Do you think that graphics in gaming has sort of hit a wall?

Balducci30 said:
Thing is whenever people post these naughty dog cutscenes - it doesn't look like that when you're actually playing. It looks like an approximation of that but not really THAT - maybe it's LOD's or whatever, maybe nanite will fix this? But these games look crazy in the cutscenes - and have fairly seamless transitions to gameplay - but when you're playing you see it just doesn't look the same quality. I don't know why that is
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It's mostly the framing that changes and then of course the lighting in cutscenes is set up to for dramatic effect.

Most movies don't look like real life either, but you're not going to tell me that real life has worse "graphics". It's just the light that is captured in a different way to serve the tone.
 
Graphics are approaching a road block so to speak. Games will really improve when the A.I. is able to give players an actual challenge
 
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SlimeGooGoo said:
Seriously? This industry has been throwing around the same open world crap for more than a decade, just look at Ubisoft.
Nintendo on their first attempt get something 10x more interesting.
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I'll easily take Witcher 3 over BOTW but that's just, like my opinion man.

Also, the stamina mechanic put a bit of a dampener on the exploration and climbing and ironically, Ubisoft used that in Fenyx to absolutely horrendous effect.

But I feel like I've strayed from the point. What's this thread about again?

Oh yeah, teh grafix.

BOTW is a great looking gaming, running at 900p on ancient hardware at 30 fps. People still refer to it today as an incredibly beautiful experience.

From a visual standpoint, the fact that people (or the market) are still satisfied with something like that in 2022, influences the body of games out there.

It's a determistic factor in why we have hit this graphics wall. It's not about developers and gaming companies lacking creativity. It's about the lack of consumer demand and the fact that improvements are simply becoming more incremental.
 
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Creating a world as detailed and alive as something like Red Dead 2 comes down to money, rather than raw power. Like the dozens of unique animations and AI cycles of each NPC in each town. PS6 hardware would mean developers who don't have unlimited budgets like a Rockstar game are more likely going to spend money on new lighting systems for example at the expense of the small details.
 
rofif said:
It looks like that in motion. The game looks like that. It's like the highest of high RTGI but it's all baked in for the most part.
Characters of course have cutscenes versions but I never once saw the gameplay version as much inferior since you don't get so close.
I find it strange that taking a screenshot is an illusion of it looking better than it does. There are no enhancements. This illusion is graphics. I don't care if it's illusion or real time. The end result is what matters and every cgi/graphics is a play on what you can and can't see.

Anyway - I know what you mean. There are better and worse looking spots. better and worse camera angles. I take good screenshots, not screenshots of crap places
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I don't mind illusion either, I'm not knocking the way they do things - Naughty Dog's graphics are a step above anyone imo. I just don't know why there is a disparity between the gameplay as a whole and some of the representations I see online where I'm like - I wish the game really felt like it looked like THAT when I was playing. It just doesn't to me. Same with LOU 2. Absolutely beautiful games, best looking games ever probably still, the cutscenes look like a cgi movie in realtime - I just don't think they look as good as I see repped online a lot of the time.
Thirty7ven said:
It's mostly the framing that changes and then of course the lighting in cutscenes is set up to for dramatic effect.

Most movies don't look like real life either, but you're not going to tell me that real life has worse "graphics". It's just the light that is captured in a different way to serve the tone.
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no but movies can have bad lighting and cinematically look like shit - so maybe that's what it is. I dunno all I know is I see screenshots, that imo don't look like how it actually looks when I'm playing.At least to me. I also played on OG ps4 and not on an oled so maybe that's part of it - like uncharted 4 the scene where I was like "oh this looks more on the level of the cutscenes" was that last boss fight with the fire in the ship or whatever. Maybe cus the camera is closer. I don't know if it's the result of the light not behaving properly in gameplay vs cutscenes because it's baked I don't know.
 
Balducci30 said:
I don't mind illusion either, I'm not knocking the way they do things - Naughty Dog's graphics are a step above anyone imo. I just don't know why there is a disparity between the gameplay as a whole and some of the representations I see online where I'm like - I wish the game really felt like it looked like THAT when I was playing. It just doesn't to me. Same with LOU 2. Absolutely beautiful games, best looking games ever probably still, the cutscenes look like a cgi movie in realtime - I just don't think they look as good as I see repped online a lot of the time.

no but movies can have bad lighting and cinematically look like shit - so maybe that's what it is. I dunno all I know is I see screenshots, that imo don't look like how it actually looks when I'm playing.At least to me. I also played on OG ps4 and not on an oled so maybe that's part of it - like uncharted 4 the scene where I was like "oh this looks more on the level of the cutscenes" was that last boss fight with the fire in the ship or whatever. Maybe cus the camera is closer. I don't know if it's the result of the light not behaving properly in gameplay vs cutscenes because it's baked I don't know.
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Maybe it's up to your psyche. I play with hdr on oled and it's lit!
 
No, but it did slow down significantly.

