The problem as I see it is that there is an upper limit on how good any game can look graphically. You can’t make a game that looks more realistic than literal reality, so any improvement is going to just approach that limit. (Barring direct brain interfacing that gives better info than the optical nerve)
Before, we started from a point that was so far removed from reality than practically anything would be an improvement. Like say “reality” is 10,000. Early games started at 10, then when we switched to 3D it was 1,000. That an enormous relative improvement, even if it’s far from the max. But now your improvements are going from 8,000 to 8,500 and while it’s still a big absolute improvement, it’s relatively minor – and you’re never going to get a perfect 10,000 so the amount you can improve by gets smaller and smaller.
All that to say, the days of huge graphical leaps are over, but the marketing for video games acts like that’s not the case. Hence all the buzzwords around new tech without much to show for it.
Well you can get to a perfect 10k hypothetically, you can have more geometric/texture/lighting detail than the eye could process. From a technical perspective.
Of course you have the technical capabilities, and that’s part of the equation. The other part is the human effort to create the environments. Now the tech sometimes makes it easier on the artist (for example, better light modeling in the engine at run time means less effort to bake lighting in, and ability for author to basically “etc…” to more detail, by smoothing or some machine learning extrapolations). Despite this, more detail does mean more man hours to try to make the most of that, and this has caused massive cost increases as models got more detailed and more models and environments became feasible. The level of artwork that goes into the whole have of pacman is less than a single model in a modern game.
Graphics are only part of it, with the power that is there I am disappointed in the low quality put to rrlease. I loved Jedi survivor, a brilliant game but it was terribly optimised. I booted it today and had nothing but those assest loading flashes as walls and structures in my immediate vicinity and eyeline flashed white into existence.
Good games arent solely reliant om graphics but christ if they dont waste what they have. Programmers used to push everything to the max, now they get away with pushing beta releases to print.
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.
Games did teach me about diminishing returns though
Kind of like smartphones. They all kind of blew up into this rectangular slab, and…
Nothing. It’s all the same shit. I’m using a OnePlus 6T from 2018, and I think I’ll have it easily for another 3 years. Things eventually just stagnate.
I miss physical keyboards on phones
What do you expect next? Folding phones? That would be silly!
I was hoping that eventually smartphones would evolve to do everything. Especially when things like Samsung Dex were intorduced, it looked to me like maybe in the future phones could replace desktops, running a full desktop OS when docked and some simplified mobile UI + power saving when in mobile mode.
But no, I only have a locked-down computer.
Yeah whatever happened to that? That was such a good idea and could have been absolutely game changing if it was actually marketed to the people who would benefit the most from it
I used it for a while when I worked two jobs. Is clock out of job 1 and had an agreement with them to be allowed to use the screen and input devices at my desk for job 2. Then I’d plug in my Tab S8 and get to work, instead of having to carry to chunky laptops.
So it still exists! What I noticed is that a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 feels underpowered and that Android, and this is the bigger issue, does not have a single browser that works as a full fledged desktop version. All browser I tested has some shortcomings, especially with drag and drop or context menus or whatever. Like things work but you’re constantly reminded that you’re running a mobile os. Like weird behavior or oversized context menus or whatever.I wish you could lunch into a Linux vm instead of Dex UI. Or for Samsung to double down on the concept. The Motorola Atrix was so ahead of it’s time. Like your phone transforming into your tablet, into your laptop, into your desktop. How fucking cool is that?
Apple would be in a prime position, they’re entire ecosystem is now ARM based and they have the chips with enough power. But it’s not their style to do somethingcoolto threaten their bottom line. Why sell one phone when you can sell phone, laptop, tablet, desktop separately?It’s super easy to forget but Ubuntu tried to do it back in the day with Convergence as well, and amusingly this article also compares it to Microsoft’s solution on Windows Phone. It’s a brilliant idea but apparently no corporation with the ecosystem to make it actually happen has the will to risk actually changing the world despite every company talking about wanting an “iPhone moment”
Apple would be in a prime position, they’re entire ecosystem is now ARM based and they have the chips with enough power. But it’s not their style to do something cool to threaten their bottom line. Why sell one phone when you can sell phone, laptop, tablet, desktop separately?
Let’s be real, Apple’s biggest risk would be losing the entire student and young professional market by actually demonstrating that they don’t need a Mac Book Pro to use the same 5 webapps that would work just as well on a decent Chromebook (if such a thing existed)
Linux vm
Or just something like Termux, a terminal emulator for Android. Example screenshot (XFCE desktop over VNC server), I didn’t know what to fit in there:
Full desktop apps, running natively under Android. For better compatibility Termux also has proot-distro (similar to chroot) where you can have… let me copy-paste
Supported distributions (format: name < alias >): * Alpine Linux < alpine > * Arch Linux < archlinux > * Artix Linux < artix > * Chimera Linux < chimera > * Debian (bookworm) < debian > * deepin < deepin > * Fedora < fedora > * Manjaro < manjaro > * openKylin < openkylin > * OpenSUSE < opensuse > * Pardus < pardus > * Ubuntu (24.04) < ubuntu > * Void Linux < void > Install selected one with: proot-distro install <alias>Though there is apparently some performance hit. I just prefer Android, but maybe you could run even full LibreOffice under some distro this way.
If it can be done by Termux, then someone like Samsung could definitely make something like that too, but integrated with the system and with more software available in their repos.
What’s missing from the picture but is interesting too is NGINX server (reverse proxy, lazy file sharing, wget mirrored static website serving), kiwix-serve (serving ZIM files including the entire Wikipedia from SD card) and Navidrome (music server).
