Let’s compare two completely separate games to a game and a remaster.
Generational leaps then:
Good lord.
EDIT: That isn’t even the Zero Dawn remaster. That is literally two still-image screenshots of Forbidden West on both platforms.
Good. Lord.
I mean, how much more photorealistic can you get? Regardless, the same game would look very different in 4K (real, not what consoles do) vs 1080p.
This is true of literally any technology. There are so many things that can be improved in the early stages that progress seems very fast. Over time, the industry finds most of the optimal ways of doing things and starts hitting diminishing returns on research & development.
The only way to break out of this cycle is to discover a paradigm shift that changes the overall structure of the industry and forces a rethinking of existing solutions.
The automobile is a very mature technology and is thus a great example of these trends. Cars have achieved optimal design and slowed to incremental progress multiple times, only to have the cycle broken by paradigm shifts. The most recent one is electrification.
tbf I went from Wii to PS4 and shit a brick
I wouldn’t mind like a new style of controller like maybe a fleshlight with buttons on the side or something
Ironically, Zelda Link to the Past ran at 60fps, and Ocarina of Time ran at 20fps.
The same framerates are probably in the Horizon pictures below lol.
Now, Ocarina of Time had to run at 20fps because it had one of the biggest draw distances of any N64 game at the time. This was so the player could see to the other end of Hyrule Field, or other large spaces. They had to sacrifice framerate, but for the time it was totally worth the sacrifice.
Modern games sacrifice performance for an improvement so tiny that most people would not be able to tell unless they are sitting 2 feet from a large 4k screen.
Had to, as in “they didn’t have enough experience to optimize the games”. Same for Super Mario 64. Some programmers decompiled the code and made it run like a dream on original hardware.
The programming knowledge did not exist at the time. Its not that they did not have the experience, it was impossible for them to have the knowledge because it did not exist at the time. You can’t really count that against them.
Kaze optimizing Mario 64 is amazing, but it would have been impossible for Nintendo to have programmed the game like that because Kaze is able to use programming technique and knowledge that literally did not exist at the time the N64 was new. Its like saying that the NASA engineers that designed the Atlas LV-3B spacecraft were bad engineers or incapable of making a good rocket design just because of what NASA engineers could design today with the knowledge that did not exist in the 50s.
when i was a smol i thought i needed to buy the memory expansion pack whenever OoT fps tanked.
Has anyone ever really noticed how samey everything looks right now? It’s a bit hard to explain, because it’s not the aesthetics of any kind of art style used, but the tech employed and how it’s employed. Remember how a lot of early 3D in film just looked like it was plastic? It’s like that, but with a wider variety of materials than plastic. Yet every modern game kinda looks like it’s made using toys.
Like, 20 years from now I think it would be possible to look at any given game that is contemporary right now and be able to tell by how it looks when it was made. The way PS1 era games have a certain quality to them that marks when they were made, or how games of the early 2000’s are denoted by their use of browns and grays.
Yes, definitely. It has to be that they’re all using the exact same engines and methods or something.
My guess is a lot of convergence to a smaller set of known game engines. Godot, unreal, unity, plus a few others and some in-house like valves source.
I could be wrong but I presume in the past almost every game was made with its own custom engine. Now a lot of them have the “unreal engine” look.
But I’m not complaining. Looks great to me and leads to better performance and fewer bugs in the long run. Of course there are some caveats
Oh yeah this isn’t a complaint, because I think it looks good. It’s just I notice it, and it probably is from almost everything being made on UE5 these days. However, I think MGSV was one of the first games to have this particular look to it, and that’s on its own in-house engine (FOX Engine). It could just be how the lighting and shadowing are done. Those two things are getting so close to photorealism that it’s the texturing and modeling work that puts things (usually human characters) into the uncanny valley. A scene of a forest can look so real… And then you put a person walking through it and the illusion is lost. lol
And they’re shocked that no one bought the PS5 pro for 800 dollars
Kind of like smartphones. They all kind of blew up into this rectangular slab, and…
Nothing. It’s all the same shit. I’m using a OnePlus 6T from 2018, and I think I’ll have it easily for another 3 years. Things eventually just stagnate.
