Honestly, I wish they would stop wasting precious processing power on graphics, and give us gameplay depth. I wanna see a plastic Army Men game where you fight in a grocery store, and you have to avoid falling cans of beans from enemy explosions.
A lot of games do. I didn't realize how atmospheric and amazing Halo Reach looked until I played it with a no hud mod. Now I play every game with the hud off, it's almost insane how big of a difference it can make when you don't have a million pointless stickers covering the screen, the games visuals can speak for themself. What's the point in Hitmarkers when the game has bloodspray?? The blood _is_ your hitmarker. Big obnoxious crosshair? RE4 solved this with a laser site back in 2004. And it's REALLY annoying when developers don't include an option to turn off the UI elements, especially when every single gameplay trailer nowadays has them turned off, because they KNOW it looks better. I don't get it, I know it'd be easy to add an option in the menu, they just choose not to.
@@bagggers9796 Fair point. But BF1 is ahead of most others, because it has great graphics, destruction physics, and sound design that turns everything up to 10 with no hud.
@@ExtantPerson What really makes BF1 such a unique game is that it's the Behemoth features where the airship and armoured train can be destroyed anywhere in the game's map. It's a major improvement from BF4's Levolution.
The more graphics we got, the less refined gameplay we kept being given. ...so it is no wonder Indie Gaming is blowing up, when you ain't wasting millions in polygon counts, you can focus on what matters: THE GAME.
That's just false. There's plenty games with great graphics and great gameplay look at gow or ghost of tsushima or the spiderman series. You can't say that across the whole gaming industry even if you look at developers like naughty dog who don't have amazing gameplay but the system they had since uncharted has only been improved across all games one after another. It's just straight up false
Indie games "blowing up" yeah right. It's because the barrier to entry of game development has lowered and it's easier to make games and there is a nostalgia factor for some indie style games. But the best selling games are still big budget game.
some games do feature liquid simulations, but they are rare. the only two that i know off, is killing floor 2, and borderlands 2, but these games are still old by today's standarts
Red Dead 2 was the last time I looked at graphics, NOT art design, and said “wow, this is incredible!” Red Dead 2 also has beautiful art design, great gameplay, and a 10/10 story, so while the graphics are the best I’ve ever seen, they’re not even in the top 3 things I would name as for why the game is great.
Whatever engine Red Dead Redemption 2 was made on is on another level honestly. You could boot it up, just mess around and it all looks like a cutscene.
I think a lot of the problem stems from UE5. It's so advanced and accessible developers don't even think to make their graphics look interesting or unique, they just put on the most advanced effects they can find and pray it can run with DLSS. Almost every new game looks the same now. Ironically, I think the limitations of technology were what made games look good.
Anecdotally true. After 7 years of Unity I switched to Unreal in February and found out that for a lot of bugs Unreal has a "fix at 10x compute impact" which is definitely intended for cinematics people who dont care about perf but you can also use it for real time technically. Shit like CCD. And some devs may abuse it.
@@Anon-vd4dqconsider that a newbie in unreal will stop iterating on his work earlier becauss it will start looking acceptable earlier becauss of lumen and post. In Unity you needed to sweat to make it look good and within iterations you found knowledge, solutions and unique style. Now volumetric fog just blends everything together and its fine.
@@namesurname624 It's really sad because I think older games genuinely looked so much better, and you don't even have to be a game developer to know. We got so good at faking so many things that the real thing just doesn't look as good anymore.
@@Anon-vd4dq Same for half life 2, except it was terrible on performance on release, but it was justified as it was a true breakthrough in terms of graphics with no comparison. All the new "next gen" games of today look the same or worse than their predecessors except they consume like 5x more resources.
Jesus, the visuals of that game blew me away when I marathoner the series 6 months ago. 2015, are you serious ? Best rain and light effects of any game I've played. I would've said best cityscape, too, but CP2077 takes it for me. But Gotham in AK is still unlike any other cityscape.
@@shiro4095 so many examples of 10 year old games that absolutely pop at high resolutions it's frustrating. IDC if the lighting isn't dynamic I can't I'm too busy playing the game having fun
its more and more expensive to make games , they cut teams in half , release half made games and then wonder why their company stocks go down even though they released 50% more games than 5 years ago
Yeah its more like the seniors who peaked and supposed to deliver what people desire are just being replaced with newbies who have no idea what they're doing so it stagnate even downgraded despite technologies are improving. I can't believe a single bit that the people who made Assasin's Creed Black Flag is the same people who made skull and bones.
Clearly the best sign of a genre improving is when every single part of it becomes completely identical and interchangeable visually to the point of absolute absurdity. Just like anime. Hail Hydra.
They didn't stagnate, they were fired. The industry has gone through round after round of laying people off to "cut the costs" incurred by losing so much of their talent in the last round of lay offs to "cut the costs" that were... This is why the indie gaming scene is having a renaissance. Not only do we suddenly have lots of talented devs with no job, but working for yourself is a pretty good way to ensure you won't get laid off.
The talent dries at the top BECAUSE the technology "gets stronger". New technology requires time to learn. Developers aren't allowed to get comfortable with the tech
I dont understand why games go for realism rather than _beauty_ The real world isnt always nice to look at. It can be, sure, but why not put effort into making things just look great instead of imitating reality? Its art! Theres a reason we still have paintings after photos were invented
Ik the game is bad but suicide squad looks great and has beautiful colors aside from the ui and architecture looks great. But the textures aren't as sharp in some areas as arkham knight so people complained. People want realism rather than colorful worlds
Because coming up with a unique art style is extremely hard to do. Not every artist has the talent to go that far. On the other hand, realistic games takes more imagination than you think. Neither is easy, but the point should always be making the world look visually gripping and be interactive in meaningful ways.
arkane games are the perfect example of that both dishonored and prey games are stunning, beautiful, but they are opposite of "realism", they look like a cartoon deep rock galactic too, cell shading without that much detail, but the light, the cave shape and the minerals reflection make this game ingeniously beautiful
Oh and it had PEAK cloth sims being advertised with Nvidia's PhysX. I miss when we had physics simulations being the selling point for hardware and software! Nowadays it's just how reflective a puddle on the ground is.
@@cepheus3d the thing with physx was that it was a scam. All the best physics puzzle games, even from that era like portal etc, use universal software physics that works just as good and doesn't rely on proprietary hardware. Check out the physics effects in Control. No need for physx to even exist anymore
This unironically. Games like Morrowind, Deus Ex, Thief and other 2000s games felt great because the textures and environments were manually handcrafted while modern games are procedural generated. Artist manual work> copy paste empty landscapes
That is not even close to the real problem. Games have always been focused on good graphics. The main problem is how developers and other employees are being handled at studios. Mass layoffs, outsourcing to foreign devs unfamiliar with the game engine, and corporate overreach into the game design itself are all much bigger problems.
@@Shaarpest Eyup, and the worst part is that apparently every division/group of devs in those companies, despite being competent, are sadly so separated and have to deal with such a crappy system that they just literally can't get things done right (save for the graphics department, but they don't need to worry about coherency with other groups cause it's mostly just visual). I think it might've been EA in particular, but in one bad case, they literally had to submit a request to fix a simple bug, AND THEN WAIT WEEKS FOR A RESPONSE. Worst part? Said response was "nah, don't touch it". Apparently the idea is that with such a huge amount of employees, they're not allowed to just edit the code freely if they see issues, but rather only do what they're told. And since the nature of coding is that one tiny little issue with one part can completely brick another section of the code, and basically make it be all glitches galore. I really feel bad for the devs that put up with it, as they're clearly talented considering how they can regularly pull off great visuals, sound design, etc, but since they're so restricted by poorly made corporate command structures, they just straight up can't fix the bugs even if they wanted to.
Back in the day games used to push interactivity far more than just raw graphics. Stuff like destructible elements, particles, minimizing clipping and maximizing proper collision, THIS is what I want the industry to put the focus into again, not the boring ray tracing and ultra-high res textures. The physics of games from 20 years ago are more impressive than modern ones because AAA devs now only care about wowing you with pretty screenshots while compromising on interactivity of their worlds that isn't as easy to demonstrate in an image but contributes far more to the actual gameplay.
yeah but the hardware requirement for those graphics is disgusting. my 5800x3d sits at 79% usage on difficulty 1, 100% by difficulty 5 or 6. ill stick a rx590 into the computer and ill probably still get bottlenecked by the cpu at 2560x1440.
@@kochissyes because the rx 590 is old at this point and like you mentioned would bottleneck your system. turn down some settings if you haven't already.
@kochiss the 5800x3d is an amazing processor. If those usage numbers are true, I think you may have something else going on. It should not be tanking that badly.
