Yes i'm aware dreamcast is the same generation. just pointing out the leap was so massive from ps1 to ps2, that nobody ever compared ps1/64 it was being compared to a console from the same generation. 

Very strange indeed. I was watching some 4k on Resident Evil 4, Ninja Gaiden, Mario galaxy 2 and MGS2 and it's kind of crazy how much Resolution plays a role in making graphics look better, they look better then most 360/ps3 games.

Yesterday. Around 2:32 am. Right after i took a nap.

Around the first time I played demos of 360 launch games. They just didn't look that much better than the better Gamecube games or God of War 1 from that year. Of course, Gears of War blew me away the next year. Felt much the same with the PS4/XB1 launch titles. It took till 2015 before I started feeling that the current gen was reaslly starting to look significantly better than late-7th gen games. So it took 1 year for gen 7 and 2 years for gen 8 to start impressing me, wheras Gen 6 was a huge jump over Gen 5 from the start. Soul Caliber on the Dreamcast, Rogue Leader on the Gamecube, no launch titles have ever been so much of a leap over what came before since then.

My fault. Didn't see the earlier posts. Carry on!

I haven't. Sure, there were a few games on the ps3 that still look great today like Uncharted 2. But that is just because developers like Naughty Dog are masters at working around hardware limitations and kept the level design simple. However, compare Red Dead Redemption to RDR2 and the difference is pretty obvious.

I still don't see diminishing returns. Even in early PS4/XBO games the improvement over PS3/360 was massive for me. With Ray Tracing on PS5/XB4, I believe this will be one of the biggest jumps we have ever witnessed.

I think a huge part of how people perceive improvements depends on the display they have. If you are still rocking a 32" 720 display, then stuff like 4K and HDR, and fine details are not going to translate. On the other hand if you have been playing on 120" projector from 480 - 4K, then the differences along the way will be massive. Then if you talk VR displays, the gains will be even more noticable for years to come. 8K might not make much of a difference if you are playing on a 24" monitor, but if you are playing on a VR headset that fills your entire vision, then the difference between 1080p, 4K, 8K, 16K, and 32K will all be massive. Also, the ability for your screen to be able to have true black, and 1,000's of nits, and a game programmed to take advantage of that will also make a massive leap.

We will reach a point where we do see diminishing returns, but it is still years away. I think it won't be until we have 120Hz, 16K, 200" CLEDIS Displays, with Perfect Black, and 10,000nits of brightness that we will truly reach the point where massive gains can not be achieved anymore. In the VR space, I think either 32K or even 64K once we hit the point of deminishing returns. There are many consoles to come between then and now, and each will see significant gains, as long as you have the proper display to see the differences.

The gap from Uncharted 1 to Uncharted 3 is larger than any equivalent gap on PS4. 

By this point in PS3's lifespan even non-crossgen launch titles like Resistance 1 looked almost a generation behind; nothing on PS4 now makes Killzone Shadowfall look a generation out of date, not even remotely.

It's not that PS4 hasn't gotten better graphically over time, it has, and its newer games do look noticeably better than Shadowfall, but if PS3's progress within its life was a 10 PS4 would be like a 3 or 4.

Probably due to the fact that information about physically based rendering propagated more easily thus we were able to get the most from this generation early on because developers were more prepared for this technical direction. IMO we still got some noticeable improvements later on in this generation such as volumetric lighting and high quality static global illumination ... 

With next generation since some developers are already well ahead of the game by experimenting with ray tracing, I don't imagine many will mind of few and far improvements in between later on with a massive boost to visual quality regardless ... 

I'm talking about the Uncanny Valley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley


The more detailed you make a video game person, the creepier they look.  This doesn't really apply to environments.  More detail on environments basically always looks good.  For living creatures, especially people, detail looks worse and it takes a lot more effort to take away the creepiness.