I'm playing through The Witcher 3 again now and having recently finished games like God of War, Horizon, od MW2, it's obvious that current day graphics are superior but the difference isn't so great that it would impact the experience in any way. Considering that it's already almost 8 years old, TW3 still looks pretty great, and there are other examples of games that still look pretty great despite being almost 10 years old. Stuff like Battlefield 4 or Killzone 4 comes to mind.

Compare that to the technological leaps that we've experienced throughout the 2000s and yeah, things have slowed down to a grind.
 
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It hit the wall during the PS360 generation. Anything we have seen ever since this gen isn't significantly better graphically speaking.

However, the cost to reach that very slight improvement is so high that it killed any risk and creativity in AAA games. Definitely not worth the loss.
 
Looking at the DS2 compared to DS1 it's like yea, these don't look too much different. Now it's just about growing scope and scale. Let's take creativity to the next level
 
As it's probably been mentioned, the incremental differences are more so because of hardware constraints.


I'd say even game design has been limited by console hardware. Games will stand out more towards the end of the gen the way Demon's Souls Remake, HFW, Flight Simulator & Rachet & Clank stand out now.
 
Balducci30 said:
I watched this I don't see how it seems like a huge leap over what we have? Just cus it's path tracing? The button looks really cool, and some of the glass in it…
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Uhm. It's now calculating light correctly in realtime.

In other words: in terms of lighting games will look like the real thing. After that we can probably say it hit the ceiling and is up to the imagination of the artists from now on.
 
By the looks of it, it'll never be photo realistic. And I'm not talking about 4k images of Unreal Engine 5 rocks and trees which look good. I'm talking animation, physics, good lip syncing and facial features. It's a few weeks till 2023 and we still got zombie eyeballs.
 
StreetsofBeige said:
By the looks of it, it'll never be photo realistic. And I'm not talking about 4k images of Unreal Engine 5 rocks and trees which look good. I'm talking animation, physics, good lip syncing and facial features. It's a few weeks till 2023 and we still got zombie eyeballs.
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I mean, look at Avatar 2 that just came out. Best SFX ever put to film by a mile, and the most expensive film ever made, and it still usually doesn't look photorealistic.

If the film industry can't do it with pre-rendered imagery costing hundreds of millions of dollars on the backs of millions of dollars worth of server farms, I have absolutely no clue why anyone would expect their $500 console to do it in real time.

It's much more of a limitation of budget and artistic resources than it is a limit of the current state of technology.
 
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One thing that never looks good in games and movies is the physics part of people flying, spaceships taking off and turning, etc....

Instead of making it look realistic, they all look super smooth and zippy like the artists doing the frame by frame CGI animation or game physics dont use a reasonable sense of acceleration or lift off. It's hard to explain in words, but any media that has tons of CGI, aliens, space ships and flying superheroes you know what I mean.
 
Johnny Concrete said:
Uhm. It's now calculating light correctly in realtime.

In other words: in terms of lighting games will look like the real thing. After that we can probably say it hit the ceiling and is up to the imagination of the artists from now on.
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I know the actual mechanics of it are crazy and technically a leap - I'm just saying the difference between the "faking" it techniques and that.. it just doesn't create something that looks vastly different than what we have.

VFX are the things that stick out most to me in video games nowadays, we still don't have fire like that ps4 dragon game tech demo from back in the day
 
Balducci30 said:
I know the actual mechanics of it are crazy and technically a leap - I'm just saying the difference between the "faking" it techniques and that.. it just doesn't create something that looks vastly different than what we have.

VFX are the things that stick out most to me in video games nowadays, we still don't have fire like that ps4 dragon game tech demo from back in the day
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That's fair. The environments in Portal are not that spectacular either, but it opens a whole lot of potential for future games. When I look at something like Fortnite that uses a cheap version of this, the lighting and reflections already look so much better then what we had before!

I think one of the reasons we don't feel that generational leap these days is that so much game developing studio's are fucking talented right now.
Back in the day you had a couple of them that produced mind blowing visuals and the rest lagging behind, now almost each month something releases that pushes it a bit forward with new tech. So improvements to game graphics happen at an even faster pace than before, but because it's more incremental now it doesn't feel like a leap anymore.

The end is nowhere near in sight.
 
No, not at all.
With raytracing being introduced into game it feels like things are taking huge leaps. I'll admit the PS4 generation felt pretty weak.

Sucked hearing people hyping up games graphics only to see that they still don't even have shadows for grass and small objects.
 
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Literally the worst time in years for this kinda topic. Massive amount of games that Look great are just recently released or will release soon. Together with out first unreal enginge 5.1 Update that makes fortnite Look immensly better.
 
The problem we are starting to see now, is that to push better graphics, we need hardware that is fundamentally more expensive

At the rate things are going, to play the latest PC games, you are going to have to invest in a $2000 graphics card. I don't know what that is going to mean for console gaming but this hobby is going to keep getting more and more expensive for everybody, as AAA developers are forced to create games with cutting edge graphics or risk their games bombing
 
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