Tomcat If this approach always won out, we'd still be living in caves.
If the opposite of this approach always won, "we" would end up a civilization that sacrifices every bit of joy on the altar of unconditional progress.
I wouldn't mind living in a cave btw. Have you ever been in one? It's quite comfy. Every single piece of architecture ever built is just an attempt to artificially re-create the original living-in-a-cave experience.
xyz I wouldn't mind living in a cave btw. Have you ever been in one?
Uh… are you familiar with the term "speleology"? I was into it when I was younger. And karst caves and catacombs. So stories about the delights of cave life don't work on me at all — I know the reality from personal experience. Caves with toilets, hot water and central heating?
If the opposite of this approach always won, "we" would end up a civilization that sacrifices every bit of joy on the altar of unconditional progress.
The joy is in utilizing the fruits of progress. Reasonable, of course. With hedonism, certainly. 
The humor is that now I am considering options to move from the city "to nature", including caves. But not out of love for primitive life, but because of the political situation. And I am not very happy about it, as I am well aware of the accompanying problems.
Tomcat but because of the political situation
See that's a bummer with lots and lots of technological progress. It creates a lot of power. And all that power can eventually end up in the hands of your political opponents. Who can turn into tyrants. This includes the power to compute. Which can turn into power to surveil.
Something to be aware of when yelping for more progress.
xyz Not sure how many fruits of hedonism can be extracted from non existent quantum computers and previous millennium vector displays though.
A lot. But why the previous one? Simply technology has made a circle (or rather a spiral) and can return to the idea on a new level.
And all that power can eventually end up in the hands of your political opponents.
We should not worry about it. Especially looking at the current situation. In brief, in this case everything happens because of the clinical stupidity of our (Russian) government. How this happened is a long and very political topic. But we can confidently say that the perpetrators of these events are simply unable to understand and use new technologies (they don't really understand the technologies of the last century). So the result is already clear. "Who will win is clear. It is not clear how many more will die."
Soviet military technology has always lagged behind Western technology precisely because of its secondary nature. I could tell many anecdotes from reality on this subject.
I forgot to add about the electric light in the caves.
xyz You're hijacking the thread with contemporary political crap again.
And all I did was try to answer the question:
xyz Why?
I'd much rather return to discussing (im)possibilities of realistic parallax that pops out of surface geometry.
It seems to have already been decided that this requires a breakthrough in technology?
Tomcat It seems to have already been decided that this requires a breakthrough in technology?
of ten, fifteen years ago. I guess.
Megalomaniak Obviously you have to decimate the end result somehow, my thought was simply that you could do so by pixel rather than vertice. OpenSubdiv is indeed close, I heard of it and remember Blender was waiting to get it for a long time... not sure if it's the same thing, but what I'm thinking of can pretty much be summed up as "GPU side subdivision surface". Thanks for mentioning Reyes too, I wasn't aware of that one and it seems very close: The image of the pot is exactly the result I was thinking of for this thread, what I was hoping deep parallax could do as you look at its edges.
xyz Definitely not passing judgment on anything! As I said I understand there's probably a reason why this didn't catch on: I just suspect it must be mathematically possible, either it was too inefficient or something else kept GPU's or OpenGL from doing it. It's just one of those things that gets you wishing, like when you play with parallax and see how realistic the depth looks but then you look at an edge and it's still sharp and you're like "was there really no way they could have done this too" 
MirceaKitsune As I said I understand there's probably a reason why this didn't catch on: I just suspect it must be mathematically possible, either it was too inefficient or something else kept GPU's or OpenGL from doing it
Who do you think is doing it for subdiv surfaces in Blender? It's likely a compute shader in your GPU. The concept of non-linear primitives is just not universal enough (nor algorithmically efficient enough) to be worthy of implementation in the low level rasterization pipeline of a standard GPU, whereas triangles are.
Using triangles, you can do "infinite" levels of subdiv surface tessellation in real time without problems. Effectively appearing perfectly smooth and running entirely on the GPU, exactly like you wish for. You just need to code it yourself because it doesn't come pre-packaged inside graphics cards, for the reason I mentioned above.
