Video game graphics have peaked. It absolutely has. It's gotten to a stage where 500% extra effort would result in 5% improvement which is not worth it imo.

We have games that were released in 2010's which still hold up to today's standards.

If every game company could fucking stop with the graphics improvements and actually work on building bangers to play and have fun with, that'd be great.

They will not

It's hollywooding time

If you are not dedicating an entire cpu core to jiggly body part bounce, then go home. Don't even bother making a game anymore.

What I'd like to see from graphics technology now is performance and efficiency rather than just showing off new effects. Give me good visuals *and* good performance with low power consumption, damnit. I want raytraced GI at 144fps on my phone. Unreasonable? Maybe not in a few hw and sw generations.

Doom Eternal is a great example of a performant engine that looks fantastic too.

(I'd say there's still a lot to do in graphics and technical animation/simulation but otherwise yes I agree).

You really need to touch grass. While you are at it, look closely at the grass. Also look at all the stuff surrounding that grass.

Sure, max detail raytrace-enhanced graphics of today are pretty impressive. But GPUs allowing to enjoy these are prohibitively expensive. I really hope, that China gets their ASML replacement sorted just like they did with solar cells - so we can all have super GPUs for cheap.

@Demolishun - I agree *sort of* lol.

@RememberMe - Yeah I agree with you too. I meant creating bangers from a perspective of optimized, low power-consuming, fun games that you can actually stick to playing.

@Oktokolo - Shove that grass up your ass. Even a mid-range graphics card like RTX 3050Ti is able to handle games at 1080p medium settings where u can't tell the diff between Ultra and medium settings. Dumbass.

For some reason that always feels that way until you look back. Unreal tournament felt like wow to me once. But if you look at truly photo realistic renders you see we still have a long way to go to make that happen real time.

Hellblade 2 is going to be interesting. I remember the first one already really focusing on a wide range of facial expressions but they seem to have made vast improvements in the sequel.

@jestdotty you can (and almost always do) have physically correct graphics but a stylized art style. Current tech is more than good enough to show "real" violence in all its horrid details, but that's not done.

As a concrete example, the rendering engine behind Pixar movies (RenderMan) uses many physically correct or physically inspired models of materials, lighting, shading, geometry (fur, skin etc.) but I don't think anyone would call their style "realistic". A lot of very cool simulations of hair, particulate substances like sand, water, etc. are also used (look at "Piper" for a good example). These days a good fraction of 3D graphics engines use physically-based rendering.

Basically, i don't think graphics technology controls how we depict violence, that bar was crossed long ago

@RememberMe I played a game from the early 2000s that was very disturbing. When you shot someone they would be screaming and slowly dying unless you head shot them. I ended up playing the whole game, but it was kinda shocking.

@jestdotty I don't remember the name of the game. Once I beat it I stopped playing. It was set in a jungle area iirc.

@Demolishun resident evil?

@RememberMe no, it was some obscure game iirc. I got it cheap somewhere.

Not sure about that.

I'm a huge Mass Effect fan and had the PS3 boxed set of the entire trilogy and played it on near constant rotation for five years after ME3 came out. Bought Legendary Edition in 2021 so I could play it on PS4 and they still managed to improve it quite significantly.

@matthewbdaly I think a lot of that comes down to the lighting. I beat the original games back to back on the Xbox 360 to lead into the remakes, and the models look pretty close to the original, but the thing that improved drastically was the honestly pretty dogshit lighting engine in the original games.

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