No? There's more color, but it's reasonable CSGO always had a kind of dull color grading/textures, though updates changed that A bit later on. A lot of players turn up saturation themselves for the (at least perceived) benefit of visibility so that might be what you saw, you also see CS players playing in 1024x768 stretched still because that's how they always played before.

They definitely gave it that trendy sunny slightly hazy day look. I'm not complaining it's a much nicer aesthetic than the original release of CSGO which felt like a Seattle afternoon in the middle of the desert.

One employer actually asked if I played war thunder in an interview, which I thought was strange until I remembered these stories.

Putting it in a bigger box with more cooling capacity will always make a much faster computer, so that's not going away anytime soon and someone will always find a way to use 20% more power than is available every time a faster computer is made. A lot of things just come down to how well you can cool something, engines, brakes, lights, computers, batteries... how hard do you want to go and how long do you want to do it often determines the form of things.

My computer fits on my desk as it is so making it smaller gains me nothing and just makes it less useful.

Maybe tower PCs will become slightly more niche again in the future, but they'll always be around for enthusiasts like me.

That's why it's unscored.

It's a pretty decent game, I still don't understand why everyone was so down on it. I had a lot of fun playing it, there was decent variety, the gunplay was good, and the silly storylines were entertaining.

I think in some cases there's a lot of merit to it, for example Red Dead Redemption, both games are pretty graphically intensive (if not cutting edge) but it's used to further the immersion of the game in a meaningful way. Red Dead Redemption 2 really sells this rich natural environment for you to explore and interact with and it wouldn't quite be the same game without it.

Also that example of Tomb Raider is really disingenuous, the level of fidelity in the environments is night and day between the two as well as the quality of animation. In your example the only real thing you can tell is the skin shaders, which are not even close between the two, SotTR really sells that you are looking at real people, something the 2013 game approached but never really achieved IMO.

if you don't care then good for you! My wallet wishes I didn't but it's a fun hobby nontheless to try and push things to their limits and I am personally fascinated by the technology. I always have some of the fastest hardware every other generation and I enjoy playing with it and doing stuff to make it all work as well as possible.

You are probably correct in thinking for the average person we are approaching a point where they just really don't care, I just wish they would push for more clarity in image presentation at this point, modern games are a bit of a muddy mess sometimes especially with FSR/DLSS

It mattered a lot more early on because doubling the polygon count on screen meant you could do a lot more gameplay wise, larger environments, more stuff on screen etc. these days you can pretty much do what you want if you are happy to drop a little fidelity in individual objects.

People just generally don't understand design or manufacturing at all it might as well be magic to the layman "all you gotta do is..." yeah sure that would make a better product in absolute quality terms, if it's possible at all, but you have to balance it against 100 other things.

There's a reason there are rooms full of relatively high paid individuals with fancy degrees or decades of experience.

pcgamesn is scraping the bottom of the barrel, they literally just find ways to say something with starfield in the title. This has been a thing since at least 2016 when FH3 came out.

It's a cool feature, always worth some mention, but baffling that they feel the need to generate a whole article out of this.

it will just hand out random DUIs to RAM owners based on statistics and reckless driving tickets to black altimas with tinted windows and bedazzled plate frames.

Yup makes sense to me, very much in line with my laymans understanding of contract law. It's very driven by social context as it is. I wonder how that differs somewhere like Japan where official seals are expected even for minor documents.

Correct it's labeled as unclassed sensitive info for law enforcement. That just means "don't share this shit on facebook if you want to keep your job"

To be slightly fair a decent number of those are redundant or were successfully merged into other projects while others were clearly very experimental in nature.