NFS 2015 still has the best visuals i've ever seen in a racing game, far better than unbound or test drive. Batman Arkham Knight looks better than suicide squad, dying light looks better than it's sequel...i really have no fucking idea what these studios are doing nowadays
Rockstar is as good at graphics and design as Kojima is at writing and music. If there is to be a studio that would make games look great again it's gonna be them.
They peaked with 1080Ti with 11GB VRAM as a performance benchmark. Consoles still have around 12GB of usable VRAM and similar GPU performance. 3060 and 6600XT also have similar performance.
Graphics have peaked for: Resolution (AA is becoming harder to improve vs how hardware is getting better at rendering old games at 4k) Lighting (Path tracing is expensive as hell but the optimization comes down to framerate and not so much improving the look as much as nvidia tries) Textures (unreal has worked on better layering, but since mega scans, textures have looked amazing) Framerates (we keep improving on this anyway) Graphics are about to peak for: LODs: I hope it will be cringe to see pop in or lod swaps thanks to mesh shaders Frame transitions (oleds have their problems with burn in but the frame transitions are near flawless) Graphics need work on: Fluid sims (performance & visuals) destructible environments hair (still)
Next years will see more and more fluid sims. But hair is so dissapointing so far. Stagnant for over a decade, going backwards even. I see asset shaders looking better than AAA
@@IFibreOpticI Oh no they do have burn in issues but to actually produce those issues you have to do stupid things like use office programs in light mode at 200 nits brightness (which is near the max for most OLEDs) 10 hours a day and then you'll likely see permanent burn-in within about 5 months of use. This isn't too unrealistic either, this is just generic office use.
@definitelynotacyborg apparently not mate, TV ratings are performing 24/7 burn in tests.for months on end, extreme tests, and even after that burn in isn't prominent on modern oleds past 2020. So normal use cases are extremely unlikely to exhibit burn in.
I miss how 90s-00s gaming had such a vast range of creativity. I love the amount of risk they took on odd concepts in This Y2K era- the Dreamcast/PS2/360. It should show us that GRAPHICS are not the most important thing.. If you can create satisfying movement, gameplay mechanics, physics effects, responsive parts of a environment that makes you want to explore it, engage it, etc. That stuff is so much more important. Not: {"Who can make the largest game map? Or have the most reflections?"} I think Art style, design, vibe, aesthetic is much more important. You don't need top notch graphics to greatly appreciate and enjoy playing a game. That's why we are seeing such a resurgence of players who have gone back to playing older games because they realized the aspects of gaming that they care about and are unhappy with most modern games. So hopefully gaming will enter a new era. That mixes in aspects of the older era's. With our modern capabilities that will hopefully help make it easier to create a satisfying game (without it taking 8 years to build a broken game. Hopefully) Currently everything is trying to be like a Triple AAA game or a free to play online battle Royale game.. A lot of us miss when we had game selection similar to how the Dreamcast/GameCube/360/PS2 era had a mix of. As well alot of those games came with options for local multiplayer, split screen, LAN parties, or offline modes against bots or other diverse offline CPU game modes. Yet modern games are not only lacking those dynamic options that give games nearly endless replayability features... Modern games are lacking even meeting the most basic standards for game's... They don't seemed focused on the core of the games to be Fun. They over focus on "realism" Rather than adding in Artistic adaptations for the greater good of gaming as a whole.. We could be doing so much better yet people are just coming out with the most bland game design, braindead AI, less care for physics effects... We could be doing so much better than this..
It’s funny how much better all those old games look with higher fidelity graphics and how they got really good around 8 years ago. You know, it’s almost like standards got higher for visuals and people saying they want worse graphics completely misses the point of older games, because what they really want is a fun and creative game that looks great instead of a blurry mess from the PlayStation 3. The graphics now are worse. People are getting exactly what they said they wanted. The reality is that their actions say everything. And making a game that looks like it came out in the 1990s or 2001 isn’t creative or clever. It’s just lazy and shows a lack of effort or desire to do anything of note. We stopped making games like those because the improvements of technology led us to bigger things and more creative ways to make games, not the limits. We won’t get any fun games if we stay in the same corners from 30 years ago. Gaming will just get complacent and everything will fall apart. There’s a balance not being met here and a false equivalency. I say go back to 2016 graphics and make fun games again. Simple as that. They look good and run good while supporting a variety of hardware and aren’t too intense to run. 2017 came around and what really got people was the part where legitimate companies started putting scams into their games that they sold to kids. The graphics being good doesn’t mean they had to put loot boxes into their games. They chose to do that because they were greedy. The graphics and business models are two separate things. If games just got worse graphics, they’d shove a lot more of these paywalls in those too because they don’t have to worry about graphics anymore. I’d know because they did that on mobile games and at the end of the Xbox 360 generation until 2017 when the law caught up. You think they won’t just do that too? They already have.
i recently started playing the first 2 metal gear games and i'll be honest, i've had a lot of fun with them, despite their age and limitations posed during those times, they managed to add in so many details and fun content inside
When I recently played Battlefield 1 and DOOM 2016, and then Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2 I kinda thought "Hey, we finally don't need to upgrade every few years!".
@@miguelpereira9859 Geniune question. Do you think its because of the more industrial dark type style doom 2016 has?. I have seen a lot players preferring that style over DE. Me personally like both doom 2016's dark style and DE's beautiful environments and models and the color style I think they chose was to fit such environments.
@@antigraviman7137 i personally believe it's because Doom 2016 had higher contrast between lit and dark areas, but I also just prefer 2016's artstyle more. Eternal leaned way too much into the comic book aesthetic while 2016 striked a perfect balance between gritty realism and cartoony expression for the kind of story it's telling. Just my 2 cents
@@miguelpereira9859 Hm I see thanks for the answer. So I think it safe so assume u will like doom the dark ages style. Because from what they have shown it does look more akin to doom 2016's style.
@@miguelpereira9859 I liked both but I think Doom 2016 overall as a game and also it's art style just holds up better. I get more of an urge to replay Doom 2016 than Eternal. Eternal just feels like you have to do things in exactly one precise way while Doom 2016 just allows you to improvise a lot more.
It's impossible to get perfect graphics and it would look shit af it was perfect realism. It enters a stage of uncanny valley where it shouldn't. In games you want them to look as real as possible to the extent where you can tell its still a game
I wouldn't say exact photorealism, maybe for environments but when it comes to living things like animals and people I can tell the difference. Like, show me a real photo of a deer and a photo of a deer from RDR2 and I'd be able to tell they're obviously different, one is real and one is not. Even still though, we peaked, because if we tried to make graphics indistinguishable from real life, it just looks uncanny because computer visuals cannot accurately replicate reality, no matter how hard they try. All this to say, we've peaked with graphics as is and while they may not be literally photorealistic and lifelike, we've still peaked and any attempt to push beyond that is futile from a design and style perspective
@@kaid8701idk, the development becomes more expensive but quality and amount of work done decreases greatly. It's like they don't want to do any optimization, and thanks to dlss they do less optimization in hopes that everyone will just buy rtx 4080 or whatever to be able to run their piece of crap with playable fps.
It get to the point where my RX 6800 16GB start to struggling on newer release like Space Marine 2 at medium-low with FSR2 and 0.5x render scale, yet it still has framedrops.
Got a 4070 ti super in my pc, an amd 7900x running 1080p ultra in Space marine 2 and still only get 90 to 120 when comparable looking games with similar settings will regularly crack 200 fps.
@@user-vp9lc9up6vunfortunately that's where tolerating studios like Bethesda gets you. At least they have the choice to fix their games if they're bad enough, ala No Man's Sky.
