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Hot Take: Graphics have completely stagnated since 2019

Moochi

Member
Everyone in the industry knows we're on the cusp of a change that is SNES
to N64 but an order of magnitude greater. Diffuser engines are coming, and after that there's no looking back.
 

Buggy Loop

Member
I mean this is from 2015 -



If this was a brand new video of a just announced Star Wars game, people would be arguing on here whether current consoles would be able to get 60fps etc.


Let's add to it

Crysis 2 2011

1946.gif


Crysis 3 2013.

34089.gif

34088.gif

34062.gif


34061.gif


Batman Arkham Knight 2015

9v9x9nli4ru71.gif


Not saying that games have not surpassed these... but hell, baby steps. Huge slowdown in graphic advancements.
 

RCU005

Member
R.4dc616458013ed5db776b25112f66282

"All their budget"...

How do you know this? Where are all the GaaS games I continue to hear about?

sony-2.jpg


You can see here that they went from 1 GaaS game from FY 21 (The Sow) to a projected 12 games for FY25. They are making 11 GaaS games.

sony4.png


In FY19 they were investing 12% of the budget on Live Service games, to more than half for FY25 (55%). They reduced 43% the budget for making traditional games like God of War, Uncharted, etc.
 

SimTourist

Member
Devs:

Seriously, the budgets aren't there to make graphics much better and publishers have learnt that graphics don't boost sales anymore.
 

HeWhoWalks

Gold Member
You can see here that they went from 1 GaaS game from FY 21 (The Sow) to a projected 12 games for FY25. They are making 11 GaaS games.



In FY19 they were investing 12% of the budget on Live Service games, to more than half for FY25 (55%). They reduced 43% the budget for making traditional games like God of War, Uncharted, etc.
In other words, not all of their budget, but a shift of some of their budget toward a successful type of game (something every company has either tried or is trying). And from 2021 at that. That's why perspective is needed so these false narratives can be squashed.

On top of that, we haven't even seen a single piece of this take form. Before we fearmonger everything, it's best to watch what happens, especially from a company like Sony who has little trouble releasing traditional games. When every game they are making is a GaaS game, then we can revisit the Panic Button.
 
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RoadHazard

Gold Member
sony-2.jpg


You can see here that they went from 1 GaaS game from FY 21 (The Sow) to a projected 12 games for FY25. They are making 11 GaaS games.

sony4.png


In FY19 they were investing 12% of the budget on Live Service games, to more than half for FY25 (55%). They reduced 43% the budget for making traditional games like God of War, Uncharted, etc.

This was the projection in 2021. From what we've heard lately, with Factions 2 being cancelled and with how many live service games are failing, I don't think the plan is still for over 50% live service stuff. Thank god.
 
the only good thing in avatar is the vegetation.
Then it looks like this in other scenes.. not to mention flying scenes and night lighting from what I saw. It's not even unpopular opinion. These are not even my observations...
S1cE3TJ.jpeg

HRzageI.png


And Alan wake 2 looks good on pc but looks very subpar on ps5 which is where I played it. For me that game ran bad and looked bad for how such a poor image quality and no reflections.. it's all grainy.
And in motion, the break up is very severe. Disabling motion blur doesn't help. (I have it on in this shot)

X0vi6ZP.jpeg

BLfsqlP.jpeg

zdVgNAM.jpeg


Sure, maybe it doesn't have these problems on PC but I played on ps5 and there are ton of games that have much better image quality on ps5 and feature effects.
Demons souls, tlou part1 or 2, ff16 and some more.
What AW2 is doing is straight up embarrassing and the way they approached the game port to ps5 is embarrassing. They brute forced pc version which is to heavy for what it is and then slapped low and moved the game to ps5. shameful... and the industry is cherishing this? Inexcusable from a company that had perfect planar reflections in MP2. They 100% could've figured out something to replace lack of rt on consoles.

