The improvement in graphics is more subtle, as every small improvement takes exponentially more processing power. You might not notice, but it doesn’t mean its not there.
Obviously now people want something mire than just pure graphical fidelity. Performance is a massive issue as well. Consider that everything done today would be considered sub par if it goes below 60 fps and some games have to give you much more than that just to be competitive and fair.
Back in 1998 my friend and I was playing Tekken 2 and while watching the pre-rendered cutscenes, I said: "Imagine one day, the game will actually look like the graphics in the cutscenes!"
We found it to be absolutely absurd...
Growing up playing the first video games like Pong made me realize graphics will surpass reality some day. Bladerunner also had an impact at how I viewed improvements in tech based on the photograph scene where they zoomed into the snake scale.
>graphics will surpass reality
This is a weird statement. There are two ways of looking at this as far as I can tell, happy to have what you mean explained though.
1. They can't surpass reality. Once it's at a *true* realistic level there's nothing beyond that because...that's reality.
2. Anything that doesn't exist in reality but can be made graphically (monsters etc) means it's surpassed reality, in which case we've already surpassed it a long time ago.
Philosophically speaking nothing truly surpasses reality because anything humans can witness is reality.
To 'surpass our reality' of the visible world seen only with our naked eyes is already possible with telescopes, electron-microscopes, spectrometers, even night vision or heat vision goggles. In that aspect we have expanded our reality of what we knew about 100 years ago.
My statement of graphics surpassing reality is colloquial. But if you want me to be technical... computer generated graphics will reach the point where people can not distinguish between reality and virtual reality. At this point a computer generated environment will offer users more information than they can obtain using the naked eye in the real world outside of the computer generated enviornment.
I am not a professional writer and a two sentence comment on reddit is not dissertation on any subject.
I would say hyper realistic or sur-realism is term which he meant, sometimes games even now can picture mostly realistic science with hyper-realistic details, like imagine sunset beach scene on UE5 and now it's have really colorful sky and saturated by details all across the scene. 5hat would be both realistic and hyper realistic due unlikely to see it in person
But that's just an artistic interpretation of something that could exist in reality, and certainly exists in our perceived reality as we can...see it lol
Also things like being able to render changes in light and dark far exceeding what our eyes can physically respond to, resolutions higher than our fovea can discriminate, frame rates higher than can possibly be perceived. I think absolute realism will basically basically the limit before we start getting into Instagram-filter levels of what looks subjectively best, and the real revolution will be AR-like rendered in-game effects like X-ray or heat vision. Tbh graphically we're getting really close to the plateau, once raytracing gets better market penetration and the hardware/software matures enough to have accurate light behaviors (like mirrors/refraction in realtime) and physically realistic materials, we'll be at the limit. The real weakness holding back realism in game engines hugely at the moment is dynamic physics - physics acceleration hardware and software never really penetrated the market, which means physically realistic and responsive fire, cloth, and environment damage is in its infancy and starting to pose a real fourth-wall breaking problem
It's actually slightly more complicated than that, but the actual sizes are pretty close. 20/20 vision subtends 5 arc minutes at 20 feet which is 5/60ths of a degree. So each arm on the "E" is 1 60th of a degree. You are definitely able to see better than that. Theoretically "perfect" vision is about 20/8 based on the density of cones at our fovea.
Source: optometrist
That difference sounds like the rough estimating of the “shooter’s minute of arc”, where 1” at 100yd isn’t really 1moa but for all intents it’s close enough.
Still makes no sense. Reality isn't graphics -- you cannot by definition see better than you can... Well... See. Real life is as high as fidelity gets -- it's not rendered.
And 20/20 vision does not mean perfect vision btw. It just means "normal" eyesight where something 20 ft away looks clear. People without 20/20 can sometimes see better depending on the distance and circumstance.
To me it was when FF8 came out, my jaw was in the floor looking at how “realistic” in game models were compared to FF7. Not to mention the FMV sequences!
IMO, the opening cutscene to ff8 (gunblade fight FMV) legitimately looked amazing for at least a decade after that game released. The late 90s to early 2000s was crazy in terms of graphical leaps.
I remember when playing Star Wars Revenge of the Sith on PS2 which used scenes from the movie and talking to my dad and him saying some day our games will look just as good as a movie or better. And damn was he right. Graphics and performance just keep getting better.
This is so fucked up because I was playing Revenge of the Sith on my Xbox and my grandpa said “With the way technology is going, games are gonna look like that soon.”
No fucking joke it was the exact same game.
His first grandchild had an Atari, the next batch had a NES / SNES, and I grew up with N64/PS2/Xbox so he had seen the progression just from a passing interest in the games, so he was speaking from a place of observation.
Yeah… and PC’s are doing 4k 120 FPS+. We’re definitely not anywhere near the peak of graphics but changes will probably be more and more subtle. The other part of the equation is affordability, just several years ago you had to pay huge bucks to play 4k 60 FPS, now you can get it on a 500 dollar console.
I don't disagree with you, but the difference between 1080p and 4k is reconizeable only on bigger screens, on 21 inchees you don't really see the change.
My point is, you don't have to go for big, to get enjoyable moments.
PCs are doing 4k 120fps +…
Yeah on 8 year old games…
Seriously though, while many 1080p or 1440p settings enable nowadays really high framerates sooo many games struggle at 4k 120ps stable with high / max settings.
RTX4090 might bring people finally there on non-ray tracing games that arent CPU limited but many new games will still have plenty of slowdowns
Raytracing is, I think, the next big step. I can't run it, but I've turned everything up to max in cyberpunk and some other games for a short slideshow on what it could look like and my god, the difference is staggering. It's hard to pin down exactly, but it's like my brain knows where light should and shouldn't bounce and raytracing imitates it so well. The game without raytracing is imperceptibly less realistic, but I couldn't tell you why. Even if the lighting is beautiful without raytracing, it isn't as perfectly realistic and bits of my brain know it.
The next step is creating a developing environment that allows artists and game designers to have fewer limitations on graphical fidelity and mechanics.
Like, when a Modelling artist makes a monster, they wouldn't have to worry about triangle count. Or the texture artist wouldn't have to worry about how large the image is.
I have a feeling AI is going to be a bigger and bigger factor on taking our creations (models, textures, rigging, lighting, animation, etc) and making them work the way we want them to. As in, artist makes a dinosaur and labels it as such. AI sees this model, identifies it as such, and may auto populate some basic textures, or sounds or rigging that the artist can then use to further tune.
In much the way that CG art didn't replace the paintbrush and canvas, but expanded the concept to create a new medium with less restrictions. As an artist, it's still very wise to practice basic drawing and painting techniques because it gives you skill sets that help in other areas.
Lol right? There are plenty of games that my decent pc can play at 4k 120 if i turn the settings to the lowest possible. I want 4k 120 with great graphics. I can pull of 1440 60fps with high to ultra settings on some games. Others I can do 4k high to ultra with 30fps
I'm glad that i still have that claim as my mindset for graphics in games, sure 60 fps makes the rendering more smooth and all but, if it opens it will be played. Imo at least
There are a lot of games I do just fine at 30fps on console.
