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  1. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by Dastreus View Post
    We are currently in the midst of a technological bottleneck. We have made transistors so small (to fit more processing power) that literally, electrons are almost unable to pass through them. Quantum computing is our next logical step, because we've gone nearly as far with our current methodology of computing.
    I need a googly eyes emoji here.

  2. #22
    Old God Vash The Stampede's Avatar
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    There are a number of reasons, but it's mostly because the PC market is tied to console. Go back to the 90's where consoles like the N64 and Playstation were innovating new graphics technology, but on PC things exploded with the introduction of the Voodoo graphics card from 3Dfx. From there other companies tried to cash in on the graphics card business like Nvidia, ATI, Intel, Rendition Vérité, S3, Matrox, PowerVR, and etc. By the year 2000 PC gaming was it's own market with unique games that consoles couldn't get. Games like Soldier of Fortune, American McGee's Alice, and etc. But that changed with the introduction of the Xbox.

    When the Xbox was introduced it brought PC hardware to consoles, which started to change the market for developers. While the Xbox was a failure, it didn't stop developers from making games based around the limiting hardware of the Xbox. This didn't become a big deal until the release of the Xbox 360 and PS3, which took GPU's from the most successful manufacturers, ATI and Nvidia. This was a big deal for developers as the income from consoles was greater than PC, and they didn't like the rampant piracy that occurs on PC. Even ID Software who championed PC gaming, had no problem limiting their games to console specifications. To make matters worse the two biggest GPU manufacturers ATI/AMD and Nvidia had investments in consoles so that creates a conflict of interest for them. Price of GPU's skyrocketed and the last unique PC game Crysis performed poorly on most hardware available in 2007. The backlash from Crysis meant that no developer in their right mind would make games that demanded the most powerful PC's.

    Because consoles are a bigger market than PC gaming, that means that developers will make games based on the lowest common denominator, which is not PC. There are factors like Moore's law is dead, but that really doesn't effect GPU's since you can just add more pipelines and bandwidth because GPU's don't deal in serial work loads. It also doesn't help that both Nvidia and AMD are the only two gaming GPU manufacturers today, and both are invested in the console market. Price of GPU's are so high that if you look on the Steam Hardware Survey the majority of GPU's people use are Pascal based like the GTX 1060, 1050, 1050 Ti. People are still using hardware from 2016 on PC. It certainly didn't help that a couple of years ago the Bitcoin market had raised prices for such a long time. Today people don't have new hardware and consoles are still the limiting factor.
    Last edited by Vash The Stampede; 2020-02-11 at 05:44 AM.

  3. #23
    Merely a Setback PACOX's Avatar
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    Graphics have improved. A lot. Improvements might be as obvious as going from 2D to 3rd, from cubes molded together to actual shapes.

    Graphics improvements now are based on how much subtle/impressive details you can place on a screen. Grass that's not just a single 2D sprite repeated at set intervals. The same repeating bump map for terrain. NPCs that are really just recolor of 3 models.

    Now particle effects have weight and volume. You can do a lot more with lighting. Props and backgrounds can be more uniquely detailed and dynamic.

    There's also less emphasis on pure polygon count and more on stylistic approaches and optimized approaches. There's no point in in making a game as groundbreaking as say Crysis at its time where you trade substance and system power just to say you have the most realistic looking game. Also doesn't help if most people can run it or have to turn the settings down to the point they can't see the work put into the game.

    People want to blame consoles but forgot that consoles give devs a controlled environment to work in. The risk of weird hardware anomalies are cut down due to working on dedicated, static hardware, built on top of of a custom OS. PC can be a lot harder. You have worry about what Nvidia is doing, what AMD is doing, how is Windows going to treat your game, drivers breaking your game, other software breaking your game, the multitude of rigs you need to account for. Do you shoot for people with high end rigs? Midtier? Do you need to future proof your game?

