Gaming Graphics jump from 1998-2008 was much greater than 2008-2018?

Meh. I don't know, look at the jump from Battlefield 4 to V. The difference is still fairly huge...

The fidelity just from last gen to this gen is vast.

I presume you were young back in 1998 where the jump in more noticeable just bc you’re not as jaded if at all.

Trust me. Go play Halo 3 then play GoW 2018 and you can tell the difference.

Just look at GTAV. On PS3 in parts that game chugged at like 10 fps where there’s higher graphical quality on PS4 and its at 30 fps.

Moore's Law was inherently flawed. Time and physical limitations just caught up with it.

I think its about the same, the real difference between 2008-2018 was detail.

I've always thought that, but can't they just use more cores to keep up with graphics/Processing?

You got me. Electrical resistance choking down the processing gains?

Well, duh, I mean games can only reach a certain point and by 1998 we were still experimenting with the first steps of full 3D gaming. What's left is photo realistic graphics which will look increadible but 10 years from now still not that big of a gap. Now lets talk about 1988 to 1998 :P

The honest truth is that budgets are more of a factor in graphics than technology.

I did some quick research, so I may be wrong but Its apparently due to the GPU would need to much power and be bigger. The CPU is fine since its the higher ends are bottlenecked by the GPU.

Moore's law was still happening for smartphones up until recently. I mean it might still be, I just lost track :P

Absolutely. Compared to 1998-2008, 2008-2018 is just an example of diminishing returns.

Sega arcade games would be better examples of what high-end 1998 video game graphics look like, since Sega arcade systems were much more powerful than console or PC systems at the time. For example, here is what a 1996 Sega Model 3 game looks like:

...Which isn't too bad compared to what a 2007 racing game looked like:

Nevertheless, the jump from 1998 to 2008 was definitely bigger than the jump from 2008 to 2018.

1998-2008 were low hanging fruits when it came to graphics upgrades.

Software has not caught up with hardware.

Moore's law continues to be a thing (more or less) but since about 2005 Windows isn't slow any more and a £50 gpu won't look a whole lot worse than a £2000 one.

The cost to a game development studio to create 3d modelling and effects that test modern hardware is prohibitive to all but the very richest, probably corporate backed studios.

So a 3d indy PS4 game will hardly look any better and probably worse than a AAA PS2 game.

Yams1980 Just a few years back the high end was around 600-700, now its 1300 dollars, its a joke.

Try £2000. https://www.ebuyer.com/724373-nvidia-quadro-m4000-sync-graphics-card-vcqm4000sync-pb

[edit] the above is for a professional workstation.. but gaming gpus are still very expensive.

I can see gpu's going the way of sound cards and being just for the hobbyists and flight sim enthusiasts.

That comparison doesn't work.

You compare PC games builded around PC hardware unreal + crysis, against a console game that is builded around 10 year old pc hardware basically with some touch ups. If you do a comparison do it right.

Now lets look at the real progress:

Unreal tournament 1998:

Crysis 2007 vanilla:

Can't really find a good screenshot of a model, but it's along the lines of this one i assume as everything is modded to the teeth picture wise and i don't own crysis on steam to make a screenshot. If anybody has the game without mods and can make a screenshot would be great until then i will keep this model.

Another screenshot, finding models for crysis vanilla without having the game is a absolute disaster so yea it could actually be better in game and this is mid settings i wouldn't know.

Star Citizen some gameplay video ( real gameplay, made a screenshot of it ).

https://i.ibb.co/R4PHMm9/b3d4e17b41f8b042cdc8d5bc682084f1.png]

https://ibb.co/5xvczy6

The reason i pick character models is because enviroments as enviroments are harder to compare as different locations stuff can look a lot more better or worse.

Anyway if you do look at enviroments then star citizen blows everything out of the water.

Also this forum needs some real god dam update, half the pictures don't upload from websites, the picture + text scramble every god dam time when you put them into a reaction is also idiotic.

Terrible.

@DragonfireXZ95: Those screenshots from Battlefield are nice but they don't go much further than Arma 2 from 2009.

They both have fully 3d tree trunks but not grass. Grass waves around and flattens but not in any direction.

Arma 2 has a more realistic lighting engine and weather effects than the latest Battlefield game.