Avatar at least have a good consoles port and only does some scenes and scenarios poorly
I appreciate you explaining your point. Thank you. Im on PC so I don't see the console versions so I can't speak on those.
 

yamaci17

Member
i dont agree on the "bruteforcing" part. %90+ of console image quality issues in alan wake 2 is fixed by ray reconstruction + DLSS. it is not bruteforcing. it is dedicated neural based solutions that work on tensor cores. it would take maybe years of extra development to implement/fix that these two tech can achieve in mere seconds of implementation. it is to make a point and I'm glad they're doing so.

(longer post is not needed. "it is to make a point and I'm glad they're doing so." this part is enough. sony and microsoft should've delivered more advanced tech)
 
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Danknugz

Member
for me it's not the graphics so much as the game play concepts and stories. Literally nothing has changed in that regard with the exception of VR, and even that fell to coroporate interests winning vs ingenuity. Every game is derivative of mario/metroid/doom basically. People get jobs in game dev and rest on their laurels making things to check the boxes and please the suits. End result is inbred creativity and weak games.
 
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for me it's not the graphics so much as the game play concepts and stories. Literally nothing has changed in that regard with the exception of VR, and even that fell to coroporate interests winning vs ingenuity. Every game is derivative of mario/metroid/doom basically. People get jobs in game dev and rest on their laurels making things to check the boxes and please the suits. End result is inbred creativity and weak games.
There's a LOT of great games coming from the indie/AA space that people just won't look at because of the graphics, which is a shame because that's were most of the good games actually are. If one was strictly a console player though, you have way less choice in the matter and can only hope some of the bigger AA games make it over to the box of choice, which is a bummer both for the consumer and the developers.
 
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Danknugz

Member
There's a LOT of great games coming from the indie/AA space that people just won't look at because of the graphics, which is a shame because that's were most of the good games actually are. If one was strictly a console player though, you have way less choice in the matter and can only hope some of the bigger AA games make it over to the box of choice, which is a bummer both for the consumer and the developers.
for me those are mostly metroidvanias
 
Yeah, it’s been like this for awhile now but with a nice rig you can experience some nice ray tracing, besides the ray tracing innovations going on the only other specialty graphics feature was what? PBR? and that was over a decade ago.

Off topic: accidentally hit the ban tab at the bottom of the page and is someone upset with Tyler, holy shit lol
 

Gojiira

Member
Dont really agree, this gen hasnt suffered from blurry image quality or aliasing quite as much, and things like pop in is much much better. Now the actual fidelity, sure its not making MASSIVE leaps, but we finally have clean looking images and decent framerates for the most part. Id rather they move on from the RTX fad and focus on art direction.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
the only good thing in avatar is the vegetation.
Then it looks like this in other scenes.. not to mention flying scenes and night lighting from what I saw. It's not even unpopular opinion. These are not even my observations...
You couldnt be more wrong about Avatar. Flying scenes, night time lighting, and even the rocks look great. Just not UE5 rocks but thats not a crime.

It's the overall package that matters and Avatar looks more impressive than ANY UE5 demo ive played. Consistently so.

avCPuMA.gif

ptOCgwb.gif


T0jWoQ1.gif


P.S it's your fault for playing AW2 on consoles despite owning a 3080 paying an extra $20 just to play the inferior version.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
You couldnt be more wrong about Avatar. Flying scenes, night time lighting, and even the rocks look great. Just not UE5 rocks but thats not a crime.

It's the overall package that matters and Avatar looks more impressive than ANY UE5 demo ive played. Consistently so.

avCPuMA.gif

ptOCgwb.gif


T0jWoQ1.gif


P.S it's your fault for playing AW2 on consoles despite owning a 3080 paying an extra $20 just to play the inferior version.
as for AW2, I would've played it on xbox360 in 144p with the other way being creating epic store account :p
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
I never bothered playing SW shooters aside from testing out I think an EA Access trial. I'm not into sci-fi shooters, but I thought the game looked incredible and at 60 fps too. BF1 also came out around that time and it looked excellent too. And that was on archaic Xbox One. If those games were remade for modern consoles, they'd be up there as best looking console shooters.
I recently went back and played all these games at max settings 4k 60 fps and nah, they are behind even the underwhelming BF2042. You could argue they have a better art style, but people really need to play these games again. The texture quality, lighting and overall world level of detail is ways behind what we are getting this gen.

