Currently trying to refund the new Indiana Jones game because it's unplayable without raytracing 
. My card isn't even old, it's just 8GB of VRAM is the absolute minimum apparently so my mobile 3060 is now useless. I miss when I used to be able to play new games in 2014 on my shitty AMD card at 20fps, yeah it didn't look great but developers still included a very low graphics option for people like me. Now you need to be upgrading every 2 years to keep up.
that one is atrocious but another thing i also find nasty is the amount of disk space new games need. sure, buying more disks is way cheaper than getting more graphical power but downloading +100Gb for a game I might just play once feels like an incredible waste
games should have a lo-fi version where they use lower textures and less graphical features for the people that cannot actually see the difference in graphics after the ps2 era
Rainbow 6 Siege had to downgrade map assets because the skins take up too much space lol
Cosmetics is a wholly separate clown-show. Dota 2 used to be a few gigabytes in space. Now because of all the hats it's like 30gb compressed.
War Thunder (garbage game, don't play) does this. You can choose to download higher quality textures. I don't care, I haven't noticed the difference
There's been a couple games I've decided to just not buy because the disk space requirement was too high. I don't think they care much about a single lost sale, unfortunately.
There are some good videos out there that also explain how UE5 is an unoptimised mess. Not every game runs on UE5 but it's the acceptable standard for game engines these days
That and DX12 in general, in my experience. Almost every game where I've had the option to use DX11 instead of DX12, the difference has been night and day. Helldivers 2 especially had an absurd improvement for me.
It's optimized around dev costs and not performance, sadly.
I'm finding the latest in visual advancements feels like a downgrade because of image quality. Yeah all these fancy technologies are being used but its no good when my screen is a mess of blur, TAA, artifacting from upscaling or framegen. My PC can actually play cyberpunk with path tracing but i can't even begin to appreciate the traced paths WHEN I CAN'T SEE SHIT ANYWAY.
Currently binging forza horizon 4 which runs at 60fps on high on my steam deck and runs 165fps maxed on my PC with 8x msaa and it looks beautiful. And why is it beautiful? Its because the image is sharp where I can actually see the details the devs put into the game. Also half life alyx another game that is on another level with crisp and clear visuals but also ran on a 1070ti with no issues. Todays UE5 screen vomit can't even compare
All games these days know is stutter, smeary image, dx12 problems and stutter
TAA, dof, chromatic aberration, motion blur, vignetting, film grain, and lens flare. Every modern dev just dumps that shit on your screen and calls it cinematic. Its awful and everything is blurry. And sometimes you have to go into an ini file because it's not in the settings.
Chromatic aberration! When I played R&C: Rift Apart on PS5 I was taking screenshots and genuinely thought there was some kind of foveated rendering in play because of how blurry the corners of the screen looks. Turns out it was just chromatic aberration, my behated.
Hate film grain too because I have visual snow and I don't need to stack more of that shit in my games.
Dev: should we make our game with a distinctive style that is aesthetically appealing? Nah slap some noise on the screen and make it look like your character is wearing dirty oakleys and has severe astigmatism and myopia that'll do it.
I despise TAA. I remember back when I played on PS4, I could immediately spot a UE4 game because they almost always had awful TAA ghosting.
I want my games to be able to be rendered in software, I want them to be able to run on a potato from the early 2000s and late 90s, is this too much for a girl to ask for
Todd Howard made Morrowind run on 64MB of RAM in a cave. With a box of scraps.
All of the boomer game devs that had to code games for like a 486 have now retired, replaced with people who nVidia or AMD can jangle shiny keys in front of to make their whole games around graphics tech like cloth physics and now ray tracing.
I just want to punch nazis why does it have to matter if the reflection of a pigeon off screen appears in Indiana Jones' eyes??
This is why solo or small team indie devs are the only devs I give a shit about. Good games that run well, are generally cheap, and aren't bloated messes.
I just want ps2-level graphics with good art direction (and better hair, we can keep the nice hair) and interesting gameplay and stories. Art direction counts for so much more than graphics when it comes to visuals anyway. There are Playstation 1 games with good art direction that imo are nicer to look at than some "graphically superior" games.