I miss physical keyboards on phones
I was hoping that eventually smartphones would evolve to do everything. Especially when things like Samsung Dex were intorduced, it looked to me like maybe in the future phones could replace desktops, running a full desktop OS when docked and some simplified mobile UI + power saving when in mobile mode.
But no, I only have a locked-down computer.
Maybe make the rectangular slab smaller again?
What do you expect next? Folding phones? That would be silly!
The question is whether “realism” was ever a good target. The best games are not the most realistic ones.
A Link to the Past > Ocarina of Time
Fight me
not really. plenty of great games have visual fidelity as a prerequisite of being good.
i dont think rdr2 would be such a beautiful immersive experience if it had crappy graphics.
So many retro games are replayable and fun to this day, but I struggle to return to games whose art style relied on being “cutting edge realistic” 20 years ago.
I dunno, Crysis looks pretty great on modern hardware and its 18 years old.
Also, CRYSIS IS 18 WHERE DID THE TIME GO?
STALKER is good, though I played a lot of Anomaly mostly, and I’m not sure that STALKER was ever known for bleeding edge graphics
Really? Cause I don’t know, I can play Shadow of the Colossus, Resident Evil 4, Metal Gear Solid 3, Ninja Gaiden Black, God of War, Burnout Revenge and GTA San Andreas just fine.
And yes, those are all 20 years ago. You are now dead and I made it happen.
As a side note, man, 2005 was a YEAR in gaming. That list gives 1998 a run for its money.
Did those go for realism though, or were they just good at balancing the more detailed art design with the gameplay?
Absolutely they went for realism. That was the absolute peak of graphics tech in 2004, are you kidding me? I gawked at the fur in Shadow of the Colossus, GTA was insane for detail and size for an open world at the time. Resi 4 was one of the best looking games that gen and when the 360 came out later that year it absolutely was the “last gen still looked good” game people pointed at.
I only went for that year because I wanted the round number, but before that Silent Hill 2 came out in 2001 and that was such a ridiculous step up in lighting tech I didn’t believe it was real time when the first screenshots came out. It still looks great, it still plays… well, like Silent Hill, and it’s still a fantastic game I can get back into, even with the modern remake in place.
This isn’t a zero sum game. You don’t trade gameplay or artistry for rendering features or photorealism. Those happen in parallel.
They clearly balanced the more detailed art design with the game play.
GTA didn’t have detail on cars to the level of a racing game, and didn’t have characters with as much detail as Resident Evil, so that it could have a larger world for example. Colossus had fewer objects on screen so it could put more detail on what was there.
Yeah. So like every other game.
Nothing was going harder for visuals, so by default that’s what was happening. They were pushing visuals as hard as they would go with the tech that they had.
The big change isn’t that they balanced visuals and gameplay. If anything the big change is that visuals were capped by performance rather than budget (well, short of offline CG cutscenes and VO, I suppose).
If anything they were pushing visuals harder than now. There is no way you’d see a pixel art deck building game on GOTY lists in 2005, it was all AAA as far as the eye could see. We pay less attention to technological escalation now, by some margin.
Yeah. So like every other game.
Except for the ones that don’t do a good job of balancing the two things. Like the games that have incredible detail but shit performance and/or awful gameplay.
Idk, I’d say that pursuing realism is worthy, but you get diminishing returns pretty quick when all the advances are strictly in one (or I guess two, with audio) sense. Graphical improvements massively improved the experience of the game moving from NES or Gameboy to SNES and again to PS1 and N64. I’d say that the most impressive leap, imo, was PS1/N64 to PS2/XBox/GameCube. After that, I’d say we got 3/4 of the return from improvements to the PS3 generation, 1/2 the improvement to PS4 gen, 1/5 the improvement to PS5, and 1/8 the improvement when we move on to PS5 Pro. I’d guess if you plotted out the value add, with the perceived value on the Y and the time series or compute ability or texture density or whatever on the x, it’d probably look a bit like a square root curve.
I do think that there’s an (understandably, don’t get me wrong) untapped frontier in gaming realism in that games don’t really engage your sense of touch or any of the subsets thereof. The first step in this direction is probably vibrating controllers, and I find that it definitely does make the game feel more immersive. Likewise, few games engage your proprioception (that is, your knowledge of your body position in space), though there’ve been attempts to engage it via the Switch, Wii, and VR. There’s, of course, enormous technical barriers, but I think there’s very clearly a good reason why a brain interface is sort of thought of as the holy grail of gaming.