The reason why it peaked has to do with the actual limitations of graphical fidelity. Basically, you can't make a design more realistic than it is without actually having the texture actually BE realistic, and we've gotten to that limitation with textures. You can't make them any more realistic than they can be unless you can somehow make a texture pack actually look like real-life, but that's nigh-impossible, even when texture packs are literally images of real-life things, because of them adjusting color saturation, etc. for cinematic textures, most you can do is increase texture resolution to give an illusion of realism, but even then you'd notice it still looks like computer graphics. We can't make them look any more real than we can and that's a given fact, and the only way we can is either increasing the texture resolution to ungodly levels or increasing polygon count, and in a lot of cases, both. All these at the cost of computing power, and as we also scale from our standard HD resolution of 1080p monitors to higher resolution ones like 4k is now becoming increasingly mainstream, those realistic graphics will have higher and higher count of polygons and texture resolution just to achieve a similar effect for higher resolution monitors. This is why when the UE5 trailer came out, it looked so realistic to the point it seemed real, but that's because of how insanely high the resolution of the textures, atleast 8k was and the polycount atleast 10mil each, and combined with the next point I'm about to say... And this is why games and even GPUs like Nvidia/AMD has instead shifted focus on more aspects of realism, because they knew we peaked some certainty in graphics. We now get more focus on physics, shadows, lighting calculations to be dynamic, etc to achieve a sense of realism other than just realistic textures and design. Basically, while realistic graphics kind of peaked around 2015 or so, there were still minor details that weren't really realistic. For example, "realistic" water in games before and even now, are often or not, not really that realistic as most calculations on water is done on surface water and still a lot of those aren't as realistic as some physics in water is not right in games. In some cases if you are able to zoom out far enough in an overworld, you'll see patternized waves, and that's because it's just sanely easier to do it. And that's because actual simulated dynamically fluid water in video games are incredibly taxing, and Nvidia's showcase from literally 2010 GTC(You can search on youtube Physics Demo Nvidia GTC 2010) is still something that we cannot really achieve in-games. But that doesn't mean we aren't getting there, UE5's Fluid Flux 2.0 looks really good. Even to this day though, there hasn't really been a game that actually made full use of water in video games as an actual gameplay mechanic. And while we have games that take place underwater like Subnautica, it doesn't really present itself with the accompanying physics of what water should have. Basically if we can achieve that physics with water, we might actually get some new games to conceptualize around using it for gameplay mechanics, more than just sailing, or riding a vehicle over surface water. What I want to say is, we might actually have more games that makes use of improved physics as a gameplay mechanic other than just eyecandy, and honestly while we have peaked in resolution, we haven't really in detail. Devs have gotten smarter with faking realism, it's why games like Unrecord really looks like someone just strapped a bodycam to a person but because of clever use of the first-person POV, camera movement, lighting and shadows, we were all duped. Now that's not to say all games should have realistic af physics. A game still needs to focus on its gameplay while also achieving fidelity. The main issue is devs and publishers are treating games too cinematic now to the point they're adding unnecessary details which does have people work on even if it takes only a few hours, but hey those are still a few hours wasted. If a game should have realistic details, then that game needs to actually have some use for that sense of realism. It's about expressing intent, that the game will actually benefit from those finer details. A lot of games and stories will have no bearing benefit from having realistic physics. There is no technical reason to have it and while it adds a level of immersion, that only really matters if the game actually had intent for immersion, games like RPGs or horror games which has finer specific physics details that elevates the experience like lighting, shadows, etc. but not on things like breakable objects or wind physics or some shit. Basically a game should only implement what it actually needs, not simulate real life. After all, if they're really trying to make it as real as possible, then they should not be using high contrast, oversaturation, cinematic textures, etc. in their games. Because real life actually looks bland af, it's not really that colorful nor oversaturated. Also achieving that sense of realism will ruin gameplay as there are factors in real life that really just doesn't work in video games, with the most famous and common example, first-person views. There was a good video I watched before that actually talks about this. It's amazing that people and devs want realistic games, but ironically also, don't want realistic games. Edit: Also just a fun tidbit here I want to say in regards to polycount. Did you know that the original FFXIV was so ambitious that one of the main reasons why it was so graphically intensive is that a lot of things in the game had an insane polycount. Like people found out the dreaded infamous flower pot in FFXIV alone had a staggering 1000 polycount and 140 lines of shader code(which IIRC is the same polycount as actual characters), all to achieve that realistic barrel-like/pot-like circular structure. This was when Tessellation or Parallax Occlusion wasn't much in-use in games yet, so that polycount is and always rendered at 1000 actively even when you're far away, and it was when SE was at the peak of their ambitions that focused a lot on cinematics and graphics over gameplay.
@@llllllllIlllIlIland what's the difference between someone writing a wall of text and you reading it to someone who makes a 7 to 10 min video and talking? Because your attention span is so short you can't read versus to just listen, you don't even have any meaningful take on this discussion.
My thoughts exactly with physics. We still have a long way to go with it. Texture realism definitely have peaked around mid 2010s to 2020s the moment 3d artists were able to use actual high resolution of real-life images in games. Nowadays it just keeps getting higher and higher at the cost of more storage space.
I think, popping LODs and noticeably appearing shadow details etc. is currently the biggest bottleneck in a realistic graphic experience. The world shouldn't only look good within a frame. The world should look good in motion, that's what you do most of the time in games. As long as we can see any details appearing out of nowhere, realistic graphics aren't there yet, imo.
People will fight you tooth and nail about this as they delude themselves to think that 4-5 year old games like RDR2 and Cyberpunk2077 look worse than games like Starfield. True story btw, someone actually said that to me.
The thumbnail is clickbait. The "2018" RDR2 Arthur Morgan with jellybeans in his palm is actually a render by a Source Filmmaker Discord Denizen, using the Source engine. It is not made in the RAGE engine, it is made by the Source engine 2007 branch.
After the late 2000s games with the GRAY filter, games started to get colorful, so they started to look better, but later games chased after realism instead more than style and theme, and then we started to get games like AC Unity and MGS V, which were extremely realistic when it comes to feel, gameplay and looks, AC Unity's environmental designs can even win in a comparison between games like RDR2. And after chasing "realism", graphics pretty much peaked in 2018, and then continued to stay on neutral. But people actually know what matters is the feel and the style of the game instead of "realism". Souls games are the perfect example, they don't have extremely realistic graphics and detail, what is has is it's ability to portray the intended feel through it's visual style and theme.
Also what ever happened to ray-tracing? People were making a big deal about it back in 2019-2020 and talking about how it's gonna "revolutionize" the gaming industry but I don't see many games actually using it.
Art style is far more important than graphical fidelity. A company that mastered this is fromsoftware. Elden Rings' graphical fidelity is garbage, but i guarantee it will remain one of the best-looking games pretty much forever unless Sony ruins it.
These AIs called FSR, DLSS, XeSS and now PSSR, destroyed the game graphics, the optimization, the history and whatever, i played Ratchet & clank - rift apart low quality in 40fps or less on a gtx 1070 "it's old graphics card" BRUH, and the rtx 3050ti? It's old? And have the same performance... This is really bad.
Great Video, and i agree. The Graphics are a huge part to the feel of the game, but the motto of over-realistic graphics is to hide the limited good content of triple- or even quadruple A titles. It is a huge breakthrough from a publisher/developer site, but as a gamer i dont level Realistic- over Atmosphere. Btw underrated
2:14 "We are reaching a point where companies are using the advancements in technology as a crutch to excuse a shorter window to optimize games, leading to newly released games that look comparable to games that are years old with a tenth of the frame rate" Sums it up perfectly.
@@RobbySutton they do, you should try Skyrim VR modded and AI enabled, half life Alyx, Aces of Thunder, Behemoth VR, Subside VR, Blade and Sorcery, Aliens Rogue Incursion, Assassin's Creed Nexus, Star wars Squadrons, Contractors, Kayak VR and many others. Playing stading up is optional (although I love it!) Its much healthier than playing sitted down
@@VRitasium half true f these games are either not for me or I have not tried the other half are games that have not even come out yet and most of these look like exclusives
The problem is that TAA, temporal upscaling, and all these things just make the screen blurry. Load up any old game and just notice how sharp they are in motion when compared to new games.
I was watching the video undisturbed until my eyes FELL ON THE SUBSCRIBER COUNT WTF I NEVER EXPECTED TO WITNESS SUCH LEVEL OF "UNDERRATED-NESS" (I'd call my self william Shakesp-) Keep it up dude!
Loved your video, felt like I was talking myself. I run a GTX1070 on 1080p and one of these days I was really thinking I would really blow some money on a GPU but damn there is no game that makes me think "This would like waaaaay better if a had the latest card".
Halo 4 objectively looks visually worse than Reach, not just talking about the questionable art style. All textures have been downscaled to meet the demands of Xbox 360 because Microsoft wanted to squeeze in one last old gen title.
@@ayoubmorjane7722 It's like saying "you can't have famous actors in movies - if you were an indie movie creator you would know!" Well obviously, if you don't have money to pay the artists, you most likely won't have artistic graphics in your game. Realism is easier now, because you can still use UE5, even without a budget, and there are plenty of cheap or free assets for it. Anyway, if you are tight on budget, don't go for realism, I agree - I was always talking about triple A games.
