These games from 2014-2016 still look fantastic, yet most of them run at hundreds of fps at native 4K on a modern card. Graphics really hit a sweetspot in terms of cost/visuals with the introduction of physically based rendering. New games obviously look somewhat better but also run up to 10x worse.
46 Comments
**Games in order:**
* Alien: Isolation (2014)
* Batman: Arkham Knight (2015)
* Battlefield 1 (2016)
* Doom (2016)
* Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst (2016)
* Need For Speed (2015)
* Rise Of The Tomb Raider (2015)
* Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (2016)
My mind is blown everytime I play Arkham Knight and remember that game came out 10 years ago
Battlefield 1 is still incredible. I miss old DICE.
Mirriors edge blew my mind, playing it for the first time back in the day
We definitely hit a fidelity wall during the PS4 generation, everything’s looked as real as can be since like, RDR2 released and that was 2018
I’ve been replaying Titanfall 2 and it’s hard to think that it’s 9 years old.
Just before the Advent of Ray Tracing (it existed before, but they started to push it more then)
Rasterization is a way more efficient use of GPU power.
Also PhysX was incredibly popular back then and really peaked, Nvidia abandoned it partly because with a good 9th/10th gen card and PhysX you didn’t really need to upgrade without new rending tech pushed out.
Today with ray tracing, while it arguably looks better, it is a huge multiplier to the GPU workload.
“up to 10x worse”
Source: my ass
Its me. I couldn’t give less of a shit about the PS4 -> PS5 jump.
Like obviously there’s improvements but the new gen does not make going back to previous games jarring like it happened up until this generation change.
I think the reason the newer games only look slightly better but do not run nearly as well is due to the realistic lightning, reflection, and shadow effects in games now. This takes a much more powerful machine to run them but does not improve the graphical experience in line with how much better your machine has to be.
Yeah, I’m getting tired of the performance issues. Visual fidelity is important, but not at the cost of performance.
I didn’t get a PC until 2019 so most of my gaming was done on an Xbox 360. Going to replay some of these games even ones made in the late 2000s is mind blowing because it feels like a remaster. Assasins creed 4 still looks amazing to this day
I find it strange that people demand arbitrary performance metrics from consoles or GPUs. “It’s gotta run 4k at 60fps!”. Okay, but for what game? There’s a big difference between Cyberpunk and Hollow Knight.
Now go look at the console versions of these games.
A game with great art direction will stand the test of time far longer.
common factor being that these games use baked lighting and no time of day systems, we should go back
Although modern games that push graphics undeniably have better graphical fidelity I’d honestly have been happy if around this time we just collectively all agreed that pushing graphics didn’t matter anymore.
For games that are a decade old they still look great(except that’s Doom Eternal up there, but 2016 still looks great anyway).
I think the doom screenshot is from eternal in 2020. The cacademon and level design both look like it. Either way I actually think 2016 looks better than eternal.
But did they run at native 4K back then?
I still can’t believe how good the original Mirror’s Edge looks not just Catalyst, it won’t ever age.
Not sure about all the games, but some of this is just confirmation bias and in Arkham Knight’s case, pure fiction. Arkham Knight came out broken as hell and was barely playable. They even removed it from Steam it was so broken. It took a lot of time before it was playable and a decade later I would hope hardware could finally run it well.
In my uninformed gamer opinion, I think this phenomenon occurs because this was the peak of rasterization and many of these games were built on mature engines with teams that have worked on them for closer to a decade.
Nowadays days we have path tracing in its infancy and higher resolution displays that make every single flaw pop out like a sore thumb. Once cards have more raytracing cores and it becomes the main lighting system for most triple A games, I think it will be mature enough to look many times better than anything we’ve seen before.
All in all though, we are definitely reaching a point of diminishing returns where artstyle is much more important than graphical fidelity/realism
There’s definitely a few sweet spots in term of graphics in the history of gaming.
2d pixels hit peak during the SNES era (with a few notable ones later, but there was diminishing return). Early 3d graphics sucked and didn’t age well.
Then 3d graphics peaked with the PS4 era for sure, with notable games in the PS2 days (but as is they don’t look that great since a lot of them targeted CRTs still, so without a remaster or upscaling it’s dicey. See: FF12)
The current gen, PS5 and PC equivalent are very iffy. We’re hitting a lot of diminishing return and people trying to shoe horn ray tracing to make it easier on the devs. Videocards are being murdered and frame rate sucks.
You look at games like Khazan or Armored Core 6 and they’re beautiful and run very well. Expedition 33 is “AA” and look great, but its usage of Unreal Engine 5 still makes it crazy performance intensive, but something like that absolutely could be done more efficiently with a “previous gen” focus.
It’s the cost cutting. Studios offload development time and resources onto customers in form of system requirements and gaslight them into thinking it’s warranted.
Why spend time carefully setting up visibility culling, lods, compressing assets and baking light when it is now the norm to just tell people to get a render farm and use AI to interpolate frames to get a serviceable framerate.
I feel like optimization was a key milestone in most dev processes. Nowadays, it seems like a secondary thought.
The pc version of Arkham Knight was so poorly optimized that they had to pull it from sale to fix it.
Art direction is extremely important.
The PS3/PS4 gap was much more impactful than the PS4/PS5 one
Dare i say, in my opinion, there has been close to 0 evolution since the PS5 launched
Totally with you – not only that, but the few talented people left in the industry now make like 5 games in their careers with how long everything takes. Take it back to Mass Effect levels of graphics and give me a game by these legends every 2-3 years
I feel like for the past 8 years or so we’ve been focused making games that already look 90% realistic look 99% realistic and that last 9% takes more graphics power than the last 40%.
“New games obviously look somewhat better” do they? Some do but a lot don’t, i would trade vasoline screen for a crisp image anyday
I’ll never understand it. If you want it to look real, go outside. I’ve played games for 35 years of my life. I prefer playing older games. I don’t need the game to be graphically advanced. It should be able to draw you in, not look amazing. I’m totally ok being back to the future 2, that games for babies. Because let’s be real. They make games these days to cater to the true babies, that its never good enough for…
Someone help me out, I don’t recognize any of the games except the Batman one.
Crisis
This is the exact sweet spot for the Steamdeck.
Ray tracing is great in some games, and I really notice it’s absence now after putting a lot of time into ray traced games. But it’s a small visual increase for a large performance drop that arguably isn’t worth it. But it’s necessary for graphics to continue to improve. Gone are the days of massive graphical fidelity leaps over previous generations. Now days it’s small steps in fidelity but big performance hits to get them
Rise of the Tomb Raider was amazing. Hair AND snow physics that ran at a decently high FPS. Loved that game.
Do you not remember how broken Arkham Knight was on release? It’s single-handedly one of the worst Pc ports in history.
I should really play the Arkham series
Modern game developers will use raytracing for everything besides working mirrors.
Doom eternal is 2020 man
I’m busy playing Last of Us 2 remake on my PC. I’m able to get 4k 100fps+ with full ray tracing on a 5070 ti. It’s an incredible visual experience. Yeah those last gen games looked sweet in still shots but in motion the visual fidelity we can get and the feel of a full ray traced environment really does feel like a leap forwards.
Doom Eternal came out in 2020.
That was back when art style mattered. Now we just get “throw it in UE5 it will look fine”
That pic of doom is from Doom Eternal, which came out in 2020
God Alien Isolation was stunning and just utterly nailed the concept it set out to master. I’m kind of sad we never got a sequel though.