
It is weird because, theoretically speaking, ray tracing should be able to make game development faster (and cheaper, due to the time saved.
tho games will still cost millions because of the tech involved) while producing visual output far better than what we are used to. This is not about hyperrealism, but rather about photorealism, even within a stylized art direction. But even the highest-end GPUs are struggling with a fully path-traced game. It may take another 20 years before path tracing becomes the default pipeline, reaching a point where even low- to mid-range GPUs can run fully path-traced games at 1440p and 60 fps without issue; the new standard
So clearly, gaming graphics still have a lot of progress ahead of them. I don't think it's a cost issue, but more of a pipeline and technical/technological one
if we take this:
to this:
so the diminishing returns argument make sense because when people talk about "graphics" they are usually taking about the entire package
If we take the same shader/material, texture quality, and polygon density from last gen to this gen, but one uses rasterization and the other uses path tracing, the latter will look much better, just like in the example
So maybe we are talking about Rasterized Diminishing Returns. We don't need higher textures or higher polygon resolution, we need path-traced lighting