They said we’d never have consumer tech that could white clip in real time but look at us now.
Games did teach me about diminishing returns though
This is what a remaster used to look like.
Pretty sick if you ask me
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I mean, how much more photorealistic can you get? Regardless, the same game would look very different in 4K (real, not what consoles do) vs 1080p.
The lighting in that image is far, far from photorealistic. Light transport is hard.
That’s true but realistic lightning still wouldn’t make anywhere near the same amount of difference that the other example shows.
Let’s compare two completely separate games to a game and a remaster.
Generational leaps then:
Good lord.
EDIT: That isn’t even the Zero Dawn remaster. That is literally two still-image screenshots of Forbidden West on both platforms.
Good. Lord.
Yeah no. You went from console to portable.
We’ve had absolutely huge leaps in graphical ability. Denying that we’re getting diminishing returns now is just ridiculous.
We’re still getting huge leaps. It simply doesn’t translate into massively improved graphics. What those leaps do result in, however, is major performance gains.
I have played Horizon Zero Dawn, its remaster, and Forbidden West. I am reminded how much better Forbidden West looks and runs on PS5 compared to either version of Zero Dawn. The differences are absolutely there, it’s just not as spectacular as the jump from 2D to 3D.
The post comes off like a criticism of hardware not getting better enough faster enough. Wait until we can create dirt, sand, water or snow simulations in real time, instead of having to fake the look of physics. Imagine real simulations of wind and heat.
And then there’s gaussian splatting, which absolutely is a huge leap. Forget trees practically being arrangements of PNGs–what if each and every leaf and branch had volume? What if leaves actually fell off?
Then there’s efficiency. What if you could run Monster Hunter Wilds at max graphics, on battery, for hours? The first gen M1 Max MacBook Pro can comfortably run Baldur’s Gate III. Reducing power draw would have immense benefits on top of graphical improvements.
Combined with better and better storage and VR/AR, there is still plenty of room for tech to grow. Saying “diminishing returns” is like saying that fire burns you when you touch it.
I am reminded how much better Forbidden West looks and runs on PS5 compared to either version of Zero Dawn.
Really? I’ve played both on PS5 and didn’t notice any real difference in performance or graphics. I did notice that the PC Version of Forbidden West has vastly higher minimum requirements though. Which is the opposite of performance gains.
Who the fuck cares if leaves are actually falling off or spawning in above your screen to fall?
And BG3 has notoriously low minimums, it is the exception, not the standard.
If you want to see every dimple on the ass of a horse then that’s fine, build your expensive computer and leave the rest of us alone. Modern Next Gen Graphics aren’t adding anything to a game.
The fact that the Game Boy Advance looks that much better than the Super Nintendo despite being a handheld, battery powered device is insane
It is baffling to me that people hate cross gen games so much. Like, how awful for PS4 owners that don’t have to buy a new console to enjoy the game, and how awful for PS5 owners that the game runs at the same fidelity at over 60FPS, or significantly higher fidelity at the same frame rate.
They should have made the PS4 version the only one. Better yet, we should never make consoles again because they can’t make you comprehend four dimensions to be new enough.
The point isn’t about cross generation games. It’s about graphics not actually getting better anymore unless you turn your computer into a space heater rated for Antarctica.
It’s a pointless point. Complain about power draw. Push ARM.
ARM isn’t going to magically make GPUs need less brute force energy in badly optimized games.
This is true of literally any technology. There are so many things that can be improved in the early stages that progress seems very fast. Over time, the industry finds most of the optimal ways of doing things and starts hitting diminishing returns on research & development.
The only way to break out of this cycle is to discover a paradigm shift that changes the overall structure of the industry and forces a rethinking of existing solutions.
The automobile is a very mature technology and is thus a great example of these trends. Cars have achieved optimal design and slowed to incremental progress multiple times, only to have the cycle broken by paradigm shifts. The most recent one is electrification.
Okay then why are they arbitrarily requiring new GPUs? It’s not just about the diminishing returns of “next gen graphics”.
That’s exactly why. Diminishing returns means exponentially more processing power for minimal visual improvement.