What hair in modern games looks like
when u see a Homo Sapiens for the first time
Yeah i would much rather a hairstyle be a single solid texture than whatever the fuck this "HAIRFX individual hair rendering 9000" bullshit is, that always ends up looking like trash
I got a special fucking bone to pick with Cities Skylines 2. I've never had a game look like such vaseline-smeared ass while making my computer sound like it's about to take off. It's a shame because it's definitely come a long way as a game and has some really nice buildings now, but to play it I start to get nervous after like half an hour and have to let my computer cool down, fuck that shit.
This is part of why I've pretty much stopped following mainstream releases. Had to return Space Marine 2 because it would not stop crashing and the low settings looked like absolute dogshit
Yeah, I'm getting real fucking tired of struggling to get 60fps in new games even with DLSS cranked to max. They don't even look much better. There's plenty of older games that look better and run better that you don't need to subject yourself to DLSS ghosting and frame gen latency to play. I've been telling my main co-op buddy that I might just stop playing new games (at least larger releases) because this shit is so frustrating.
DLSS created an excuse for developers to throw optimization to the side and just do whatever they please. I figured this is what would happen when it was created and it’s definitely happening now. I’m glad that I don’t play AAA games for the most part, cause this shit sounds annoying.
if a game can't run on everything people have run Doom on, i don't want to play it
yes this includes the digital pregnancy test and the parking ticket validator
duke nukem: that's a lot of ~~words~~ VRAM. too bad i'm not buyin it.
seriously, i hate this shit. i have a 1080 ti that i got used several years ago when the market had hit a bit of a lull and it's got some firmware bug that stops it from running most modern games, even ones it h as enough vram to run. this is why indie games and old games that people are still making mods or private server sets for like cod4 are so great.
People were saying this about Morrowind
Yeah but they were right, Morrowind looks too good, every game should look like Cruelty Squad
They were kind of correct back then two with the amount of upgrading the industry would expect you to do. That just petered off there for a while, luckily. seems to be back in full force now though
That said, at least back then all the shit gave you actual functionalities as per graphics instead of like raytracing on retinas or some bullshit you'd never notice
My CPU is 12 years old and my GPU 7. So yeah... I’m gonna stick with indie and older games.
The gamers yearn for Forward+ rendering...
Yeah i think gaming as an industry is becoming 'more specialized' which is not necessarily good. All the engine developers are just working on very generic graphics stuff for like Unreal and Unity, rather than engine devs being a position at a company that makes games themselves, which can greatly optimize them for specific games.
I've said this before but Fallout 4 came out nearly 10 years ago. And in a just world there would have been 3 New Vegas style spin off sequels of variable quality and a 4th on its way.
The new indiana jones is actually pretty decently optimized, like I run it at 1080p all high/ultra settings on my rtx 3060 12gb, with DLAA downscaling enabled at a mostly locked 60fps. Like it is leagues better than any UE5 game, it's just the hard VRAM requirements that suck.
I feel like a lot of the issues game graphics have nowadays is just that GPU prices have been ridiculously inflated over the last two decade because of crypto/ai. Like it is not surprising that devs will follow the newest trends and technologies when it comes to graphics, but the hardware needs of raytracing and global illumination and the likes are just too high for what gpu performance/dollar you can get in 2024. I just recently upgraded from an AMD RX480 to a used Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB (which seemed to be the best bang for the buck, an RTX 4060 would have been much more expensive for not a lot more performance), and that upgrade gets you maybe double performance in your games, for a GPU that is a whole seven years newer (and no VRAM upgrade at all when you get the base model). These cards just simply shouldn't cost as much as they do. If you don't have unlimited money to spend, you are going to have a much worse experience today compared to half a decade or a decade ago.
This kind of thing is why consoles are so popular. No need to worry about insane specs, graphics card prices, etc, you just buy the console and it's good for 6-9 years.
I'm pretty sure that's on the way out. Up until PS2/Xbox/Gamecube you bought the game and then you played the game. Then came installing the games on your console and managing disk space and shit. Now there's pro versions and graphical settings in console games. By the time the next generation from now is in place, it's just gonna be like choosing prebuilt PCs and futzing around with graphical settings all the same, except on way more locked hardware.
I am lucky enough that I'm not that interested in high-specs AAA titles to begin with: of the 100+ games I've put on a DIY wishlist, I'd say less than 10 of them fall in this category. It's mostly indie/retro titles, older titles or mid-budget.
video games need to go back to looking like halo 1
pre-rendered cutscenes should look like gta 4
All games should go back to looking, playing, and being Halo: Combat Evolved (2001)
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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