This is what a remaster used to look like.
Pretty sick if you ask me
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I mean, how much more photorealistic can you get? Regardless, the same game would look very different in 4K (real, not what consoles do) vs 1080p.
Let’s compare two completely separate games to a game and a remaster.
Generational leaps then:
Good lord.
EDIT: That isn’t even the Zero Dawn remaster. That is literally two still-image screenshots of Forbidden West on both platforms.
Good. Lord.
Yeah no. You went from console to portable.
We’ve had absolutely huge leaps in graphical ability. Denying that we’re getting diminishing returns now is just ridiculous.
The fact that the Game Boy Advance looks that much better than the Super Nintendo despite being a handheld, battery powered device is insane
Is it that much better? The colours just look more saturated to me
There’s noticably more detail, especially along the coastline. Also, the more saturated colors improve contrast
It is baffling to me that people hate cross gen games so much. Like, how awful for PS4 owners that don’t have to buy a new console to enjoy the game, and how awful for PS5 owners that the game runs at the same fidelity at over 60FPS, or significantly higher fidelity at the same frame rate.
They should have made the PS4 version the only one. Better yet, we should never make consoles again because they can’t make you comprehend four dimensions to be new enough.
The point isn’t about cross generation games. It’s about graphics not actually getting better anymore unless you turn your computer into a space heater rated for Antarctica.
This is true of literally any technology. There are so many things that can be improved in the early stages that progress seems very fast. Over time, the industry finds most of the optimal ways of doing things and starts hitting diminishing returns on research & development.
The only way to break out of this cycle is to discover a paradigm shift that changes the overall structure of the industry and forces a rethinking of existing solutions.
The automobile is a very mature technology and is thus a great example of these trends. Cars have achieved optimal design and slowed to incremental progress multiple times, only to have the cycle broken by paradigm shifts. The most recent one is electrification.
Okay then why are they arbitrarily requiring new GPUs? It’s not just about the diminishing returns of “next gen graphics”.
path tracing is a paradigm shift, a completely different way of showing a scene to that normally done, it’s just a slow and expensive one (that has existed for many years but only started to become possible in real time recently due to advancing gpu hardware)
Yes, usually the improvement is minimal. That is because games are designed around rasterization and have path tracing as an afterthought. The quality of path tracing still isn’t great because a bunch of tricks are currently needed to make it run faster.
You could say the same about EVs actually, they have existed since like the 1920s but only are becoming useful for actual driving because of advancing battery technology.
Then let the tech mature more so it’s actually analogous with modern EVs and not EVs 30 years ago.
Yea, it’s doing that. RT is getting cheaper, and PT is not really used outside of things like cyberpunk “rt overdrive” which are basically just for show.
Except it’s being forced on us and we have to buy more and more powerful GPUs just to handle the minimums. And the new stuff isn’t stable anyways. So we get the ability to see the peach fuzz on a character’s face if we have a water-cooled $5,000 spaceship. But the guy rocking solid GPU tech from 2 years ago has to deal with stuttering and crashes.
This is insane, and we shouldn’t be buying into this.
That’s exactly why. Diminishing returns means exponentially more processing power for minimal visual improvement.
I think my real question is what point do we stop trying until researchers make another breakthrough?
Researchers can’t make a breakthrough if they don’t try ^^
AAA game designers don’t need to be the researchers.
That’s what game engines are for
Great, let the game engine people go wild. We don’t need to try and build the next Far Cry with all of their beta tech though.
I wouldn’t mind like a new style of controller like maybe a fleshlight with buttons on the side or something
Ironically, Zelda Link to the Past ran at 60fps, and Ocarina of Time ran at 20fps.
The same framerates are probably in the Horizon pictures below lol.
Now, Ocarina of Time had to run at 20fps because it had one of the biggest draw distances of any N64 game at the time. This was so the player could see to the other end of Hyrule Field, or other large spaces. They had to sacrifice framerate, but for the time it was totally worth the sacrifice.
Modern games sacrifice performance for an improvement so tiny that most people would not be able to tell unless they are sitting 2 feet from a large 4k screen.