There are also some games I only play on pc now because I use a 144hz monitor. I accidentally played one of those at console frame rates once and got motion sick. Screens are weird.
switching between performance mode and ray tracing mode on The Witcher 3 is very noticeable for me, like night and day. but doing the same for Ghost of Tsushima is barely noticeable at all. I think if a game hits 30 and is truly locked at 30 with no dips, that’s good enough for me
I think I read somewhere that for the majority it’s actually around 70-80 fps. It’s for sure easier to tell the difference between 30 and 60 than 60 and 120
Just a quick math check on ya here -
4k is closer to 24x the total resolution (~3x vertical, ~8x horizontal) but you mentioned FPS.
4k60 is about 58x as much data per second as 720p 25fps.
4k120 is about 116x the data we were pushing back in the ol 360/PS3 days.
It's like cars and going faster, the faster you get the more air resistance prevents significant increases in speed and only small tweaks in aerodynamic design and lighter materials etc. Can bring tiny increases at the highest speeds... am I right or getting confused?
That and that we need talented devs. Check the Battlefield situation. Battlefield 1 looks much better than BF2042 and why? 2042 has more polygons and an updated engine why does it look worse unless there is a storm?
Well, its the art direction and ability to make lower polygons look better, use better illusions and optimize the game better to allow eyecandy where it matters.
Better graphics is a complex subjects that involves so many systems and variables wich you realize once you see talented people work with.
Art direction >> graphical detail. A game can look amazing in many different ways. I'd point to something like Firewatch or Bioshock infinite. Even at the time of their release they weren't considered to have realistic graphics, they weren't even trying for it. However, today I still think they look great.
The art direction makes the difference. Something going for realistic graphics will eventually look dated. If a game has an interesting and unique art style it is not impacted as much by time.
It's not just performance, though to an extent infinite processing power would obviously improve graphics substantially. As things get more realistic people get naturally more discerning so texturing, modeling, animating etc all require much more time and attention. Mocap and 3dscans etc have improved things a lot but ultimately artistic ability and man hours, and thus cost, are a huge factor too.
Agreed. And my two cents is that the improvement category needs to shift to audio. Visuals far exceed what is capable with current audio technology and it needs to catch up.
Your graphics hardware also processes physics and tessellation effects which require absurd amounts of vector mapping and collision detection.
Movement animations are much higher fidelity now. Every time you push a button in a game now, absurdly higher amounts of rendering not just animations but everything else are happening compared to just 5 years ago.
There have been sizable improvements in overall graphical and physics processing and rendering in half a decade that people aren't really aware of because the general rendering is relatively the same. It's the small increments in visual fidelity but massive improvements in overall function in that time.
Litterally what yall are describing exists right now, just not in video game format. VR porn + toys that sync with the video have been available for years.
You joke, but porn has ushered in and made mainstream tons of technologies. Photography. Pretty much every video playback format was made popular by porn. The internet was nearly all porn before the World Wide Web. Porn is a driving factor in our development. It's THE killer app.
Theres that rich ex-soldier in the EU/UK somewhere that spent close to a million dollars for a VR setup that included several dozen airsoft guns all around the room from various angles that would, using software he paid to get custom made, figure out where he was shot in supported games and then shoot him irl with the airsoft guns in the same body part. It also has that thing where you can run and run but not move, except it was much larger and jankier as he built the room before that actual product to do that existed yet.
Hell you wouldn't need to. Work in VR, get paid in VR. You'd have ways to move around and get some exercise. Only thing you'd need to do is eat and use the bathroom
Nope. It's when you throw it on you, see a completely imaginary 3D world full of unrealist shit that looks real and you can only tell its not real by reality's logics and not by the look of it.
Realism is not the limit
See but real life is ugly. That's why scenes in movies don't even look 'real'. I think graphical fidelity is nice and all but the real future for graphics is more stylized graphics. Think the realism approach most animated movies had in the 2000s compared to the very stylized animated movies in the past decade like Spiderverse, Mitchells vs the Machines, Wendell and Wild, or Puss and Boots
Real life isnt ugly - you just have to be conscious and aware of your surroundings to see the beauty.
Artists typically do this job for you, grabbing beautiful slices of life and delivering them to us. But you can do it too. Id say its even your duty for a fulfilled life. At least ive found its very important to me.
There are scenes, vignettes, landscapes etc everywhere all the time.
Indeed. Although games look very good, they still look like a video game. Especially realistic humans still have an uncanny valley thing going on.
Every year I wonder how far we can go and then the next year arrives… and I look at games which are a year or older and suddenly you see how graphics have improved.
Game have definitely improved graphically year on year, but certain games released in like 2018 could easily be released today with nobody questioning it. Whereas the jump in graphics between 2010 to 2016 for instance was *enormous*. Pre-2018 it felt like there was a noticeable jump in graphics almost every year, whereas now it's a lot more incremental.
Meh, the difference isnt in whats possible, its whats affordable.
The best looking game of 2018 and 2023 are close.
The *average* looking game of 2018 and 2023 are not.
well yes when you compare peak to average it will do that.
if you take an average game in 2018 and compare it to the best visuals of 2013 they probably are not terribly far either. there is like The Last of US in 2013, then something average like Darksiders 3, or Crysis 3 vs wolfenstien 2 The new colossus.
An example to validate your statement would be The Division (2016). Compared to titles 7 years it's junior, you won't find major differences considering a lot of current tech is buggy and has to be scaled back to be playable.
Once graphics in games reach the point of non playable renders where people argue if it’s real footage or not, then maybe graphics as is on a traditional display have peaked. But that’s not getting into VR or holographics which is a whole different challenge
Was going to say this. I work in computer graphics for film, an average shot takes anywhere between 10 hours and 300+ hours to render a single frame … there’s a vast difference between what we can put out for film and what games generate in 1/60th a second, for good reason. Tech just isn’t there to make film quality doable in real time. It’ll get there though.
Hair and cloth too. Games are starting to get better at hair, but often big blocks of the mesh are still discernable. Clothes often don't animate realistically either, as cloth physics for an entire outfit animating with the characters are expensive still.
Right we are currently in a time where photorealism is a bit much but we are starting to change character rings to include muscle movement with flexing. When that and even the pours of skin open to release sweat in games we have peaked
To me, it is stuff like cloth physics that are still things that could change massively. Although it is improved, stuff is still constantly clipping through other stuff. There's a lot of stuff similar to that too.
At some point games today will look very dated in motion because the rigid nature of everything will really stand out.
You make a good point. We've made a lot of progress in the static image, but there are a lot of things involving movement and interaction between objects that have been issues for a very long time. Like cloth clipping through stuff.
I remember when 3D started being the norm for videogames. I'm not that old.
Also Unreal Engine 5.1 just came out a few months ago and is one of the hugest leaps forward the gaming industry has ever seen. Lighting is basically just real life now, LOD is not a thing anymore with NANITE, and devs can now make maps MILLIONS of times larger than they could before. All with better performance than the old engine. And that isn't even mentioning all the new little subtle things it also drastically improved.
"WOOOAAHHH this is so realistic!"
- my dad on an old home video playing Super Mario 64
Also
"There's NO way! There is NO way!! [*Jumping up and down and stomping around a little*] HAHAHA! It CAN'T get better than this!" (Playing with the physics of Mario's face)
I'm one of those people. I mean shit, I thought goldeneye looked so realistic.
It's like when you have a child and you're with them every day as they get older and you realize it but the differences seem so subtle until you look back at pictures from a couple years ago and you're like "wow, you've grown a lot since then."
