Oh i agree it's not like before anymore. We are going  5 years into 9th gen and people regulary call last gen games still the best looking games, it's really more about art stye/skill of the developer now more then anything.

Nanite/virtualized geometry and lumen/realtime GI are the biggest perceptible jump forward in graphics for me since the transition to physically based rendering at the dawn of the 8th gen; the problem is that they seem to decimate performance on consoles, at least when they try to run them at 60fps, resulting in very low resolutions.

Maybe they'll properly come into their own on 10th gen consoles, kinda like how PBR technically existed on a few 7th gen titles but didn't reach its full potential until PS4/XBO.

I won't lie after watching more hell blade 2 footage today that game really stands out graphically it's just so limited in scope and gameplay with boring looking locations. It's hard to compare to other games it like comparing botw to luigi mansion we know why one looks much better so it doesnt make it so impressive. Now if PS6 can make those graphics 1440p with dlss or something similar in a open world city then yea we would finally get a something similar to a ps3 to ps4 jump.

Forbidden West on PC is absolutely stunning.  

Yea thats a really great looking game, but honestly best looking ps4 games look amazing on a beast pc imo.

While we're talking about nice graphics in general, I can't seem to get enough of ambient modded Cyberpunk videos:

Walking around and taking in the sights is just such a mood in that game...

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.

All hail the tedious cowboy game!

DMC5 tributes Cowboy game!

Nonstory context in spoiler

The most impressed I have been with graphics in the last decade is still this:

Still waiting for an actual game to look this good.