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.

Photorealism is no big deal anyway, it's going to gradually happen and then become so normalized that people don't care.

Is this photoreal? No, but it's close enough that you get into a territory of "who really cares that much" being a small audience.

People don't really care about photo realistic unless your game look very intresting, fun and interactive. Just look at hell blade 2 sales.

In motion, it had the uncanny valley effect. It looks good but they have a white background to trick you. Sorry to bring it up again but the look how real our talking head is. Reminds me of Half-life Tech demo. Dreamcast. PS2. On Shenmue's release, they did the Shenmue passport with talking heads but still backgrounds as just about every ounce of rendering power was put into the talking head. Of course in game models didn't look as good.

Granted Matrix demo has more to it in motion but once we got to the city part of the demo it looked nice but not as nice as CG Keanu. Tech demo's are demo's for a reason. Only brought it up as it's not a new idea.

The Matrix demo was the first "game" (if you can call it that) on current gen which really looked like a major step forward from PS4/XBO's best to me.

Since then, Avatar Frontiers of Pandora and Hellblade II impressed me the most. Looking forward to seeing how Gears of War E-Day turns out as the series has a long history of pushing Xbox hardware hard, as well as what Naughty Dog can squeeze out of PS5 whenever their next game arrives.

This gen's insistence on 60fps feels like it's limiting its visual potential a lot in my opinion; the core rendering technology is limited to what mid range 2020 hardware can do in 16.7ms of frametime which is pretty restrictive. 

All these years later Shenmue still looks impressive to me. Unbelievably good looking for a game from 1999, to the point where it can hold its own alongside even games on later and stronger hardware of that generation.

We already had actual photo real graphics in the 90's when CD-Rom games came out.... Sure it clashed with the backgrounds, but for example the remake of Riven, the CGI characters look way worse than the live action did in the original.

And most recently the 7th Guest VR remake featured volumetric live action video, looked very realistic, albeit low resolution. It's all the subtle movements that make it look human, CGI still can't fully capture that.

The uncanny valley is going to be a problem though. People will care when they get that icky feeling watching CGI characters look 'wrong' in unexpected ways.

Stop trying to derail another thread. I am not going to have this endless debate again, clearly you won't listen to those with more experience and qualifications in a field.

So end of discussion.

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.

Internet polls are not known for accuracy...  not sure why you are putting so much stock in some random poll.

The problem is your position makes zero sense.  The ps5 has 2x the ram, over 2x the memory bandwidth and a more modern chipset....  and you think ps5 games don't look better?  No offense but that is a bit Soundwave like.

I don't see how it makes  zero sense. You take RDR 2 do 4K/60FPS and it's easily still one of the best looking game and using the ps5 power imo.  let's compare the most advanced game graphically in pics. Sure hell balde 2 is more advanced with the latest tech but its not like its blowing aaway those rdr 2 in pics and it really comes down to what art style which you perfer with RDR having massive scope, and way more variety it easily wins. Still it has the most realistic and complex world in gaming today as well, this also why it wins many polls it won both on neogaf and resetera and its detroyed last of us 2 in polls.

I'm not arguing with you.  Rachet, Demon and other next gen titles obviously destroy it.  A 1060 runs RDR2...  that is an old ass gpu.  Full stop.