Having a direct brain interface game, that’s realistic enough to overcome the Uncanny Valley, would destroy peoples lives. People would, inevitably, prefer their virtual environment to the real one. They’d end up wasting away, plugged into some machine. It would lend serious credence to the idea of a simulated universe, and reduce the human experience by replacing it with an improved one. Shit, give me a universe wherein I can double-jump, fly, or communicate with animals, and I’d have a hard time returning to this version.
We could probably get close with a haptic feedback suit, a mechanism that allows you to run/jump in any direction, and a VR headset, but there would always be something tethering you to reality. But a direct brain to machine interaction would have none of that, it would essentially be hijacking our own electrical neural network to run simulations. Much like Humans trying to play Doom on literally everything. It would be as amazing as it was destructive, finally realizing the warnings from so many parents before its time: “that thing’ll fry your brain.”
Tbf, it’s kinda bullshit that we can’t double jump IRL. Double jumping just feels right, like it’s something we should be able to do.
Yeah, no, it’d likely be really awful for us. I mean, can you imagine what porn would be like on that? That’s a fermi paradox solution right there. I could see the tech having a lot of really great applications, too, like training simulations for example, but the video game use case is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.
I agree generally, but I have to offer a counterpoint with Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I only just got back into it after bouncing off in 2019, and I wish I hadn’t stopped playing. I have a decent-ish PC and it still blows my entire mind when I go roaming around the countryside.
Like Picard said above, in due time this too will look aged, but even 7 years on, it looks and plays incredible even at less-than-highest settings. IMHO the most visually impressive game ever created (disclaimer: I haven’t seen or played Horizon). Can’t wait to play KC:D 2!
Factorio and Balatro
Like cgi and other visual effects, realism has some applications that can massively improve the experience in some games. Just like how lighting has a massive impact, or sound design, etc.
Chasing it at the expense of game play or art design is a negative though.
It’s the right choice for some games and not for others. Just like cinematography, there’s different styles and creators need to pick which works best for what they’re trying to convey. Would HZD look better styled like Hi-Fi Rush? I don’t really think so. GOW? That one I could definitely see working more stylized.
The improvement levels are the same amount they used to be. It’s just that adding 100mhz to a 100mhz processor doubles your performance, adding 100mhz to a modern processor adds little in comparison as a for instance.
Well, that’s what Moore’s Law was for. The processing power does increase massively over each generation. It’s just that at this point better graphics are less noticeable. There is not much difference to the eye between 100.000 and a million or more polygons.
We’ve basically reached the top. Graphics fidelity is just down to what the artists do with it.
I disagree ( that we have reached the top).
Go watch a high budget animated movie (think Pixar or Disney) and come back when real time rendered graphics look like that.
Yea games look good, but real time rendering is still not as good as pre rendered (and likely will never be). Modern games are rife with clipping, and fakery.
If you watch the horizon forbidden West intro scene (as an example), and look at the details, how hair falls on characters shoulders, how clothing moves in relation to bodies, etc, and compare it to something like inside out 2, it’s a world of difference.
If we can pre render it, then in theory it’s only a matter of time before we can real time render it.
yeah but the right hand pic has twenty billion more triangles that are compressed down and upscaled with AI so the engine programmers dont have to design tools to optimise art assets.
It just works™
Eventually we hit a limit to how round we could make car tires.
Rush on the N64 had octagonal tires and real damage! I still play it every year or so.
Oh it’s a bit of a running joke that every time there’s a new Forza or Gran Turismo, they brag about how round the tires are and how wet the pavement looks.
Don’t get me started on Horizon: Forbidden West. It was a beautiful game. It also had every gameplay problem the first one did, and added several more to boot. The last half of the game was fucking tedious, and I basically finished it out of spite.
Awww.
I enjoyed the heck out of the first one, especially the story. Haven’t gotten around to picking up the 2nd so that’s a bummer to read.
I’d say it’s still worth playing, but the story is way more predictable, and they made some things more grindy to upgrade than they were in the first one. Also they added robots that are even more of a slog to fight through.
Those giant turtles are bullshit and just not fun.
If it helps, I loved both.
Very much same. I wish the Burning Shores expansion was a bit longer. It’s kinda hard to call it a must-play DLC, but it’s got some big stuff in terms of Aloy’s character development.