One of the reasons I skipped the other consoles but got a GameCube was because all the first party stuff was buttery smooth. Meanwhile trying to play shit like MechAssault on Xbox was painful.
I never had trouble with MechAssault, because the fun far outweighed infrequent performance drops.
I am a big proponent of 60fps minimum, but I make an exception for consoles from the 5th and 6th generations. The amount of technical leap and improvement, both in graphics technology and in gameplay innovation, far outweighs any performance dips as a cost of such improvement. 7th generation is on a game by game basis, and personally 8th generation (Xbox One, Switch, and PS4) is where it became completely unacceptable to run even just a single frame below 60fps. There is no reason that target could not have been met by then, definitely now. Switch was especially disappointing with this, since Nintendo made basically a 2015 mid-range smartphone but then they tried to make games for a real game console, with performance massively suffering as a result. 11fps, docked, in Breath of the Wild’s Korok Forest or Age of Calamity (anyehwere in the game, take your pick,) is totally unacceptable, even if it only happened one time ever rather than consistently.
tbf I went from Wii to PS4 and shit a brick
Yeah, but the Wii was a very underpowered system, and it didn’t even have HDMI. That transition wouldn’t have been as stark going from PS3 to PS4.
Horizon Zero Dawn was a stunning game, I did pretty much the same
I’m kinda annoyed bc my 2 BFFs JUST got PlayStations like for Xmas. I’ve been on PS4+PS5 for a long while now and played both Horizons for free. I really wanted to tell them to give Zero Dawn a whirl just to show what the PS5 could do with it… but for full price? Eh… I’ll leave that up to them.
Ignorance is bliss.
The question is whether “realism” was ever a good target. The best games are not the most realistic ones.
A Link to the Past > Ocarina of Time
Fight me
I’ve been playing the zelda games in order since the new one was announced on the switch and I’m stuck on OoT (zelda 2 was a pain as well).
I don’t have much free time.
So many retro games are replayable and fun to this day, but I struggle to return to games whose art style relied on being “cutting edge realistic” 20 years ago.
I dunno, Crysis looks pretty great on modern hardware and its 18 years old.
Also, CRYSIS IS 18 WHERE DID THE TIME GO?
There’s a joke in there somewhere about Crysis being the age of consent but I just can’t land it right now.
Probably because I’m old enough to remember it’s release.
Really? Cause I don’t know, I can play Shadow of the Colossus, Resident Evil 4, Metal Gear Solid 3, Ninja Gaiden Black, God of War, Burnout Revenge and GTA San Andreas just fine.
And yes, those are all 20 years ago. You are now dead and I made it happen.
As a side note, man, 2005 was a YEAR in gaming. That list gives 1998 a run for its money.
I would say GoW and SotC at least take realism as inspiration, but aren’t realistic. They’re like an idealized version of realism. They’re detailed, but they’re absolutely stylized. SotC landscapes, for example, look more like paintings you’d see rather than places you’d see in real life.
Realism is a bad goal because you end up making every game look the same. Taking our world as inspiration is fine, but it should almost always be expanded on. Know what your game is and make the art style enhance it. Don’t just replicate realism because that’s “what you’re supposed to do.”
Look, don’t take it personally, but I disagree as hard as humanly possible.
Claiming that realism “makes every game look the same” is a shocking statement, and I don’t think you mean it like it sounds. That’s like saying that every movie looks the same because they all use photographing people as a core technique.
If anything, I don’t know what “realism” is supposed to mean. What is more realistic? Yakuza because it does these harsh, photo-based textures meant to highlight all the pores or, say, a Pixar movie where everything is built on this insanely accurate light transfer, path traced simulation?
At any rate, the idea that taking photorealism as a target means you give up on aesthetics or artistic intent is baffling. That’s not even a little bit how it works.
On the other point, I think you’re blending technical limitations with intent in ways that are a bit fallacious. SotC is stylized, for sure, in that… well, there are kaijus running around and you sometimes get teleported by black tendrils back to your sleeping beauty girlfirend.