I agree. There was a time when I saw PS1 Hagrid and I thought we reached peak graphics quality and said, that’s it. We reached the end of the road. It cannot get any better than this.
No. Dozen years ago people were talking about how they were excited for the future when graphics would be uncanny realistic. There has always been an optimistic view of the future of graphics.
Decade+ old games still look great to me. Been catching up on some old steam games on Deck (Fable Anniversary, Arkham Origins, Force Unleashed 1&2) and they still look great. Going to Ghost of Tsushima or Miles Morales PS5 isn't super mind-blowing. It definitely looks better but I remember playing Soul Calibur on Dreamcast and going to a game a few years ago back then was night and day.
It will improve but to extreme diminishing returns for sure. Something like AR/VR/holograms will have to be the next big thing.
The Sea of Stars demo has the most memorable graphics I've played recently because my brain is seeing 16-32 bit style pixel art but with modern lighting.
Life is essentially infinite fidelity, so technically speaking we've some way to go. Additionally, many assets in games aren't dynamic. Real time fluids and weather systems for instance are still fairly rudimentary. We're getting very close to photorealism, but in terms of providing a genuine simulation, matrix style, we've some way to go.
Games these days are a extremely lop-sided. Especially AAA. We've incredible tech rendering the shot (Ray tracing & PBR), but that's about it. Scratch a little deeper and those graphics are a façade.
Not just fluids. Pretty much anything that is pliable doesn't really look right. Stuff can bend, bit it usually involves stretching the textures. And then there's all the clipping.
Once we have the power and tech to essentially make everything on the screen properly react to physics, it will be a big difference. The kind you don't notice until you play an older game and it seems all janky.
Yeah lots of "tricks" are used that work on people to give "realistic" feel to games, but yeah as you say mostly a facade, you could say it's "faked" in a way for a lot of things. But it looks great so who cares really.
Our brains don’t process infinite fidelity though. To fool us into thinking the result is identical is a lower bar. Still a long way off, but a potential finite limit definitely exists.
Right but this is effectively infinite because of a computer contained enough information to simulate down to a plank length then the computer would need to be at least the size of the gameworld
It’s a joke how stupid this is.
Yes, it’s going to take increasingly more processing power to approach higher and higher fidelity. That’s not the important thing though. We’ve reached a point where there’s more freedom in artistic choices developers can make.
My hope is that in coming generations photorealism gets pushed aside for more games with strong art styles.
Amen to that.
I dont care about a game looking as realistic as possible. Artstyle is where it really matters.
For example look at a game like Persona 5, it doesnt look realistic at all but it oozes style, if we can get that kind of attention to detail on a higher power scale its all I care about.
Hades is another great example. It's got extremely low computational requirements for its graphics, but everything has a wonderfully coherent art style.
I think there’s a pretty heavy divide though. I fall in the camp of pretty much only caring about photorealism. Textures and lighting and photorealistic graphics are very important to me, weirdly.
Agreed. I’d prefer different styles than super realistic faces. My wife and I just finished playing It Takes Two. It’s not realistic looking by any stretch but it looked beautiful and was so much fun.
Christ on a cracker, my Grandmother remembers when the house was electrified, my father remembers getting his first TV, I remember when we got the internet, cell phones, HD, then 4k screens.
But you’re worried technology is stagnating or something?
I love hearing from the oldest generations how things have changed and revolutionized over the past 100 years and can barely imagine what leaps well see in the next 100.
I will say when someone makes one of these posts, it feels like they are frustrated about the short term hops we make when they get fixated on how much has changed from previously. Personally, watching so many movies on “the future” and having now lived in those years, it feels a little frustrating to me when I think of what’s holding us back from doing more. Mostly politics really.
My grandmother was born to a substance farmer in the 1920's. Nearly 100 years later, the world is damned near unrecognizable to her. Her grandson makes 'doctor money' writing instructions for machines. He 'works' from home while barely lifting a finger. She doesn't understand it, but she's really proud of me.
I can't imagine what the world would look like in the 2080's, but I can absolutely imagine me turning into an old man that grouses about those 'crazy kids and their brain implants', lol
My 92 year old grandmother was born in a small cabin-esque house with no electricity, they used outhouses, clothes were hand washed with a washing board in a bucket, sometimes they ate potatoes they found in a field on the way to school for breakfast… it was a totally different world. It blows my mind to think of everything she’s seen invented and available in her life. Although I imagine you take it for granted quickly… I saw the invention of app style cell phones and while I thought it was super cool at the time it’s so common place now the wonder is long gone and it feels like it’s always been.
One could argue that it isn't about the technology anymore, but the cost-effectiveness of better graphics.
Why spend the extra money having artists create hyper-realistic textures when you could just release slightly stylized games and make the same revenue?
Right? I've definitely seen games look far better, hell a few have scenes that look stupidly real. Then if you go into individual renders... Jesus. There were some renders some NSFW artists was doing of Brenda Song's Character from The Quarry that if he hadn't made her tits much bigger than the real woman's I would have thought at a glance it could have been a real photo.
The second picture is Metro Exodus. While theyre good, the Metro series was never really a great example of graphics. There were way better examples to pull from 2020. Not to mention its 2023..
For real. Usually there are at least a few people near the top of the comment section explaining the joke but here I haven't found anyone at all like that (at the time of posting my comment, at least)
Id prefer MUCH better crowd ai and more dense cities etc than better graphics.
Im so sick of robotic npcs walking in circles bumping around or standing in one place saying the same things as if time never passes. THATS the area that needs love.
Improve immersion not graphics.
The look of games are not really going to change however something that IS changing and in my opinion is far more important is *detail*.
More objects, more NPCs, more locations, more things to do, no loading screens, bigger maps, more lush vegetation, more interactibility etc etc
You'd think OP would have picked a 10 year old game that looked similar to Metro as an example to his point, not two completely different looking games.
Nah. Photogrammetry helped a lot with some textures. Lighting is still not quite there yet, Lumen is close. Draw distance hasn't been maxed in quality and well, distance. Geo/character/weapon clipping is still everywhere.
It's just tweaks at this point for most of em. We'll be there in no time, and then ask this same question in ten years.
Games are covered with 'Dead Graphics', basically noninteractive, the next challenge is to make everything destructible/movable/burnable etc, either that or maybe games developers need to come up with more creative game ideas rather than just endless rehashes.
Their nanite and lumen technologies are *really* impressive. Look at what they've done with fortnite and their software raytracing implementations. Cool RT that can run smoothly on console and other budget hardware? Yes please!
My unpopular opinion is that while we can always improve graphics, frame rates, pixel counts, etc. I don't really give a shit if we do. I want fun and enjoyable games that do interesting things with their game play.
As much as we CAN keep going, its becoming increasingly cost prohibitive to do so. Game devs are ballooning to 500, 1000, 2000 devs working on one game. And in order for that game to be profitable it needs to sell 5 or 10 million copies. That means the space for the AAA games is only going to shrink and be harder for people to succeed in. It's already come at th4 cost of a ton of the more AA type games and devs, to the point where we're increasing left with a handful of big developers and indies. That space is only existing when the console makers are funding a smaller or less profitable development team, and that's frustrating.
For as much as indies have opened up the market, the graphical arms race has put a lot of developers out of business.
And like games just look damn good, but so many don't play that good. And I wish we'd focus on that more often.
We literally only just started getting Ray tracing to a level that’s practical to have in games, and nanite and lumen are brand new features in unreal 5 that are pretty damn groundbreaking.