If You liked the stealth aspects of the first game then there is no point in starting the second. The stealth is gone. It’s also more difficult. The equipment is much more complicated.
I enjoyed learning the backstory of the first one, but I was very disinterested in the story, as in, what is currently happening.
I agree. I loved the first game, considered it one of my favourites. Couldn’t wait for the sequel. I was so disappointed, I abandoned it after a couple of hours.
I loved both. Different strokes…
Why not do apples to apples?
I mean, the original image is a cutscene, so…
But hey, I’ll split the difference. Instead of SMB 1, which was a launch game and literally wasn’t running on the same hardware (because mappers), we can do Mario 3 instead.
Or, hear me out, let’s not do a remaster at all for current gen leaps. Here’s a PS4 vs PS5 sequel one.
It doesn’t work as well, though, since taking the absolutely ridiculous shift from 2D to 3D, which has happened once and only once in all of gaming history, is a bit of a cheat anyway.
Oh, and for the record, and I can’t believe I’m saying this only now, LttP looks a LOT better than OoT. Not even close.
Oh I don’t care about leap comparisons, was just taking interest at how graphics have evolved over time. To be honest graphics have been going downhill for a few years now in big games thanks to lazy development chasing “good” graphics, fucking TAA…
I agree that it’s a meme comparison anyway. I just found it pertinent to call out that remasters have been around for a long time.
I don’t know that I agree on the rest. I don’t think I’m aware of a lazy game developer. That’s a pretty rare breed. TAA isn’t a bad thing (how quickly we forget the era when FXAA vaseline smearing was considered valid antialiasing for 720p games) and sue me, but I do like good visuals.
I do believe we are in a very weird quagmire of a transitional period, where we’re using what is effectively now a VFX suite to make games that aren’t meant to run in real time on most of the hardware being used to run them and that are simultaneously too expensive and large and aiming at waaay too many hardware configs. It’s a mess out there and it’ll continue to be a mess, because the days of a 1080Ti being a “set to Ultra and forget it” deal were officially over the moment we decided we were going to sell people 4K monitors running at 240Hz and also games made for real time raytracing.
It’s not the only time we’ve been in a weird interaction of GPUs and software (hey, remember when every GPU had its own incompatible graphics API? I do), but it’s up there.
TAA is absolutely a bad thing, I’m sorry, but it’s way worse than FXAA, especially when combined with the new ML upscaling shit.
It’s only really a problem with big games or more specifically UE5 games as temporal is baked into it.Yeah, there was that perfect moment in time where you could just put everything max, have some nice SMAA on and be happy with >120fps. The 4K chase started yeah, but the hardware we have now is ridiculously powerful and could run 4K 120fps no problem natively, if the time was spent achiveing that rather than throwing in more lighting effects no one asked for, speed running development and then slapping DLSS on at the end to try and reach playable framerates, making the end product a blurry ghosting mess. Ugh.
Hell, no. 120 fps wasn’t even a thing. That flash in the pan moment was when 1080p60 was the PC standard and 720p30 the console standard and the way the hardware worked you could hit max specs on a decent PC every time. It lasted like three or four years and it was wonderful.
By the point we started going above the NTSC spec on displays the race was lost. The 20 series came out, people started getting uppity about framerate while playing some 20 year old game and it all went to crap on the PC front.
As for AA, I don’t think you remember FXAA well, or at least in relation to what we have. ML upscaling is so much sharper than any tech we had a couple of gens ago, short of MSAA (and frankly even MSAA). The problems that have become familiar in many UE5 games are not intrinsic to the tech, they have a lot to do with what the engine does out of the box and just how out of spec some of the feature work is.
I feel like people have gotten stuck with some memes (no motion blur! DLSS bad! TAA bad!) that are mostly nostalgic of how sharp 1080p used to look compared to garbage-tier sub 720p, sub 30 fps console games. It’s getting to the point where I have so many major gripes with a lot of modern games but I feel it becomes one of those conversations you can’t have in public because it gets derailed immediately.
In any case I think we can at least agree that it’s been an awkward couple of generations of PC hardware and software for whatever reason and GPUs, engines and displays need to get realigned in a way where people can just fire up games and expect them to look and run as designed.