But is it aiming at photorealism? Hell yeah. That approach to faking dynamic range, the deliberate crushing of exteriors from interiors, the way the sky gets treated, the outright visible air adding distance and scale when you look at the colossi from a distance, the desaturated take on natural spaces… That game is meant to look like it was shot by a camera all the way. They worked SO hard to make a PS2 look like it has aperture and grain and a piece of celluloid capturing light. Harder than the newer remake, arguably.
Some of that applies to GoW, too, except they are trying to make things look like Jason and the Argonauts more than Saving Private Ryan. But still, the references are filmic.
I guess we’re back to the problem of establishing what people mean by “realism” and how it makes no sense. In what world does Cyberpunk look similar to Indiana Jones or Wukong? It just has no real meaning as a statement.
If anything, I don’t know what “realism” is supposed to mean. What is more realistic? Yakuza because it does these harsh, photo-based textures meant to highlight all the pores or, say, a Pixar movie where everything is built on this insanely accurate light transfer, path traced simulation?
The former is more realistic, but not for that reason. The lighting techniques are techniques, not a style. Realism is trying to recreate the look of the real world. Pixar is not doing that. They’re using advanced lighting techniques to enhance their stylized worlds.
Some of that applies to GoW, too, except they are trying to make things look like Jason and the Argonauts more than Saving Private Ryan. But still, the references are filmic.
Being inspired by film is not the same as trying to replicate the real world. (I’d argue it’s antithetical to it to an extent.) Usually film is trying to be more than realistic. Sure, it’s taking images from the real world, but they use lighting, perspective, and all kinds of other tools to enhance the film. They don’t just put some actors in place in the real environment and film it without thought. There’s intent behind everything shown.
I guess we’re back to the problem of establishing what people mean by “realism” and how it makes no sense. In what world does Cyberpunk look similar to Indiana Jones or Wukong? It just has no real meaning as a statement.
Cyberpunk looks more like Indiana Jones than Persona 5. Sure, they stand out from each other, but it’s mostly due to environments.
I think there’s plenty of games that benefit from realism, but not all of them do. There are many games that could do better with stylized graphics instead. For example, Cyberpunk is represented incredibly well in both the game and the anime. They both have different things they do better, and the anime’s style is an advantage for the show at least. The graphics style should be chosen to enhance the game. It shouldn’t just be realistic because it can be. If realism is the goal, fine. If it’s supposed to be more (or different) than realism, maybe try a different style that improves the game.
Realism is incredibly hard to create assets for, so it costs more money, and usually takes more system resources. For the games that are improved by it, that’s fine. There’s a lot of games that could be made on a smaller budget, faster, run better, and look more visually interesting if they chose a different style though. I think it should be a consideration that developers are allowed to make, but most are just told to do realism because it’s the “premium” style. They aren’t allowed to do things that are better suited for their game. I think this is bad, and also leads to a lack in diversity of styles.
I don’t understand what you’re saying. Or, I do, but if I do, then you don’t.
I think you’re mixing up technique with style, in fact. And really confusing a rendering technique with an aesthetic. But beyond that, you’re ignoring so many games. So many. Just last year, how do you look at Balatro and Penny’s Big Breakaway and Indiana Jones and go “ah, yes, games all look the same now”. The list of GOTY nominees in the TGAs was Astro Bot, Balatro, Wukong, Metaphor, Elden Ring and Final Fantasy VII R. How do you look at that list of games and go “ah, yes, same old, same old”.
Whenever I see takes like these I can’t help but think that people who like to talk about games don’t play enough games, or just think of a handful of high profile releases as all of gaming. Because man, there’s so much stuff and it goes from grungy, chunky pixel art to lofi PS1-era jank to pitch-perfect anime cel shading to naturalistic light simulation. If you’re out there thinking games look samey you have more of a need to switch genres than devs to switch approach, I think.
By “all games look the same” I’m being hyperbolic. I mean nearly all AAA games and the majority of AA games (and not an insignificant number of indies even).