One issue with high fidelity is also that its distracting and useless. To me it even breaks immersion, as I'm watching some cutscene and all the little details are fighting for my attention. Why do we need to see the pores on the character's skin, or the hair on their arms, and stuff like that? Is that really worth the trade-off of having longer installation times with a lot more disk space taken, and longer loading screens or loading-animations, and requiring an overly expensive graphics card to handle it? And then they also often clutter the scenery too much. In movies, they carefully craft the scenery with just enough things to look plausible, lived in, etc, but not too cluttered that it distracts the viewer from what matters, which is usually the characters. They also carefully consider the colors of the whole scene. It's clear that "professional" game developers don't know crap about any of this stuff. They didn't study movie making, and yet... they're essentially making interactable movies these days. Ignoring these things is fine when they're making something cartoony, but it's not at all fine if they're doing realism. Heck, even cartoonists got this right decades ago. Road Runner cartoons, for example, didn't put any more detail into the scenery than necessary, because there's no point doing it. It's just good enough that you can take it all in at a glance, and get the idea, and then pay attention to the characters.
I was playing Bioshock 2 the other day, and I was still wowed by how good the game looks. Graphics didn’t need to progress past that point because we already peaked there.
Nah. I am hardcore CS2 player and they dropped Artstyle in favour of bland realism. The new water is just another photorealistic real life water coming true in life attempt Try compare CSGO to CS2 side by side. CS2 is just has better fidelity but less detailed textures + 50% more brightness. CSGO tried to be different beautiful with diverse atmosphere with rainy, snowy, overcast maps but CS2 is just Broad daylight and burning sun in every maps.
the moment i saw games hit ray tracing i knew that one day games looking realistic would not last long as a selling point lol, one day devs will be forced to actually be creative again (sadly that creativity will probably go into making up genders for characters)
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Design > Detail. Simple as that
Exactly artstyle always beats graphical details
So true, also nice pfp lol
Jet Set Radio Future is the best example of it, cool wacky design can age better compared to over "realistic" look.
But older games had more detail, makes this argument irrelevant
aesthetics > graphical fidelity
Honestly, I wish they would stop wasting precious processing power on graphics, and give us gameplay depth. I wanna see a plastic Army Men game where you fight in a grocery store, and you have to avoid falling cans of beans from enemy explosions.
Why has nobody thought of this?
We’ve all wanted a game like that with toys and action figures
Guys... it already exist a game like that.
It called toy soldiers, for the xbox 360. Not exactly like you described but still. I agree i would want game ñike thst with new graphics
@@Ahrone1586 I want one with all the action figures and toys from our childhoods
Battlefield 1 with no HUD gameplay looks and feels like a movie.
A lot of games do. I didn't realize how atmospheric and amazing Halo Reach looked until I played it with a no hud mod. Now I play every game with the hud off, it's almost insane how big of a difference it can make when you don't have a million pointless stickers covering the screen, the games visuals can speak for themself. What's the point in Hitmarkers when the game has bloodspray?? The blood _is_ your hitmarker. Big obnoxious crosshair? RE4 solved this with a laser site back in 2004. And it's REALLY annoying when developers don't include an option to turn off the UI elements, especially when every single gameplay trailer nowadays has them turned off, because they KNOW it looks better. I don't get it, I know it'd be easy to add an option in the menu, they just choose not to.
@@bagggers9796 Fair point. But BF1 is ahead of most others, because it has great graphics, destruction physics, and sound design that turns everything up to 10 with no hud.
the atmosphere alone encaptures that war period. 👌
@@ExtantPerson What really makes BF1 such a unique game is that it's the Behemoth features where the airship and armoured train can be destroyed anywhere in the game's map. It's a major improvement from BF4's Levolution.
@@channe3049 I did really like BF4’s levolution, but I agree, the behemoths add a lot
The more graphics we got, the less refined gameplay we kept being given.
...so it is no wonder Indie Gaming is blowing up, when you ain't wasting millions in polygon counts, you can focus on what matters: THE GAME.
Thats why i play pong on my potato powered calculator
@@Rainy_nightday unfathomably based
Graphics are part of the game, if you’re trying to do something like cyberpunk 2077 you need very good graphics
That's just false. There's plenty games with great graphics and great gameplay look at gow or ghost of tsushima or the spiderman series. You can't say that across the whole gaming industry even if you look at developers like naughty dog who don't have amazing gameplay but the system they had since uncharted has only been improved across all games one after another. It's just straight up false
Indie games "blowing up" yeah right. It's because the barrier to entry of game development has lowered and it's easier to make games and there is a nostalgia factor for some indie style games. But the best selling games are still big budget game.
Graphics we still don't have:
- shadows for foliage
- liquid simulations
Add realistic food eating animation to that.
@@aryabratsahoo7474 You don't swallow food whole in less than 0.002 seconds?
@@aryabratsahoo7474 not just that, but animations still don't look realistic enough, tho I think everyone prefers them faster in general
Foliage shadows exist. Let me introduce you to Path Tracing.
some games do feature liquid simulations, but they are rare. the only two that i know off, is killing floor 2, and borderlands 2, but these games are still old by today's standarts
Red Dead 2 was the last time I looked at graphics, NOT art design, and said “wow, this is incredible!” Red Dead 2 also has beautiful art design, great gameplay, and a 10/10 story, so while the graphics are the best I’ve ever seen, they’re not even in the top 3 things I would name as for why the game is great.
Whatever engine Red Dead Redemption 2 was made on is on another level honestly. You could boot it up, just mess around and it all looks like a cutscene.
@@voidofhope6259 the rage engine, it'll be the same one used for gta 6 but better seeing how its been 6 years about
@@lololazureyep... but rdr2 was developed in rage 8....and gta6 is gonna be rage 9.....I can't wait to see it.......🫠🫠
You don't know what art design means lol
RDR2 looks the way it looks because of art style
@@ReachTea Graphical clarity is the same as art style? I don't think so.
The Crocodile analogy was 10/10.
yes i was laughing so hard
I think a lot of the problem stems from UE5. It's so advanced and accessible developers don't even think to make their graphics look interesting or unique, they just put on the most advanced effects they can find and pray it can run with DLSS. Almost every new game looks the same now. Ironically, I think the limitations of technology were what made games look good.
Limitations incite creativity. For example, halo combat evolved. For a game made in 2001, there is no other game quite like it
Anecdotally true. After 7 years of Unity I switched to Unreal in February and found out that for a lot of bugs Unreal has a "fix at 10x compute impact" which is definitely intended for cinematics people who dont care about perf but you can also use it for real time technically. Shit like CCD. And some devs may abuse it.
@@Anon-vd4dqconsider that a newbie in unreal will stop iterating on his work earlier becauss it will start looking acceptable earlier becauss of lumen and post.
In Unity you needed to sweat to make it look good and within iterations you found knowledge, solutions and unique style.
Now volumetric fog just blends everything together and its fine.
@@namesurname624 It's really sad because I think older games genuinely looked so much better, and you don't even have to be a game developer to know. We got so good at faking so many things that the real thing just doesn't look as good anymore.
@@Anon-vd4dq Same for half life 2, except it was terrible on performance on release, but it was justified as it was a true breakthrough in terms of graphics with no comparison. All the new "next gen" games of today look the same or worse than their predecessors except they consume like 5x more resources.
bro snuck in bloodborne psx and thought we wouldn't notice
I didn't know about Bloodborne PSX, neither played or seen the gameplay of Bloodborne, yet I watched the same second asking, is that PSX Bloodborne?
What do you mean? It says "real" right there.
0:47
Piracy is morally righteous, and these companies want you to buy their slop and eat bug sandwiches.
Leddit
Wouldnt Batman Arkham Knight deserve a mention in a video about graphics peaking?
Man Ham Night
Yes
And that sh!t ran on UE3.. Without the requirement for RT capable hardware...
Jesus, the visuals of that game blew me away when I marathoner the series 6 months ago. 2015, are you serious ?
Best rain and light effects of any game I've played. I would've said best cityscape, too, but CP2077 takes it for me. But Gotham in AK is still unlike any other cityscape.
Uncharted 4, AC Unity
I cannot believe that 2013 was 30 years ago
Same I bought my first game system about 22 years ago in 1938.
I honestly can't wait to actually say that soon and wonder where the hell did time go
You had me tweaking there
Wait, what!!??? I thought it was only like 29 years ago... 😭😭😭 Time flies fast...
Stop 😂
The worse part was that graphics now looks worse, and somehow runs worse.
It's the double whammy that hurts so bad tbh
Exactly like wtf look at Arkham knight bro it’s so old but looks super next gen and runs on mid specs
Taa
word. same goes with movie cgi right now.