    That's why on PC you'll see devs use old engines until the owner of the engine refuses to maintaining legacy support out of letting the dead die. Why a dev might choose a kinda crappy/limited engine because it's at least battle tested and won't just break. Why you might have had DX-xxx on your PC for years but no dev will implement it.

    Pushing the boundaries on PC is risky, expensive, an no one is going to give you money if you were brave enough to take a risk that will benefit devs 2,3 years down the line but your actual project was DoA.

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  4. #24
    Quote Originally Posted by Chingylol View Post
    How come graphics in games haven't improved that dramatically in the past 10 years?
    There are several factors at play.

    First and foremost, you must realize that graphics have drastically increased over the past few years, but not necessarily in the ways you're looking for. Overall image fidelity hasn't increased much, but things such as lighting and particle systems have been improved quite a bit. The start of the current gen was a slow burn, but compare major games coming out today with what came out at the start of the generation, and it shows a marked improvement. Just because older games still look good today doesn't mean newer games don't look better.

    Texture fidelity will also increase with increased amounts of available ram on the market, but increasing a, say, 100,000 poly model to a 200,000 poly model for increase model fidelity is a massive increase in the amount of data bandwidth required. Additionally, like many other people have stated, games generally are optimized for console play first. Even in the case of PC exclusives, they're generally built with engines that favor console gameplay.

    Additionally, the old Moore's law is slowing down across the board. The overall advancements in computing technology from 2010 to 2020 aren't quite as much of a leap as 2000-2010. We're currently struggling against the limitations of silicon based computing technology. In the past, we could make huge strides in graphics through brute forcing it with more raw power, but we're reaching a point where to get more out of what's currently available, we need to optimize and favor style over pure photorealism. If you look at the "slow down" in the advancement of graphics in gaming, you'll see that it closely parallels the slowdown in overall computing technology. We've reached a bit of a core clock speed brick wall, and so we've just been throwing more and more cores into the mix and trying to optimize software to run accordingly.

  5. #25
    Just get Flight Simulator 2020 when it comes out. I heard it's incredibly taxing on even a 2080 Ti at maximum settings in the Alpha test right now.

    https://youtu.be/OmoG8jgdQvQ?t=1391

    Screenshot for those who don't wish to watch a video:

    Last edited by Master Factician; 2020-02-11 at 06:16 AM.

  6. #26
    Quote Originally Posted by Darththeo View Post
    Are we ignoring WoW is a 16 year old game that started work in 2001?

    If you don't think the graphics have improve drastically ... look at some of the in game cinematics from Wrath and compare to what we got in BfA.
    WotLK opening cinematic doesn't feel outdated though. Ok most of the improvement since then have been made on details (such as facial expression, eyes, hair...) but hey, this trailer is still lit on a technical pov.

    Imo graphics haven't improved for a few reasons:
    - It's hard to improve something that is already great, and we're reaching the point of photorealism on a few games (cinematics at least)
    - old/cartoonish styles are at high demand (WoW, Fortnite, Apex, Borderlands 3), so it's easy to not notice the realistic games
    - High-res games usually requires high-end computers not everyone has, especially now that the gaming community has switched to portable things and consoles. You could very well create an ultra-realistic/life-like game but it won't port to console (or badly) and certainly not to mobile, where the money is nowadays.

  7. #27
    How far to you expect them to go?

    Nowadays what needs improvement is the lighting, the number of people rendered on screen, etc. Not so much the models. Guess that's what RTRT is trying to accomplish on the lightning department.

  8. #28
    Most devs focus on consoles, so we're paced to them. Next gen will be a significant boost but comparatively a few years behind current PCs.

  9. #29
    Have you checked Red Dead 2, OP?

