@Anti_Woke They kind of are in a way. It's not a million miles away from the same system as a crypto pump and dump. Certain people are making absolute bank while leaving others holding the bag and destroying entire ecosystems in their wake.
Love that others are seeing this shite!! My God! Just look at install sizes for games from all console generations. I have seen and own so many 7GB games that totally buttfuck 100GB games in graphics, fun, and innovation!! Lost Odyssey. A complete master class on optimization and disc shuffle; EVERY bit counted and was important.
@Anti_Woke It's kind of both. For example, there are certain ways to make money WITHOUT customers needing to buy your product. But it's a very deep rabbit hole. P.S. BASED nickname, comrade ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) (don't mind me using the word "comrade", I just like this word... and I'm also Russian :p)
wait, wait, your telling me the citizens in a city builder game all had modeled teeth ?!! Im a 3d artist my mind is blown. how in the world was that missed?! I am actually flabbergasted.
The one positive of the high RAM prices we are dealing with currently is maybe it will force more developers to get more creative with graphics design again.
I feel like indie games are essentially repeating the rarely seen art of ”being smart with resources” and developing games for what matters than what people may not even care for
My experience is that 95% of indies never care (more precisely can't afford) about optimization and as result perform a lot worse than AAA games in terms of fps/graphics ratio. Let's be honest, there's no way that they will be outdevelop way bigger and smarter teams. Sometimes it might happen, but overall AAA have way more potential as along as they aren't as dysfunctional as EA.
Private companies, small companies and indie companies are probably the only ones able to truly do that nowadays. All the big ones need to reach so high margins that they literally can't afford creativity.
Developers used to optimize their games. They don't do that anymore. They just rely on various technologies like upscalers and frame generators. Because of this, they can't put nearly as much quality into the games graphically than they used to.
That thing about the teeth was absolutely ridiculous. It is crazy to think that devs sophisticated enough to model teeth at that polygon count would actually even consider it for a scenario you couldn't even appreciate it in is absolutely disappointing.
It's just poor programming skills. I'll argue the skill set, expertise, and devotion of development teams have gone down hill in the past 15 years. Just look at dev teams then compared to dev teams now.
@jlzimmerman75 Devs don't make 3d models, that's what 3d modelers do. Basically they forgot to add a low LOD (level-of-detail) version model of the people without teeth. Or you could say they didn't spend the time to create low LOD models for everything.
Uncanny Valley is why little kids run away from their favourite costumed characters at like, Disneyland! Even that young, their brains are telling them something is wrong and the character existing in this reality is "wrong."
After FF7, every developer had to put out a 150 hour + Opus. It's one thing if it's a game like Horizon where you can have fun killing the dinosaurs and see that you've spent 500 hours and aren't even halfway through the game and it's another when you just stack on uninteresting quests just to get to over 150 hours. The Ninja Gaiden games have a playtime around 20-25 hours and they are some of the best games in graphics and story. I'm sorry but GTA Vice City was the best in the series because it kept to telling a story. After Vice City Rockstar just started making a huge map and stacking on quests, and giving you girl friends and other diversions just to add to the time it takes to finish the game. Red Dead Redemption 2, it is a fantastic game but it is a text book example of this.
This is precisely the same dynamic seen in the performing arts - a simple glove puppet can be highly immersive for an audience if done well and nobody ever says 'it's not realistic' (think Southpark), whereas an incredibly complex, full scale animatronic dinosaur, to use an example I've seen, can completely fail to capture the viewer because it attempts to look real and therefore any small flaw proves it is nothing of the kind and so breaks immersion. This teaches that if you set consistent rules for the universe the story takes place in, the audience will accept those rules and a glaring lack of realism without any conscious effort, they choose instead to focus on the story and emotional content etc. However, if you set the rule of the fictional universe as "just like reality" you will always fail because any flaw will immediately ruin the illusion - and there will _always_ be a flaw because a fiction is, by default, not reality. It is therefore self defeating to attempt to recreate reality in this way because all it does is draw the audience's attention to every detail that proves otherwise. It's like sitting at a piano, bragging about being as good as Mozart then playing a little tune - people will shake their heads and laugh whereas if you say "This is a little tune I wrote," they'll listen attentively and enjoy it. Watching the main push of the gaming industry fail to recognise this dynamic while it has been understood for millennia in other artforms has frustrated me for years.
