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Soundwave on 08 September 2023
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Norion said:
Soundwave said:

IMO after you get passed PS4 tier graphics, the differences in visuals become much more subtle because either you invest that horse power in subtle effects like light bounces/reflections or ... you spend a Hollywood movie style budget for higher end models/visuals ... the second option is not possible for most studios, even huge studios can't be making $200 million dollar video games. Graphics don't magically come for free. The other thing is lighting doesn't scale linearally like people think. Just because you have 5x more powerful hardware doesn't mean your lighting is going to look 5x better. It means your GPU can be bogged down be calculating light bounces that basically force it to max out but the end result of what it looks like on screen actually isn't that big of a difference.

This isn't fully true. Heavily improved lighting from path tracing is gonna make a big difference to visuals when that becomes standard. Diminishing returns are setting in but there's still a long way to go from PS4 tier graphics.

To be honest not really. You can cheat a lot with baked lighting to make it look similar. 

If you want "way bettererer graphics" than PS4 era, the budget restrictions become restrictive. Movies cost $200 million for maybe like 45 minutes worth of effects shots/CGI ... a video game needs to be like 30 hours long and have 5x times as many environments in many cases, no artist is just magically going to work on this stuff for free. You have to pay people to do that and even as a huge studio, what happens if you spend $150 million on a game (before marketing) and it doesn't do as well as you hoped? Now bravo, your entire studio is bankrupt. 

You have to massively expand your staff to get games to look far better than the PS4 because really a PS4 can already create fairly realistic looking visuals. Like what is the top shit next-gen game right now? Starfield? Starfield doesn't look that much better than God of War Ragnarok which runs fine on the PS4. 

Also no console can really ever do full blown ray tracing. For movie effects the light bounces in a scene take hours to render a single frame and a few seconds of footage can take days of massive computers to render at top quality. 

It's fools gold IMO. You're better off just going with baked lighting and letting a talented visual artist tweak the look area by area IMO because the performance cost is absurd. 

Even a PS2 game could cripple a PS5 if you really crank the light bounces to be accurate, to me it's not worth it. Random kid in Nebraska playing your game isn't really going to appreciate or give a crap what those light rays are doing.