Can graphics keep evolving? How? For how long?

[curl-6]

Pemalite said:

curl-6 said:

Yeah I'm kinda the same; as cool as it is to see amazing stuff like Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, Hellblade II, Hogwarts Legacy, Alan Wake 2, etc on PS5/Xbox Series, at the same time I have no trouble going from that back to my Switch or even older consoles like my Wii, 360, PS3, OG Xbox, PS1, etc.

Maybe it's cos I grew up in early days of 3D graphics, but even plenty of 6th and 7th gen games still look good to me. Since getting my PS5 I replayed the Mass Effect trilogy on 360, and while they have clearly aged, the graphics never hindered my enjoyment.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora has probably one of the most -impressive- environments graphically and Hellblade 2 has one of the most impressive character rendering pipelines going with some very very impressive subsurface scattering going on, giving the skin a very realistic look.

And Hogwarts Legacy has some stupidly impressive lighting considering whats going on in the world.

Are they the pinnicle of the current generation of consoles? No. But it's definitely exciting to see where things go over the next 4~ years as developers start to push the current generation hardware, harder.

The bonus is we are finally dropping the shackles of last generation technology, albeit slowly.

Yeah Avatar's jungle rendering with all the dense interactive vegetation looks terrific, it reminds me of playing Crysis and Uncharted back in the 7th gen, and being wowed by how how organic and detailed they were. (Okay maybe it's not quite as stunning as Crysis was, but it did give me similar vibes to the first time I saw Drake's Fortune in action back in the day)

And yeah the humans in Hellblade II are easily the best I've seen in any game. Really goes to show what current gen consoles can do when they're not committing half their horsepower just to get to 60fps.