Agreed. I think generally avoiding newer games and instead playing those 5-10 years old isn't just better value for money, (because you avoid paying a premium for recent releases) but arguably just as much fun, because most of the bugs have been fixed, there's plenty of DLC (often included with the main game), the player community is smaller, but more stable, so potentially friendlier and more chill.
This video was pushed to my algo, I watched the whole thing thinking it was some bigger channel with tons of views only to see it has less than 1000 views. Excellent work, dude! Subscribed instantly
I remember hearing a story from the Guilty Gear devs that they "broke" UE4 to make the anime cell-shaded look. That is the kind of ingenuity you don't see often.
so the main issues with graphics are these right now: 1. they don't remove clutter [both in polygons you'll NEVER see, but also in set dressing] 2. either no Focus OR too Obvious on what is the path... even by shading something with higher importance 3. the Vaseline'd taxidermy of NPC characters 4. Drag 'n Drop Asset-Flips causing Aesthetic Dissonance 5. Instagram Filter Marketing over Depth [Ubisoft's watchdogs did this BTW, gamers were not happy] Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!
Watchdogs situation was hilariously bad, they reduced the texture quality on PC to make it look similar to the console releases of the game but a dev managed to sneak in the high quality version of the textures that were shown off in trailers for the game. You had to do some shenanigans with the game files to get the game to use the high quality textures. Ubisoft stupidly wanted graphical parity across all platforms, they wanted the PC release to not outshine the console releases of the game, they wanted to intentionally make the PC release ugly.
1. They do! and this actually baked in modern graphics rendering pipelines. 2. Thats a matter of taste I guess. 3. Thats mainly due to temporal rendering tricks to !optimize the game! If they rendered everything in realtime even a 5090 would melt. 4. You have any idea how many assets a modern game has? millions and your saying they need to build all of that from scratch? Yeah dream on.. 5. Thats the one thing I agree on but only a hand full of studios do this.
@FullFledged2010 0. kinda referencing what is said in the video more than anything, but thank you for your points. 1. true, there is occlusion culling as an example I can bring off the top of my head. though it is more about visual clarity over "realism", where there is tons of items IN-screen [that really have no reason thematically or mechanically to be there besides eyte-candy] as an issue... though what is ALSO brought into the engines are those power hungry tools that devour performance for breakfast. which in turn seem to be used more so than anything else because with optimizations... like occlusion culling, you have to keep the performance up WHILE keeping the visuals up as well without fail. also apparently in games like resident evil 9 [at least on the switch, though that might be some specific porting shenanigans.] with it's in-box design... it seems to run quite great... while some other games run terribly open world. though another thing that is odd... why does it seem like the requirements go up, when the graphical fidelity seems similar to or even just the same? [specifically on PC from 2010 to 2026] 2. I am referring to the yellow paint type of hinting being TOO obvious, which to some ruins the idea of a game and makes it feel like it is on rails and more movie-logic bound. 3. uhm, why does having the dead look in an NPC's face happen to be an issue of temporal anti-aliasing? at all? that is more a graphical design choice and expressive faces CAN exist in lower-resolution versions... that is what is referenced. 4. this is true... but some people might want to decimate the triangles and restructure the topology of the movie-grade assets, into low-poly game assets. takes more time, but for those of us who don't have anything close to the 5090... much appreciated. mind you I am still on a GTX 1070... might update with a steam machine later... but that will be much later. 5. I think that everyone can agree that deceptive marketing practices are bad... especially if they don't deliver on it. though yes, thank you for saying that! Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!
