this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Someone already mentioned those graphics were optimized for old CRT TV's, but also consider the fact that it was simply the best wed seen, and it blew our minds.
Just imagine what top notch realism will be 20 years from now, assuming it's not all DLC for the same old stuff, obviously.
Honestly, a good CRT shader is a real game changer for emulation. Many emulators have the ability to add a mesh grid over the top of the image, but this is just about the worst way to try to emulate a CRT; It doesn’t actually emulate CRT pixels, and the black grid laid on top of everything simply reduces the overall image brightness.
For an example of a good CRT shader, consider looking into CRT Royale. The benefit to a shader is that it’s actually running each frame through a calculation before it reaches your screen. So it is actually able to emulate a CRT properly. Shaders can actually emulate the individual red/green/blue pixels of CRTs, emulate the bloom around white text, emulate the smearing that occurs with large color differences, etc… It really does make old games much more pleasant to look at.
We hit diminishing returns a while ago. It will be much harder to find improvements, both in terms of techniques and computation.
Consider that there is ten years between Atari Pitfall and Wolfenstein 3D, ten years between that and Metroid Prime, and ten years between that and Mass Effect 3, and then about ten years between that and now. There's definitely improvement between all those, but once past Metroid Prime, it becomes far less obvious.
We've hit the point where artistic style is more important than taking advantage of every clock cycle of the GPU.
This is even earlier, the 80s, but I remember getting a not especially good game called The Halley Project for my Apple II, but I would load the game over and over again because the intro had a song with real vocals and guitar, something basically unheard of on an Apple II, or virtually any other computer at the time.
So I loaded it. Over and over.
And this is no different.
Graphics 20 years from now will be incrementally better, but not mind-blowingly so. We're rapidly approaching games that are 20 years old still looking pretty decent today.
It’s so hard to go back. Possibly impossible, to remember what it was like to see those things from that point in history.
It's still happening, there's just so much of it now we're more aware of what the improvements actually are on a technical level, that we've come to expect it even before release of the lastest thing. And it's mostly disappointing now because we're chasing that same high.
The changes are more incremental now too. It's slightly better textures here, better lighting there, maybe a studio puts extra effort into motion nature and animations. But it's not leaps and bounds better every generation anymore like it used to be.
There was that video going around a couple days ago comparing Arkham Knight to Suicide Squad and that's a great example of graphics not getting noticeably better if a studio doesn't really try for it.
But I'll bet games that start coming out with the latest Unreal Engine, like Senua's Saga, are going to give some of that feeling of amazement again.