The movie Avatar—and, more recently, Blue Sky’s The Crudes—has raised the bar on our expectations of virtual worlds. With a massive amount of geometry and special effects, even a single frame of the Avatar world took a reported 30–50 hours to render. In real time, we hope to have at least 30 frames per second. Obviously, something must be sacrificed. Figure 1-6 depicts a world that, in 2003, was pre-rendered only with 1.5 million polygons and special effects. Today, in real time, this scene easily achieves a high enough frame rate to be used as a game environment—even before optimization.