PS2 graphics were pretty on point. Upscale to a modern resolution, many of them still look decent now.
Xbox 360 era we got a lot of normal maps added (so models looked a lot more complex than they were).
PS4 added physically based rendering (ability to make parts of models look shiny without needing to separate them).
And the new shit is ray tracing, which PS5 isn’t really powerful enough to do, but honestly neither are most affordable PCs. We get nicer lighting at least, but we’ll still be on the old render paths for a while yet.
You still get improvements over time, but nothing is really going to compare to PS1 to PS2.
Games have gotten prettier, no argument, but I still feel like we’re playing the same games we were playing 20 years ago just with slight QOL improvements.
Yeah, I feel like everything we have now could have been done on the PS3 and Xbox 360. At least gameplay wise. Before that they were quite limited in terms of RAM. The big open world games probably couldn’t have been done prior to that gen. Stuff like Assassin’s Creed 2 or Far Cry 3 wouldn’t have been possible at all on PS2, I feel.
The closest they had was GTA SA which had huge nearly empty areas to hide the loading of the main city areas.
I’m just going to butt in and say that Far Cry 3 is the most ridiculously perfectly optimised game I’ve ever played. I managed to get it running on internal graphics of an old laptop in 800x600 resolution with potato settings and it was genuinely still enjoyable. I think I played through it halfway like that before I got my pc back.
PS2 graphics were pretty on point. Upscale to a modern resolution, many of them still look decent now.
Xbox 360 era we got a lot of normal maps added (so models looked a lot more complex than they were).
PS4 added physically based rendering (ability to make parts of models look shiny without needing to separate them).
And the new shit is ray tracing, which PS5 isn’t really powerful enough to do, but honestly neither are most affordable PCs. We get nicer lighting at least, but we’ll still be on the old render paths for a while yet.
You still get improvements over time, but nothing is really going to compare to PS1 to PS2.
Games have gotten prettier, no argument, but I still feel like we’re playing the same games we were playing 20 years ago just with slight QOL improvements.
Yeah, I feel like everything we have now could have been done on the PS3 and Xbox 360. At least gameplay wise. Before that they were quite limited in terms of RAM. The big open world games probably couldn’t have been done prior to that gen. Stuff like Assassin’s Creed 2 or Far Cry 3 wouldn’t have been possible at all on PS2, I feel.
The closest they had was GTA SA which had huge nearly empty areas to hide the loading of the main city areas.
I’m just going to butt in and say that Far Cry 3 is the most ridiculously perfectly optimised game I’ve ever played. I managed to get it running on internal graphics of an old laptop in 800x600 resolution with potato settings and it was genuinely still enjoyable. I think I played through it halfway like that before I got my pc back.