@@shiro4095 so many examples of 10 year old games that absolutely pop at high resolutions it's frustrating. IDC if the lighting isn't dynamic I can't I'm too busy playing the game having fun
Graphics "peaked" because the talent has dried up at the top. the technology gets stronger but the people implementing it stagnated
its more and more expensive to make games , they cut teams in half , release half made games and then wonder why their company stocks go down even though they released 50% more games than 5 years ago
Yeah its more like the seniors who peaked and supposed to deliver what people desire are just being replaced with newbies who have no idea what they're doing so it stagnate even downgraded despite technologies are improving. I can't believe a single bit that the people who made Assasin's Creed Black Flag is the same people who made skull and bones.
Clearly the best sign of a genre improving is when every single part of it becomes completely identical and interchangeable visually to the point of absolute absurdity. Just like anime. Hail Hydra.
They didn't stagnate, they were fired. The industry has gone through round after round of laying people off to "cut the costs" incurred by losing so much of their talent in the last round of lay offs to "cut the costs" that were...
This is why the indie gaming scene is having a renaissance. Not only do we suddenly have lots of talented devs with no job, but working for yourself is a pretty good way to ensure you won't get laid off.
The talent dries at the top BECAUSE the technology "gets stronger". New technology requires time to learn. Developers aren't allowed to get comfortable with the tech
I dont understand why games go for realism rather than _beauty_
The real world isnt always nice to look at. It can be, sure, but why not put effort into making things just look great instead of imitating reality? Its art! Theres a reason we still have paintings after photos were invented
Ik the game is bad but suicide squad looks great and has beautiful colors aside from the ui and architecture looks great. But the textures aren't as sharp in some areas as arkham knight so people complained. People want realism rather than colorful worlds
Because coming up with a unique art style is extremely hard to do. Not every artist has the talent to go that far. On the other hand, realistic games takes more imagination than you think. Neither is easy, but the point should always be making the world look visually gripping and be interactive in meaningful ways.
Cyberpunk captures both realistic textures and beauty
arkane games are the perfect example of that
both dishonored and prey games are stunning, beautiful, but they are opposite of "realism", they look like a cartoon
deep rock galactic too, cell shading without that much detail, but the light, the cave shape and the minerals reflection make this game ingeniously beautiful
Name one game
Mirror's Edge is an amazing example of this
Beautiful game
Yeah when that dropped I felt like this was the peak. Totally real
Those guys at DICE knew how to balance art direction with technical power in it's games
Oh and it had PEAK cloth sims being advertised with Nvidia's PhysX. I miss when we had physics simulations being the selling point for hardware and software! Nowadays it's just how reflective a puddle on the ground is.
@@cepheus3d the thing with physx was that it was a scam. All the best physics puzzle games, even from that era like portal etc, use universal software physics that works just as good and doesn't rely on proprietary hardware. Check out the physics effects in Control. No need for physx to even exist anymore
The pursuit of graphical fidelity is what has ruined gaming imo
This unironically. Games like Morrowind, Deus Ex, Thief and other 2000s games felt great because the textures and environments were manually handcrafted while modern games are procedural generated. Artist manual work> copy paste empty landscapes
That is not even close to the real problem. Games have always been focused on good graphics. The main problem is how developers and other employees are being handled at studios. Mass layoffs, outsourcing to foreign devs unfamiliar with the game engine, and corporate overreach into the game design itself are all much bigger problems.
@@Shaarpest Eyup, and the worst part is that apparently every division/group of devs in those companies, despite being competent, are sadly so separated and have to deal with such a crappy system that they just literally can't get things done right (save for the graphics department, but they don't need to worry about coherency with other groups cause it's mostly just visual). I think it might've been EA in particular, but in one bad case, they literally had to submit a request to fix a simple bug, AND THEN WAIT WEEKS FOR A RESPONSE. Worst part? Said response was "nah, don't touch it".
Apparently the idea is that with such a huge amount of employees, they're not allowed to just edit the code freely if they see issues, but rather only do what they're told. And since the nature of coding is that one tiny little issue with one part can completely brick another section of the code, and basically make it be all glitches galore. I really feel bad for the devs that put up with it, as they're clearly talented considering how they can regularly pull off great visuals, sound design, etc, but since they're so restricted by poorly made corporate command structures, they just straight up can't fix the bugs even if they wanted to.
no, it's the woke mob that fucked it
Back in the day games used to push interactivity far more than just raw graphics. Stuff like destructible elements, particles, minimizing clipping and maximizing proper collision, THIS is what I want the industry to put the focus into again, not the boring ray tracing and ultra-high res textures. The physics of games from 20 years ago are more impressive than modern ones because AAA devs now only care about wowing you with pretty screenshots while compromising on interactivity of their worlds that isn't as easy to demonstrate in an image but contributes far more to the actual gameplay.
Thank you for citing your source for that graphics quality over time graph
Helldivers is a bad example for this because that game wasn’t even supposed to be AAA contender but still looks really good for what it is
Its engine was also discontinued mid development and the tiny team at arrowhead had to develop it on the fly after the fact.
yeah but the hardware requirement for those graphics is disgusting. my 5800x3d sits at 79% usage on difficulty 1, 100% by difficulty 5 or 6. ill stick a rx590 into the computer and ill probably still get bottlenecked by the cpu at 2560x1440.
@@kochiss5800x3d, rx590 and 1440p monitor is really odd combo
@@kochissyes because the rx 590 is old at this point and like you mentioned would bottleneck your system. turn down some settings if you haven't already.
@kochiss the 5800x3d is an amazing processor. If those usage numbers are true, I think you may have something else going on. It should not be tanking that badly.
NFS 2015 still has the best visuals i've ever seen in a racing game, far better than unbound or test drive. Batman Arkham Knight looks better than suicide squad, dying light looks better than it's sequel...i really have no fucking idea what these studios are doing nowadays
eh nfs uses TAA, only looks good on TVs from far away.
@@zgaminggallery9910 yeah but i was talking about the lighting and art design of them. TAA only makes the image blurry, and you can turn it off on pc
@@SuSTR7 the game isnt designed to run with TAA off, it makes the whole screen glittery.
What are they doing? Well, they are checking for harmful stereotypes and representation in their games, duh....
ESG is what's happening.
gta 6 can only save us now, they made red dead 2, where the horse balls shrink in winter
imagine your car's gas tank freezes in a hurricane 💀
Rockstar is the few that people have faith in
@@imtotallybored They maybe as greedy as activation but they still dont make the same game over and over and over. Oh and their games are good.
Rockstar is as good at graphics and design as Kojima is at writing and music. If there is to be a studio that would make games look great again it's gonna be them.
Don't hurricanes happen in the summer?
@@coffe_6969they are greedy for sure, but they make great games
They peaked with 1080Ti with 11GB VRAM as a performance benchmark. Consoles still have around 12GB of usable VRAM and similar GPU performance. 3060 and 6600XT also have similar performance.
Graphics have peaked for:
Resolution (AA is becoming harder to improve vs how hardware is getting better at rendering old games at 4k)
Lighting (Path tracing is expensive as hell but the optimization comes down to framerate and not so much improving the look as much as nvidia tries)
Textures (unreal has worked on better layering, but since mega scans, textures have looked amazing)
Framerates (we keep improving on this anyway)
Graphics are about to peak for:
LODs: I hope it will be cringe to see pop in or lod swaps thanks to mesh shaders
Frame transitions (oleds have their problems with burn in but the frame transitions are near flawless)
Graphics need work on:
Fluid sims (performance & visuals)
destructible environments
hair (still)
Next years will see more and more fluid sims.
But hair is so dissapointing so far. Stagnant for over a decade, going backwards even. I see asset shaders looking better than AAA
Oled tv's havnt really had burn issues for years now...
Also Hellblade 2 has impressive as hell fluid simulation.
But yea its still not there yet
@@IFibreOpticI Oh no they do have burn in issues but to actually produce those issues you have to do stupid things like use office programs in light mode at 200 nits brightness (which is near the max for most OLEDs) 10 hours a day and then you'll likely see permanent burn-in within about 5 months of use. This isn't too unrealistic either, this is just generic office use.
@definitelynotacyborg apparently not mate, TV ratings are performing 24/7 burn in tests.for months on end, extreme tests, and even after that burn in isn't prominent on modern oleds past 2020. So normal use cases are extremely unlikely to exhibit burn in.
Bad Company 2 had destructible buildings and deforming terrain, why in the world don't we still have this in every FPS in 2024.
