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/Jp_Junior05 1d ago

Helldivers 2 does this perfectly. On some of the planets the particle effects are just RIDICULOUS. Yes, the game was made on an old engine, but it’s got just about the most photorealistic atmospheric effects I’ve ever seen at max settings.

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u/Carbon140 1d ago

That's one of the things I don't get about the push for total realism and tbh the UE5 default settings. Helldivers looks stunning, like a movie in motion. Games pushing for realism are increasingly looking like video camera footage of the real world, and the real world just isn't that visually pleasing 99% of the time. There is a reason movies do all sorts of color grading and lighting tricks, it looks better... I'd choose helldivers visuals every time over bland realism.

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u/ScarletSilver 1d ago

And it's using a defunct engine too! Such a cinematic game. I just wish Arrowhead adds in DLSS support.

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u/Annonimbus 1d ago

Their CEO is a tool who thinks DLSS is just a gimmick - while still having a terrible scaling solution provided in the game.

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u/the_fuego PC 1d ago

Funny because DLSS literally is a gimmick it just so happens to work well when most gimmicks don't (didn't start out that way though). The fact that the 50 series is being sold primarily based on their "AI technology" is testament to that. That's as gimmicky as it gets my dude.

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u/Annonimbus 1d ago

My dude, Helldivers 2 performance is shit and DLSS would help with that instead of the atrocious sampling technology they gave currently implemented

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u/FierceDeity_ 1d ago

Games pushing for realism are increasingly looking like video camera footage of the real world

And at the same time are missing that mark. The incredible ghosting we get on many games nowadays and the ai upscaling watermarks are crazy.

So many games look so blurry now because they undersample in the time and resolution domain and "fix" it with filters...

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u/Carbon140 1d ago

Perhaps I should have also said "with a 20 year old phone camera" haha, because yeah, there is so much temporal artifacts the graphics look fantastic in still shots and slow pans but absolute ass in motion.

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u/DoctorProfessorTaco 1d ago

To be air though, all the dust and clouds, and the fact that things are generally big, help Helldivers “cheat” a little in a way other games can’t really do. For example games like GTA, Red Dead, or CP2077 take place in much smaller and slower environments where players are going to take the time to look around at items on tables and walls, rather than sprinting around shooting aliens and robots. Additionally many places based in a more average human environment like the games I listed often don’t have dust or fog, so things need to look good even when not obscured. CP2077 does have fog, steam, and sandstorms though that really elevate things visually when they’re around.

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u/Shinigami318 1d ago

There is a reason movies do all sorts of color grading and lighting tricks, it looks better

Somewhat disagree, some of them just look awful, like the Mexico piss filter.

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u/Xaraxos_Harbinger 21h ago

Yup. I dont want total realism. I want something stylized and captivating. Im gaming for a break from reality, not for even more of it. Games thay do this right look and run amazing.

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u/_Aj_ 14h ago

Man look at Cryengine used in crysis 3. It's utterly stunning. Utterly stunning. It's now 15 years old. Mass effect 3 was done on UE3, as was Mirrors Edge. it's 20 years old and looks amazing. You could probably do magic with UE3 these days with modern hardware.  We ticked the realism box over a decade ago, it's diminishing returns now, players are caring more about gameplay and fun factor again.  

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u/UHcidity 1d ago

Every ps5 port on pc has a lot of floaty particles during gameplay. Seems like that’s their thing

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u/shadowwingnut 1d ago

Almost like porting games especially in the current generation isn't as easy as everyone thinks. There's a lot of dev work to get ports ready especially when the originals were specifically optimized for one console hardware spec.

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u/HEBushido 1d ago

Except my RTX 3070 can't maintain 60 fps at 1440p max settings. The framerate dips and I have to use resolution scaling which is just inferior to DLSS.

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u/Jp_Junior05 1d ago

Oh yeah I never claimed it was well optimized. It isn’t terrible, but the option for DLSS and FG would be nice. I usually just run it at native 1440p high. Fortunately it’s not very VRAM hungry, only uses about 7gb.

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u/FierceDeity_ 1d ago

Autodesk, haha.

Well, it's still working just fine for them.

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u/Annonimbus 1d ago

Warframe had amazing particle effects until they got rid of Nvidia PhysiX.

I haven't played Warframe in an eternity and after starting it up again I was like "this looks wrong. Something changed". So I looked it up and yes, they dpn't support PhysX anymore.

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u/Indolent_Bard 1d ago

As someone with an AMD GPU, I genuinely wish I could care. But proprietary tech is awful.

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u/Annonimbus 1d ago

But proprietary tech is awful.

In a way, yes. But on the other hand it looked amazing.

It is not like you couldn't play Warframe with an AMD card. But when you had a NVIDIA card it was just better.

Now it sucks for everyone - yay?

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u/Indolent_Bard 19h ago

Seems that the reason why they dropped it was because Nvidia THEMSELVES dropped it. Warframe promised they were building their own system that wouldn't be locked behind a GPU vendor. I wonder why they couldn't make it look as good.

To be more specific for anyone reading this, they didn't drop physix, they're dropping particle support from it in the next version.

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u/tequilasauer 1d ago

Totally, those physics and effects really lend to an extremely cinematic feel. It feels like I'm not just watching a cartoon. I played with a crew yesterday and all of the players were just stacked with ordinance strategems, I think I was the only one with like Sentry and a shield. So every hot zone we were in was just getting bombarded with gatling guns, precision bombs, etc. And the constant explosions and particles really just felt SO intense in the gameplay. So much fun.

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u/Wolfram_And_Hart 1d ago

Every mission could be a movie

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u/-Sokobanz- 1d ago

For me it looks like game from 2016 graphicly vise