I'm playing Arkham Knight right now and I swear, it might be the greatest graphical feat ever conceived. It's just so beautiful to look at and has amazing direction. The immersion is fantastic, you really do feel like you're in Gotham City.
@592Johno It plays great on the Playstation 4, that's 2015 technology. But the PS4 version mostly avoided the technical problems of the PC version's initial release, thankfully.
Batman has a good artistic direction (don't know if you call that this way in english) this is why you feel it is incredible. Now be honest : go at different spots, do nothing (no fast pace action) and just really look at the textures... Nothing special... It looks good because everything is dark, meaning you can "cheat" on all graphics settings, you cannot see any difference. Just put some fog, reflection etc. and that's all. Not to mention the area itself, clearly not the same as rendering NightCity for instance... Point is that, like in the video, you cannot compare things not related to each other. B:AC focus on atmosphere meaning you put effort in it (gameplay is really poor in comparison to CP2077) so obviously recent game cannot put the same effort in the same area otherwise all games would be unplayable (this is literally what happened before using DLSS).
I'm a 3d Artist working in the AAA industry. And I think you have a lot of things wrong. 1) Teeth in NPCs in Cities Skyline do affect performance, but not as much as the number of polygons, since those polygons were occluded by other surfaces, they aren't rendered. Still, they do create draw calls in memory and possible lighting computation that the GPU has to work. Still, my guess is that they didn't create proper LODs for them; those teeth are very similar to a basic teeth set in character modelling, when they created the base body for a NPCs, they probably forgot the teeth were there. With LODs, the engine replaces meshes with lower resolution and mipmapped textures to make things run smoothly (You probably seen this with trees/rocks in games, that suddenly look much better as you get closer to them), probably the LODs weren't properly set up, but also can count for buildings and whatever over 3d meshes they had. That also means that it doesn't matter that the community opened the 3d files and saw the teeth if the file only had the LOD0, because that level of detail is only meant to be used when the camera is very close to an object. 2) Devs aren't lazy because we don't want to make proprietary engines; that's a job and business decision. If you have a proprietary engine, mantaining said engine is entirely up to the company, that cost a lot of money, and also makes it very difficult to hire new people, because you have to train them and they might program or design in a way that is not totally compatible. The rise of engines like Unity or unreal allow programmers to know a programming language, know how to apply it, be hired anywhere and start working much faster. Also, it helps if a newcomer has to work on a previous person's code. Most programmers who arrive at a new engine made by another guy that left the company would totally trash the other guy's work, wouldn't understand a thing and probably would try to start from scratch, costing even more money. Using Unreal or Unity eliminates that, and you're sure to have support from the parent company (like Epic in the case of Unreal), and artists like myself can work more comfortably since we already know how to navigate, move, tweak and configure stuff. Making a new engine isn't always the solution, especially since studios have limited budget and time given by their parent companies. 3)Upscaling is crap, totally agree with that, but I assure you that we devs are still using a lot of tricks that would blow your mind to optimize. Most gamers don't know what "optimizing" is, and they think is a vague term to "make the game run better", but without knowing how exactly we do that. But trust me, we do. Hardware nowadays is more complicated and varied from user to user, that's why performance is so different among PCs, but Console games usually run like butter, because they're usually designed to THAT specific hardware. The "Unreal Look" is not an Unreal problem, believe it or not. It has to do with art direction; Yoshi's Crafted World or Hi-Fi Rush are made in Unreal Engine 4. But most of the time, studios want a 'realistic' look, and Unreal excels in light, reflections and stuff. The grainy part is due to upscaling; thank Nvidia for that crap. But if you wanna make a stylized game in Unreal, you can! You can create all kinds of shaders, but Unreal is heavily made towards correct physically-based rendering texture pipelines (PBR) that means, realistic light behaviour in materials. So, if you want something different, that means extra work, and probably extra graphics load. The reason why Nvidia and other companies push so hard into this technology is simply that progress has stagnated, graphics reached a certain plateau, and if you see CPUs f, ex, they barely improved in recent years. Same as GPUs, that basically add more VRAM, create table-sized graphics cards that barely fit in pc cases and called it day, because they can't make transistors any smaller, we reached a scale where electrons start behaving in a quantum way and that creates power leaks, too much heat and components fail, And it wouldn't be feasible for consumer technology to make computers much bigger, because that would end laptop businesses, or you would need a data center rack to fit your components. I think that when new alternatives (better alternatives, like bismuth) to silicon start mass producing, progress will make larger leaps. 