The times of console giants, their fiefdoms and the big game studios is coming to an end.
And there are AAA that make and will make good money with graphics being front and center.
I'm just not sold.
Do I really think that BG3 being slightly prettier than, say, Dragon Age / Skyrim / etc made it a more enticing game? Not to me certainly. Was cyberpunk prettier than Witcher 3? Did it need to be for me to play it?
My query isn't about whether you can get people to upgrade to play new stuff (always true). But whether they'd still upgrade if they could play on the old console with worse graphics.
I also don't think anyone is going to suddenly start playing video games because the graphics improve further.
-How difficult it must be for the art/technical teams at game studios to figure out for all the detail they are capable of putting on screen how much of it will be appreciated by gamers. Essentially making sure that anything they're going to be budgeting significant amount of worker time to creating, gamers aren't going to run right past it and ignore or doesn't contribute meaningfully to 'more than the sum of its parts'.
-As much as technology is an enabler for art, alongside the install base issue how well does pursuing new methods fit how their studio is used to working, and is the payoff there if they spend time adapting. A lot of gaming business is about shipping product, and the studios concern is primarily about getting content to gamers than chasing tech as that is what lets their business continue, selling GPUs/consoles is another company's business.
Absolutely - graphical improvements make the game more immersive for me and I don't want to go back and replay the games I spent hundreds of hours in mid two thousands, like say NVN or Icewind Dale (never played BG 2). It's just not the same feeling now that I've played games with incomparable graphics, polished mechanics and movie level voice acting/mocap cutscenes. I even picked up Mass Effect recently out of nostalgia but gave up fast because it just isn't as captivating as it was back when it was peak graphics.
I routinely re-play games like Diablo 2 or BG1/2 and I couldn't care less about graphics, voice acting or motion capture.
Exactly. Graphics are not the end all be all for assessing games, but it’s odd how quickly people handwave away graphics in a visual medium.
Very successful games are still being made that use sprites, low-res polygons, cel shading, etc. While these techniques still can run into hardware limits, they generally don't benefit from the sort of improvements (and that word is becoming ever more debatable with things like AI frame generation) that make for better looking [whatever that quality is called] games.
This is just one type of graphics. And focusing too heavily on it is not going to be enough to keep the big players in the industry afloat for much longer. Some gamers care--apparently some care a lot--but that isn't translating into enough sales to overcome the bloated costs.
There is a difference between graphics as in rendering (i.e. the technical side, how something gets rendered) and graphics as in aesthetics (i.e. visual styles, presentation, etc).
The latter is important for games because it can be used to evoke some feel to the player (e.g. cartoony Mario games or dreadful Silent Hill games). The former however is not important by itself, its importance only comes as means to achieve the latter. When people handwave away graphics in games they handwave the misplaced focus on graphics-as-in-tech, not on graphics-as-in-aesthetics.
And yet many more have no such issue doing exactly this. Despite having a machine capable of the best graphics at the best resolution, I have exactly zero issues going back and playing older games.
Just in the past month alone with some time off for surgery I played and completed Quake, Heretic and Blood. All easily as good, fun and as compelling as modern titles, if not in some ways better.
There is a reason there are so many complaints in social media about being obvious to gamers in what game engine a game was written on.
It used to be that game development quality was taken more seriously, when they were sold via storage media, and there was a deadline to burn those discs/cartridges.
Now they just ship whatever is done by the deadline, and updates will come later via a DLC, if at all.
Both of these seem to suffer from incentive issues similar to enterprise software: They're not marketing and selling to either end users or professionals, but studio executives. So it's important to have - preferably a steady stream of - flashy headline features (e.g. nanite, lumen) instead of a product that actually works on the most basic level (consistently render frames). It doesn't really matter to Epic Games that UE4/5 RT is largely unplayable; even for game publishers, if you can pull nice-looking screenshots out of the engine or do good-looking 24p offline renders (and slap "in-game graphics" on them), that's good enough.
The shader stutter issues are non-existent on console because consoles have one architecture and you can ship shaders as compiled machine code. For PC you don't know what architecture you will be targeting, so you ship some form of bytecode that needs to be compiled on the target machine.
The issue is that, because of monolithic pipelines, you have to provide the exact state the shaders will be used in. There's a lot of that, and a large part of it depends on user authored content, which makes it really hard to figure out in advance.