All we are seeing is higher resolutions. This adds detail. But the problem is a resolution can be too high and the amount of detail can be more than your brain is capable of processing as so is either wasted gpu or at worst distracting.

A more realistic game would have complicated perspective effects and blurring to imitate the human eye and the movement of light waveforms through the atmosphere.

Modeling the real world is live 3d is an epic task. But it's mostly a software issue than it is a hardware one.

Arma 2 - 2009 - Bohemia Interactive

Depends on which games you're looking At

compared to

or

vs

looks pretty impressive to me

@Jag85: The model 3 boardput outsome impressive games back in the late 90s but it looks way outdated, just look at the simple polygon models and blocky textures.

@boxrekt said:

Is this a cutscene or gameplay? Just wondering about the black bars.

I mean, this is the whole point I've been making for years about diminishing returns. If you look at the numbers, the leaps continue to be huge - the computational load increase is there. But resolutions are so high, polygons so detailed, lighting so realistic, etc, that a huge increase numerically and computationally is perceptually small.

Sure, some games clearly look better than others every year, but that's down to developer talent, artistic taste, etc. Apples to apples, a top tier visuals game reflects a huge leap over its predecessor still - on paper. We just can't perceive it as clearly.

So when we have people asking what we want from next gen... Idk, for me it's going to be more about features and better performance

@jackamomo said:

@DragonfireXZ95: Those screenshots from Battlefield are nice but they don't go much further than Arma 2 from 2009.

They both have fully 3d tree trunks but not grass. Grass waves around and flattens but not in any direction.

Arma 2 has a more realistic lighting engine and weather effects than the latest Battlefield game.

All we are seeing is higher resolutions. This adds detail. But the problem is a resolution can be too high and the amount of detail can be more than your brain is capable of processing as so is either wasted gpu or at worst distracting.

A more realistic game would have complicated perspective effects and blurring to imitate the human eye and the movement of light waveforms through the atmosphere.

Modeling the real world is live 3d is an epic task. But it's mostly a software issue than it is a hardware one.

Arma 2 - 2009 - Bohemia Interactive

Umm, yeah, Battlefield 4 doesn't look any better than Arma 2 for the most part. I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing with me.

@vfighter: Sega Model 3 is dated by today's standards, but still held up pretty well compared to early PS3/360 games.

You raise a valid point. How much would it cost to have a Minecraft style destructible environment be photo realistic? idk.

@DragonfireXZ95: I agreeing with you if you're saying, comparatively, the period from 1998 to 2008 represents a more significant development of 3d graphics than the period of 2009 to 2018.

Arma 2 lacks a good (not buggy) engine but offers very high levels of detail.

Diminishing returns guys

And at some point in the future the graphics will stop evolving altogether.

It feels like the overall state of graphics depends mostly on how good the current idtech, source, unreal engine or unity engine is.

@jun_aka_pekto: gameplay

That's weird. Why do some gameplay have no horizontal bars while others do? What situations will cause the black bars to show up? The last time I saw something similar was with The Order 1886. But, the whole game had it.

I feel the jump was about equal.

1998 to 2008, we increased the polygon count and visual effects a ton, but even Crysis didn't quite have believable humans and environments yet.

2008 to 2018, and now we have jaw dropping lighting and environments (such as Rise of the Tomb Raider) and much more fully realized human character models and animations.

Even with these improvements, however, we still haven't perfected lifelike game characters. To me, Uncharted 4's characters feel more lifelike than Leon and Claire from the Resident Evil 2 Remake released a few hours ago. Marvin and the Trucker in that game are very convincing to me, but the two protagonists just look a bit "shiny" or something is slightly off about them.

And I'm mainly a PC gamer. The newest consoles I own are a PS3 and an Xbox 360. I don't need a PS4 or Xbox One.

I have no clue. I have over a 100 hours in that game and never saw any black bars.

That animated GIF I was pointing to had black bars. I have to assume it's a cutscene if gameplay is fullscreen.

I don't think Horizon supports ultrawide but you see that in ultrawide video on a standard 16:9

Well said.

Only reason is because Graphics were Terrible in the 90's. By 2005 you had 360 Games like Kameo and PGR 3 which Looked Beautiful. By 2006 games like Gears of War launched and Gaming Graphics with very poor image quality were a thing of the Past in AAA Titles.

