Graphics whore thread - serious decline in videogame graphics since 2007

[Gerrard]

 

[Turjan]

I'd much rather see technically unimpressive, visually consistent graphics than yet another next-gen clusterfuck.

This. Very realistic graphics have the problem that they, often enough, steer into uncanny valley territory. In a stylized environment, you get away with mediocre animations, whereas in photorealistic environments you have to make sure animations are perfect to avoid breaking the immersion.

Regarding Wyrmlord's point, there are some games where the developers made a step back regarding graphics in a game series. Not sure whether they wanted to save money or avoid support tickets. One case I just noticed was from Flatout: UC to Flatout 3, where the later game turned the graphics down a notch.

 

[JarlFrank]

Pre-2007

Post-2007

What games are these?

 

[Astral Rag]

JarlFrank

paranautical activity
receiver
ace of spades

 

[DefJam101]

JarlFrank
Receiver is actually a great little game. idk about the other two

 

[Multidirectional]

Hurr trees, am I supposed to be impressed??

 

[pippin]

JarlFrank
Receiver is actually a great little game. idk about the other two

Paranautical Activity is tha game made by this deranged guy who threatened to kill Gaben, which lead to getting the game removed from Steam.
I played it months after this event and did not liked it at all, but, to be fair, it seems there was work done in the game, since it was early access.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Hurr trees, am I supposed to be impressed??

Have some 1996 trees:

 

[racofer]

1996:

And still better than all other games posted so far.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

1996

Post 2007:

And still better than all other games posted so far.

Fix'd

 

[Sceptic]

Is thie one of the counterstrikes? It looks surprisingly good.

And goddamn Unreal looks so purty even now.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Is thie one of the counterstrikes? It looks surprisingly good.

And goddamn Unreal looks so purty even now.

SWAT 4 you goof.

 

[funkadelik]

1996

Post 2007:

And still better than all other games posted so far.

Is thie one of the counterstrikes? It looks surprisingly good.

And goddamn Unreal looks so purty even now.

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

WoW started a sea change in the industry, you get a much broader potential sales demographic if you design your game around mid-end systems.

Now everyone is doing it, and ofc there's the console issue that's been mentioned upthread.

There's also the fact that single-core (i.e. gaming) CPU performance has been plateauing since, yep...around 2004 when the 2006-2007 games were being specced out during the design phase. The GPU depends heavily on CPU performance in games. It's not improving, and game designers still haven't been able to solve/innovate/transition from the single-theaded programming paradigm to multi-threaded (it's a very hard problem). Thus, multiple cores are useless for games, and most programs in general. Multiple cores basically let you run several separate programs at the same time, despite all the marketdroid talk and misinformation.

The Death of CPU Scaling in 2004

The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software

Notice that Moore's Law still stands (transistor doubling), but clock speed has leveled out due to voltage leaking, heat, and other issues at the nanometer scale.

Underrated post. I care to add this doesn't just apply to textures/lightning, but also physics, AI, and other gameplay scripts, calculations.

You can imagine game that would focus an entire core on AI calculations.

I was expecting the thread to discuss that, but it didn't and I'm disappointed. Consoles were also never a culprit we have PC exclusive games and they do not showcase anything significantly out of the ordinary so far.

 

[Lyric Suite]

we have PC exclusive games

Nice fallacy you have going there.

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

we have PC exclusive games

Nice fallacy you have going there.

The PC market is as strong as ever. Yet has shown nothing significantly different than consoles as of today as far as graphic technology is concerned. A franchise like the Total War has completely stagnated since 2004, and the issue with the CPU being the real bottleneck is common knowledge since at least shogun 2.

You are still one of those who missed the point of the CPU technology and programming, which is the biggest culprit and affects consoles as well in a more complicated manner.

 

[DefJam101]

For the longest time I pictured X:Rebirth, an entry in the series of games that would perhaps benefit more from multithreading than any other video game series ever, as the game to finally break out of the monothread ghetto. It released as a single-threaded supposed-to-be-multiplatform-but-we-fucked-that-up-too Xbox 360 crack baby that looked like shit, played like shit, ran like shit, and made thousands of autistic egosoft fans contemplate suicide. Maybe it was a sign

 

[made]

1995 pixel art:

2014 pixel art:

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm

 

[Astral Rag]

And still better than all other games posted so far.

All other games except Quake of course

 

[chotread]

Is thie one of the counterstrikes? It looks surprisingly good.

And goddamn Unreal looks so purty even now.

SWAT 4 you goof.

I really miss that game

 

[Gragt]

And still better than all other games posted so far.

All other games except Quake Doom of course

 

[pippin]

Hurr trees, am I supposed to be impressed??

Spoiler

[/QUOTE]

 

[Zeriel]

1995 pixel art:

2014 pixel art:

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Yeah, this shit pisses me off the most. I would really like to see more mid-budget companies try the 2D approach. Daedalic has shown it can still work. Titles like Memoria look better than anything in recent memory.

Spoiler

And yet somehow despite all the Kickstarters that ape after the heritage of games like that, they always opt for some awful, slapped-together 3D implementation that looks as if it came out of a Russian chop-shop circa 2001.

I would sacrifice actual babies for a Quest for Glory type game with art on the level of Memoria.

 

[DefJam101]

1996 graphics

post-1996 graphics

:draq:

 

[Zeriel]

:draq:

Not enough paragraphs.