It's a fundamental design mistake in D3D12/Vulkan that is slowly being corrected, but it will take some time (and even more for game engines to catch up).
Like, on the one hand, you have engines/games which always stutter, have more-or-less long "shader precompilation" splashscreens on every patch and still stutter anyway. The frametime graph of any UE title looks like a topographic cross-section of Verdun. On the other hand there are titles not using those engines where you wouldn't even notice there were any shaders to precompile which... just run.
[1] https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...
> In a highly programmable real-time rendering environment such as Unreal Engine (UE), any application with a large amount of content has too many GPU state parameters that can change to make it practical to manually configure PSOs in advance. To work around this complication, UE can collect data about the GPU state from an application build at runtime, then use this cached data to generate new PSOs far in advance of when they are used. This narrows down the possible GPU states to only the ones used in the application. The PSO descriptions gathered from running the application are called PSO caches.
> The steps to collect PSOs in Unreal are:
> 1. Play the game.
> 2. Log what is actually drawn.
> 3. Include this information in the build.
> After that, on subsequent playthroughs the game can create the necessary GPU states earlier than they are needed by the rendering code.
Of course, if the playthrough used for generating the list of shadersdoesn't hit X codepath ("oh this particular spell was not cast while holding down shift"), a player hitting it will then get a 0.1s game pause when they invariably do.
Just a quick search,
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/the-ps5-stutter-issue-is-re...
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/stutters-on-xbox-series...
Can't do that for PC so you either have long first runs or stutter for JIT shader compiles.
I mean, are you actually talking from experience at all here?
It's really more that engines are an insane expense in money and time and buying one gets your full team in engine far sooner. That's why they're popular.
If it was so simple to bootstrap an engine no one would pay the percentage points to Unity and Epic.
The reality is the quality bar is insanely high.
Honestly the only reason I caved with the GPU purchase (which cost the equivalent of a PS pro) was the local AI - but in retrospect that was useless as well.
And I can count on those games still being playable on my six year old hardware because they are in fact developed for 6 year old hardware.
> PC performance for 6+ year hardware is guaranteed to suck
For new titles at maximum graphics level sure. For new titles at the kind of fidelity six year old consoles are putting out? Nah. You just drop your settings from "ULTIMATE MAXIMUM HYPER FOR NEWEST GPUS ONLY" to "the same low to medium at best settings the consoles are running" and off you go.
They were enough since PS4 era to deliver smooth, immersive graphics.
The Last of Us franchise, especially part 2 have been the most immersive experiences that I have had in gaming.
This game pretty much told me that the PlayStation is more than capable of delivering this kind of experiences.
Now, if some of those high budget so-called AAA games cannot deliver not even a fraction of that - I believe - is on them.
For example, Tiny Glade and Teardown have ray traced global illumination, which makes them look great with their own art style, rather than expensive hyper-realism.
But currently this is technically hard to pull off, and works only within certain constrained environments.
Devs are also constrained by the need to support multiple generations of GPUs. That's great from perspective of preventing e-waste and making games more accessible. But technically it means that assets/levels still have to be built with workarounds for rasterized lights and inaccurate shadows. Simply plugging in better lighting makes things look worse by exposing the workarounds, while also lacking polish for the new lighting system. This is why optional ray tracing effects are underwhelming.
Many PC users also own a switch. It is in fact one of the most common pairings. There is very little I want get on PC from PS/Xbox so very little point in owning one, I won't get any of the Nintendo titles so keeping one around makes significantly more sense if I want to cover my bases for exclusives.
I'm curious why graphics are stagnating and even getting worse in many cases.
BF1 is genuinely gorgeous, I can't lie. I think it's the photogrammetry. Do you think the lighting is better in BF1? I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that BF6's lighting is more dynamic.
To my eyes everything looked better in BF1.
Maybe it's trickery but it doesn't matter to me. BF6, new COD, and other games all look pretty bad. At least compared to what I would expect from games in 2025.
I don't see any real differences from similar games released 10 years ago.
Battlefield 6 vs Battlefield 1 - Direct Comparison! Attention to Detail & Graphics! PC 4K
The progress in 9 years do seems underwhelming.