Maybe we havent gotten the true next gen leaps we have come to expect, but saying things are stagnant or that we havent topped 2015 games like battlefront and batman ak is simply not true.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
as for AW2, I would've played it on xbox360 in 144p with the other way being creating epic store account :p
why? whats wrong with the epic store? they dont have some silly overlay. you login with your google account and they give you free games. i have received death stranding, gta5, batman trilogy, rage 2, kingdom come, world war z, ghost recon, shadow of tomb raider, fallout 3, guardians of the galaxy and many more B games for free. their discounts are way better than steam's or psn's. just this year, star wars was going for $35 everywhere but epic gave me a 30% coupon off the $35 price.

Got alan wake 2 for $40 from gmg and it automatically sync'd to my epic account. no need to redeem it manually like i do on steam.

i honestly dont understand it.
 

JimmyRustler

Gold Member
Well, for a reason. There isn’t really a lot left to do. I think at this point even minor improvements take way too much resources and work. It’s just not worth it any more. It kinda became apparent when AC Untiy released and it was so ahead of its time they actually downgraded Syndicate. The days of too much wow are gone.

AW2 looked arguably fantastic and was great leap just still…. I mean, we are just not going from blocky pixels any more. Ever since the HD gen we reached a level of visuals where the devs could start doing whatever they want. Hence only minor improvements from then on.
 

yamaci17

Member
as for AW2, I would've played it on xbox360 in 144p with the other way being creating epic store account :p
that mentality is just another side artifact of you not understanding the situation of why the game has shortcomings on console

remedy is not making big money like nd, rockstar or other big studios. they're pretty limited. their games are niche, their games usually focus on the art side of it. they're not making flashy products that everyone hypes up. yet they're great all the same. and only reason alan wake 2 could exist is because Epic funded it. Epic does not hold this game hostage like they did with some other games. This time it is different because they literally backed it up. it is why they had to cut corners for console version, rely on NVIDIA stuff for shortcuts, and there's really nothing wrong with that as well.

if not for epic the game wouldn't even exist at all.

same goes for death stranding. if kojima and sam lake didn't have special pull none of those games would exist. death stranding is not making big money like some other games out there. 2 won't either. it is ps exclusive because sony backs it up big time.

if epic kept backing studios like remedy I could say they're more valuable to me than Steam. all Valve is doing sitting on dota and counter strike money. Nothing stopped Valve from funding studios like Remedy. They have no interest in it. Instead they're scared of Windows/game pass so they're pushing steam deck/linux gaming and just stall for time with vr half life games like a troll

I just wish we lived in a world where dstranding or alan wake didn't require special funding for existing but it is what it is

this situation is the 1st time I fully supported Epic exclusivity and didn't mind it all. In fact I was happy buying the game on Epic. I wish more people did. Epic launcher's biggest problem is the feature set right now. But they don't seem to care. Their approach is like game pass. Both is failing big time. But that is another topic
 
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rofif

Can’t Git Gud
why? whats wrong with the epic store? they dont have some silly overlay. you login with your google account and they give you free games. i have received death stranding, gta5, batman trilogy, rage 2, kingdom come, world war z, ghost recon, shadow of tomb raider, fallout 3, guardians of the galaxy and many more B games for free. their discounts are way better than steam's or psn's. just this year, star wars was going for $35 everywhere but epic gave me a 30% coupon off the $35 price.

Got alan wake 2 for $40 from gmg and it automatically sync'd to my epic account. no need to redeem it manually like i do on steam.

i honestly dont understand it.
I have my principles and I don't like their tactics.
And I don't give a crap about free games. I play what I want, when I want. Not when they give it to me for free
 
I've been impressed with demon souls l, horizon 2 and ratchet and clank. We are running into diminishing returns but also we are going from last gen 30 fps baseline to mostly 60 fps baseline for games. Graphically things will slow down to render twice as fast.
 

buenoblue

Member
The reason for me is developers are using low ass resolutions like 720/900p and raytracing at low res then using shity fsr to upscale it to 4k 🤢


If you really care about graphics you can have every game at 4k 60+fps with raytracing. It's just gonna cost you £3000. But yeah if you care about graphics get a PC. But it's great to have a choice and most games come to PC now.
 