Watch this video. Maybe it’ll help you understand what I’m saying.
Whenever I see takes like these I can’t help but think that people who like to talk about games don’t play enough games, or just think of a handful of high profile releases as all of gaming.
Lol. No. Again, I was being hyperbolic and talking mostly about the AAA and AA space. I personally almost exclusively play indies who know what they’re trying to make and use a style appropriate to it. I play probably too many games. I also occasionally make games myself, I was the officer in a game development club in college, and I have friends in the industry. I’m not just some person who doesn’t understand video games.
Did those go for realism though, or were they just good at balancing the more detailed art design with the gameplay?
Absolutely they went for realism. That was the absolute peak of graphics tech in 2004, are you kidding me? I gawked at the fur in Shadow of the Colossus, GTA was insane for detail and size for an open world at the time. Resi 4 was one of the best looking games that gen and when the 360 came out later that year it absolutely was the “last gen still looked good” game people pointed at.
I only went for that year because I wanted the round number, but before that Silent Hill 2 came out in 2001 and that was such a ridiculous step up in lighting tech I didn’t believe it was real time when the first screenshots came out. It still looks great, it still plays… well, like Silent Hill, and it’s still a fantastic game I can get back into, even with the modern remake in place.
This isn’t a zero sum game. You don’t trade gameplay or artistry for rendering features or photorealism. Those happen in parallel.
They clearly balanced the more detailed art design with the game play.
GTA didn’t have detail on cars to the level of a racing game, and didn’t have characters with as much detail as Resident Evil, so that it could have a larger world for example. Colossus had fewer objects on screen so it could put more detail on what was there.
Yeah. So like every other game.
Nothing was going harder for visuals, so by default that’s what was happening. They were pushing visuals as hard as they would go with the tech that they had.
The big change isn’t that they balanced visuals and gameplay. If anything the big change is that visuals were capped by performance rather than budget (well, short of offline CG cutscenes and VO, I suppose).
If anything they were pushing visuals harder than now. There is no way you’d see a pixel art deck building game on GOTY lists in 2005, it was all AAA as far as the eye could see. We pay less attention to technological escalation now, by some margin.
Yeah. So like every other game.
Except for the ones that don’t do a good job of balancing the two things. Like the games that have incredible detail but shit performance and/or awful gameplay.
STALKER is good, though I played a lot of Anomaly mostly, and I’m not sure that STALKER was ever known for bleeding edge graphics
Stalker gamma is free if anyone wanted to try it out. I ended up buying the OG games cause I liked it so much.
The 2nd one is good, but I would advise people to wait until they implement more promised features before they buy it.
I just finished STALKER 2. It’s a fucking mess and was unplayably broken for half a month at one point for me, and I fucking love it. It took me 80 hours of mostly focusing on advancing the story to reach the end, and I feel like I only saw maybe 30% of what’s out there. I can already tell that this is going to be my new Skyrim, tooling around with 500 hours in the game and still finding new situations. I’m SO FUCKING PUMPED for anomaly 2-- a lot of the same modders that worked on anomaly are already putting out modpacks for Stalker 2.
not really. plenty of great games have visual fidelity as a big help in making it good.
i dont think rdr2 would be such a beautiful immersive experience if it had crappy graphics.
Visual fidelity isn’t the same as realism. RDR2 is trying to replicate a real experience, so I mostly agree with you. However, it does step away from realism sometimes to create something more.
Take a look at impressionist art, for example. It starts at realism, but it isn’t realistic. It has more style to it that enhances what the artist saw (or wanted to highlight).
A game should focus on the experience it’s tying to create, and it’s art style should enhance that experience. It shouldn’t just be realistic because that’s the “premium” style.
For an example, Mirror’s Edge has a high amount of fidelity (for its time), but it’s highly stylized in order to create the experience they wanted out of it. The game would be far worse if they tried to make the graphics realistic. This is true for most games, though some do try to simulate being a part of this world, and it’s fine for them to try to replicate it because it suits what their game is.
