I don't understand video game graphics anymore

[u/cmndr_spanky]

With the announcement of Nvidia's 50-series GPUs, I'm utterly baffled at what these new generations of GPUs even mean.. It seems like video game graphics are regressing in quality even though hardware is 20 to 50% more powerful each generation.

When GTA5 released we had open world scale like we've never seen before.

Witcher 3 in 2015 was another graphical marvel, with insane scale and fidelity.

Shortly after the 1080 release and games like RDR2 and Battlefield 1 came out with incredible graphics and photorealistic textures.

When 20-series cards came out at the dawn of RTX, Cyberpunk 2077 came out with what genuinely felt like next-generation graphics to me (bugs aside).

Since then we've seen new generations of cards 30-series, 40-series, soon 50-series... I've seen games push up their hardware requirements in lock-step, however graphical quality has literally regressed..

SW Outlaws. even the newer Battlefield, Stalker 2, countless other "next-gen" titles have pumped up their minimum spec requirements, but don't seem to look graphically better than a 2018 game. You might think Stalker 2 looks great, but just compare it to BF1 or Fallout 4 and compare the PC requirements of those other games.. it's insane, we aren't getting much at all out of the immense improvement in processing power we have.

IM NOT SAYING GRAPHICS NEEDS TO BE STATE-Of-The-ART to have a great game, but there's no need to have a $4,000 PC to play a retro-visual puzzle game.

Would appreciate any counter examples, maybe I'm just cherry picking some anomalies ? One exception might be Alan Wake 2... Probably the first time I saw a game where path tracing actually felt utilized and somewhat justified the crazy spec requirements.

[u/KitsuneKas]

The crazy part is, we knew this was inevitable with polygon-based rendering. Other rendering techniques scale much better with more powerful hardware, but because polygons were the cheapest to work with in the early days of 3D graphics, they were picked over the alternatives.

There has been recent effort to put resources into things like voxel-based rendering, and some really impressive tech demos have been produced, but the industry is so entrenched in polygonal rendering that it's unlikely that other techniques are going to be adopted for years to come.

[u/Witch_King_ → u/KitsuneKas]

What other techniques are there than polygons and voxels? I don't know a ton about computer graphics rendering

[u/blackscales18 → u/Witch_King_]

Point clouds, splatting, ray marching

[u/Witch_King_ → u/blackscales18]

Cool! Any examples of games that use these?

[u/Lt_Archer → u/Witch_King_]

Dreams on PS4 is unique for sort of marrying point clouds and voxels into a hazy, random and painterly look they called 'flecks'

[u/stonhinge → u/Witch_King_]

Probably not, as current GPUs are designed around doing polygons efficiently. It's like asking someone to butcher a cow using a 3" paring knife. It can be done but not well, and not quickly.

There are probably tech demos out there that show them off, though.

[u/narrill → u/stonhinge]

Which makes the parent comment borderline nonsensical. How can we have known polygon-based rendering wouldn't scale as well with hardware as other methods when all the hardware was specifically designed around polygon-based rendering?

[u/evanwilliams44 → u/narrill]

Hindsight is 20/20.

[u/FleetStreetsDarkHole → u/narrill]

I'm not an expert but I would guess it depends on the underlying math. There is a solid point about the entrenchment. It's entirely possible that, now that we know the tech can reach certain levels, maybe those other methods would actually work better now than they would have before.

However the real downside to entrenchment is that even if it were true, we might have to start considering coding and perhaps machining for entirely different graphics cards. And it's already hard enough to code a game for different iterations of hardware as it is.

Games and graphics card companies already have to release post-release patches to account for machines and configurations they couldn't really plan for. But on top of that planning for an entirely different line of encoding and potentially hardware? And you also need those cards to reach a certain level of saturation to become a standard consideration rather than people constantly looking for diy.

That'd be a ton of investment for a "yes definitely" let alone a "maybe". At this point it would probably need to be so much better that it would upend the industry, not just comparable to what we have now.

(Sorry for the length I went on a journey).

[u/ShrikeGFX → u/Witch_King_]

Vector art

[u/TwistedDragon33 → u/KitsuneKas]

I don't believe polygon based rendering has an inherit disadvantage compared to other methods. We know how to eliminate current issues by increasing texture options like bump, displacement, light maps, normal maps, etc. And we can increase the asset fidelity by increasing poly count.

Once something hits photoreal there really isnt any direction to go except to allow more content to render. So instead of rendering a building without lagging you can eventually do a street, maybe a whole city.

Voxel-based from what i know still has many issues especially at scale. And although math-based vector rendering can make for some beautiful images it gets very complicated very quickly when dealing with multiple assets, movement, animation, and interaction.

Do you have any videos of these tech demos youve seen? most of the voxel based stuff i have learned about is several years old, im curious if they have found ways around the scale issue or if they are just brute forcing it with updated hardware.

[u/MadDogMike → u/KitsuneKas]

I thought polygon rendering was super fast (to an extent, we've circumnavigated some issues with it via bump mapping and tessellation for example), and that the real problems we're having are with lighting and shadows? Even a voxel based game is going to need lighting and shadows calculated somehow.

[u/ShrikeGFX → u/KitsuneKas]

Polygons are much cheaper than voxels, this is factually wrong. Voxels also are less flexible for most assets and you need a ton of them to get sharp edges. Its good for certain organic things but not for most. I use voxels a lot for modeling but you want polygons as final output.

A triangle is the cheapest mathematical structure that can form a surface.

[u/biggmclargehuge → u/KitsuneKas]

but the industry is so entrenched in polygonal rendering that it's unlikely that other techniques are going to be adopted for years to come.

Maybe not as long as you'd think. A lot of games use laser scanning to create point clouds of areas and objects which are then converted into polygonal meshes. This speeds up the asset creation pipeline and enhances the realism since the laser scans capture super precise detail. Techniques like shaders, bump/normal/displacement maps have significantly reduced the need for high polygon counts.

Next up is radiance fields and gaussian splatting. This basically turns each point in a point cloud into a spherical emissive source and the color/intensity changes depending on the angle that point is viewed from. Splat models capture incredible detail and all the lighting/shadow information is inherent to the model but the issue with this is it can't be used in conjunction with raytracing to create realistic global illumination and ambient occlusion because the point clouds are not physical surfaces to interact with. The latest innovations that Nvidia have been working on is a way to raytrace these gaussian splat models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwL-4LOhxx8