My entire life when I heard someon say that it would get under my skin. The only ceiling has always been to make it so realistic, we can’t tell the difference.
Graphics peaked with the original Lara Croft and her triangular bosom. It’s been a steady decline since then trying to make things look round. Just accept the triangles.
that’s for sureIt’s the eco friendly way to go
Anymore = ever again
Any more = any further
They’re two different things.
They don’t make games that look like that anymore, even though we thought the graphics couldn’t get any more realistic back then.
You know everyone was scanning your comment hard to see if you made any grammar mistakes.
@ThirdWorldOrder @otp Right. Lol
Bruh, english has thousands of words with multiple means and the same spelling. You understood the meaning.
“Oh no, they’re trying to teach me about grammar! I must resist knowledge!”
Brother, you’re trying to teach grammar to non native English speaker when some native English speakers don’t know it, he learnt how to write and read and that’s enough since it’s not his first language
On Lemmy and Reddit, the grammar police are in full force, well-equipped, and numerous. Resistance against them is futile.
They’re teaching grammar to anyone that’ll read their comment lol calm down
I can tell your apart of the grammar police.
ThisThese caused protests
In crt they look great though
They looked better than in HD, but no one in their right mind thought that was peak performance. It was just better than anything we’d seen so far.
Child imagination and crt picture do wonders, while i agree with you that it wasn’t peak performance, my childhood memories show me that this picture was way better than current AAA titles
Actually, the early 3D didn’t look ‘great’ even on CRT. Particularly PS1 had affine texture mapping and a very “wobbly” low precision geometry operations, in addition to the obvious limitations of polygon count and texture resolution. It was “neat” and “novel” to see that be attempted, but it felt in some ways kind of like a step back from where 2D games had gotten by that point. Both visually and control wise (very awkward control/camera schemes were attempted back then).
Much of the “but it looks great on CRT” applies to pretty deliberately crafted pixel art given knowledge of how NTSC or PAL feeding into a CRT behaved. The artistic design knew precisely how it was going to be presented and used that for interesting tricks in how things got blurred (e.g. faux translucency by putting stripy sprites on top of each other and letting the blur fake the translucency). In the 3D land, the textures and models were going to be distorted before presentation so they couldn’t do a lot of “leaning into the CRT” in their design. Consolation being that the hardware could now actually pull off the efects they were formerly relying on the CRT blur to pull off.
I’ll second that… I always found PS1 3D games to be pure eye-cancer even when played on a CRT TV back in the day. N64 was good-but-not-great by comparison.
The first time I thought I was seeing real life on the screen was NFS3 on PC, which… well, looking back, I was clearly wrong, but it’s decent-looking at least. The next time was when I briefly mistook my cousins playing NFL2K on Dreamcast for a Christmas day football game back in '99, and I feel like that generation of console (Dreamcast/PS2/Gamecube/OG XBox) is about where 3D games are, graphically at least, still palatable.
Red faction series destruction mechanics be like, nobody in AAA scene even tried to mimic it
Someone already mentioned those graphics were optimized for old CRT TV’s, but also consider the fact that it was simply the best wed seen, and it blew our minds.
Just imagine what top notch realism will be 20 years from now, assuming it’s not all DLC for the same old stuff, obviously.
We hit diminishing returns a while ago. It will be much harder to find improvements, both in terms of techniques and computation.
Consider that there is ten years between Atari Pitfall and Wolfenstein 3D, ten years between that and Metroid Prime, and ten years between that and Mass Effect 3, and then about ten years between that and now. There’s definitely improvement between all those, but once past Metroid Prime, it becomes far less obvious.
We’ve hit the point where artistic style is more important than taking advantage of every clock cycle of the GPU.
It’s so hard to go back. Possibly impossible, to remember what it was like to see those things from that point in history.
It’s still happening, there’s just so much of it now we’re more aware of what the improvements actually are on a technical level, that we’ve come to expect it even before release of the lastest thing. And it’s mostly disappointing now because we’re chasing that same high.
The changes are more incremental now too. It’s slightly better textures here, better lighting there, maybe a studio puts extra effort into motion nature and animations. But it’s not leaps and bounds better every generation anymore like it used to be.