Couldn’t disagree more. Immersion comes from the details, not the fidelity. I was told to expect this incredibly immersive experience form RDR2 and then I got:
- carving up animals is frequently wonky
- gun cleaning is just autopilot wiping the exterior of a gun
- shaving might as well be done off-screen
- you transport things on your horse without tying them down
Yeah that didn’t do it for me.
realism and visual fidelity are two slightly overlapping but different things.
a game can have great graphics but its npcs be unrealistic bullet sponges. cp2077 comes to mind, not that this makes it a bad game necessarily.
i dont actually want to go to the bathroom in-game but i love me some well written story, graphics can help immensely with that. among other things.
come to think of it 100% realist games would probably be boring
I had way more fun in GTA 3 than GTA 5. RDR2 isn’t a success because the horse has realistic balls.
To put another nail in the coffin, ARMA’s latest incarnation isn’t the most realistic shooter ever made. No amount of wavy grass and moon phases can beat realistic weapon handling in the fps sim space. (And no ARMA’s weapon handling is not realistic, it’s what a bunch of keyboard warriors decided was realistic because it made them feel superior.) Hilariously the most realistic shooter was a recruiting game made by the US Army with half the graphics.
realism and visual fidelity are not the same thing.
BUT, visual fidelity adds a LOT to the great writing in rdr2.
Yeah but you said it was a pre-requisite and that’s just false.
you are right i didnt notice i had worded it that way and its not what i meant
Factorio and Balatro
Idk, I’d say that pursuing realism is worthy, but you get diminishing returns pretty quick when all the advances are strictly in one (or I guess two, with audio) sense. Graphical improvements massively improved the experience of the game moving from NES or Gameboy to SNES and again to PS1 and N64. I’d say that the most impressive leap, imo, was PS1/N64 to PS2/XBox/GameCube. After that, I’d say we got 3/4 of the return from improvements to the PS3 generation, 1/2 the improvement to PS4 gen, 1/5 the improvement to PS5, and 1/8 the improvement when we move on to PS5 Pro. I’d guess if you plotted out the value add, with the perceived value on the Y and the time series or compute ability or texture density or whatever on the x, it’d probably look a bit like a square root curve.
I do think that there’s an (understandably, don’t get me wrong) untapped frontier in gaming realism in that games don’t really engage your sense of touch or any of the subsets thereof. The first step in this direction is probably vibrating controllers, and I find that it definitely does make the game feel more immersive. Likewise, few games engage your proprioception (that is, your knowledge of your body position in space), though there’ve been attempts to engage it via the Switch, Wii, and VR. There’s, of course, enormous technical barriers, but I think there’s very clearly a good reason why a brain interface is sort of thought of as the holy grail of gaming.
Having a direct brain interface game, that’s realistic enough to overcome the Uncanny Valley, would destroy peoples lives. People would, inevitably, prefer their virtual environment to the real one. They’d end up wasting away, plugged into some machine. It would lend serious credence to the idea of a simulated universe, and reduce the human experience by replacing it with an improved one. Shit, give me a universe wherein I can double-jump, fly, or communicate with animals, and I’d have a hard time returning to this version.
We could probably get close with a haptic feedback suit, a mechanism that allows you to run/jump in any direction, and a VR headset, but there would always be something tethering you to reality. But a direct brain to machine interaction would have none of that, it would essentially be hijacking our own electrical neural network to run simulations. Much like Humans trying to play Doom on literally everything. It would be as amazing as it was destructive, finally realizing the warnings from so many parents before its time: “that thing’ll fry your brain.”
People would, inevitably, prefer their virtual environment to the real one. They’d end up wasting away, plugged into some machine. It would lend serious credence to the idea of a simulated universe, and reduce the human experience by replacing it with an improved one.
Have you considered making the real world better?
Tbf, it’s kinda bullshit that we can’t double jump IRL. Double jumping just feels right, like it’s something we should be able to do.
Yeah, no, it’d likely be really awful for us. I mean, can you imagine what porn would be like on that? That’s a fermi paradox solution right there. I could see the tech having a lot of really great applications, too, like training simulations for example, but the video game use case is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.