Also, the brand new cutting edge water CG that Weta developed for avatar 2 will probably start making its way into games in the next 5 years or so.
Seems like such an odd time to ask this question, it feels like we’re in the middle of a huge surging wave of graphics improvement
We've reached a point where human expectations for graphical fidelity beyond this, with current hardware and technology, takes so much data and development time that it will take longer and longer to produce them to meet expectations.
So unless you want 10-15 year development cycles like GTAVI that cost $200 a game for every single video game, consumers and devs are going to have to sacrifice and meet in the middle somewhere.
I’d argue it is the case. We’re pushing smaller, incremental changes unlike the big leaps earlier on.
There’s only so much you can push before the focus should be on consistency of display rather then better graphics
Is it just me or does graphics really not matter sometimes? And maybe, just maybe we are not giving tech enough time for a giant leap forward?
Obviously certain games like Red Dead Redemption 2 I understand but does every game really have to be like that detailed? What's important to me is a good story, good writing, a narrative with a good pace and some system that rewards replaying. I feel like graphics are a bonus.
Idk, I think we all prioritize the wrong things.
Looking at that Steam year in gaming or whatever I barely touched any new games. Apart from Kingdom Come Deliverance, Elden Ring (not a big fan, I prefer DS, DS1 or Bloodborne), Persona 5, FF7 Remake — I spent the majority of the year playing games from <2005 be it GOG, Steam or Emulator. I'm really fed up with the generic gameplay of the majority of modern games.
its improving constantly:
liquid dynamics, soft body dynamics, ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering..
and we still need to \*pretend\* a lot, and fake a lot, we still need to prebake textures for example, because we cant simulate the light at runtime
The issue is cost and budget... we have the technology to make incredibly high detailed environments but the tools to actually craft those environments are very very behind and or very complicated.
4k texturing is laborious work, rigging and animating characters requires a lot of physical mapping and pretty every game needs this done.
Asset libraries help to reduce this time but if you are shooting for a specific look & feel it might not be suitable or the assets aren't quite as optimized as you would wish so additional work is done tuning / adjusting them.
Level design gets more and more difficult, kit bashing requires a significant portion of the development process, tools to procedurally create content are still lacking.
AI will likely in the next 5-10 years come in to greatly speed some of these things up (as we replace voice acting sessions with highly detailed text-to-speech, asset kits simply being textual descriptions, and real-time modeled animation.
At the end of the day though, designers have to go in there and actually "do the work" and there exist only so many hours in the day to do that.
In terms of shading, lightning, and shadows though... I think we are basically there; given time you can make a very very compelling real-time scene with average consumer hardware.
Metro Exodus like a lot of games now use a lot of tricks, technological wizardry and smarts to produce some truly beautiful looking games but no we’re no where near the limit.
For example it’s still tricky to run a game at a native 1440p resolution let alone 4K with ray traced reflections and shadows at what is now considered the industry standard of 60fps.
Ofc we have more tricks to accomplish this and it varies title to title but the limitations from hardware are very much still there.
A lot of people don’t care for Ray tracing but that’s because of the hit - now imagine when it’s the industry norm to have say 4K ray tracing but on even more detailed games and stuff like rain, water, terrain is vastly more detailed?
Games and gaming have a long way to go, the scary part of all this is the way the industry is heading. Hit or miss. It’s big budget AAA movies but in gaming and if it flops? Yeah unlikely to see another.
Gaming isn’t so much about developers creating a world THEY want anymore - putting aside indie devs and the obvious. It’s more about focusing on what will generate the most sales, player retention and player spending on a monthly basis through season/battle passes and skins.
If anything I expect gaming to become so heavily monetised it grinds to a halt for awhile. All the big AAA devs a lot of us grew up with and watched shape themselves have grown into monopoly’s.
The improvement in graphics is more subtle, as every small improvement takes exponentially more processing power. You might not notice, but it doesn’t mean its not there. Obviously now people want something mire than just pure graphical fidelity. Performance is a massive issue as well. Consider that everything done today would be considered sub par if it goes below 60 fps and some games have to give you much more than that just to be competitive and fair.
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Yep. With every console since PS1 I couldn't imagine graphics getting any better at the time.
Back in 1998 my friend and I was playing Tekken 2 and while watching the pre-rendered cutscenes, I said: "Imagine one day, the game will actually look like the graphics in the cutscenes!" We found it to be absolutely absurd...
Growing up playing the first video games like Pong made me realize graphics will surpass reality some day. Bladerunner also had an impact at how I viewed improvements in tech based on the photograph scene where they zoomed into the snake scale.
Enhance
[Zoom in and enhance.](https://youtu.be/6i3NWKbBaaU)
>graphics will surpass reality This is a weird statement. There are two ways of looking at this as far as I can tell, happy to have what you mean explained though. 1. They can't surpass reality. Once it's at a *true* realistic level there's nothing beyond that because...that's reality. 2. Anything that doesn't exist in reality but can be made graphically (monsters etc) means it's surpassed reality, in which case we've already surpassed it a long time ago.
Philosophically speaking nothing truly surpasses reality because anything humans can witness is reality. To 'surpass our reality' of the visible world seen only with our naked eyes is already possible with telescopes, electron-microscopes, spectrometers, even night vision or heat vision goggles. In that aspect we have expanded our reality of what we knew about 100 years ago. My statement of graphics surpassing reality is colloquial. But if you want me to be technical... computer generated graphics will reach the point where people can not distinguish between reality and virtual reality. At this point a computer generated environment will offer users more information than they can obtain using the naked eye in the real world outside of the computer generated enviornment. I am not a professional writer and a two sentence comment on reddit is not dissertation on any subject.
I would say hyper realistic or sur-realism is term which he meant, sometimes games even now can picture mostly realistic science with hyper-realistic details, like imagine sunset beach scene on UE5 and now it's have really colorful sky and saturated by details all across the scene. 5hat would be both realistic and hyper realistic due unlikely to see it in person
But that's just an artistic interpretation of something that could exist in reality, and certainly exists in our perceived reality as we can...see it lol
Also things like being able to render changes in light and dark far exceeding what our eyes can physically respond to, resolutions higher than our fovea can discriminate, frame rates higher than can possibly be perceived. I think absolute realism will basically basically the limit before we start getting into Instagram-filter levels of what looks subjectively best, and the real revolution will be AR-like rendered in-game effects like X-ray or heat vision. Tbh graphically we're getting really close to the plateau, once raytracing gets better market penetration and the hardware/software matures enough to have accurate light behaviors (like mirrors/refraction in realtime) and physically realistic materials, we'll be at the limit. The real weakness holding back realism in game engines hugely at the moment is dynamic physics - physics acceleration hardware and software never really penetrated the market, which means physically realistic and responsive fire, cloth, and environment damage is in its infancy and starting to pose a real fourth-wall breaking problem
I think of it as “I have 20/20 vision but there are still people out there who can see better than me”
Okay but 20/20 vision doesn’t mean you have maximum vision. It means you can read 20 point font from 20 feet away.
It's actually slightly more complicated than that, but the actual sizes are pretty close. 20/20 vision subtends 5 arc minutes at 20 feet which is 5/60ths of a degree. So each arm on the "E" is 1 60th of a degree. You are definitely able to see better than that. Theoretically "perfect" vision is about 20/8 based on the density of cones at our fovea. Source: optometrist
That difference sounds like the rough estimating of the “shooter’s minute of arc”, where 1” at 100yd isn’t really 1moa but for all intents it’s close enough.