I miss how 90s-00s gaming had such a vast range of creativity. I love the amount of risk they took on odd concepts in This Y2K era- the Dreamcast/PS2/360. It should show us that GRAPHICS are not the most important thing.. If you can create satisfying movement, gameplay mechanics, physics effects, responsive parts of a environment that makes you want to explore it, engage it, etc. That stuff is so much more important. Not: {"Who can make the largest game map? Or have the most reflections?"} I think Art style, design, vibe, aesthetic is much more important. You don't need top notch graphics to greatly appreciate and enjoy playing a game. That's why we are seeing such a resurgence of players who have gone back to playing older games because they realized the aspects of gaming that they care about and are unhappy with most modern games. So hopefully gaming will enter a new era. That mixes in aspects of the older era's. With our modern capabilities that will hopefully help make it easier to create a satisfying game (without it taking 8 years to build a broken game. Hopefully) Currently everything is trying to be like a Triple AAA game or a free to play online battle Royale game.. A lot of us miss when we had game selection similar to how the Dreamcast/GameCube/360/PS2 era had a mix of. As well alot of those games came with options for local multiplayer, split screen, LAN parties, or offline modes against bots or other diverse offline CPU game modes. Yet modern games are not only lacking those dynamic options that give games nearly endless replayability features... Modern games are lacking even meeting the most basic standards for game's... They don't seemed focused on the core of the games to be Fun. They over focus on "realism" Rather than adding in Artistic adaptations for the greater good of gaming as a whole.. We could be doing so much better yet people are just coming out with the most bland game design, braindead AI, less care for physics effects... We could be doing so much better than this..
It’s funny how much better all those old games look with higher fidelity graphics and how they got really good around 8 years ago. You know, it’s almost like standards got higher for visuals and people saying they want worse graphics completely misses the point of older games, because what they really want is a fun and creative game that looks great instead of a blurry mess from the PlayStation 3. The graphics now are worse. People are getting exactly what they said they wanted. The reality is that their actions say everything. And making a game that looks like it came out in the 1990s or 2001 isn’t creative or clever. It’s just lazy and shows a lack of effort or desire to do anything of note. We stopped making games like those because the improvements of technology led us to bigger things and more creative ways to make games, not the limits. We won’t get any fun games if we stay in the same corners from 30 years ago. Gaming will just get complacent and everything will fall apart. There’s a balance not being met here and a false equivalency. I say go back to 2016 graphics and make fun games again. Simple as that. They look good and run good while supporting a variety of hardware and aren’t too intense to run. 2017 came around and what really got people was the part where legitimate companies started putting scams into their games that they sold to kids. The graphics being good doesn’t mean they had to put loot boxes into their games. They chose to do that because they were greedy. The graphics and business models are two separate things. If games just got worse graphics, they’d shove a lot more of these paywalls in those too because they don’t have to worry about graphics anymore. I’d know because they did that on mobile games and at the end of the Xbox 360 generation until 2017 when the law caught up. You think they won’t just do that too? They already have.
bro wrote a book ain’t nobody got time for allat
i recently started playing the first 2 metal gear games and i'll be honest, i've had a lot of fun with them, despite their age and limitations posed during those times, they managed to add in so many details and fun content inside
My guy there's no difference between them and now
I cannot read all that im so sorry
The modern graphics has more details but...feels bland and blurry.
They gotta pump motion blur and anisotropic somewhere
Blame that on TAA
TAA ruined the latter half of the PS4 generation
TAA sucks
No blame that on AI super resolution scaling and frame gen
When I recently played Battlefield 1 and DOOM 2016, and then Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2 I kinda thought "Hey, we finally don't need to upgrade every few years!".
Doom 2016 looks better than Eternal IMHO
@@miguelpereira9859 Geniune question. Do you think its because of the more industrial dark type style doom 2016 has?. I have seen a lot players preferring that style over DE. Me personally like both doom 2016's dark style and DE's beautiful environments and models and the color style I think they chose was to fit such environments.
@@antigraviman7137 i personally believe it's because Doom 2016 had higher contrast between lit and dark areas, but I also just prefer 2016's artstyle more. Eternal leaned way too much into the comic book aesthetic while 2016 striked a perfect balance between gritty realism and cartoony expression for the kind of story it's telling. Just my 2 cents
@@miguelpereira9859 Hm I see thanks for the answer. So I think it safe so assume u will like doom the dark ages style. Because from what they have shown it does look more akin to doom 2016's style.
@@miguelpereira9859 I liked both but I think Doom 2016 overall as a game and also it's art style just holds up better. I get more of an urge to replay Doom 2016 than Eternal. Eternal just feels like you have to do things in exactly one precise way while Doom 2016 just allows you to improvise a lot more.
"Realistic graphics" don't look anything at all like real life, they look like "generic video game".
genuinely true comment
It's impossible to get perfect graphics and it would look shit af it was perfect realism. It enters a stage of uncanny valley where it shouldn't. In games you want them to look as real as possible to the extent where you can tell its still a game
Can tell no one here has played Hellblade 2, and it shows
Sure if you're poor with outdated components sure
@@IFibreOpticIthat doesn't look realistic bud
That crocodile analogy was the best analogy to modern gaming I've seen
there’s no upgrade because we’ve already hit photorealism. how are we going to surpass photorealism and what would it even look like?
not really. but the problem nowadays is just bad games, i mean, look at ubisoft. they more interested in pronouns than games
We gettin immersive headgear, sword art online in Full body gear and neuralink with AI implemented 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️📢📢📢📢✨✨🎇🎇🎇🎇🎇🎇
@@madhunter6420 yes, really. we have achieved photorealism years ago. it doesn't have to be realism 100% to be photorealism
I wouldn't say exact photorealism, maybe for environments but when it comes to living things like animals and people I can tell the difference. Like, show me a real photo of a deer and a photo of a deer from RDR2 and I'd be able to tell they're obviously different, one is real and one is not. Even still though, we peaked, because if we tried to make graphics indistinguishable from real life, it just looks uncanny because computer visuals cannot accurately replicate reality, no matter how hard they try. All this to say, we've peaked with graphics as is and while they may not be literally photorealistic and lifelike, we've still peaked and any attempt to push beyond that is futile from a design and style perspective
Astro Bot actually looks incredible though
Design + Style + Meaning+ Art > Graphic. There are multiple aspects apparently!
Why games becoming heavy to run why company's releases games unfinished bugy unoptimised at the start now a days
@@kaid8701idk, the development becomes more expensive but quality and amount of work done decreases greatly. It's like they don't want to do any optimization, and thanks to dlss they do less optimization in hopes that everyone will just buy rtx 4080 or whatever to be able to run their piece of crap with playable fps.
Graphics are important. What matters is that they don’t interfere with the gameplay and make everything look like smeared marshmallows in an oven.
@@kaid8701Because the people at the top making decisions are inept morons who got there through nepotism and kissing ass
sorry but i want bf1 or rdr2 like graphics aswell, idk why people think graphic is not important
You're a real one for including the game names in the description, I completely forgot about Signalis.
Five star meal… for his first video.
very yes
It get to the point where my RX 6800 16GB start to struggling on newer release like Space Marine 2 at medium-low with FSR2 and 0.5x render scale, yet it still has framedrops.
Got a 4070 ti super in my pc, an amd 7900x running 1080p ultra in Space marine 2 and still only get 90 to 120 when comparable looking games with similar settings will regularly crack 200 fps.
Space Marine 2 is pretty CPU heavy, not GPU
i played with a 4080 and without framegen i was doing 75fps in 2k (high-medium settings) meanwhile 2-3 years old games does a lot more in 4k maxed out
The most beautiful use of raytracing is Minecraft. Ultra realistic lighting on hyper stylized voxel world is gorgeously surreal.
Minecraft RTX was unironically a huge selling point for me when I bought my RTX 3080
I need my graphics for my blocks designed for children. Yeah makes sense
I think Cyberpunk might have stolen that crown from Minecraft
@@miguelpereira9859 agreed with you, Path tracing took the crown
@@miguelpereira9859 nah rtx word emerged from minecraft in my opinion
-Video Game Graphics Peaked 8 Years ago.
-Bodycam (2024) has joined the chat.
This is such a well written video bro well done
I feel like I stumbled on to the beginning of a legend and I just so happened to bare witness to your first upload. Seriously well put together man
Cyberpunk was "bad" at the beginning but now it could easily get into the list of the best games or games with a unique artstyle
Games shouldn't need redemption
@@user-vp9lc9up6v what does that means?
@@user-vp9lc9up6vunfortunately that's where tolerating studios like Bethesda gets you. At least they have the choice to fix their games if they're bad enough, ala No Man's Sky.
I enjoyed Cyberpunk but it definetly isnt one of the best games, the story is pretty weak in my opinion
@throwthrow-c7e CDPR actually respects its player base.
0:26 Someone just had to insult Helldivers 2.