Yes. It's called diminishing returns, and it affects all computer technology. Computers in general stopped advancing as quickly, not just in terms of gaming. The only exception was mobile computing (specifically smartphones and tablets, and thus handhelds by extension), which picked up around 2008.

Depends on which Crysis screenshots to use.

or

RTX 2080 Ti doubles as near workstation GPU card e.g. tensor, BVH search engine accelerator (RT) and strong async compute (with plenty of TMU read/write units)

I would say it was about equal. The jump will always be less obvious (diminishing returns), but we got to a point when every game looks great, some almost Pixar quality, and run pretty well, even on consoles.

Its equal for me, those early unreal engine 3 made games is quite ugly to look at nowadays. The thing that matters is actually gameplay, which 1998 games dont hold up as well as 2008 ones. Depends on games though, jrpg tactics games is timeless no matter what era

@DragonfireXZ95 said:

Meh. I don't know, look at the jump from Battlefield 4 to V. The difference is still fairly huge...

Yes, I would say I definitely notice the difference between Battlefield 4 and Battlefield 1 or V. But the difference aren't Unreal to Crysis level.

It's funny you mentioned those Sega Arcades. I used to amazed by the graphics on those Arcades when I was a kid and you are right it did rival PC hardware back then. But you are comparing racing games. How about Unreal or Quake II or Half-Life running in 32 bit color on nVidia TNT back in 1998. It would beat out those Sega arcade games. Not saying they were impressive because I was impressed with the graphics in other games like Datyona USA 2 also using Sega Model 3. They were using Real3D graphics (later in Sega's Dreamcast Sega used PowerVR graphics much to the dismay of 3DFX who expected Sega to use Voodoo graphics in their console, 3DFX may have even survived a bit longer had Sega used Voodoo but that's another story ;)). But the Voodoo 2 or the Riva TNT easily beat out those Real3D graphic chips in those Sega Model 3 arcades.

For Forza Motor Sport 2 I find Need For Speed Most Wanted running at 1080P on the PC a much better looking game.

Not jaded at all. Because as a kid didn't have the money to put towards PC Gaming hardware and parents were too poor to buy a graphics card every other year.

Yes I having played the newer gears on the PC I do see a noticeable jump compared to Halo 3. But strictly from an objective point of view going from Unreal to Crysis or Far Cry 2 the jump is night and day.

I don't even want to talk about the jump from that era. ;) 3D Accelerated graphics at least for home PC's didn't even exists.

Yes the lighting did get better over the 10 years. But from 1998 to 2008 nearly everything got better, textures, lighting, polygon count and by a significant margin.

Yeah I would say 2005/2006 is when game really started to look like modern games of today. Looking at games like F.E.A.R. and the original Gears of War on the PC. Just look at the re-release of Gears of War on the PC back in 2016 they didn't do a graphical overall because they didn't need to. And the fact that we stayed with the same generation of console for nearly 10 years with the Xbox 360 from 2005 - 2013. The longest console generation that I can remember.

@jun_aka_pekto said:

Depends on which Crysis screenshots to use.

or

Yes. You are right looking at Vanilla Crysis there were definitely some rough edges. Still holds up really well 10 years later though.

@jun_aka_pekto said:

@boxrekt said:

Is this a cutscene or gameplay? Just wondering about the black bars.

It's gameplay my friend.

I know it's hard for some people to believe especially PC only fans but these are the kind of gfx that are possible when a game is coded to the metal vs generalized optimization.

High profile next generation console exclusive games will literally look like CG movies. Titles like Horizon Zero Dawn and God of War come close on ancient 1.8TF hardware. When Sony devs reveal their titles on PS5's rumored 10TF it will be 4k 60fps running graphics on the level of The Avatar.

Yes, even simple walking animation look amazing or could be mistaken for "pre-rendered cut-scense" if you hadn't played the game. The black bars there are just how the footage was captured.

Play the game and you'll see it's all gameplay.

These

are an examples of a cut scenes in HZD. The gameplay actually looks better than cut scenes in HZD.

I think the best comparison would be the metal gear Solid games although 5 came out in 2015.

Personally, if I was playing the game or recording gameplay videos, I like to keep things, such as screen ratio, consistent. But, that's just me.

Yes it a good idea if you compare Star War Shadowed Empire for nintendo 64 to Star War Force Unleash.

Yup, hope we get 60fps/1080p as a standard for console games.