4)Unreal DOES NOT do ANYTHING automatically, no matter how many times Epic says that in their flashy trailers. Lumen and Nanite need A SHITLOAD of research to properly adapt our working pipelines, and they need ANOTHER SHITLOAD of tweaking, rendering tests, and so on to be feasible. 5) Upscaling doesn't eliminate the need for optimizing, in the slightest; you're simply wrong there. Draw calls, physics and light computing, material shading calculations, texture maps loaded in memory, pathfinding, behaviour, and a really, really long etcétera take most of the computing power; polygons actually don't mean as much as years ago nowadays. Polygons are cheap. But the rest isn't, and those things aren't affected by resolution. So yes, we do still need to optimize. A lot. There are better scaling technologies than DLSS that can run a lot better, but they have their own setbacks. There's also a big problem with BRDF. You can learn about it here (don't worry, it's explained for beginners) ruclips.net/video/qZtNU-4yqtI/video.html 6)We Devs HATE GenAI, or at least the 100% of coworkers and internet friends that I have, we hate it. I used it for generating portraits for Dungeons and Dragons for my friends, but for work? I wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot stick. And 90% of people in the industry would agree. So no, we don't use it. To prototype, we use gray textures or our own libraries, and concept art is made by concept artists (those who hate genai even more than the rest). GenAI takes all the fun, interesting and enjoyable parts of our work and leaves the boring, dull, technical and unfulfilling. 7) Stock assets are used basically in prototyping. In all the productions I've been to, we create everything from scratch, buying things can save you once in a specific case, but most of the time, stock assets create more problems than offer solutions. Most of the time is easier to create an asset from scratch than to hammer-fit a bought one into your modelling/texturing/rendering pipeline. So no, wrong again. I agree that looking for distinct artstyles is the way to go, trust me, most people in the industry do. But 100% of the time, our hands are tied by decisions above our pay grade. We devs are gamers too. We are gamers that loved games so much that we wanted to learn to make them. So we're conscious about what the public feels because we feel the same way, and we know even more bad things/bugs/glitches/fails/crap that the average gamer does. But we don't call the shots in the AAA industry. Sometimes you're lucky, and you get a director who wants to do interesting things, and sometimes the suits meddle and don't want to "experiment" with their investments. It sucks. I know. Well, sorry for the long post, but for God's sake, research a little bit before claiming certain things like absolute truths.
First of all - you don't need to apologize for the long post, in fact I do want to thank you for the incredibly detailed answer. Really it gave me a lot of insight, especially from an actual Developer. I'm just a frustrated gamer myself and don't claim to have as much inside knowledge as you do. The things I'm listing in the Video are purely from my point of view as the end consumer who just sees the final thing and wonders what happened. One thing I definitely want to apologize for is if it came across that I called ALL developers lazy and like they are not talented anymore - thats not what I intended to say. When I said 'lazy design' it wasn't directed to you but at the guys who force these unoptimized, rushed deadlines on you. In fact at this point seems that we are on the same side, the gamers who get a product that feels subpar and you as a developer, which actually breaks my heart, because you want to do unique things but gets blocked by guys above your paygrade. Regarding the technical details - thank you for making me aware of my mistakes, and I will make sure to not do them again (I'm watching the Video about the BRDFs as of typing this reply). Thank you for taking your time and also thank you for doing the hard work behind the scenes 🤝
This reply needs so many more likes as it's exactly what people need to hear. They love to blame things which they don't have a complete understanding of, yet they don't bother to fill those holes in their knowledge to better understand the issues at hand. Unreal Engine in its many iterations has been the workhorse of the gaming industry and can produce a near infinite amount of gameplay experiences with an unlimited amount of art styles. It's not the engines being used and it's (typically) not the developers. The main problem with the AAA space is publishers and their investors meddling with development, pushing for specific release windows regardless of the many issues that can arise in development in an effort to meet their quarterly projections. They are using a model that is too close to TV and Movies, static forms of media which don't have to undergo rigorous tests whenever a change is applied.