😂
Mid-divers 2
Corpo-Divers 2
"At this point just go outside" I lol'd, brilliant
The reason why it peaked has to do with the actual limitations of graphical fidelity. Basically, you can't make a design more realistic than it is without actually having the texture actually BE realistic, and we've gotten to that limitation with textures. You can't make them any more realistic than they can be unless you can somehow make a texture pack actually look like real-life, but that's nigh-impossible, even when texture packs are literally images of real-life things, because of them adjusting color saturation, etc. for cinematic textures, most you can do is increase texture resolution to give an illusion of realism, but even then you'd notice it still looks like computer graphics.
We can't make them look any more real than we can and that's a given fact, and the only way we can is either increasing the texture resolution to ungodly levels or increasing polygon count, and in a lot of cases, both. All these at the cost of computing power, and as we also scale from our standard HD resolution of 1080p monitors to higher resolution ones like 4k is now becoming increasingly mainstream, those realistic graphics will have higher and higher count of polygons and texture resolution just to achieve a similar effect for higher resolution monitors. This is why when the UE5 trailer came out, it looked so realistic to the point it seemed real, but that's because of how insanely high the resolution of the textures, atleast 8k was and the polycount atleast 10mil each, and combined with the next point I'm about to say...
And this is why games and even GPUs like Nvidia/AMD has instead shifted focus on more aspects of realism, because they knew we peaked some certainty in graphics. We now get more focus on physics, shadows, lighting calculations to be dynamic, etc to achieve a sense of realism other than just realistic textures and design. Basically, while realistic graphics kind of peaked around 2015 or so, there were still minor details that weren't really realistic. For example, "realistic" water in games before and even now, are often or not, not really that realistic as most calculations on water is done on surface water and still a lot of those aren't as realistic as some physics in water is not right in games. In some cases if you are able to zoom out far enough in an overworld, you'll see patternized waves, and that's because it's just sanely easier to do it. And that's because actual simulated dynamically fluid water in video games are incredibly taxing, and Nvidia's showcase from literally 2010 GTC(You can search on youtube Physics Demo Nvidia GTC 2010) is still something that we cannot really achieve in-games. But that doesn't mean we aren't getting there, UE5's Fluid Flux 2.0 looks really good. Even to this day though, there hasn't really been a game that actually made full use of water in video games as an actual gameplay mechanic. And while we have games that take place underwater like Subnautica, it doesn't really present itself with the accompanying physics of what water should have. Basically if we can achieve that physics with water, we might actually get some new games to conceptualize around using it for gameplay mechanics, more than just sailing, or riding a vehicle over surface water. What I want to say is, we might actually have more games that makes use of improved physics as a gameplay mechanic other than just eyecandy, and honestly while we have peaked in resolution, we haven't really in detail.
Devs have gotten smarter with faking realism, it's why games like Unrecord really looks like someone just strapped a bodycam to a person but because of clever use of the first-person POV, camera movement, lighting and shadows, we were all duped. Now that's not to say all games should have realistic af physics. A game still needs to focus on its gameplay while also achieving fidelity. The main issue is devs and publishers are treating games too cinematic now to the point they're adding unnecessary details which does have people work on even if it takes only a few hours, but hey those are still a few hours wasted. If a game should have realistic details, then that game needs to actually have some use for that sense of realism. It's about expressing intent, that the game will actually benefit from those finer details. A lot of games and stories will have no bearing benefit from having realistic physics. There is no technical reason to have it and while it adds a level of immersion, that only really matters if the game actually had intent for immersion, games like RPGs or horror games which has finer specific physics details that elevates the experience like lighting, shadows, etc. but not on things like breakable objects or wind physics or some shit.
Basically a game should only implement what it actually needs, not simulate real life. After all, if they're really trying to make it as real as possible, then they should not be using high contrast, oversaturation, cinematic textures, etc. in their games. Because real life actually looks bland af, it's not really that colorful nor oversaturated. Also achieving that sense of realism will ruin gameplay as there are factors in real life that really just doesn't work in video games, with the most famous and common example, first-person views. There was a good video I watched before that actually talks about this. It's amazing that people and devs want realistic games, but ironically also, don't want realistic games.
Edit: Also just a fun tidbit here I want to say in regards to polycount. Did you know that the original FFXIV was so ambitious that one of the main reasons why it was so graphically intensive is that a lot of things in the game had an insane polycount. Like people found out the dreaded infamous flower pot in FFXIV alone had a staggering 1000 polycount and 140 lines of shader code(which IIRC is the same polycount as actual characters), all to achieve that realistic barrel-like/pot-like circular structure. This was when Tessellation or Parallax Occlusion wasn't much in-use in games yet, so that polycount is and always rendered at 1000 actively even when you're far away, and it was when SE was at the peak of their ambitions that focused a lot on cinematics and graphics over gameplay.
The yapper
@@llllllllIlllIlIland what's the difference between someone writing a wall of text and you reading it to someone who makes a 7 to 10 min video and talking? Because your attention span is so short you can't read versus to just listen, you don't even have any meaningful take on this discussion.
My thoughts exactly with physics. We still have a long way to go with it. Texture realism definitely have peaked around mid 2010s to 2020s the moment 3d artists were able to use actual high resolution of real-life images in games. Nowadays it just keeps getting higher and higher at the cost of more storage space.
what he said
I think, popping LODs and noticeably appearing shadow details etc. is currently the biggest bottleneck in a realistic graphic experience. The world shouldn't only look good within a frame. The world should look good in motion, that's what you do most of the time in games. As long as we can see any details appearing out of nowhere, realistic graphics aren't there yet, imo.
I swear, this is the first video after I got the blue screen of death. Why you had to give me a SECOND heart attack?
People will fight you tooth and nail about this as they delude themselves to think that 4-5 year old games like RDR2 and Cyberpunk2077 look worse than games like Starfield.
True story btw, someone actually said that to me.
4:24 what game is that and what is the genre? The art style looks good
Katana zero
@@juanjoxpa thanks mate
I wss shocked to see that you only have one video
until a low end graphics card can shit on the 4090 we won't get any updates
We still have big companies adding 50 gb to games for """graphics"""
So true and it's annoying
50gb isn't a lot bud
@@AndrewB23 it adds up eventually
Rookie numbers if you really want large storage graphics see what happens if you try to full upograde skyrim to 16k texutures...
if a knife from stalker 2 crashes my pc, then we all know something's wrong.
The thumbnail is clickbait. The "2018" RDR2 Arthur Morgan with jellybeans in his palm is actually a render by a Source Filmmaker Discord Denizen, using the Source engine. It is not made in the RAGE engine, it is made by the Source engine 2007 branch.
It's there for comedic effect, silly!
@ It peaked 17 years ago
I can't believe 2014 was 10 years ago
After the late 2000s games with the GRAY filter, games started to get colorful, so they started to look better, but later games chased after realism instead more than style and theme, and then we started to get games like AC Unity and MGS V, which were extremely realistic when it comes to feel, gameplay and looks, AC Unity's environmental designs can even win in a comparison between games like RDR2. And after chasing "realism", graphics pretty much peaked in 2018, and then continued to stay on neutral. But people actually know what matters is the feel and the style of the game instead of "realism". Souls games are the perfect example, they don't have extremely realistic graphics and detail, what is has is it's ability to portray the intended feel through it's visual style and theme.
Also what ever happened to ray-tracing? People were making a big deal about it back in 2019-2020 and talking about how it's gonna "revolutionize" the gaming industry but I don't see many games actually using it.
>story
>shows signalis
dont do this to me man i dont need to go through depression again
Perhaps, this is hell
@@perhapsthisishell achtung
its me mrs signalis i need 300 rationmarks
@@perhapsthisishell None of us are here by choice.
Art style is far more important than graphical fidelity. A company that mastered this is fromsoftware. Elden Rings' graphical fidelity is garbage, but i guarantee it will remain one of the best-looking games pretty much forever unless Sony ruins it.
RAINWORLD SPOTTED 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
“And next, we have the rest of the animal kingdom”
*source engine ragdoll noises intensify*
RAIN WORLD SPOTTED!!!!!! WHO CARES FOR ULTRA REALISTIC GRAPHICS 🔥🔥🔥🗣️🗣️🗣️
YES
One frame of stalker detected. Video liked. Channel subscribed.
-Nathan
Amen.
These AIs called FSR, DLSS, XeSS and now PSSR, destroyed the game graphics, the optimization, the history and whatever, i played Ratchet & clank - rift apart low quality in 40fps or less on a gtx 1070 "it's old graphics card" BRUH, and the rtx 3050ti? It's old? And have the same performance... This is really bad.
