Games that were graphically well ahead of their time

[hinch]

Pemalite said:

hinch said:

It was impressive at the time but its aged badly. I thought they way overused/overcooked spectacular maps and the low res textures and normal maps didn't help. Character models were quite low poly too.

In the same year (2004) Half Life 2 released and tbh it still looks quite serviceable today.

The modelling does have a plastic-like presentation to it, but having so many stencil shadows back on a Geforce FX/Radeon 9700 was pretty impressive back in the day... And I would argue that those stencil shadows have held up pretty well considering all the other effects games used back then like... Bloom. Ugh.

Yeah the bloom era lol. Feels like we're heading that way with raytracing. Where almost every game which has RT reflections HAS to have super reflective puddles in them to show off the tech. Once devs figure it out and use it subtly and more realistically, its going to enhance game experience quite a bit for visuals for future games.

Last edited by hinch - on 08 October 2020