Tams

Member
One of the lesser known benefits of being a Nintendo fan is that there's always room for improvement on the graphics front.

Gives you something to look forward to.
 
This gen starts when Naughty Dog unveils their new game, or when GTA6 drops. Red Dead 2 is still the king and that came out in 2018.
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
Nothing against the topic creator but you are far from the authority and someone who should be speaking on this statement when you don't know the dynamic of the advancements we are still currently under. New advancements and implementation of rendering techniques, AI upscaling, API advancements, HW advancements which are more console like in their ideology, etc

I see some of your other opinions but this is a shot from afar compared to those of us constantly talking and looking at this subject. I would give more credit but I don't see heavy discussion from you on tech on a normal basis.

In short, you are wrong.
 

DanielG165

Member
I don’t think we would have gotten titles like Flight Simulator, Avatar, A Plague Tale: Requiem, DS2, Hellblade 2, Cyberpunk on PC, Alan Wake 2, and GTA 6, if video game graphics became stagnated. Those are only a handful of examples, also.
 

midnightAI

Member
One of the lesser known benefits of being a Nintendo fan is that there's always room for improvement on the graphics front.

Gives you something to look forward to.
Then you look at other platforms and it's...

Bryan Cranston Reaction GIF


(Gameplay still beats graphics, but... Why not both.gif)
 

Strider311

Member
IMG-5454.jpg
For me personally I’m fine with OG Xbox graphics. 360 is acceptable too. I dont need games to look much better than this.
Same, although I’d say at the PS4 level like Sekiro or Bloodborne. That but at 60fps is a perfectly acceptable standard for me.
 
lol imo the worst 2 examples. especially avatar which looks like a ps3 game in some scenes. nah man.
alan wake 2 is fine but it's baked game. Just like tlou2 for the most part... and its shit on consoles
My bro you talk about Forspoken, you can't shit on these games ova here.

And Forspoken is a decent looking game nowadays, but avatar blows it away
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
My bro you talk about Forspoken, you can't shit on these games ova here.

And Forspoken is a decent looking game nowadays, but avatar blows it away
Forspoken plays 10x better than alan wake 2.
And I think it looks decent enough but there is a reason I dont bring it's graphics up any chance I get. It's just Ok looking.
 

raduque

Member
4k is overrated. It's unnecessary. TV manufacturers jumped the shark pushing 4k. 1080p would get 60fps every time, and maybe even 1440p too. I play on my RTX2080 at 1440p and can do 60fps in most games at max or near max without RT.
Let's add to it

Crysis 2 2011

1946.gif


Crysis 3 2013.

34089.gif

34088.gif

34062.gif


34061.gif


Batman Arkham Knight 2015

9v9x9nli4ru71.gif


Not saying that games have not surpassed these... but hell, baby steps. Huge slowdown in graphic advancements.
Crysis 2 and 3 were gorgeous looking games. I played them both on a GTX 460 with 768mb ram!
 

HeWhoWalks

Gold Member
4k is overrated. It's unnecessary. TV manufacturers jumped the shark pushing 4k. 1080p would get 60fps every time, and maybe even 1440p too. I play on my RTX2080 at 1440p and can do 60fps in most games at max or near max without RT.

Crysis 2 and 3 were gorgeous looking games. I played them both on a GTX 460 with 768mb ram!
Yeah, 1440 is where it's at!
 
4k is overrated. It's unnecessary. TV manufacturers jumped the shark pushing 4k. 1080p would get 60fps every time, and maybe even 1440p too. I play on my RTX2080 at 1440p and can do 60fps in most games at max or near max without RT.

Crysis 2 and 3 were gorgeous looking games. I played them both on a GTX 460 with 768mb ram!
Only people with subpar hardware would say that. There is a HUGE difference between 4K and QHD. No DLSS setting will nullify this difference.
I jumped from a 2070 Super to a 4070 Super. Playing 4k native now and the difference is night and day.

Don't say it's unnecessary or overrated just because your setup can't keep up.
It's a lie.
 
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