I think my real question is what point do we stop trying until researchers make another breakthrough?
path tracing is a paradigm shift, a completely different way of showing a scene to that normally done, it’s just a slow and expensive one (that has existed for many years but only started to become possible in real time recently due to advancing gpu hardware)
Yes, usually the improvement is minimal. That is because games are designed around rasterization and have path tracing as an afterthought. The quality of path tracing still isn’t great because a bunch of tricks are currently needed to make it run faster.
You could say the same about EVs actually, they have existed since like the 1920s but only are becoming useful for actual driving because of advancing battery technology.
Then let the tech mature more so it’s actually analogous with modern EVs and not EVs 30 years ago.
Yea, it’s doing that. RT is getting cheaper, and PT is not really used outside of things like cyberpunk “rt overdrive” which are basically just for show.
Except it’s being forced on us and we have to buy more and more powerful GPUs just to handle the minimums. And the new stuff isn’t stable anyways. So we get the ability to see the peach fuzz on a character’s face if we have a water-cooled $5,000 spaceship. But the guy rocking solid GPU tech from 2 years ago has to deal with stuttering and crashes.
This is insane, and we shouldn’t be buying into this.
It’s not really about detail, it’s about basic lighting especially in dynamic situations
(Sometimes it is used to provide more detail in shadows I guess, but that is also usually a pretty big visual improvement)
I think there’s currently a single popular game where rt is required? And I honestly doubt a card old enough to not support ray tracing would be fast enough for any alternate minimum setting it would have had instead. Maybe the people with 1080 ti-s are missing out, but there’s not that many of them honestly. I haven’t played that game and don’t know all that much about it, it might be a pointless requirement for all I know.
Nowadays budget cards support rt, even integrated gpus do (at probably unusable levels of speed, but still)
I don’t think every game needs rt or that rt should be required, but it’s currently the only way to get the best graphics, and it has the potential to completely change what is possible with the visual style of games in the future.
Edit: also the vast majority of new solid gpus started supporting rt 6 years ago, with the 20 series from nvidia
That’s my point though, the minimums are jacked up well beyond where they need to be in order to cram new tech in and get 1 percent better graphics even without RT. There’s not been any significant upgrade to graphics in the last 5 years, but try playing a 2025 AAA with a 2020 graphics card. It might work, but it’s certainly not supported and some games are actually locking out old GPUs.
Ironically, Zelda Link to the Past ran at 60fps, and Ocarina of Time ran at 20fps.
The same framerates are probably in the Horizon pictures below lol.
Now, Ocarina of Time had to run at 20fps because it had one of the biggest draw distances of any N64 game at the time. This was so the player could see to the other end of Hyrule Field, or other large spaces. They had to sacrifice framerate, but for the time it was totally worth the sacrifice.
Modern games sacrifice performance for an improvement so tiny that most people would not be able to tell unless they are sitting 2 feet from a large 4k screen.
Had to, as in “they didn’t have enough experience to optimize the games”. Same for Super Mario 64. Some programmers decompiled the code and made it run like a dream on original hardware.
The programming knowledge did not exist at the time. Its not that they did not have the experience, it was impossible for them to have the knowledge because it did not exist at the time. You can’t really count that against them.
Kaze optimizing Mario 64 is amazing, but it would have been impossible for Nintendo to have programmed the game like that because Kaze is able to use programming technique and knowledge that literally did not exist at the time the N64 was new. Its like saying that the NASA engineers that designed the Atlas LV-3B spacecraft were bad engineers or incapable of making a good rocket design just because of what NASA engineers could design today with the knowledge that did not exist in the 50s.
One of the reasons I skipped the other consoles but got a GameCube was because all the first party stuff was buttery smooth. Meanwhile trying to play shit like MechAssault on Xbox was painful.
I never had trouble with MechAssault, because the fun far outweighed infrequent performance drops.
I am a big proponent of 60fps minimum, but I make an exception for consoles from the 5th and 6th generations. The amount of technical leap and improvement, both in graphics technology and in gameplay innovation, far outweighs any performance dips as a cost of such improvement. 7th generation is on a game by game basis, and personally 8th generation (Xbox One, Switch, and PS4) is where it became completely unacceptable to run even just a single frame below 60fps. There is no reason that target could not have been met by then, definitely now. Switch was especially disappointing with this, since Nintendo made basically a 2015 mid-range smartphone but then they tried to make games for a real game console, with performance massively suffering as a result. 11fps, docked, in Breath of the Wild’s Korok Forest or Age of Calamity (anyehwere in the game, take your pick,) is totally unacceptable, even if it only happened one time ever rather than consistently.
when i was a smol i thought i needed to buy the memory expansion pack whenever OoT fps tanked.
