| Renamed said: I've read the whole thread and I'm convinced now that all R&D should just stop and everything should use the RDR2's RAGE engine because graphics will never get better. Movies production should also move to RAGE. Simulation Theory has even been disproven by RDR2. I even just tossed out my sliced bread. |
My point wasn't that graphics weren't getting better, but that they have really slowed down, and backed it with evidence of polls of what the biggest gaming forums think. graphics have gotten so good that it really comes down to art style, and the talent of the devs at the moment unless we are talking about path tracing with cyberpunk 2077 nothing is making red dead 2 or last of us 2 look dated at 4k.
Once pbr materials, high quality baked lighting and TAA came into force slowly over last gen, the difference between the best looking games has largely been down to budget and team technical proficiency. More modern lighting algorithms and RT can get you fewer artefacts in motion but don't tend to actually look more spectacular - see like Alan Wake 2 on PC with path tracing on versus all RT off, 90% of the time it looks very similar and it's more that the PT has accurate reflections and more physically accurate lighting (but not necessarily "better looking" in most cases).
A single frame of Red Dead 2 and TLOU2 don't look noticeably better than many other games but it's the constency in motion, the animation work and the attention to world detail that really push them into the top tier. And all of that is still giving them legs up over most games released today. Quite a few games can be said to have better graphics but the fact they're still so highly competitive speaks to how much of the low hanging fruit in rendering has already been picked.
