[pdelbarba]

I think it depends on context. There are a lot of sim games where the environment is very controlled and forums are littered with people who can't tell whether the occasional picture is real or in-game. A forest is hard to render accurately but a plane in flight is pretty trivial

[i-am-curious]

Forests have pretty much been solved. Look at games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, forest looks amazing. The difficulty now is limited to finer details, like hair. Hair is still pretty much unsolved.

[sillysaurusx]

See? It’s almost deterministic. People really can’t accept that we don’t know how to do something.

Plop a nature video next to your forest rendering and it’ll become apparent just how unsolved trees are. And everything else, for that matter.

The precise claim is this: viewers should be able to identify a rendered video no better than random chance. If you conduct this experiment, you’ll see that real videos from actual video cameras wipe the floor.