I am probably unqualified to speak about this, as I am using an RX 550 low profile and a 768P monitor and almost never play newer titles, but I want to kickstart a discussion, so hear me out.
The push for more realistic graphics was ongoing for longer than most of us can remember, and it made sense for most of its lifespan, as anyone who looked at an older game can confirm - I am a person who has fun making fun of weird looking 3D people.
But I feel games’ graphics have reached the point of diminishing returns, AAA studios of today spend millions of dollars just to match the graphics’ level of their previous titles - often sacrificing other, more important things on the way, and that people are unnecessarily spending lots of money on electricity consuming heat generating GPUs.
I understand getting an expensive GPU for high resolution, high refresh rate gaming but for 1080P? you shouldn’t need anything more powerful than a 1080 TI for years. I think game studios should just slow down their graphical improvements, as they are unnecessary - in my opinion - and just prevent people with lower end systems from enjoying games, and who knows, maybe we will start seeing 50 watt gaming GPUs being viable and capable of running games at medium/high settings, going for cheap - even iGPUs render good graphics now.
TLDR: why pay for more and hurt the environment with higher power consumption when what we have is enough - and possibly overkill.
Note: it would be insane of me to claim that there is not a big difference between both pictures - Tomb Raider 2013 Vs Shadow of the Tomb raider 2018 - but can you really call either of them bad, especially the right picture (5 years old)?
Note 2: this is not much more that a discussion starter that is unlikely to evolve into something larger.
I kind of stopped caring about graphics at the end of the PS3 days. That was the last time were graphics made a substantial gameplay difference, namely it allowed bigger environments and more verticality (e.g. Assassins Creed). The 10 years after that it just turned into a wash, the shaders got better, we got PBR, subsurface scattering and all the jazz, but none of it really mattered. Something like Dead Space or Red Faction: Guerrilla still has more interesting interaction with enemies and environments than most modern games.
I care about graphics only in so far that you need to have enough of it to render the interactive elements of your game. Past that it’s just fluff or even detrimental, as uber realstic graphics often lead to a much harder to read game environment, as it’s no longer clear what you can interact with and what not (and ginormous floating hologram icons ain’t exactly a good solution here either).
The one area that still needs powerful graphics is Virtual Reality. The screen covering a much bigger FOV than a monitor game requires a ton more pixels to push around, as well as higher refresh rate (~4k@90fps is were it starts getting acceptable). However, VR so far still hasn’t gained any real traction in the gaming space and
FacebookMeta trying monopolize it ain’t helping either. This might take quite a few more years before it becomes relevant.These days my graphics card is mostly running StableDiffusion for AI image generation. While my gaming is mostly just 16bit games or indie stuff that could run on a 10 or 20 year old PC just fine.
Thank you! The strength of video games as a medium is interactivity. If it doesn’t enhance my ability to exist and act in a virtual space it’s essentially worthless to me. I want better physics, better AI, and more interesting mechanics, not better anti-aliasing and effects that mistake eyeballs for camera lenses.
raytracing in control did make a slight difference as you could see enemies around the corner that rasterized games couldn’t render since the object is not in screenspace
also it should allow easier development in the future when every device is capable of it since they won’t have to put as many lighting hacks