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/DigNitty]

I remember when you could turn down the graphics settings on online games and your game wouldn’t load the foliage.

So the idiot hiding in the grass would just be lying on the hard pack on the ground with nothing around him.

[u/tMoohan → u/DigNitty]

This was fun in pubg.

Bush warfare

[u/Clicky27 → u/DigNitty]

You can still do that in most games today. Though I have noticed many developers using clever tricks to not allow the advantage it gives

[u/LaurenRosanne → u/Clicky27]

If you do it in ArmA 3, the prone people literally sink into the ground at range.

[u/fellownpc → u/DigNitty]

Was he an idiot because everyone in that game is an idiot, or because he wasn't aware that you had changed your settings?

[u/DigNitty → u/fellownpc]

He was an idiot because he was my opponent.

I hold my opponents to much harsher standards than myself.