  10. #30
    The Unstoppable Force Ielenia's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chingylol View Post
    Was talking to my brother about the Witcher TV series and mentioned the games to him since he's not really a gamer. And it occurred to me.. The graphics in the Witcher 2 are just a small step below even some AAA games now in 2020, and that game came out in 2010. If you look in the past decade leaps such as 1990-2000 and 2000-2010, video game graphics on both console and PC took HUGE strides compared to 2010-2020. Is there a specific reason for this?
    Short answer: small details.

    Long answer: imagine a round 3D object with 20 polygons. Like a dice with 20 sides. If we increase the polygon count of said object by adding 20 more polygons, adding up to 40, while keeping the 3D object the same size, which means the polygons also got smaller. You'll definitely notice the change in the shape.

    Then you add 20 more, and get 60 polygons total count, each polygon being even smaller. You'll notice the change, but you'll also notice that it's not as noticeable a change as it was the first time. And then add 20 more. And then 20 more. And 20 more. Each time, the polygons become smaller and smaller. You'll start noticing the changes less and less the smaller the details, as in, the polygon size.

    I mean, look at this image:

    I made a series of 5 circles using vectors in Photoshop. The first one has 5 anchor points. I then added 5 more anchor points. See how noticeable the change was? Then I added 5 more. Then 5 more. Then 5 more. Then 5 more. Do you see how the "visual gains" seems to be smaller and smaller, even though the number of 'polygons' increased at the same pace throughout the five images?
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  11. #31
    Immortal Darththeo's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ophenia View Post
    WotLK opening cinematic doesn't feel outdated though. Ok most of the improvement since then have been made on details (such as facial expression, eyes, hair...) but hey, this trailer is still lit on a technical pov.
    I am talking about the in game cinematics. Like Wrathgate, not the expansion opening.
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  12. #32
    I wish we still had studios like Crytek who wanted to get the most out of the games graphics to make them look as good as possible, even if the games end up nothing special (though I really liked the first Crysis). Back then you needed a high end PC just to run this game, but the graphics were so good that it made for some of the best gaming experiences you could have at the time.

    There are still plenty of great lookins games being released. Red Dead Redemption 2 looks stunning and is very fun to play.

  13. #33
    Old God Vash The Stampede's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by McNeil View Post
    I wish we still had studios like Crytek who wanted to get the most out of the games graphics to make them look as good as possible, even if the games end up nothing special (though I really liked the first Crysis). Back then you needed a high end PC just to run this game, but the graphics were so good that it made for some of the best gaming experiences you could have at the time.
    Crytek is still around, and they released a new demo called Neon Noir which shows Ray-Tracing without the need of dedicated hardware like from Nvidia's RTX. The thing about Crysis was that back in 2007 I had no problem running the game on my Sapphire Radeon X1950 GT, which I still have laying around somewhere. It was only a $150 graphics card as well. ATI's most expensive card at the time was the X1950 Pro which was sub $200, but Nvidia had cards that went well beyond that in price. Nvidia had cards that easily went to insane prices like the 8800 GTX was $600. Later AMD/ATI released the HD 3000 series where the Radeon HD 3870 was only $220 and destroyed most of Nvidia's lineup. But like today most people bought only Nvidia hardware and by the time Crysis was released nobody had that kind of money for the hardware. The financial crisis of 2008 was just a year away so definitely people couldn't afford to upgrade their aging PCs.


  14. #34


    Modelling is reaching a plataeu which means the improvements need to shift to things like lightning -hence consoles next gen pushing the ray tracing meme- and sound design which are a lot harder to pull off as easily and efficiently.

  15. #35
    Screenshots don't tell much. Graphics have come miles in the last 10 years and it's not in still images, it's in attention to detail. Human animations, the way the wind makes the plants, water and trees move, real time reflections, dynamic lighting getting to the point it is nearly as good as baked in lighting etc etc(last two are about to get even better as ray tracing starts picking up steam).