And brought to any internet-connected computer via Cloudflare QuickTunnel (because it doesn’t need account nor domain name). The mobile data upload speed will finally matter, a lot.You get the idea, GNU+Linux. And Android already has the Linux kernel part.
Linux on DeX was a thing but killed by Samsung
Maybe make the rectangular slab smaller again?
I would love to have a smaller phone. Not thinner, smaller. I don’t care if it’s a bit thick, but I do care if the screen is so big I can’t reach across it with one hand.
OnePlus 6 line of phones are one of the very few with good Linux support, I mean, GNU/Linux support. If custom ROMs no longer cut it you can get even more years with Linux. I had an iPhone, was eventually fed up, got an Android aaand I realized I am done with smartphones lol. Gimme a laptop with phone stuff (push notifications w/o killing battery, VoLTE) and my money is yours, but no such product exists.
One company put a stupid fucking notch in their screen and everyone bought that phone, so now every company has to put a stupid fucking notch in the screen
I just got my tax refund. If someone can show me a modern phone with a 9:16 aspect ratio and no notch, I will buy it right now
You can easily keep a phone for 7 years.
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.
If we can pre render it, then in theory it’s only a matter of time before we can real time render it.
Not really, because pre renders are often optimized to only look good from one side. If you try to make a 3D model out of it and render that in real time in the game world, it might look ugly or weird from another angle.
They said we’d never have consumer tech that could white clip in real time but look at us now.
I would argue that late SNES era games look far better than their early 3d era follow ups
Late 16 bit games had to lean into distinct art directions which allowed them the stand the test of time.
And they’re shocked that no one bought the PS5 pro for 800 dollars
I don’t mind the graphics that much, what really pisses me off is the lack of optimization and heavy reliance on frame gen.
To be fair there isn’t just graphics.
Something like Zelda Twilight princess HHD to Zelda Breath of the wild was a huge leap in just gameplay. (And also in graphics but that’s not my point)
Idk. Breath of the Wild felt more like a tech demo than a full game. Tears of the Kingdom felt more fleshed out, but even then… the wideness of the world belied its shallowness in a lot of places. Ocarina of Time had a smaller overall map, but ever region had this very bespokely crafted setting and culture and strategy. By the time you got to Twilight Princess, you had this history to the setting and this weight to this iteration of the Zelda setting.
What could you really do in BotW that you couldn’t do in Twilight? The graphics got a tweak. The amount of running around you did went way up. But the game itself? Zelda really peaked with Majorem’s Mask. So much of this new stuff is more fluff than substance.
What? Botw was awesome! There was so much to explore, the world was interesting, the NPCs are good, and so on. Oot and Majora’s Mask are both amazing too of course, but botw is a modern masterpiece.
I don’t understand why developers and publishers aren’t prioritizing spectacle games with simple graphics like TABS, mount and blade, or similar. Use modern processing power to just throw tons of shit on screen, make it totally chaotic and confusing. Huge battles are super entertaining.
The dream of the '10s/20s game industry was VR. Hyper-realistic settings were supposed to supplant the real world. Ready Player One was what big development studios genuinely thought they were aiming for.
They lost sight of video games as an abstraction and drank too much of their own cyberpunk kool-aid. So we had this fixation on Ray Tracing and AI-driven NPC interactions that gradually lost sight of the gameplay loop and the broader iterative social dynamics of online play.
That hasn’t eliminated development in these spheres, but it has bifricated the space between game novelty and game immersion. If you want the next Starcraft or Earthbound or Counterstrike, you need to look towards the indie studios and their low-graphics / highly experimental dev studios (where games like Stardew Valley and Undertale and Balatro live). The AAA studios are just turning out 100 hour long movies with a few obnoxious gameplay elements sprinkled in.
I feel like we won’t be able to see the difference until a couple of years, like CGI in old movies.
The generational leap from PS3 -> PS4 wasn’t that significant already, and that happened more than 10 years ago. The biggest difference seem to be lights/shadows and texture size, the latter of which balloons game size and can tank performance
There’s no better generational leap than Monster Hunter Wilds, which looks like a PS2 game on its lowest settings and still chugs at 24fps on my PC.
Could’ve done your research before buying. Companies aren’t held to standards bc people are uninformed buyers.
Never said I bought it. Why would I buy a 70€ game without running the benchmark tool first?
I just still find it ridiculous that it looks and runs like ass when MH World looks and runs way better on the same PC. Makes me wonder what’s really behind whatever ‘technological advancements’ have been put into Wilds. It’s like it’s an actual scam to make people buy new hardware with no actual benefit.
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.
when i was a smol i thought i needed to buy the memory expansion pack whenever OoT fps tanked.
Had to, as in “they didn’t have enough experience to optimize the games”. Same for Super Mario 64. Some programmers decompiled the code and made it run like a dream on original hardware.
The programming knowledge did not exist at the time. Its not that they did not have the experience, it was impossible for them to have the knowledge because it did not exist at the time. You can’t really count that against them.
Kaze optimizing Mario 64 is amazing, but it would have been impossible for Nintendo to have programmed the game like that because Kaze is able to use programming technique and knowledge that literally did not exist at the time the N64 was new. Its like saying that the NASA engineers that designed the Atlas LV-3B spacecraft were bad engineers or incapable of making a good rocket design just because of what NASA engineers could design today with the knowledge that did not exist in the 50s.
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.
This is what a remaster used to look like.
It was a remake not a remaster. The hit boxes weren’t the same.
The difference is academic and doesn’t affect my point.
Technically an original source code was adopted to SNES, even including some (most?) glitches, so I’d say it’s more like a port or remaster than remake, even though graphics and audio were remade.
Pretty sick if you ask me
I agree whole heartedly