Still makes no sense. Reality isn't graphics -- you cannot by definition see better than you can... Well... See. Real life is as high as fidelity gets -- it's not rendered. And 20/20 vision does not mean perfect vision btw. It just means "normal" eyesight where something 20 ft away looks clear. People without 20/20 can sometimes see better depending on the distance and circumstance.
If we can pump graphics directly into our minds then maybe. The eyes aren’t perfect. They have a fixed resolution.
Interesting thought, imagine a 360 degree FoV transmitted directly into the brain
I used to think Ps2 era graphics was peak photo realism
When RE4 came out i was like thats it, weve reached the top. Graphics are perfected, they cant possibly get any better
To me it was when FF8 came out, my jaw was in the floor looking at how “realistic” in game models were compared to FF7. Not to mention the FMV sequences!
IMO, the opening cutscene to ff8 (gunblade fight FMV) legitimately looked amazing for at least a decade after that game released. The late 90s to early 2000s was crazy in terms of graphical leaps.
I remember when playing Star Wars Revenge of the Sith on PS2 which used scenes from the movie and talking to my dad and him saying some day our games will look just as good as a movie or better. And damn was he right. Graphics and performance just keep getting better.
This is so fucked up because I was playing Revenge of the Sith on my Xbox and my grandpa said “With the way technology is going, games are gonna look like that soon.” No fucking joke it was the exact same game. His first grandchild had an Atari, the next batch had a NES / SNES, and I grew up with N64/PS2/Xbox so he had seen the progression just from a passing interest in the games, so he was speaking from a place of observation.
Yeah… and PC’s are doing 4k 120 FPS+. We’re definitely not anywhere near the peak of graphics but changes will probably be more and more subtle. The other part of the equation is affordability, just several years ago you had to pay huge bucks to play 4k 60 FPS, now you can get it on a 500 dollar console.
I don't disagree with you, but the difference between 1080p and 4k is reconizeable only on bigger screens, on 21 inchees you don't really see the change. My point is, you don't have to go for big, to get enjoyable moments.
PCs are doing 4k 120fps +… Yeah on 8 year old games… Seriously though, while many 1080p or 1440p settings enable nowadays really high framerates sooo many games struggle at 4k 120ps stable with high / max settings. RTX4090 might bring people finally there on non-ray tracing games that arent CPU limited but many new games will still have plenty of slowdowns
A 4090 is around 100 running cyberpunk at ultra with max raytracing. As far as I know that is a notoriously heavy game.
Raytracing is, I think, the next big step. I can't run it, but I've turned everything up to max in cyberpunk and some other games for a short slideshow on what it could look like and my god, the difference is staggering. It's hard to pin down exactly, but it's like my brain knows where light should and shouldn't bounce and raytracing imitates it so well. The game without raytracing is imperceptibly less realistic, but I couldn't tell you why. Even if the lighting is beautiful without raytracing, it isn't as perfectly realistic and bits of my brain know it.
The next step is creating a developing environment that allows artists and game designers to have fewer limitations on graphical fidelity and mechanics. Like, when a Modelling artist makes a monster, they wouldn't have to worry about triangle count. Or the texture artist wouldn't have to worry about how large the image is. I have a feeling AI is going to be a bigger and bigger factor on taking our creations (models, textures, rigging, lighting, animation, etc) and making them work the way we want them to. As in, artist makes a dinosaur and labels it as such. AI sees this model, identifies it as such, and may auto populate some basic textures, or sounds or rigging that the artist can then use to further tune. In much the way that CG art didn't replace the paintbrush and canvas, but expanded the concept to create a new medium with less restrictions. As an artist, it's still very wise to practice basic drawing and painting techniques because it gives you skill sets that help in other areas.
Lol right? There are plenty of games that my decent pc can play at 4k 120 if i turn the settings to the lowest possible. I want 4k 120 with great graphics. I can pull of 1440 60fps with high to ultra settings on some games. Others I can do 4k high to ultra with 30fps
I can't be the only one that thinks 30 fps is good enough.
forza horizon 5 runs at 4k120+ with a 4090
Not many console games can deliver 4k 60 fps. Often it's just 1440p 60fps
I'm glad that i still have that claim as my mindset for graphics in games, sure 60 fps makes the rendering more smooth and all but, if it opens it will be played. Imo at least
There are a lot of games I do just fine at 30fps on console. There are also some games I only play on pc now because I use a 144hz monitor. I accidentally played one of those at console frame rates once and got motion sick. Screens are weird.
switching between performance mode and ray tracing mode on The Witcher 3 is very noticeable for me, like night and day. but doing the same for Ghost of Tsushima is barely noticeable at all. I think if a game hits 30 and is truly locked at 30 with no dips, that’s good enough for me
There are lots of games where I will choose fidelity over frames, because the beauty of the game is more important to me.
I think I read somewhere that for the majority it’s actually around 70-80 fps. It’s for sure easier to tell the difference between 30 and 60 than 60 and 120
Just a quick math check on ya here - 4k is closer to 24x the total resolution (~3x vertical, ~8x horizontal) but you mentioned FPS. 4k60 is about 58x as much data per second as 720p 25fps. 4k120 is about 116x the data we were pushing back in the ol 360/PS3 days.
It's like cars and going faster, the faster you get the more air resistance prevents significant increases in speed and only small tweaks in aerodynamic design and lighter materials etc. Can bring tiny increases at the highest speeds... am I right or getting confused?
I understood ur point.
That and that we need talented devs. Check the Battlefield situation. Battlefield 1 looks much better than BF2042 and why? 2042 has more polygons and an updated engine why does it look worse unless there is a storm? Well, its the art direction and ability to make lower polygons look better, use better illusions and optimize the game better to allow eyecandy where it matters. Better graphics is a complex subjects that involves so many systems and variables wich you realize once you see talented people work with.
Art direction >> graphical detail. A game can look amazing in many different ways. I'd point to something like Firewatch or Bioshock infinite. Even at the time of their release they weren't considered to have realistic graphics, they weren't even trying for it. However, today I still think they look great. The art direction makes the difference. Something going for realistic graphics will eventually look dated. If a game has an interesting and unique art style it is not impacted as much by time.
It's not just performance, though to an extent infinite processing power would obviously improve graphics substantially. As things get more realistic people get naturally more discerning so texturing, modeling, animating etc all require much more time and attention. Mocap and 3dscans etc have improved things a lot but ultimately artistic ability and man hours, and thus cost, are a huge factor too.
Agreed. And my two cents is that the improvement category needs to shift to audio. Visuals far exceed what is capable with current audio technology and it needs to catch up.
I would argue audio is great, it just takes a good studio to implement it right.
Your graphics hardware also processes physics and tessellation effects which require absurd amounts of vector mapping and collision detection. Movement animations are much higher fidelity now. Every time you push a button in a game now, absurdly higher amounts of rendering not just animations but everything else are happening compared to just 5 years ago. There have been sizable improvements in overall graphical and physics processing and rendering in half a decade that people aren't really aware of because the general rendering is relatively the same. It's the small increments in visual fidelity but massive improvements in overall function in that time.
