I recall a lot of hype more than a decade ago about all the textures going away and being replaced with math formulas to generate everything on the fly. Games were supposed to get dramatically smaller. What ever happened to that?
And there was also the opposite, John Carmack in particular didn't have a problem with using huge amount of data, "Rage" is an application of this idea. The game uses a single, huge, non-repeating "megatexture", with elaborate caching strategies to keep it playable even on slow media (HDD/optical). The idea was to give complete freedom to artists and not require them to be mathematicians. Further down the line, he even considered using sparse voxel octrees, i.e. even more huge 3D textures.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Inigo Quilez ( https://iquilezles.org/ ). He literally draws with maths, and he is famous for his 4k demoscene productions. The problem is that about no one else is capable of doing what he does.
I see that Inigo Quilez work is more in the "render a scene not necesarily in real time" realm. Like, you could make a raytracing program, make it render off camera a shiny scene, and only after rendering it shows you the image.
Because of this, its very suited to math and procedural generation. You just change some parameters, render and show. Games instead have to do this in real time, with less latency and CPU/GPU usage. And procedural/math generated content tends to be CPU heavy (more usage+latency), if not also on the GPU (cant be cached, etc).
Shaders are more on the middle of this, because you want to apply certains transformations to and from rendering data.
It is an order of magnitude more expensive to produce art assets that way than to just hire people familiar with photoshop and maya. Those procedurally generated assets in tech demos like .kkrieger were just that: tech demos.
Asset production is already the bulk of the cost of AAA video game production.
Economics. Supply and demand. To create good procedural art you have to hire software engineers with artistic talent, which are more expensive than the texture and model artists you can find by the hundreds coming out of art schools.
> all the textures going away and being replaced with math formulas to generate everything on the fly.
Anyone who thought this was incredibly naive.
I look around my room and try to think about what textures could be generated procedurally. My walls, carpet, and ceiling? Yeah, sure. The stickers on my computer? No way.
Does it have to be one or the other and not both? I think your room could have textures for small items like stickers but the house itself could be a semi-static procedure? Maybe the tricky part would be group parties that have to share the procedure, maybe sharing a set of procedural seeds?
