Was Nintendo right to opt out of the graphics arms race?

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Norion said:

Chrkeller said:

Fair points.  I suppose cross gen might hold back some developments  but it seems somewhat negligible at this point.  Plenty of games have optional RT, so the ps5 could push RT on cross gen ports.  Heck isn't spiderman one of those examples?

And all hardware eventually will be obsolete, that is a good point, the window is just much larger.  

RT is something that will gonna become a proper standard next decade, the current consoles are bad at it so this generation is a transitional period for that technology. In the next 5-10 years the huge wild card with this is AI since how quickly world models advance will matter massively. It's something that could potentially make the PS6 become outdated fast depending on how things go.

I have my doubts. Real deal traditional ray tracing with real accurate light bounces as in what's done in Hollywood movies for CGI still requires hours to render even single frames with entire warehouses of top end workstations. 

More likely you'll just get more watered down ray tracing for a while and then eventually AI will just replace the entire visual pipeline completely and throw polygons, textures, lighting algos out the window entirely and just base things on photographic and video reference.