Why have graphics stagnated for almost 20 years?
- Thread starter Simon0001
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Why has gameplay stagnated for almost 20 years?
Or to compare BF2 to BF2042, gotten worse?
Aye worse lol.
Agreed. 2004 was very good also (Far Cry, Doom 3, HL2) but those games are starting to age a bit now.
I think the main differences are textures are typically higher resolution now (a lot more VRAM) and you've got ray tracing to throw in the mix. Plus just generally more detail due to enhanced processing power.
When you try games from 20 years ago you realise just how bad they looked visually.
I'd suggest an upgrade from your AGP Radeon X800XL. I recently from one to a 2w pci-e sandwich maker and I can now run doom at 240p with everything turned off.
It looks truly breathtaking.
Minecraft Magoo
That's it though, they didn't look bad, particularly at the time.
Tbh I can play HL2 and have zero issues with how it looks.
I'd say that most games still look like a collection of cardboard cutouts dropped in to make a scene. Sure they have upped the number of polys and thrown in pre-baked lighting but that's not fooling everyone. I find RT has helped a lot to resolve this, but the uptake is very slow and often not used as well as current hardware would allow.
As I said HL2 is fine because 2004 was a watershed year for graphics, but 20+ years ago it tails off rapidly. Once you push back past 1998 (Unreal, Forsaken) pretty much everything is terrible, I remember thinking NFS3 looked decent at the time, but it's actually really bad when you go back to it.
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It's because we went from 1000 to 100,000 polygons per car / player character etc over a period of 5 years or so, and that is a huge jump in fidelity, a 100x increase in the number of polygons. Around this time a wide range of effects / tricks were introduced and wowing us (who remembers seeing the Quake 2 lighting for the first time).
In the last five years we may have gone from, I don't know, 2,000,000 to 2,500,000 polygons, so whilst 50 times number of polygones increased compared to 20 years ago, (I am just making these numbers up by the way!), this is only a 0.25x increase - of course you're not going to ntoice it compared to previous increases. Not to mention the effects we managed to implement into games have, well, already been implemented - yes they look much better and are rendered in a different way now but we can't be wowed by the real time lighting because it's alreay been done if you know what I mean.
Finally resolutions have increased from 0.3mp (640x480) to 0.7mp (1024x768) to ~1mp (720p) but then 2mp (1080p) and now 8mp (4k) so the number of pixels that all these polygons need to be rendered in(?) is increasing exponentially too so its exponentially, exponentially harder to make a game look much much better.
The other way of looking at it is that the orginal 3D acellerators on the PCI bus would use 25 watts max and not even need a heatsink. AGP came along and raised that to ??? and heatsinks and sometimes fans were needed. Then PCI-E raised that to 75 Watts and we needed good heatsink and fans. Then we got the 6 pin connection (another 75 watts) and we needed dual slot coolers... then 2x 6 pin, and then 8 pin (150 watts),now we're at, watt, 300+ watts and a triple slot cooling for a high end graphics card? I feel this increase has been pretty linear over the years so the graphics tech has definitely been ramping up, we just struggle to see the increased quality now its got so good
In the last five years we may have gone from, I don't know, 2,000,000 to 2,500,000 polygons, so whilst 50 times number of polygones increased compared to 20 years ago, (I am just making these numbers up by the way!), this is only a 0.25x increase - of course you're not going to ntoice it compared to previous increases. Not to mention the effects we managed to implement into games have, well, already been implemented - yes they look much better and are rendered in a different way now but we can't be wowed by the real time lighting because it's alreay been done if you know what I mean.
Finally resolutions have increased from 0.3mp (640x480) to 0.7mp (1024x768) to ~1mp (720p) but then 2mp (1080p) and now 8mp (4k) so the number of pixels that all these polygons need to be rendered in(?) is increasing exponentially too so its exponentially, exponentially harder to make a game look much much better.
The other way of looking at it is that the orginal 3D acellerators on the PCI bus would use 25 watts max and not even need a heatsink. AGP came along and raised that to ??? and heatsinks and sometimes fans were needed. Then PCI-E raised that to 75 Watts and we needed good heatsink and fans. Then we got the 6 pin connection (another 75 watts) and we needed dual slot coolers... then 2x 6 pin, and then 8 pin (150 watts),now we're at, watt, 300+ watts and a triple slot cooling for a high end graphics card? I feel this increase has been pretty linear over the years so the graphics tech has definitely been ramping up, we just struggle to see the increased quality now its got so good
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While I wouldn’t argue graphics have stagnated I would have at least before RT argued that graphics cards had mostly stagnated and got boring for many years. Every generation for a long time felt like more of the same only with a little more speed each generation. At least it did until RT and RTX took off then things got interesting again.