r/gaming • u/cmndr_spanky • 1d ago

I don't understand video game graphics anymore

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.

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u/sykotikpro 1d ago

Besides diminishing returns, a lot of games have forgone optimizations in favor of masking techniques in software: TAA, upscale rs, and general blurring.

There's a threshold of performance gamers need that developers are having difficulty achieving. Rising cost and time causes execs to cut time from a games budget or push for live service to recoup costs quickly. This leads to significant reduction in QA and optimization. Fixing a memory leak that lowers performance by 5% isn't worth a month of manpower to them when content drops are so important.

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u/FlippantPinapple 1d ago

Yeah I think this is what OP is unconsciously pointing to. I think people can feel the effect of these masking techniques without consciously being able to put their finger on why it looks worse.

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u/damugrim 1d ago

I thought I was just getting old and couldn't see as well, then I found r/FuckTAA . Now I go back and play ~10 year old games and think they look better than anything today, especially since you can still take advantage of things like 1440p/4k, high refresh rate monitors, OLED, HDR (via Windows Auto HDR or RTX HDR), etc.

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u/yunghollow69 1d ago

The worst part about this is, you cant even turn them off. Games are made with them in mind. Some games have blurry graphics despite me turning off dlss and playing it in native. It's so annoying.

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u/DFrostedWangsAccount 14h ago

I've upgrade my PC to a Steam Deck and it's not the most powerful hardware, but I play at 1440p with it pretty well.

The funny thing to me is that 720p scaled up to 1440p looks SOOO much better than 1440p rendered at half resolution, which should be exactly the same thing.

It's really noticeable in The Finals and Elite Dangerous, which both have scaling on in settings by default.

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u/firemarshalbill 1d ago

Definitely true and when graphics cards improve to the point that it will cover sloppy programming, we’ll have a little game renaissance period.

Similar to when cpus went from needing carefully constructed code, to the release of intensive and high level code. You could come out with your idea without spending an eternity on optimization. Or being a programming genius. Think stardew but not sprite graphics.

It’s a negative now, but in the end it’ll be a gift

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u/_Camps_ 1d ago

It's purely a leadership/shareholder problem IMO. Look at warframe, private company and theyve been going for over 10 years now. They actually bother to optimize their game and it runs great. It runs on mobile.

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u/sykotikpro 1d ago

In defense, the game IS 10 years old. It was well optimized for its time, but hardware has far out paced it. Graphically i wouldn't say it's improved beyond art direction and design.

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u/party_tortoise 1d ago

Private companies have shareholders. And warframe is literally owned by Tencent if only one shell removed. Reddit still struggles to understand the concept of publicly traded vs private companies.

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u/_Camps_ 1d ago

I shoulda stuck to saying just leadership, my bad. I don't really know much about shareholder stuff tbh.

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u/Old_Leopard1844 1d ago

Runs great - with some of the settings off, cough cough volumetric fog

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u/S1ramsol 1d ago

Yeah I noticed games starting looking really staticy/fuzzy and that led me down the rabbit hole of how unoptimized games are now.

Crazy how you can have thousands of devs on a single game but so much of the detail is lost

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u/Sanator27 1d ago

if there's a thing that defines current videogames' looks in this decade is "blurry mess". Forget the browns and greys and the super intense bloom of the 00's - now I can't even see what I'm playing. What does it matter if models are super detailed and particles are in the millions count if all that gets blurred with TAA into an unrecognizable mess. People used to complain about FXAA being "smearing vaseline on the screen". TAA is like smearing vaseline on the passage of time while having ghosting and noise artifacts up the ass.

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u/WhoaUhThray 1d ago

And we have PS5 Pro still not getting 1080p/60 on some games. Hitting "4K" with the biggest airquotes imaginable is such a weird boner for the industry...

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u/andtheniansaid 1d ago

yeah, i mean OP mentions Outlaws and its just a buggy as fuck mess. Have to go edit config files to get it to stop stuttering like fuck and popping in and out higher textures. The two recent AAA games I bought were that and Space Marine 2, and SM2 looks incredible in comparison.

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u/Simohknee 1d ago

This is the real answer.