Originally Posted by
Edge-
They have improved considerably, especially on console. It's just not always as readily apparent, at least on PC, where they've always been able to push graphics more compared to console.
We've had tons of new tech developed over the years, dynamic resolution scaling, DLSS anti-aliasing, HDR integration, ray tracing etc.
And you can see in that video that poly counts and meshes are lower fidelity than you get from AAA games nowadays, in addition to texture resolutions that are as good if not better than what we see in that video which was more a RAM limitation based on my understanding. Just look at things like the fidelity of the "damaged" parts of the wall in the thumbnail.
Progress isn't linear though, and you'll see spikes with certain advancements followed by smaller improvements over the years. The thing is more than we're going less for pure photorealism now and more for different art styles and directions to help games age better over time as photorealism ages very poorly. Not to mention that you similarly get decreasing returns on investment visually.
Though your comparison videos aren't like for like. You have a PS1 game, a PS3 game that never pushed for graphics, and then a PC game where the graphical fidelity was one of the key selling points.