There was that video going around a couple days ago comparing Arkham Knight to Suicide Squad and that’s a great example of graphics not getting noticeably better if a studio doesn’t really try for it.
But I’ll bet games that start coming out with the latest Unreal Engine, like Senua’s Saga, are going to give some of that feeling of amazement again.
Honestly, a good CRT shader is a real game changer for emulation. Many emulators have the ability to add a mesh grid over the top of the image, but this is just about the worst way to try to emulate a CRT; It doesn’t actually emulate CRT pixels, and the black grid laid on top of everything simply reduces the overall image brightness.
For an example of a good CRT shader, consider looking into CRT Royale. The benefit to a shader is that it’s actually running each frame through a calculation before it reaches your screen. So it is actually able to emulate a CRT properly. Shaders can actually emulate the individual red/green/blue pixels of CRTs, emulate the bloom around white text, emulate the smearing that occurs with large color differences, etc… It really does make old games much more pleasant to look at.
This is even earlier, the 80s, but I remember getting a not especially good game called The Halley Project for my Apple II, but I would load the game over and over again because the intro had a song with real vocals and guitar, something basically unheard of on an Apple II, or virtually any other computer at the time.
So I loaded it. Over and over.
And this is no different.
Graphics 20 years from now will be incrementally better, but not mind-blowingly so. We’re rapidly approaching games that are 20 years old still looking pretty decent today.
Did games get any better though when the graphics got better? I remember being so hyped seeing PS3 game footage pre-2006, then after a few years it was like “oh shit, we have to go back!”
PS2 graphics were pretty on point. Upscale to a modern resolution, many of them still look decent now.
Xbox 360 era we got a lot of normal maps added (so models looked a lot more complex than they were).
PS4 added physically based rendering (ability to make parts of models look shiny without needing to separate them).
And the new shit is ray tracing, which PS5 isn’t really powerful enough to do, but honestly neither are most affordable PCs. We get nicer lighting at least, but we’ll still be on the old render paths for a while yet.
You still get improvements over time, but nothing is really going to compare to PS1 to PS2.
Games have gotten prettier, no argument, but I still feel like we’re playing the same games we were playing 20 years ago just with slight QOL improvements.
Yeah, I feel like everything we have now could have been done on the PS3 and Xbox 360. At least gameplay wise. Before that they were quite limited in terms of RAM. The big open world games probably couldn’t have been done prior to that gen. Stuff like Assassin’s Creed 2 or Far Cry 3 wouldn’t have been possible at all on PS2, I feel.
The closest they had was GTA SA which had huge nearly empty areas to hide the loading of the main city areas.
I’m just going to butt in and say that Far Cry 3 is the most ridiculously perfectly optimised game I’ve ever played. I managed to get it running on internal graphics of an old laptop in 800x600 resolution with potato settings and it was genuinely still enjoyable. I think I played through it halfway like that before I got my pc back.
I saw some arguments over the last few years. It seems that the gaming industry focused so hard on good graphics that they forgot how to make the rest of the games. Honestly some faithful re-releases with updated graphics of ancient 8 and 16 bit games, would probably sell fairly well.
Sure if you consider the industry to only be AAA size games
AAA titles have always tried to be on the cutting edge of new graphics. Indies obviously are an exception to the “new games bad” rule.
Right but indie, A, and AA are just as much part of the industry as AAA
In your opinion, what is an example of an A or AA title?
Some did and some didn’t. I’m pretty salty as the FF7 remake because, to me, it feels like it’s missing the heart of the original game. And the chocobo shit which I loved. I just wish they’d stop cheapening things when they remade them ffs. They just make them look nice and it feels like they put no other effort into it. Which is idiotic because they already have the whole game mapped out. Just remake it how it fucking was goddammit >:(
Meanwhile, BG3, the new Spiderman games, and the new Zelda games were (to me) fantastic. The perfect mixes of gorgeous graphics and actually solid gameplay that felt like they had some love and soul put into them.
So it’s a mixed bag and at the end of the day pretty graphics can’t trick people into liking games that should have been better. We complain about Skyrim being ported all over the damn place but at least they don’t drop half the original content every time. That’s such a sad low bar but there it is.