One lone man in a bedroom with a bunch of memes makes great video with hueg -fonts- words better than Barbara Kruger ever could.
Great Video, and i agree. The Graphics are a huge part to the feel of the game, but the motto of over-realistic graphics is to hide the limited good content of triple- or even quadruple A titles. It is a huge breakthrough from a publisher/developer site, but as a gamer i dont level Realistic- over Atmosphere.
Btw underrated
UA-cam is funny, they literally recommended me "RDR2 SCREENSHOT CONFUSED with NATURE photos in NEWS" after I watched this video.
1:46 has no one heard that cyberpunk is good now?
No.
@@macrofurra Sad, because it is
Still not the game that was promised 10 years ago.
@@beeny4370 At this point does it even matter? If it's good that's a W, especially compared to it's very rocky launch
We heard you. We just don’t care.
2:14 "We are reaching a point where companies are using the advancements in technology as a crutch to excuse a shorter window to optimize games, leading to newly released games that look comparable to games that are years old with a tenth of the frame rate"
Sums it up perfectly.
In 2 years RDR2 will become 8 years old,times doesn't give a f and flies like a falcon.
VR IS the upgrade. We now can play VR which is 10x more immersive than having to play sitted while looking at a flat screen
Dog when they make good VR games I will start playing again but it would require gamers to get up which will never be popular for that reason
@@RobbySutton they do, you should try Skyrim VR modded and AI enabled, half life Alyx, Aces of Thunder, Behemoth VR, Subside VR, Blade and Sorcery, Aliens Rogue Incursion, Assassin's Creed Nexus, Star wars Squadrons, Contractors, Kayak VR and many others.
Playing stading up is optional (although I love it!) Its much healthier than playing sitted down
@@VRitasium I am talking about a contestant flow of good VR games that are great for replayability Wich non of these games have
@@VRitasium key word modded and even if so Skyrim is still not amazing for today's standards
@@VRitasium half true f these games are either not for me or I have not tried the other half are games that have not even come out yet and most of these look like exclusives
7 years later, CoD WWII's graphics still blows my mind.
1:10 HELLO RAIN WORLD OST??? BIOENGINEERING MY BELOVED
Literaly paused at that moment
1:56 It's already been 4 years!?
Its because of the abandonment of a graphical style in favor of extreme realism
The crocodile analogy is spot on.
The problem is that TAA, temporal upscaling, and all these things just make the screen blurry. Load up any old game and just notice how sharp they are in motion when compared to new games.
1:39 anyone know the song name?
Rain World OST - Bio-engineering
@@potato5119 thanks man, really should've known this lmao
I was like: Hey! I know that one.
Like that meme with leonardo dicaprio
I was watching the video undisturbed until my eyes FELL ON THE SUBSCRIBER COUNT
WTF
I NEVER EXPECTED TO WITNESS SUCH LEVEL OF "UNDERRATED-NESS" (I'd call my self william Shakesp-)
Keep it up dude!
SIGNALIS MENTIONED RAHHHHHHH I LOVE VISUAL MOTIF THAT WORKS HAND IN HAND WITH THE MUSICAL AND ARTISTIC MOTIF
Thought you would have had at least 100k subs, Keep up the good content mate
3:17 RAIN WORLD MENTION!!!!
WHAT THE FUCK IS PEAK🗣️🗣️🗣️🔥🔥🔥
this is a really amazing first video. I look forward to the content in the future!
HE USED SIGMALIS IN HIS VIDEO OH MY GOD. INSTANT LIKEEE
DO YOU REMEMBER OUR PROIMSEE??? EAST GERMANY!!!!!
Small Channel but the quality of this video is amazing also the writing is entertaining and capturing keep going💪🏻
what game is in 0:37 ?
Metro exodus i think
Metro: Exodus
it's a pretty good story driven FPS
@@matt0_o thank you, i just thought my comment would jus get buried
Metro exodus! I recomand playing it, and it’s very worth playing for the money!
@@Pitiplwuf i bought it, started it, i dont regret
Holy fuck man it's almost like there hasn't been an upgrade because you can't get more real than real life graphics...
0:43 METRO EXODUS MENTIONED LETS GO
Yes. Lets go
@@light4299 lets go on the train guys, I hear Novosibirsk is lovely this time of year
@@yaboi672 Novosibirsk is abysmal any time of year, believe me I lived there.
@@Korn1holio on a scale of 1 - 10, how bad was Novosibirsk?
Helldivers 2 looks great if you dont set the graphics settings like that
yeah this guy is kind of a dumbass
Hellblade came out in 2017 and still blows most current AAA games out of the water with its graphics
Loved your video, felt like I was talking myself. I run a GTX1070 on 1080p and one of these days I was really thinking I would really blow some money on a GPU but damn there is no game that makes me think "This would like waaaaay better if a had the latest card".
Remember how good Halo 4 looked on the Xbox 360?
Now look at Halo Infinite on the Xbox Series X…
halo 4 is an even worse exemple than halo 3 or reach says alott
@@raduidk13 not really 3 only has better lighting thats about it fraphics wise
Halo 4 objectively looks visually worse than Reach, not just talking about the questionable art style.
All textures have been downscaled to meet the demands of Xbox 360 because Microsoft wanted to squeeze in one last old gen title.
@@_MaZTeR_ reach looks way more blurry than h4 both where limited by the console
Infinite's campaign graphics look great if you literally lower the brightness
This is the kind of topic I would have loved to cover myself if I made videos
Thank you for voicing what I wanted to say
3:33 made me like this video
0:51 massive?
Imagine
Ngl kinda nothing burger video, but right idea
UA-cam algo blessed this video. I thought you had 1000s of subs. The video editing is really good. I liked and subbed
what game is this 3:53?
Minecraft
Cruelty Squad
Cruelty squad
Last of us part ll
I subbed. Great video man, keep up the awesome work :)
Art>realism
Why do we have to choose? There are games that prove we can have both of these things.
@@dzonydzas4964 if you are an indie game dev you will know that you can't do both
@@ayoubmorjane7722 It's like saying "you can't have famous actors in movies - if you were an indie movie creator you would know!" Well obviously, if you don't have money to pay the artists, you most likely won't have artistic graphics in your game. Realism is easier now, because you can still use UE5, even without a budget, and there are plenty of cheap or free assets for it. Anyway, if you are tight on budget, don't go for realism, I agree - I was always talking about triple A games.
That blue screen sound while having your brandnew 4k laptop beside.........
One issue with high fidelity is also that its distracting and useless. To me it even breaks immersion, as I'm watching some cutscene and all the little details are fighting for my attention. Why do we need to see the pores on the character's skin, or the hair on their arms, and stuff like that? Is that really worth the trade-off of having longer installation times with a lot more disk space taken, and longer loading screens or loading-animations, and requiring an overly expensive graphics card to handle it?
And then they also often clutter the scenery too much. In movies, they carefully craft the scenery with just enough things to look plausible, lived in, etc, but not too cluttered that it distracts the viewer from what matters, which is usually the characters. They also carefully consider the colors of the whole scene. It's clear that "professional" game developers don't know crap about any of this stuff. They didn't study movie making, and yet... they're essentially making interactable movies these days. Ignoring these things is fine when they're making something cartoony, but it's not at all fine if they're doing realism.
Heck, even cartoonists got this right decades ago. Road Runner cartoons, for example, didn't put any more detail into the scenery than necessary, because there's no point doing it. It's just good enough that you can take it all in at a glance, and get the idea, and then pay attention to the characters.
That makes zero sense, the more realistic the more your TV becomes a window, you're just poor with a terrible system so you don't like high resolution
I was playing Bioshock 2 the other day, and I was still wowed by how good the game looks. Graphics didn’t need to progress past that point because we already peaked there.
Well I feel like Valve is working on graphics a lot lately and Source 2 is looking great for its water physics.
Nah. I am hardcore CS2 player and they dropped Artstyle in favour of bland realism. The new water is just another photorealistic real life water coming true in life attempt
Try compare CSGO to CS2 side by side. CS2 is just has better fidelity but less detailed textures + 50% more brightness.
CSGO tried to be different beautiful with diverse atmosphere with rainy, snowy, overcast maps but CS2 is just Broad daylight and burning sun in every maps.
dang...this your first Upload? keep 'em coming u got my sub, great Points 👍🏼
0:48 dude is just trolling us at this point. Why tf sony?
think abit to do with it is we went from 1080p to 4k which with the same graphic settings requires 4x more gpu power.
the moment i saw games hit ray tracing i knew that one day games looking realistic would not last long as a selling point lol, one day devs will be forced to actually be creative again (sadly that creativity will probably go into making up genders for characters)