I truly don't know how to explain this to anyone who wasn't around then.

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

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.

You know everyone was scanning your comment hard to see if you made any grammar mistakes.

I can tell your apart of the grammar police.

Bruh, english has thousands of words with multiple means and the same spelling. You understood the meaning.

I have never in my life seen someone refer to CRT TVs as crtvs and it's really fucking with my head lmao

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 think it depends... Definitely with 2d games, but for instance, the heads and fists in Goldeneye (N64) always looked blocky

Composite connections more than CRTs. An RGB SCART connection reveals so many sins.

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.

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...

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

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.

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

And then you look at it again now and realize the truth

We peaked when we had full hd. After all what could top full high definition... fuller high definition? That would just be silly.

GPUs are getting better, but the demand from the crypto and ML AI markets mean they can just jack up the price of every new card to higher than the last so the prices have stopped dropping with each new generation.

2. We didn't need to rely on fakery like DLSS and frame generation to get playable frame rates.

If truly believe what you wrote, then you should never look into the details of how a game world is rendered. It's fakery stacked upon fakery that somehow looks great. If anything, the current move of ray tracing with upscaling is less fakery than what was before.

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.

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.

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.

It’s so hard to go back. Possibly impossible, to remember what it was like to see those things from that point in history.

Oh, man, I'm about to relitigate an almost 30 year old nerd argument. Here we go.

I thought Quake looked like crap.

It's brown, and blocky and chunky and in software mode at 320x200 it's barely putting together a readable, coherent picture at all. Compared to what the peak of legacy tech was at the time, which was probably Duke Nukem 3D, I thought it was a genuine step backwards.

Now, it played well, it was fast and they got a ton of mileage out of the real 3D geometry to make crazy and cool level designs. But visually? Hot garbage.

You're right that the game changer was actually 3D acceleration, and Quake did come to life when it started hitting HD resolutions of 480p or (gasp) 800p, comparable to what we were already getting in Build engine games and 2D PC games elsewhere, but the underlying assets are still very, VERY ugly. To me it all came together in Quake 2, which was clearly built for the hardware. That's when I went "well, I need one of these cards now" and went to get a Nvidia Riva.

I have no complaints about Quake's sound design, though. I can hear it in my head right now. No music, just sound effects. I don't know what that shotgun sound is taken from, but it's definitely not a shotgun and it sounds absolutely amazing.

Oh, and on the original point, I'm not super sure of "graphics can't get any better" beign a thing that I thought, but I do remember when somebody showed me a PS2 screenshot of Silent Hill 2 gameplay in a magazine I mocked them for clearly having mistaken a prerendered cutscene for real time graphics. Good times.

And even then it was amazing. Honestly, some games of the era just never lost relevancy, and I play a few myself to this day.

(Picture - Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, 2003, the best lightsaber fighting game of all times)

Curious to hear more about your stance on view distance because you felt it needed to be mentioned twice.

I can't imagine anything about increased potential being inherently bad in an of itself, but it does present more opportunities for level designers to fall short by under-utilizing the spaces.

There is a level of charm that came from the compromise forced by technical limitations which pushed a lot of detail into sky boxes and other 2D workarounds to simulate a 3D space. Even so, it was always frustrating when you became aware that those details would only ever be unavailable to explore up close.

M2 EXCLUSIVE! Full specifications of 1997's hottest new 64 bit game machine

To think what might have been. The M2 would have tough competition against the PlayStation and N64 but it would have been interesting to see what a 3DO successor would have done to the market at the time, especially if 3DO had stuck with the hardware licensing model.

Permanently Deleted

1999 Aliens vs. Predaror had:

• actual 3D waves. The mesh for the water surface was actually transformed and reacted to your character moving through it creating waves—you could slosh the whole small pools around by running around in them. No shader trickery there.
• explosion fireballs that were 3D and freaking reacted to the environment. Throw a grenade on the floor, the fireball is hemispherical. Throw in into a ventilation shaft, you get a pillar of fire shooting out from the opening. It was absolutely mind-blowing!
• physics engine that allowed physics-enabled objects to be thrown around, bouncing from the walls etc. In 1999. Bizarrely, the objects couldn't rotate so they always retained the same orientation. It saw use in level design where you could destroy the supports of some stone blocks and let them fall down to block some large pipes.
• flame thrower flame reflected from the walls. You could shoot around a corner or set yourself on fire in confined spaces with it.
• no apparent limit for texture resolution. I remember people modding it with 1k and 2k textures (originals were like 64x64 or 128x128). In 2002.

And today we need ray tracing to mimic fraction of that power

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.

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.

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.

But we also knew that those pre-rendered cutscenes took at least a week to render and didn't think the games themselves would ever look that good.

Edit: after giving it more thought, that should instead be "dreamed of the day gameplay would look that good" because the overall trend was obvious.

What game is this? I didn't know that PS1 could do phong

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.

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.