, Scott, e100 Jan 25 at 10:18

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1 Answer

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The difference between "real-time" rendering and rendering inside of software is that the game is optimized for what it's rendering. This means that the game knows what's going to happen, it can pre-calculate and it can render lower resolution textures if it needs to (which, most of the time it does).

Software on the other hand concentrates on quality and precision. It doesn't know what will happen until you tell it to do something. The algorithms are more generalized and may be a bit slower when compared to those of game engines.

Here is a helpful discussion I found one the subject.

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