    Hell, even in just the console realm and only 3 years apart look at TLOU vs Uncharted 4 from same studio. The difference couldn't be more huge, let alone if you compare TLOU to TLOU2 which will be 7 years apart.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Daedius View Post
    Most devs focus on consoles, so we're paced to them. Next gen will be a significant boost but comparatively a few years behind current PCs.
    Well good thing too, because PC exclusive games aren't exactly lookers for the most part. You have those AAA console devs to thank for having pretty games.

  16. #36
    diminishing returns, as you get closer to the top the effort it takes to go from 8 to 9 is way higher than from 2 to 3, also graphical effects such as texture filtering have less visual impact on a today's 4k image than a 640x480 image in 1997 when voodoo chip was introduced.
    Last edited by D3athsting; 2020-02-11 at 08:38 PM.
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  17. #37
    Quote Originally Posted by D3athsting View Post
    diminishing returns, as you get closer to the top the effort it takes to go from 8 to 9 is way higher than from 2 to 3, also graphical effects such as texture filtering have less visual impact on a today's 4k image than a 640x480 image in 1997 when voodoo chip was introduced.
    Well the only real breakthrough in the last 10 years is ray tracing. Games still continue to look better and better though, and games they look good are on another level from games that don't.

    This is mostly done through stuff that is not hardware limited. RDR2 on consoles looks better then most PC games of far stronger PCs for a reason(not saying it looks better then RDR2 on PC before anyone tries that strawman btw lol), not because it's using some magic voodoo but because of attention to detail in things that are done by shear brute force work, number of unique models, number of unique animations, quality of said animations, number of unique assets, number of unique materials made for use etc. All of these things make games look better and aren't technically demanding on hardware.

  18. #38
    Old God Vash The Stampede's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tech614 View Post
    Well good thing too, because PC exclusive games aren't exactly lookers for the most part. You have those AAA console devs to thank for having pretty games.
    PC exclusives today aren't exclusive to PC because of the compute power but because of the input devices. There are some games that absolutely require a keyboard and mouse. Back in the day PC games were all about the hardware like Doom, Quake, Unreal, Half Life, and etc. You couldn't run those games on consoles from the day these games were launched. Even when these games got ported, it usually resulted in something getting cut from the game due to limitations. The last game to do this was Crysis and when they ported the game to consoles they used the Cryengine 3 with some stuff cut out from the PC version. Nobody today makes a game so demanding for PC that you have to wait until the next generation consoles to be able to run it. There is a rumor that Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed because the Xbox One couldn't handle the game. So rather having CD Projekt release the game for PC exclusively, they're instead waiting for when the PS5 and Xbox Series X are released, at least hypothetically speaking.

  19. #39
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    Hmm i think the graphics have jumped as much between 2010 and 2020, as it did between 2000 and 2010. The thing is just, that we have reached a point, where realistic graphics are at a point, where improving them no longer increases functionality. After that point, it does not really make much sense gameplay wise, and is only something you care about if you want to make an art game.

    And there are art games out there if you look. Many games break the limits of how we think of graphics and keep improving the top every year, but you just don't see them main stream anymore. Its a waste of money to improve graphics, when we have come to a point, where players really does not notice the improvement, as we are talking about fine detail improvement.

    People noticed the blocky graphics of 2000, but nobody noticed that each grass straw on a 2020 game lawn is finely detailed and has its own movement AI.
    May the lore be great and the stories interesting. A game without a story, is a game without a soul. Value the lore and it will reward you with fun!

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  20. #40
    Quote Originally Posted by Pandragon View Post
    Greed increased. Companies want to make as many games as possible for as little as possible to maximize profits.
    It has nothing to do with that. It's simply hardware/software limitations.

    There's a reason why even with a 2080ti I can't enjoy to the fullest a 1440p monitor at 165hz in some games and it would be mental to say it's because the graphics are not demanding when we are talking about 2 pieces of hardware worth 2k moneys.

    Or are hardware companies colluding with game developers?

    If anything games nowadays forfeit complex and engaging systems in favor of pretty pixels.

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