The Next Generation Of Graphics & Presentation: A Quick Look

[curl-6]

Pemalite said:

curl-6 said:

As someone who found the graphical leap from PS3/360 to PS4/X1 quite underwhelming, and who hasn't really been blown away by a game's graphics since Uncharted 2 in 2009, I feel like I'm still waiting for that "next gen" feeling that games like Gears of War 1, Rogue Squadron 2, and Mario 64 gave me back in their day. 

I think allot of people felt the jump to be underwhelming... When in-fact it was actually a pretty massive jump.

The old generation had allot of lighting and shadowing baked/pre-calculated and in extreme cases, part of the texture work.
Then the new generation came a long and did it all in real time, dynamically, it's more expensive.

Shame that the Scorpio and Neo is actually launching, would have been interesting to see if developers reverted to pre-calculated/baked stuff to save processing time and bolster imagry elsewhere.

I know that on paper the specs divide is considerable, I was referring more to how that manifests in the actual visual impression that I see on screen. For instance, a game can have 10 times as many polygons, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will look 10 times as good to an observer.

I feel like the rule of diminishing returns combined with their mid-range-in-2013 hardware is preventing PS4 and Xbox One from providing the kind of gargantuan visual leap over PS3/360 that I have come to expect from the generational transitions I've lived through in the past. This is the first generation where I haven't had that "holy crap, how is this even a video game" moment that I got from Gears 1 in 2006, or Rogue Squadron 2 in 2001.