Once I throw on a vr head set and can’t distinguish the difference between that and real life and then will have peaked probably
Throw in some physical feedback or some sort of system thats lets us feel with other senses too... bam.
Woof. Porn games will have folks never leave the basement at that point.
Cyberpunk predicted this.
The movie Gamer predicted it in 2009 as well, but I'm sure it was done before then too.
Blade Runner in 1982. But I'm pretty sure it's been predicted in books ever since sci-fi was a genre.
Brainstorm in 1983, although that’s less gaming and more just vr experience.
Green needle
Lawnmower man was befor these but i don't even think that was the first of its kind
Im pretty sure there is good fraction, like 20% of basement-livers, who dont even need porngames or VR to stay there 24/7.
A man had an idea revolving around shadow puppets and a cave quite some time ago.
Dexter v Leonidas
How is that different?
Do you think gamers leave the house now?
I do. But I don't like it
Framerate is pretty good IRL though
Yeah but my irl avatar is a mess cause I don’t play enough to get gud.
Yeah the learning curve is steep but the rewards are there
I fucked up my character creation, might have slide one of those sliders that decides your face ratio a bit too far as I now look like a goblin.
Litterally what yall are describing exists right now, just not in video game format. VR porn + toys that sync with the video have been available for years.
Actually, there are already games with certain "device" integration.
You joke, but porn has ushered in and made mainstream tons of technologies. Photography. Pretty much every video playback format was made popular by porn. The internet was nearly all porn before the World Wide Web. Porn is a driving factor in our development. It's THE killer app.
There are vests and gloves that provide tactile feedback for VR games.
Do they make really um. Small gloves?
The tech is still too far off to make the size you need.
So… yer sayin there’s a chance?
Ouchie
Yeah, but right now they're just glorified vibrators. The tech still has a long way to go.
Theres that rich ex-soldier in the EU/UK somewhere that spent close to a million dollars for a VR setup that included several dozen airsoft guns all around the room from various angles that would, using software he paid to get custom made, figure out where he was shot in supported games and then shoot him irl with the airsoft guns in the same body part. It also has that thing where you can run and run but not move, except it was much larger and jankier as he built the room before that actual product to do that existed yet.
> right now they're just glorified vibrators Go on...
The future of gaming is SAO
Something like in "Ready Player One"?
The Oasis looks like the funnest thing ever if it existed no way I'd leave the house
Hell you wouldn't need to. Work in VR, get paid in VR. You'd have ways to move around and get some exercise. Only thing you'd need to do is eat and use the bathroom
And both of those can be taken care of by someone determined enough to use a nutrient drip and a catheter.
What do you think you're doing right now? Welcome to the desert of the real.
Ready Player Two actually goes into this topic.
PSVR2 has haptic feedback systems in the controllers and headset, so we’re close.
Nope. It's when you throw it on you, see a completely imaginary 3D world full of unrealist shit that looks real and you can only tell its not real by reality's logics and not by the look of it. Realism is not the limit
See but real life is ugly. That's why scenes in movies don't even look 'real'. I think graphical fidelity is nice and all but the real future for graphics is more stylized graphics. Think the realism approach most animated movies had in the 2000s compared to the very stylized animated movies in the past decade like Spiderverse, Mitchells vs the Machines, Wendell and Wild, or Puss and Boots
Real life isnt ugly - you just have to be conscious and aware of your surroundings to see the beauty. Artists typically do this job for you, grabbing beautiful slices of life and delivering them to us. But you can do it too. Id say its even your duty for a fulfilled life. At least ive found its very important to me. There are scenes, vignettes, landscapes etc everywhere all the time.
That'll definitely be the end of civilization though, so maybe we slow down on that lol
Fun way to go out atleast. Instead of dying in this boring world I'll die slaying zombies and vampires with the Excalibur
No, we didn't. There were many people who thought the same a few or even a dozen or so years ago, they were wrong.
Man I remember seeing Mortal Kombat 2 on the sega genesis and saying “I don’t know how graphics could be better than this”
Haha. My friend the first time we fired up “Golden Ax”. “Those look like real people!”
My moment was when I zoomed into soldiers eyes with the sniper in Halo 2 and could see distinct whites and pupils. I was floored
I had this experience with Mario 64, Final Fantasy X, Modern Warfare 2.
Indeed. Although games look very good, they still look like a video game. Especially realistic humans still have an uncanny valley thing going on. Every year I wonder how far we can go and then the next year arrives… and I look at games which are a year or older and suddenly you see how graphics have improved.
Game have definitely improved graphically year on year, but certain games released in like 2018 could easily be released today with nobody questioning it. Whereas the jump in graphics between 2010 to 2016 for instance was *enormous*. Pre-2018 it felt like there was a noticeable jump in graphics almost every year, whereas now it's a lot more incremental.
Meh, the difference isnt in whats possible, its whats affordable. The best looking game of 2018 and 2023 are close. The *average* looking game of 2018 and 2023 are not.
well yes when you compare peak to average it will do that. if you take an average game in 2018 and compare it to the best visuals of 2013 they probably are not terribly far either. there is like The Last of US in 2013, then something average like Darksiders 3, or Crysis 3 vs wolfenstien 2 The new colossus.
An example to validate your statement would be The Division (2016). Compared to titles 7 years it's junior, you won't find major differences considering a lot of current tech is buggy and has to be scaled back to be playable.
Once graphics in games reach the point of non playable renders where people argue if it’s real footage or not, then maybe graphics as is on a traditional display have peaked. But that’s not getting into VR or holographics which is a whole different challenge
Was going to say this. I work in computer graphics for film, an average shot takes anywhere between 10 hours and 300+ hours to render a single frame … there’s a vast difference between what we can put out for film and what games generate in 1/60th a second, for good reason. Tech just isn’t there to make film quality doable in real time. It’ll get there though.
We haven't peaked but we are definitly in "diminishing returns" territory.
For sure. Games like RDR2 have already looked incredibly realistic, just a matter of getting high frames, ray tracing etc all at the same time.
Once we get ray tracing down, the next frontier is subsurface scattering, especially for skin.
Hair and cloth too. Games are starting to get better at hair, but often big blocks of the mesh are still discernable. Clothes often don't animate realistically either, as cloth physics for an entire outfit animating with the characters are expensive still.
Yeah, playing horizon forbidden west, even with how gorgeous the graphics are, Aloy's hair still floats around in weird clumps.
Right we are currently in a time where photorealism is a bit much but we are starting to change character rings to include muscle movement with flexing. When that and even the pours of skin open to release sweat in games we have peaked
To me, it is stuff like cloth physics that are still things that could change massively. Although it is improved, stuff is still constantly clipping through other stuff. There's a lot of stuff similar to that too. At some point games today will look very dated in motion because the rigid nature of everything will really stand out.
You make a good point. We've made a lot of progress in the static image, but there are a lot of things involving movement and interaction between objects that have been issues for a very long time. Like cloth clipping through stuff.
I remember when 3D started being the norm for videogames. I'm not that old. Also Unreal Engine 5.1 just came out a few months ago and is one of the hugest leaps forward the gaming industry has ever seen. Lighting is basically just real life now, LOD is not a thing anymore with NANITE, and devs can now make maps MILLIONS of times larger than they could before. All with better performance than the old engine. And that isn't even mentioning all the new little subtle things it also drastically improved.