I agree generally, but I have to offer a counterpoint with Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I only just got back into it after bouncing off in 2019, and I wish I hadn’t stopped playing. I have a decent-ish PC and it still blows my entire mind when I go roaming around the countryside.
Like Picard said above, in due time this too will look aged, but even 7 years on, it looks and plays incredible even at less-than-highest settings. IMHO the most visually impressive game ever created (disclaimer: I haven’t seen or played Horizon). Can’t wait to play KC:D 2!
Like cgi and other visual effects, realism has some applications that can massively improve the experience in some games. Just like how lighting has a massive impact, or sound design, etc.
Chasing it at the expense of game play or art design is a negative though.
It’s the right choice for some games and not for others. Just like cinematography, there’s different styles and creators need to pick which works best for what they’re trying to convey. Would HZD look better styled like Hi-Fi Rush? I don’t really think so. GOW? That one I could definitely see working more stylized.
And they’re shocked that no one bought the PS5 pro for 800 dollars
Eventually we hit a limit to how round we could make car tires.
We technically aren’t at max roundness. Almost every rendered now renders polygons, but it’s possible to make a rendered to other shapes. We can render a perfect cylinder if we want to, or whatever shape you can define mathematically.
Rush on the N64 had octagonal tires and real damage! I still play it every year or so.
Oh it’s a bit of a running joke that every time there’s a new Forza or Gran Turismo, they brag about how round the tires are and how wet the pavement looks.
Don’t get me started on Horizon: Forbidden West. It was a beautiful game. It also had every gameplay problem the first one did, and added several more to boot. The last half of the game was fucking tedious, and I basically finished it out of spite.
Awww.
I enjoyed the heck out of the first one, especially the story. Haven’t gotten around to picking up the 2nd so that’s a bummer to read.
I’d say it’s still worth playing, but the story is way more predictable, and they made some things more grindy to upgrade than they were in the first one. Also they added robots that are even more of a slog to fight through.
Those giant turtles are bullshit and just not fun.
If it helps, I loved both.
Very much same. I wish the Burning Shores expansion was a bit longer. It’s kinda hard to call it a must-play DLC, but it’s got some big stuff in terms of Aloy’s character development.
If You liked the stealth aspects of the first game then there is no point in starting the second. The stealth is gone. It’s also more difficult. The equipment is much more complicated.
I enjoyed learning the backstory of the first one, but I was very disinterested in the story, as in, what is currently happening.
I agree. I loved the first game, considered it one of my favourites. Couldn’t wait for the sequel. I was so disappointed, I abandoned it after a couple of hours.
I loved both. Different strokes…
The improvement levels are the same amount they used to be. It’s just that adding 100mhz to a 100mhz processor doubles your performance, adding 100mhz to a modern processor adds little in comparison as a for instance.
Well, that’s what Moore’s Law was for. The processing power does increase massively over each generation. It’s just that at this point better graphics are less noticeable. There is not much difference to the eye between 100.000 and a million or more polygons.
We’ve basically reached the top. Graphics fidelity is just down to what the artists do with it.
I disagree ( that we have reached the top).
Go watch a high budget animated movie (think Pixar or Disney) and come back when real time rendered graphics look like that.
Yea games look good, but real time rendering is still not as good as pre rendered (and likely will never be). Modern games are rife with clipping, and fakery.
If you watch the horizon forbidden West intro scene (as an example), and look at the details, how hair falls on characters shoulders, how clothing moves in relation to bodies, etc, and compare it to something like inside out 2, it’s a world of difference.
If we can pre render it, then in theory it’s only a matter of time before we can real time render it.
yeah but the right hand pic has twenty billion more triangles that are compressed down and upscaled with AI so the engine programmers dont have to design tools to optimise art assets.
I know you’re joking, but these probably have the same poly count. The biggest noticeable difference to me is subsurface scattering on her skin. The left her skin looks flat, but the right it mostly looks like skin. I’m sure the lighting in general is better too, but it’s hard to tell.
yeah they probably just upped internal resolution and effects for what I assume is an in-engine cutscene. Not that the quality of the screenshot helps lmao
It just works™
Why not do apples to apples?
