The problem as I see it is that there is an upper limit on how good any game can look graphically. You can’t make a game that looks more realistic than literal reality, so any improvement is going to just approach that limit. (Barring direct brain interfacing that gives better info than the optical nerve)
Before, we started from a point that was so far removed from reality than practically anything would be an improvement. Like say “reality” is 10,000. Early games started at 10, then when we switched to 3D it was 1,000. That an enormous relative improvement, even if it’s far from the max. But now your improvements are going from 8,000 to 8,500 and while it’s still a big absolute improvement, it’s relatively minor – and you’re never going to get a perfect 10,000 so the amount you can improve by gets smaller and smaller.
All that to say, the days of huge graphical leaps are over, but the marketing for video games acts like that’s not the case. Hence all the buzzwords around new tech without much to show for it.
Graphics are only part of it, with the power that is there I am disappointed in the low quality put to rrlease. I loved Jedi survivor, a brilliant game but it was terribly optimised. I booted it today and had nothing but those assest loading flashes as walls and structures in my immediate vicinity and eyeline flashed white into existence.
Good games arent solely reliant om graphics but christ if they dont waste what they have. Programmers used to push everything to the max, now they get away with pushing beta releases to print.
Well you can get to a perfect 10k hypothetically, you can have more geometric/texture/lighting detail than the eye could process. From a technical perspective.
Of course you have the technical capabilities, and that’s part of the equation. The other part is the human effort to create the environments. Now the tech sometimes makes it easier on the artist (for example, better light modeling in the engine at run time means less effort to bake lighting in, and ability for author to basically “etc…” to more detail, by smoothing or some machine learning extrapolations). Despite this, more detail does mean more man hours to try to make the most of that, and this has caused massive cost increases as models got more detailed and more models and environments became feasible. The level of artwork that goes into the whole have of pacman is less than a single model in a modern game.
The problem as I see it is that there is an upper limit on how good any game can look graphically. You can’t make a game that looks more realistic than literal reality, so any improvement is going to just approach that limit. (Barring direct brain interfacing that gives better info than the optical nerve)
Before, we started from a point that was so far removed from reality than practically anything would be an improvement. Like say “reality” is 10,000. Early games started at 10, then when we switched to 3D it was 1,000. That an enormous relative improvement, even if it’s far from the max. But now your improvements are going from 8,000 to 8,500 and while it’s still a big absolute improvement, it’s relatively minor – and you’re never going to get a perfect 10,000 so the amount you can improve by gets smaller and smaller.
All that to say, the days of huge graphical leaps are over, but the marketing for video games acts like that’s not the case. Hence all the buzzwords around new tech without much to show for it.
Graphics are only part of it, with the power that is there I am disappointed in the low quality put to rrlease. I loved Jedi survivor, a brilliant game but it was terribly optimised. I booted it today and had nothing but those assest loading flashes as walls and structures in my immediate vicinity and eyeline flashed white into existence.
Good games arent solely reliant om graphics but christ if they dont waste what they have. Programmers used to push everything to the max, now they get away with pushing beta releases to print.
Well you can get to a perfect 10k hypothetically, you can have more geometric/texture/lighting detail than the eye could process. From a technical perspective.
Of course you have the technical capabilities, and that’s part of the equation. The other part is the human effort to create the environments. Now the tech sometimes makes it easier on the artist (for example, better light modeling in the engine at run time means less effort to bake lighting in, and ability for author to basically “etc…” to more detail, by smoothing or some machine learning extrapolations). Despite this, more detail does mean more man hours to try to make the most of that, and this has caused massive cost increases as models got more detailed and more models and environments became feasible. The level of artwork that goes into the whole have of pacman is less than a single model in a modern game.