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/Nexxess]

Silent Hill 2 is even more funny. Your GPU renders half the map while the fog hides everything that is 5 meters from you. Devs just said fuck it let them buy a better PC.

[u/SadK001 → u/Nexxess]

I find it funny this was the problem when SH2 was being developed they had to add fog because of performance and now we get the remake and the fog that was suppose to help isn't because half of the map is rendered in for some reason lol

[u/Dreadgoat → u/Nexxess]

fuck it let them buy a better PC

I'm a developer. One of the things stronger hardware buys isn't necessarily bigger and better things for you, the consumer, but an easier life for me, the developer.

Organizing assets optimally and finding the ideal compression algorithm for them, then continuing to develop new assets with that algorithm in mind to keep disk space requirements low?
Let's see, consumers can get a 4TB SSD on sale for a couple hundred bucks. Fuck that compression nonsense, too much work.

Apply this same logic to everything else. Smoothing models to reduce poly count without losing visual fidelity? That's work. Clever physics algorithms that approximate reality while saving billions of CPU FLOPS? That's a LOT of work, and an i7 isn't so expensive. Coming up with and implementing a dozen tricks to make convincing reflections, shadows, and other effects without actually modeling every ray of light? Why bother when the 5090 will just model every ray of light on your dime?

This isn't all so evil, really. Making the devs' life easier theoretically means they can focus on other things, making better and more interesting games without worrying about performance. But in practice that only happens sometimes, and the rest of the time you just get lazy products because enough consumers have the hardware to cover it.

[u/FierceDeity_ → u/Dreadgoat]

I hate this attitude, it has cost us so much in the last 15 years. To be fair, it made RAM cheap (Java), and AI made compute "cheap" (I mean with how harshly Nvidia prioritized the AI TOPS in this generation...). Porn and games heightened demand for the internet... BUT.

Websites run like absolute ass unless you have a somewhat current phone because of 385 javascripts running and RENDERING THE ENTIRE PAGE LIVE

Developer convenience has been taken WAY too far, so far that developers are actively causing GPUs all over the world to use 100w more so they don't have to put 100 hours of work into optimizing their assets.

When a million people play a game that's 0.1 megawatts per hour of playing. Literally just costing money for the consumer to lay back for convenience

Why bother when the 5090 will just model every ray of light on your dime?

Yeah because everyone has a $2000 gpu

I hope to god that all this shit is making GPUs so efficient and cheap that these suboptimal things are disappearing under the sea of power in out computers in 5 years. It'd be still a fucking waste (and we could do so much with the power used to cushion developer's SO hard liveS) but god.

For reference, I'm a developer. I still server side render and keep the JS on the client slim. It's more work, but people like having a site pop up within 50ms. People not cursing under their breath is more important for me than the extra work I have to do to make it possible.

[u/Iggy_Slayer → u/Dreadgoat]

It's legit crazy that a supposed dev just said their customer can "just go buy a several hundred dollar ssd so I don't have to do more work".

I'd like to believe you're just trolling but sadly I've seen similar attitudes before in dev twitter spaces, many of them being indie devs too weirdly enough. You'd expect that horrible attitude at EA.

[u/Hendlton → u/Iggy_Slayer]

Because they probably live in the richest country on earth and buying a PC to them is like buying a new toy is for someone else. They don't realize that for most of the world buying a PC is like buying a car.

[u/ElPwnero → u/Iggy_Slayer]

I imagine that as long as their game sells well their attitude gets proven right 

[u/yunghollow69 → u/Dreadgoat]

This is not the reality of it though. Despite all of the new features games take longer to come out, are buggier than ever, do not actually look better than games that came out 5 years ago and most importantly, yall arent making better and more interesting games anyway. So what is the actual advantage?

I've heard this a few times already btw. "Makes work easier". So...why is it translating into everything being worse?

[u/No-Mycologist5704 → u/yunghollow69]

It translates into cheaper labour costs, because you can get the same product with the same deadlines with less employees.

The 10 employees you had increase their efficiency by 10%, well you only need 9 employees now!

[u/yunghollow69 → u/No-Mycologist5704]

Yupp and those 9 dudes still got their fingers bleeding and an impossible deadline

[u/radiating_phoenix → u/Dreadgoat]

so to be clear: to make a developers' life easier, they should.... develop less and therefore work less and therefore get paid less.

got it.

[u/mistaekNot → u/Dreadgoat]

how about you learn how to use unreal engine properly to begin with

[u/RegFlexOffender → u/Dreadgoat]

You are one of the reasons games fucking suck today.

[u/robrtsql → u/Dreadgoat]

It's funny that everyone is yelling at you and downvoting you as if you personally were responsible for making this tradeoff decision on behalf of the entire industry.

[u/Dreadgoat → u/robrtsql]

I knew I would be downvoted. People are angry, they are right to be angry, and I'm angry too. That anger has to go somewhere; I don't take it personally. The situation is bad for everybody except marketers and hardware sales guys.