I used to have a subscription to Game Informer magazine. I very specifically remember the multi page preview for the upcoming game, Oblivion. The pictures they had in there, I swear to God, were actually pictures of trees and grass. The fidelity was unparalleled and it was the peak of what games could do. Idk why that article sticks out so much, but it felt like the top of the mountain.
And then you look at it again now and realize the truth
I can relate, but by the time Oblivion came out I was already starting to get jaded about graphical fidelity. What I can tell you is that I ogled over a similar preview for Morrowind, and actually built my first PC specifically targeting the recommended specs to run it in all its glorious glory!
Tale as old as time I suppose
Christmas of probably 98 or 99, my older brother gave my younger brother and I his PlayStation. He had Final Fantasy VII, and that was probably when I popped my graphics cherry. I was astounded when I went back to play it years later.
Hah I get that but it was for half life 1 and I thought the graphics were amazing. Rainbow 6 rogue spear was my first PC game and I thought that was the pinacle of graphics… fuck I’m old.
Dayum, rogue spear, you made my heart aching from nostalgia
If you want a real nostalgia kick go here:
https://youtu.be/ZiSTywA6fHY?si=6mGUbtMeqV4OG_vC
I remember the game disc doubled as a sound track of you put it in a CD player.
For me it was reading in Playstation Magazine that there were melting ice cubes in the then upcoming Metal Gear Solid 2. I’m not even sure PS2 had been released yet at the time, so I was just awe struck thinking wow it’s getting so powerful and detailed that even ice cubes in a sink are accounted for.
I think even at the time we could all tell that Oblivion’s faces had fallen down the mountain on the way up a couple of times.
Man for me it was playing Halo CE on the original Xbox, you could see the individual blades of glass on the ground texture! I was absolutely blown away haha
I had Quake running with software 3D, got a 3DFX board and patched Quake to run with hardware 3D and the results just blew my mind…
I remember upgrading to a voodoo 3dfx card around the time transparent water was possible in Quake. The graphics blew me away and the ability to see players in the water gave a ridiculous advantage.
I remember when the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was being claimed by people as an animated movie that was so photorealistic, you wouldn’t even be able to tell you were looking at animated characters.
TBF it hasn’t gotten much better than that in the 22 years since. Beowolf was cool, though.
Oh my god! I don’t know anyone else besides me who liked Beowulf!
I saw it in theatres back when those new age 3D glasses came out, it looked really cool.
Yep! Me too! Grendel and his mother were both so cool.
For me it was the water in farcry 1
I never thought they looked anything like realistic back then, but I did think that they looked beautiful.
Tbf these games were made with crtvs in mind and crtvs blurred the edges making things look smoother. They only look so blocky nowadays because newer tvs have better resolution so you can clearly see all the blocky edges.
Emulators have filters for that, though.
Btw, is there something similiar for wine? Not vkbasalt, because dxvk can create issues with too big address space in older games.
I have never in my life seen someone refer to CRT TVs as crtvs and it’s really fucking with my head lmao
Cathode Ray TubieVision
Good name for an android porn site!
It’s a habit I picked up from my dad lol
He always called them crtvs because he thought the “tube” part of cathode ray tube was unnecessary when using the acronym. You know it’s a tube because what else would a cathode ray be in?
I liked it better when I thought it meant Cathode Ray TubaVision
I like it. Gonna use the one other time this possibly comes up in my lifetime.
I think it depends… Definitely with 2d games, but for instance, the heads and fists in Goldeneye (N64) always looked blocky
The moment GMan’s mouth fucking moved in Half Life when he talked. 🤯
Going back even farther I remember my mind being blown when the rain in Ninja Gaiden on nes changed directions
The weather effects and condensation on Samus’s visor in Metroid Prime had this same feeling. It’s been quite a while since such minor graphical details in a game held me in such awe.
I still remember the first time a character’s feet lined up when they walked up stairs. Couldn’t believe it lol. I wish I could remember what game it was but it was SO long ago. I do remember later being similarly impressed by MGS2 stairs
That was Killer Instinct for me.