It is kind of ironic that you would mention Threat Interactive as he would personally disagree on your point of "The Unreal Look not being an Unreal Problem." Anyway, my question from a consumer's perspective is, why is realism slandered pretty hard when discussing visuals in gaming? I will concede that from a developer standpoint it is definitely easier to develop a stylized game and market it to its target audience but I do think that there is definitely potential for smaller devs to learn from past AAA to see how to achieve a better visuals/performance ratio in titles that go for realism. For example, I believe that having GT7 tonemapping or Frostbite level SSR would be a pretty big win for the industry standard engine, however I would imagine that Unreal wouldn't allow for that. Now I understand that a 3d Artist like yourself has to deal with Unreal as that is what you have to work with at the end of the day. However, it is crazy to me (from a consumer's perspective) that AAA devs would take this engine, make next to no modifications to it, and enable every performance hogging feature under the sun while smearing the image with TSR and/or do a Randy Pitchford by telling us that "the game is unoptimized just use DLSS." I am aware that the scenario that I just outlined is far from every UE5 studio and some like Genki, Hazelight, and Embark Studios actually did a good job with the engine considering the resources at hand (although The Finals and ARC Raiders are on the Nvidia RTX branch). The point is that I am tired of being sold a game that generally looks and runs worse than its last gen or cross-gen counterparts, uses upscaling or RT as a crutch, and then charging top dollar for it. My apologies if this turned from an art style vs realism comparison to a rant about optimization as I am probably wrong or misunderstanding a few points. I get not every game is going to be Need for Speed 2015 level optimized but I just think that making games that look good and run well on modern affordable hardware should have been figured out a while ago...
I work in the industry as artist too, 21 years. I agree with almost everything you say except... "We Devs HATE GenAI" Actually a bunch of us like it lol. We just don't say so because the people who don't like it are so vocal and emotional about it. Especially the concept artists who like you say feel very threatened by it, But I think unnecessarily. They will be fine because we still need actual human made concepts. Gen Its great for ideation though, For brainstorming ref or allowing non-artists a way to convey what they're thinking of to actual concept artists. I wouldn't use it in in game assets though (and most companies wont let you anyway) but there are AI tools that actually do aid in the process by automating away tedium and allowing you to focus on the creative stuff. I'm happy for AI tools that do things like masking, batching, Uvmapping, mesh optimizations etc. It will allow us to focus on more artistic areas and to create more content than we could have before. I will say the whole AI conversation is interesting because the people I know who are most against it are usually extremely left wing socialist communist types who have been speaking for decades about this utopia where no one has to work anymore and everyone has an equal ability to create. But when it turned out that AI was potentially coming for their jobs first and not blue collar jobs, and when it started giving uneducated people the power to create art assets... Suddenly this vision isnt so desirable after all😆
It's not that simple. Greed has always existed. In the 70s & 80s we exported manufacturing to the 3rd world. We were told that cheaper products would be worth the loss of jobs. Today, cheap products aren't a choice. 1st world companies need to find a way to out-cheap China, all while paying the most in the world for labor and while dealing with the most strict environmental and other red tape. The global median income is around $5k a year, and we're feeling that equalization the hardest. I split my time in my wife's 3rd world country and their quality of life is skyrocketing.
These days it means "do it yourself in the options bRoOo" or "Just go PlAy sOeMtHing eLsE bRoOoo" They have no interest in polishing products. I see it all the time in my line of work (We'll fix it in post!) or you could just tighten up and fix it now you absolute horseradish.
