The moment GMan’s mouth fucking moved in Half Life when he talked. 🤯
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
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.
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.
I have never in my life seen someone refer to CRT TVs as crtvs and it's really fucking with my head lmao
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
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.
It is my opinion that we reached peak graphics 6 or 7 years ago when GTX1080 was king. Why?
- Games from that era look gorgeous (eg Shadow of Tomb Raider), yet were well optimized to run high/ultra at FHD on RX570.
- We didn't need to rely on fakery like DLSS and frame generation to get playable frame rates. If anything, people used to supersample for the ultimate picture quality. Even upping the rendering scale to 1.25 made everything so crisp.
- MSAA and SMAA antialiasing look better, but somehow even TAA from that era doesn't seem as blurry. Today, might as well use FXAA.
Graphics today seem ass-backward to me: render at 60...70% scale to have good framerates, FX are often rendered at even lower resolution, slap on overly blurry TAA to hide the jaggies, then use some upsample trickery to get to the native resolution. And it's still blurry, so squirt some sharpening and noise on top to create an illusion of detail. And still runs like crap, so throw in frame interpolation to get the illusion of higher frame rate.
I think it's high time we should be able to run non-raytracing graphics at 4k native and raytracing at 2.5k native on 500€ MSRP GPU-s with no trickery involved.
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.
- 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.
There's a saying in computer graphics: if it looks right, it is right. Meaning you shouldn't worry if the technique makes a mockary of how light actually works as long as the viewer won't notice.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
At least we were happy back then
For me it wasn't a video game but adjacent - I saw Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in 2001 and thought "well, that's it, computer graphics have achieved photorealism and nothing could possibly ever be better."
Didn't get the "graphics can't get any better" idea, however, when Quake came out, and we turned on GL graphics, it really hit me that eventually graphics could, eventually, be actually realistic. Like, it is hard to explain to people born after this era the INSANE leap forward Quake was.
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.
Because we were stuck on "how did they put a whole world in the TV?!" And hadn't gotten to "but why they triangle?"
3d was huge, it didn't matter that it was ugly.
Here's a decent impression of the times: http://i.imgur.com/mAUyo.jpg
But back in the day (2003-ish) we still had amazing things to look forward to:
- translucency (windows were not see-through)
- realtime lighting and shadows (shadows were blobs below a model)
- metallic reflection, and reflections in general (though working mirrors existed since at least Duke Nukem 3D, but those were a hack; copy the room and player model and flip them around to create the effect of a mirror)
- further viewing distances (though this isn't a positive, IMO)
- physics (everything was static - models moved, but did not rotate (much))
- inverse kinematics
It's crazy how far we've gotten, but view distances spoil everything (IMO), and graphical improvements have slowed down (not stalled, but definitely slowed down) with Ray Tracing becoming wide-spread being the last big graphical improvement (since 2018).
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.
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.
~~This~~ These caused protests
Unreal on a Voodoo3 had fucking reflections on the walkway, and I watched that damn intro over and over.
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.
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!"
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.
Even back in 1999 we could tell the difference between in-game graphics and pre-rendered cutscenes. Nobody thought that the blocky model shown here was as good as it got.
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.
That's got phong shading for a start. Was pretty advanced for a PS1 game. Before that each poly had it's own normals, so everything looked blockier. Think Tekken 3 vs Tekken 2.
I was little when the OG Ace Combat game came out on the PS1 right? Polygonal jet engines & everything lol
Until i was like 11, whenever i saw real pictures of actual aircraft that were in the game i thought they were fake because their engines weren't polygonal enough 🤣🤣🤣
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.
I never thought they looked anything like realistic back then, but I did think that they looked beautiful.
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.
That screen shot is very generous to ps1 graphics
That's because it's actually an N64 screenshot, which was more powerful than the PS1.
It's Castlevania 64.
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