I wouldn’t mind like a new style of controller like maybe a fleshlight with buttons on the side or something
I don’t know what kind of games you’re playing. No seriously, what are the names of the games you’re playing and where can I download them?
Well I play a lot of Street Fighter and I think I’ve perfected a real winner of a control method; but it’d also be good for Minecraft so I can try and fuck a creeper
Kind of like smartphones. They all kind of blew up into this rectangular slab, and…
Nothing. It’s all the same shit. I’m using a OnePlus 6T from 2018, and I think I’ll have it easily for another 3 years. Things eventually just stagnate.
One company put a stupid fucking notch in their screen and everyone bought that phone, so now every company has to put a stupid fucking notch in the screen
I just got my tax refund. If someone can show me a modern phone with a 9:16 aspect ratio and no notch, I will buy it right now
Maybe make the rectangular slab smaller again?
I would love to have a smaller phone. Not thinner, smaller. I don’t care if it’s a bit thick, but I do care if the screen is so big I can’t reach across it with one hand.
What do you expect next? Folding phones? That would be silly!
tbf I went from Wii to PS4 and shit a brick
Yeah, but the Wii was a very underpowered system, and it didn’t even have HDMI. That transition wouldn’t have been as stark going from PS3 to PS4.
Horizon Zero Dawn was a stunning game, I did pretty much the same
I’m kinda annoyed bc my 2 BFFs JUST got PlayStations like for Xmas. I’ve been on PS4+PS5 for a long while now and played both Horizons for free. I really wanted to tell them to give Zero Dawn a whirl just to show what the PS5 could do with it… but for full price? Eh… I’ll leave that up to them.
Ignorance is bliss.
Eventually we hit a limit to how round we could make car tires.
Rush on the N64 had octagonal tires and real damage! I still play it every year or so.
Oh it’s a bit of a running joke that every time there’s a new Forza or Gran Turismo, they brag about how round the tires are and how wet the pavement looks.
We technically aren’t at max roundness. Almost every rendered now renders polygons, but it’s possible to make a rendered to other shapes. We can render a perfect cylinder if we want to, or whatever shape you can define mathematically.
Don’t get me started on Horizon: Forbidden West. It was a beautiful game. It also had every gameplay problem the first one did, and added several more to boot. The last half of the game was fucking tedious, and I basically finished it out of spite.
Awww.
I enjoyed the heck out of the first one, especially the story. Haven’t gotten around to picking up the 2nd so that’s a bummer to read.
I’d say it’s still worth playing, but the story is way more predictable, and they made some things more grindy to upgrade than they were in the first one. Also they added robots that are even more of a slog to fight through.
Those giant turtles are bullshit and just not fun.
If it helps, I loved both.
If You liked the stealth aspects of the first game then there is no point in starting the second. The stealth is gone. It’s also more difficult. The equipment is much more complicated.
I enjoyed learning the backstory of the first one, but I was very disinterested in the story, as in, what is currently happening.
I agree. I loved the first game, considered it one of my favourites. Couldn’t wait for the sequel. I was so disappointed, I abandoned it after a couple of hours.
yeah but the right hand pic has twenty billion more triangles that are compressed down and upscaled with AI so the engine programmers dont have to design tools to optimise art assets.
I know you’re joking, but these probably have the same poly count. The biggest noticeable difference to me is subsurface scattering on her skin. The left her skin looks flat, but the right it mostly looks like skin. I’m sure the lighting in general is better too, but it’s hard to tell.
yeah they probably just upped internal resolution and effects for what I assume is an in-engine cutscene. Not that the quality of the screenshot helps lmao
It just works™
The improvement levels are the same amount they used to be. It’s just that adding 100mhz to a 100mhz processor doubles your performance, adding 100mhz to a modern processor adds little in comparison as a for instance.
