A game engine alone cannot achieve photorealism at scale because rendering explicit detail is prohibitively expensive for most creators and players.

Game engines handle state, rules, and physics exactly, but photorealism requires expensive rendering of high-resolution textures, complex lighting, and material simulations. Engines cut corners with baked lighting and simplified objects. Reaching true photorealism demands more skill and hardware than most creators and players have. ✦ AI generated

Anupam Singh · ByteByteGo Newsletter · 2026-07-21 · original ↗

Photorealism is where engines struggle. To make a world look real, the engine has to render all of that detail explicitly: high resolution textures, complex lighting, and simulation for effects like light scattering through fog or the way different materials reflect it. All of that is expensive to compute, and it only gets more expensive the more realistic you push it. So engines cut corners. They bake lighting ahead of time instead of calculating it live, swap in simpler versions of objects that are far away, reuse textures, or lean on a stylized look that hides the missing detail.

Read full article ↗excerpt · fair-use quotation