Kids in the 90's were more like, 3D looks like shit, 2D looks way better. I was one of them...

1998 2D vs 3D




Going 3D killed rollercoaster tycoon, killed monkey island for me as late as 2009. Real Myst still doesn't come close to Riven. Of course all those could easily outdo their 2D versions by now, yet the money isn't there.

Anyway I'm going off topic :) Although maybe there are some parallels in the transition from 2D to 3D and screens to VR. There will be a step back in graphics fidelity. You will have to learn how to move around again comfortably and game developers have to think up new ways how to approach game play and controls. And just as with early 3D, there are people that think VR is the next big thing and people that dismiss it as inferior.

Btw I loved both those games up there, yet Rollercoaster tycoon 3, I'll never forgive that! Ugly buggy broken mess on release.

This is good point, graphics really didn't get much better in last 8 years.

I believe we will, but i think dat we're worrying too much about the graphics instead of gameplay, some of the most played games/franchise right now don't even have the best graphics like LOL, COD, CS:GO and Clash of Titan for example.

I don't agree with most of the posts, graphics can be improves until we can't see the difference anymore. What i want to say is that the eye definition is limited, and when the pixels will be smaller than what the eye can discern, the improvement of graphics will be totally useless. It's the same thing with fps, a game with more than 60fps is useless too, when the eye have difficulty to discern more than 30 fps (that's why movies don't exceed that limit). Certainly, graphics didn't reach the maximum yet, but the evolution will be more and more hard to see till we won't be able to notice any visible improvement. And then, it will be the time to concentrate on gameplay innovations.

It's a screenshot with high-end hardware of 3 year old high-end-hardware (two GTX680 cards SLI), maxed out settings and probably graphic enhancing mods that weren't available 8 years ago.

Hershel_layton is spoton, it have always been like this tho, back then companies racing to who have colors, bigger bits and even better visual. It's just dat back then, we didnt have access to the internet, so amount of infomation we could get was very limited, which is the main factor dat consumers were being very easy on what they purchased. But now, everything is informed on the Net, we would know which one is more powerful or which one is cheaper or which one have more exclusives or even a subjective's matter like which one is better, based on popular opinions.

It will obviously improve. The problem is just that both companies and people want big improvements before they are actually viable, so we have a mess of horrible power consumption, drivers that lag behind HW, very HW specific improvements that require special code to be fully exploited making games crap on other HW if too many of the available resources are spent to optimise them just on some HW, etc. But when things settle, you definitely see the improvements, it's just that you'll see it in a consistent way, not just on heavily optimised games, when both HW and SW have aged a little.

In 2008 on 8800GT game didn't looked much worse than this, only had much worse FPS. So My point stands.

this is not modded its how crysis was supposed to look like before crytek downgraded the visuals in order for people to max out the game

and yes you could play this game this way with 3x 8800GTX Ultras at the time, x2 if its only 720p 30fps

Seems like the resolution of Half Life OF screenshots downgraded itself. Was much higher as is made the thread, really strange. I changed to another picture.