Baked lighting looks almost as good as ray tracing because, for games that use baked lighting, devs intentionally avoid scenes where it would look bad.
Half the stuff in this trailer (the dynamically lit animated hands, the beautiful lighting on the moving enemies) would be impossible without ray tracing. Or at the least it would look way way worse:
There are actually some fossils of dinosaur mummies, a rare preservation of a rare preservation. For some species these give us direct evidence of their physical appearance beyond their bone structure.
Take a look at the spray spout on the watering can in the top panel and the hand holding the tomato plant in the bottom panel.
This is AI generated.
What's interesting to me about that phrase is that no one uses the word "powerhouse" for anything else any more, except maybe to call something powerful.
Since it's not the 1920s any more and we have an electrical grid and centralized power generation. We still sometimes do use temporary off-grid generators, but we no longer have any need for a dedicated word that means "building or shed that we keep our generators in".
I don't think I've heard any European say this about American junk/fast food even once.
About the only thing I think I've heard in regards to flavor is "sickeningly sweet" and "even stuff that's not supposed to be sweet is sweet".
This is more psychotic than any of the dialogue in American Psycho.
I'm going to sound a little pissy here but I think most of what's happening is that console hardware was so limited for such a long time that PC gamers got used to being able to max out their settings and still get 300 FPS.
Now that consoles have caught up and cranking the settings actually lowers your FPS like it used to people are shitting themselves.
If you don't believe me then look at these benchmarks from 2013:
https://pcper.com/2013/02/nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan-performance-review-and-frame-rating-update/3/
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/review-nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan-6gb-185/
Look at how spikey the frame time graph was for Battlefield 3. Look at how, even with triple SLI Titans, you couldn't hit a consistent 60 FPS in maxed Hitman Absolution.
And yeah, I know high end graphics cards are even more expensive now than the Titan was in 2013 (due to the ongoing parade of BS that's been keeping GPU prices high), but the systems in those reviews are close to the highest end hardware you could get back then. Even if you were a billionaire you weren't going to be running Hitman much faster (you could put one more Titan in SLI, which had massively diminishing returns, and you could overclock everything maybe).
If you want to prioritize high and consistent framerate over visual fidelity / the latest rendering tech / giant map sizes then that's fine, but don't act like everything was great until a bunch of idiots got together and built UE5.
EDIT: the shader compilation stuff is an exception. Games should not be compiling shaders during gameplay. But that problem isn't limited to UE5.
Most diagrams don't include the mesentery, so people just think their intestines are sitting there like a pile of rope inside their torso.
It needs a port that you can attach your bag of caffeinated noodles to.
I don't think I would have brought a new person into the world during any of the other time periods you mention either.
Man I am so tired of the endless parade of articles with the premise "How could conservatives possibly think this?? Surely if we just take the time to carefully understand their reasoning we can blah blah blah...."
Here I'll answer the the "why" right now:
A) Most US conservatives live in suburbs and rural areas and generally hate and fear inner cities and the people who live there. They also generally hate and fear environmentalism. They also greatly resent the idea that the USA isn't the best country on earth at literally everything. They're also violently homophobic and have such deeply toxic ideas of masculinity that they consider it to be weak and "gay" to drive a smaller vehicle.
So when an urbanism advocate says they want people to give up their lifted truck to live in a city and ride a bicycle so the US can be more like Europe and East Asia to help the environment how in the world do you expect them to react in any other way?
B) This is a population that's addicted to hate, fear and opposition like a drug, and conservative politicians and news orgs are the dealers. They need to periodically find something new to tantrum about. If there is no reason to hate something then a reason will be created. This was the case with LED lightbulbs, with COVID, with Romneycare, and so on and on and on. The 15 minute city conspiracy theories are not some sort of new unprecedented pattern of behavior.
Its kind of interesting to me how conservative the IT industry is with stuff like this.
The industry loves to say "move fast and break things" or "innovate and disrupt", but that generally only applies to things that can be shat out in a two week long Python project (or shat out in 2 weeks after publicly funded universities spent years figuring out the algorithm for you). For anything foundational, like CPU architecture, operating systems, or the basic assumptions about how UI should work, they're terrified of change.