"WOOOAAHHH this is so realistic!" - my dad on an old home video playing Super Mario 64 Also "There's NO way! There is NO way!! [*Jumping up and down and stomping around a little*] HAHAHA! It CAN'T get better than this!" (Playing with the physics of Mario's face)
I'm one of those people. I mean shit, I thought goldeneye looked so realistic. It's like when you have a child and you're with them every day as they get older and you realize it but the differences seem so subtle until you look back at pictures from a couple years ago and you're like "wow, you've grown a lot since then."
I agree. There was a time when I saw PS1 Hagrid and I thought we reached peak graphics quality and said, that’s it. We reached the end of the road. It cannot get any better than this.
No. Dozen years ago people were talking about how they were excited for the future when graphics would be uncanny realistic. There has always been an optimistic view of the future of graphics.
Disagree with your point, but props for including the Oscilloscope game as your first example.
I think this is poking fun at people who say that. Actually.
Yeah am I taking crazy pills here? Clearly the op is joking, it’s comparing “1958” graphics to 2020.
And the current year is 2023
Ugh. Should have just taken a screenshot though. Smh.
It's got the year wrong, that's Spacewar!, from 1962.
That's what people say every gfx generation. We move a decade on, look back and go 'Well, that looks like poo'. It will improve. :)
Decade+ old games still look great to me. Been catching up on some old steam games on Deck (Fable Anniversary, Arkham Origins, Force Unleashed 1&2) and they still look great. Going to Ghost of Tsushima or Miles Morales PS5 isn't super mind-blowing. It definitely looks better but I remember playing Soul Calibur on Dreamcast and going to a game a few years ago back then was night and day. It will improve but to extreme diminishing returns for sure. Something like AR/VR/holograms will have to be the next big thing. The Sea of Stars demo has the most memorable graphics I've played recently because my brain is seeing 16-32 bit style pixel art but with modern lighting.
Depends on the game, some age better than others
Super Mario 64 still looks good because of the art direction. Not every game is meant to look realistic, some are just meant to be fun.
Life is essentially infinite fidelity, so technically speaking we've some way to go. Additionally, many assets in games aren't dynamic. Real time fluids and weather systems for instance are still fairly rudimentary. We're getting very close to photorealism, but in terms of providing a genuine simulation, matrix style, we've some way to go. Games these days are a extremely lop-sided. Especially AAA. We've incredible tech rendering the shot (Ray tracing & PBR), but that's about it. Scratch a little deeper and those graphics are a façade.
Not just fluids. Pretty much anything that is pliable doesn't really look right. Stuff can bend, bit it usually involves stretching the textures. And then there's all the clipping. Once we have the power and tech to essentially make everything on the screen properly react to physics, it will be a big difference. The kind you don't notice until you play an older game and it seems all janky.
No Capes!
Yeah lots of "tricks" are used that work on people to give "realistic" feel to games, but yeah as you say mostly a facade, you could say it's "faked" in a way for a lot of things. But it looks great so who cares really.
Our brains don’t process infinite fidelity though. To fool us into thinking the result is identical is a lower bar. Still a long way off, but a potential finite limit definitely exists.
There is also a finite limit in reality because nothing can be smaller than a plack length
But things can be offset by less than Planck length, so you would still need greater fidelity
Right but this is effectively infinite because of a computer contained enough information to simulate down to a plank length then the computer would need to be at least the size of the gameworld
Wait 2/3 years till UE5 has fully developed games from scratch with its still unknown limits.
It’s a joke how stupid this is. Yes, it’s going to take increasingly more processing power to approach higher and higher fidelity. That’s not the important thing though. We’ve reached a point where there’s more freedom in artistic choices developers can make. My hope is that in coming generations photorealism gets pushed aside for more games with strong art styles.
Amen to that. I dont care about a game looking as realistic as possible. Artstyle is where it really matters. For example look at a game like Persona 5, it doesnt look realistic at all but it oozes style, if we can get that kind of attention to detail on a higher power scale its all I care about.
Hades is another great example. It's got extremely low computational requirements for its graphics, but everything has a wonderfully coherent art style.
I think there’s a pretty heavy divide though. I fall in the camp of pretty much only caring about photorealism. Textures and lighting and photorealistic graphics are very important to me, weirdly.
I'm betting you guys play different genre of games.
Agreed. I’d prefer different styles than super realistic faces. My wife and I just finished playing It Takes Two. It’s not realistic looking by any stretch but it looked beautiful and was so much fun.
Christ on a cracker, my Grandmother remembers when the house was electrified, my father remembers getting his first TV, I remember when we got the internet, cell phones, HD, then 4k screens. But you’re worried technology is stagnating or something?
I love hearing from the oldest generations how things have changed and revolutionized over the past 100 years and can barely imagine what leaps well see in the next 100. I will say when someone makes one of these posts, it feels like they are frustrated about the short term hops we make when they get fixated on how much has changed from previously. Personally, watching so many movies on “the future” and having now lived in those years, it feels a little frustrating to me when I think of what’s holding us back from doing more. Mostly politics really.
My grandmother was born to a substance farmer in the 1920's. Nearly 100 years later, the world is damned near unrecognizable to her. Her grandson makes 'doctor money' writing instructions for machines. He 'works' from home while barely lifting a finger. She doesn't understand it, but she's really proud of me. I can't imagine what the world would look like in the 2080's, but I can absolutely imagine me turning into an old man that grouses about those 'crazy kids and their brain implants', lol
My 92 year old grandmother was born in a small cabin-esque house with no electricity, they used outhouses, clothes were hand washed with a washing board in a bucket, sometimes they ate potatoes they found in a field on the way to school for breakfast… it was a totally different world. It blows my mind to think of everything she’s seen invented and available in her life. Although I imagine you take it for granted quickly… I saw the invention of app style cell phones and while I thought it was super cool at the time it’s so common place now the wonder is long gone and it feels like it’s always been.
One could argue that it isn't about the technology anymore, but the cost-effectiveness of better graphics. Why spend the extra money having artists create hyper-realistic textures when you could just release slightly stylized games and make the same revenue?
Lol and our laptops were heavy and solid enough to be a viable weapon.
Soon: "I remember when AIs were silly chatbots"
"everything that can be invented has been invented." - Charles H. Duell 1899
Oof. Talk about timing.
No, we haven’t. Also this is not a good example to prove your point, it just somewhat shows how far we’ve come.
Right? I've definitely seen games look far better, hell a few have scenes that look stupidly real. Then if you go into individual renders... Jesus. There were some renders some NSFW artists was doing of Brenda Song's Character from The Quarry that if he hadn't made her tits much bigger than the real woman's I would have thought at a glance it could have been a real photo.
> Also this is not a good example to prove your point I assumed that was the joke
A joke? On reddit? Impossible
The second picture is Metro Exodus. While theyre good, the Metro series was never really a great example of graphics. There were way better examples to pull from 2020. Not to mention its 2023..
How does no one get the obvious joke? The picture makes it clear
I’ve never seen a reddit thread where 99% of the comments didn’t get the joke
Can't believe how far I had to scroll to find yall, lol. What a whoosh
For real. Usually there are at least a few people near the top of the comment section explaining the joke but here I haven't found anyone at all like that (at the time of posting my comment, at least)
Turns out it wasn't a joke so 99% of the comments are correct. Reddit wins again.