A cutscene isn’t the best representation. This shows off the 8-bit vs 16-bit better.
I mean, the original image is a cutscene, so…
But hey, I’ll split the difference. Instead of SMB 1, which was a launch game and literally wasn’t running on the same hardware (because mappers), we can do Mario 3 instead.
Or, hear me out, let’s not do a remaster at all for current gen leaps. Here’s a PS4 vs PS5 sequel one.
It doesn’t work as well, though, since taking the absolutely ridiculous shift from 2D to 3D, which has happened once and only once in all of gaming history, is a bit of a cheat anyway.
Oh, and for the record, and I can’t believe I’m saying this only now, LttP looks a LOT better than OoT. Not even close.
Oh I don’t care about leap comparisons, was just taking interest at how graphics have evolved over time. To be honest graphics have been going downhill for a few years now in big games thanks to lazy development chasing “good” graphics, fucking TAA…
I agree that it’s a meme comparison anyway. I just found it pertinent to call out that remasters have been around for a long time.
I don’t know that I agree on the rest. I don’t think I’m aware of a lazy game developer. That’s a pretty rare breed. TAA isn’t a bad thing (how quickly we forget the era when FXAA vaseline smearing was considered valid antialiasing for 720p games) and sue me, but I do like good visuals.
I do believe we are in a very weird quagmire of a transitional period, where we’re using what is effectively now a VFX suite to make games that aren’t meant to run in real time on most of the hardware being used to run them and that are simultaneously too expensive and large and aiming at waaay too many hardware configs. It’s a mess out there and it’ll continue to be a mess, because the days of a 1080Ti being a “set to Ultra and forget it” deal were officially over the moment we decided we were going to sell people 4K monitors running at 240Hz and also games made for real time raytracing.
It’s not the only time we’ve been in a weird interaction of GPUs and software (hey, remember when every GPU had its own incompatible graphics API? I do), but it’s up there.
TAA is absolutely a bad thing, I’m sorry, but it’s way worse than FXAA, especially when combined with the new ML upscaling shit.
It’s only really a problem with big games or more specifically UE5 games as temporal is baked into it.Yeah, there was that perfect moment in time where you could just put everything max, have some nice SMAA on and be happy with >120fps. The 4K chase started yeah, but the hardware we have now is ridiculously powerful and could run 4K 120fps no problem natively, if the time was spent achiveing that rather than throwing in more lighting effects no one asked for, speed running development and then slapping DLSS on at the end to try and reach playable framerates, making the end product a blurry ghosting mess. Ugh.
Hell, no. 120 fps wasn’t even a thing. That flash in the pan moment was when 1080p60 was the PC standard and 720p30 the console standard and the way the hardware worked you could hit max specs on a decent PC every time. It lasted like three or four years and it was wonderful.
By the point we started going above the NTSC spec on displays the race was lost. The 20 series came out, people started getting uppity about framerate while playing some 20 year old game and it all went to crap on the PC front.
As for AA, I don’t think you remember FXAA well, or at least in relation to what we have. ML upscaling is so much sharper than any tech we had a couple of gens ago, short of MSAA (and frankly even MSAA). The problems that have become familiar in many UE5 games are not intrinsic to the tech, they have a lot to do with what the engine does out of the box and just how out of spec some of the feature work is.
I feel like people have gotten stuck with some memes (no motion blur! DLSS bad! TAA bad!) that are mostly nostalgic of how sharp 1080p used to look compared to garbage-tier sub 720p, sub 30 fps console games. It’s getting to the point where I have so many major gripes with a lot of modern games but I feel it becomes one of those conversations you can’t have in public because it gets derailed immediately.
In any case I think we can at least agree that it’s been an awkward couple of generations of PC hardware and software for whatever reason and GPUs, engines and displays need to get realigned in a way where people can just fire up games and expect them to look and run as designed.