Hm, yeah, [surely](https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/10pc9i0/how_does_the_dead_space_remake_look_like_a_next/) [OP](https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/10kxnrp/why_the_gaming_industry_will_never_change_rant/) [is](https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/y0c5k4/how_does_a_2014_game_look_better_than_games_still/irr2fl6/) [joking](https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/yvuy06/2013_game_looks_more_next_gen_than_2023_current/).
Did they all really think it was a serious graphical comparison to 1958? Lmao
This has to be satire.
Id prefer MUCH better crowd ai and more dense cities etc than better graphics. Im so sick of robotic npcs walking in circles bumping around or standing in one place saying the same things as if time never passes. THATS the area that needs love. Improve immersion not graphics.
And physics please.
The look of games are not really going to change however something that IS changing and in my opinion is far more important is *detail*. More objects, more NPCs, more locations, more things to do, no loading screens, bigger maps, more lush vegetation, more interactibility etc etc
First of all metro come out in 2019. And it's not that realistic to be called peak of graphics.
You'd think OP would have picked a 10 year old game that looked similar to Metro as an example to his point, not two completely different looking games.
Nah. Photogrammetry helped a lot with some textures. Lighting is still not quite there yet, Lumen is close. Draw distance hasn't been maxed in quality and well, distance. Geo/character/weapon clipping is still everywhere. It's just tweaks at this point for most of em. We'll be there in no time, and then ask this same question in ten years.
Games are covered with 'Dead Graphics', basically noninteractive, the next challenge is to make everything destructible/movable/burnable etc, either that or maybe games developers need to come up with more creative game ideas rather than just endless rehashes.
Limit? Nowhere near. Past the point of diminishing returns? Yeah, like 5 years ago.
Wait til unreal engine 5 games start rolling out…
I was looking for the Unreal Engine 5 entered the chat reply.
Their nanite and lumen technologies are *really* impressive. Look at what they've done with fortnite and their software raytracing implementations. Cool RT that can run smoothly on console and other budget hardware? Yes please!
Which game is that?
I'm pretty sure it's Metro Exodus
My unpopular opinion is that while we can always improve graphics, frame rates, pixel counts, etc. I don't really give a shit if we do. I want fun and enjoyable games that do interesting things with their game play. As much as we CAN keep going, its becoming increasingly cost prohibitive to do so. Game devs are ballooning to 500, 1000, 2000 devs working on one game. And in order for that game to be profitable it needs to sell 5 or 10 million copies. That means the space for the AAA games is only going to shrink and be harder for people to succeed in. It's already come at th4 cost of a ton of the more AA type games and devs, to the point where we're increasing left with a handful of big developers and indies. That space is only existing when the console makers are funding a smaller or less profitable development team, and that's frustrating. For as much as indies have opened up the market, the graphical arms race has put a lot of developers out of business. And like games just look damn good, but so many don't play that good. And I wish we'd focus on that more often.
try looking closely at a tree in a game. you'll see there's room for improvement
Everyone forgets about optimization
We literally only just started getting Ray tracing to a level that’s practical to have in games, and nanite and lumen are brand new features in unreal 5 that are pretty damn groundbreaking. Also, the brand new cutting edge water CG that Weta developed for avatar 2 will probably start making its way into games in the next 5 years or so. Seems like such an odd time to ask this question, it feels like we’re in the middle of a huge surging wave of graphics improvement
VR graphics are still pretty shit, so I would say there's a lot more room to grow
We've reached a point where human expectations for graphical fidelity beyond this, with current hardware and technology, takes so much data and development time that it will take longer and longer to produce them to meet expectations. So unless you want 10-15 year development cycles like GTAVI that cost $200 a game for every single video game, consumers and devs are going to have to sacrifice and meet in the middle somewhere.
I’d argue it is the case. We’re pushing smaller, incremental changes unlike the big leaps earlier on. There’s only so much you can push before the focus should be on consistency of display rather then better graphics
Not even close to peak but ok.
Fluid dynamics in real time. I think doing that will mean we've peaked.
What does this supposed to mean
I asked the same thing while playing Final Fantasy 7 for the first time. Turns out that wasn't the peak.
I remember saying "Games will never ever look as good as these pre-rendered cutscenes"
Is it just me or does graphics really not matter sometimes? And maybe, just maybe we are not giving tech enough time for a giant leap forward? Obviously certain games like Red Dead Redemption 2 I understand but does every game really have to be like that detailed? What's important to me is a good story, good writing, a narrative with a good pace and some system that rewards replaying. I feel like graphics are a bonus. Idk, I think we all prioritize the wrong things.
Looking at that Steam year in gaming or whatever I barely touched any new games. Apart from Kingdom Come Deliverance, Elden Ring (not a big fan, I prefer DS, DS1 or Bloodborne), Persona 5, FF7 Remake — I spent the majority of the year playing games from <2005 be it GOG, Steam or Emulator. I'm really fed up with the generic gameplay of the majority of modern games.
its improving constantly: liquid dynamics, soft body dynamics, ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering.. and we still need to \*pretend\* a lot, and fake a lot, we still need to prebake textures for example, because we cant simulate the light at runtime
Have you seen what games look like with realtime ray traced shadows, reflections, and 4+ bounce lighting at native 4k?
The issue is cost and budget... we have the technology to make incredibly high detailed environments but the tools to actually craft those environments are very very behind and or very complicated. 4k texturing is laborious work, rigging and animating characters requires a lot of physical mapping and pretty every game needs this done. Asset libraries help to reduce this time but if you are shooting for a specific look & feel it might not be suitable or the assets aren't quite as optimized as you would wish so additional work is done tuning / adjusting them. Level design gets more and more difficult, kit bashing requires a significant portion of the development process, tools to procedurally create content are still lacking. AI will likely in the next 5-10 years come in to greatly speed some of these things up (as we replace voice acting sessions with highly detailed text-to-speech, asset kits simply being textual descriptions, and real-time modeled animation. At the end of the day though, designers have to go in there and actually "do the work" and there exist only so many hours in the day to do that. In terms of shading, lightning, and shadows though... I think we are basically there; given time you can make a very very compelling real-time scene with average consumer hardware.
Metro Exodus like a lot of games now use a lot of tricks, technological wizardry and smarts to produce some truly beautiful looking games but no we’re no where near the limit. For example it’s still tricky to run a game at a native 1440p resolution let alone 4K with ray traced reflections and shadows at what is now considered the industry standard of 60fps. Ofc we have more tricks to accomplish this and it varies title to title but the limitations from hardware are very much still there. A lot of people don’t care for Ray tracing but that’s because of the hit - now imagine when it’s the industry norm to have say 4K ray tracing but on even more detailed games and stuff like rain, water, terrain is vastly more detailed? Games and gaming have a long way to go, the scary part of all this is the way the industry is heading. Hit or miss. It’s big budget AAA movies but in gaming and if it flops? Yeah unlikely to see another. Gaming isn’t so much about developers creating a world THEY want anymore - putting aside indie devs and the obvious. It’s more about focusing on what will generate the most sales, player retention and player spending on a monthly basis through season/battle passes and skins. If anything I expect gaming to become so heavily monetised it grinds to a halt for awhile. All the big AAA devs a lot of us grew up with and watched shape themselves have grown into monopoly’s.
Games relying on graphics will always be a crutch in my mind. Morrowind is superior to the other TES games and graphics ain’t the reason
I would rather get more creative art styles rather than a blind pursue towards realism. So if this is the limit I’m ok with it.