@BattleCorgiTV I play KCD2 at a steady 60-72 FPS(capped it there) with maxed out settings and no DLSS turned on, while struggling to get a steady 30-40 on MH: Wilds and STALKER 2 at mid settings with DLSS on. Interesting thing about frame-gen is that it's only a thing for newer graphics cards too, ie the ones that should have zero issues with running games at the best settings, and not for those of us that have older hardware. So, that tech kinda misses the mark...
@Cr0wsMurd3r absolutely agree 100 percent. It should be looked at as a way to help future proof current gen cards for future games that tax resources more heavily due to beautiful next gen graphics, not a freakin crutch for underpaid, under talented, under caring, overworked devs lol
I hate frame gen is because when a character blinks, I'm immediately taken away from my immersion cause the character blinks like a lizard with sets of eyelids
@n@nakkipatukka123int taken and deleted my troll comment. ;) I'm ambivalent in terms of FG. On one hand it's an obvious technology that I eagerly awaited to arrive in games (it has been around for video since the early 2000's), and in some games in works very well, but in too many games the implementation isn't just right. Objects missing motion vectors is the biggest problem IMO, which leads to the warping you described, and to annoying ghosting (even of UI elements, which would be extremely easy to exclude from the FG). Also it makes uneven frame times even more visible, which makes it practically unusable in the majority of UE5 titles, which are notoriously choppy. Nevertheless it's here to stay, since it's the only reasonable way to get the motion clarity coming with really high frame rates without drastically reducing graphical fidelity. I believe the future is actually something like Lossless Scaling already does (or tries to do), where you just set a fixed target like your screen's maximum refresh rate, and the frame generation takes care to fill it up based on whatever inconsistent base frame rate it receives.
10:00 Back in the day, an experienced developer started with low geometry and little details. Had a well running system and then worked their way up to the limit of performance. The exact opposite of what you describe
yeah this whole video was thrown together lazily. i don’t think he did any research. its ironic because just like the games hes complaining abt, the overall premise of the video is sound but the execution is lazy and relies on presentation quality.
The Secret of Monkey Island aka Monkey Island 1! This 36 years old game has timeless graphics and is one of the most atmospheric games ever. I was blown away as a 7 year old boy when my neighbor showed me "the pirates game" when I pestered him for PC games. I could not really play it because I could hardly read and I didn't understand any English. But still the game fascinated me in a way that's hard to describe. It just grabbed me and took me in. Whe I saw the movie Pirates of the Caribbean for the first time I immediately thought of Monkey Island. This simple game gave me the same vibes as a big budget Hollywood movie. At the time it really felt like I participated in a pirates adventure. It's hard to believe how much atmosphere, feel and style they were able to transport with 320x200 pixels and simple MIDI sound. In my opinion the soundtrack also aged like fine wine and is still amazing. The developers really cared for their product and wanted to give you the best experience possible despite the technical limitations at the time.
@jenpachi2408 And as far as UE itself is concerned, the problem is that the engine is built from the ground up around Epic's experimental implementations of different rendering features, and deviating from these features requires devs to invest an insane amount of hours to rewrite half of the engine.
It's thanks to hiring university graduates instead of competent passionate people. They stretched the quality workers too thin between too many studios and games.
@rattlehead999nah id imagine it's poor allocation of budget People are hired into different roles, what's more likely is they just don't hire many people to specifically work on the games optimization because they feel its a waste of money.
@kitecoco3 Not just optimization, but the quality of most games, 2025 was incredibly strong, but 2020-2024 were very weak years, with only a few gems in each. Otherwise yes, the stronger the hardware gets, the less devs will optimize, it's just how software development is. But at the same time, there is a threshold which you must not cross in terms of saving time and money on optimization.
0:22 I remember those good old hyped days, I remember those promises, always waiting for a better, more realistic games. I'm 38 years old now and I honestly thought my nephew who is only 9, would be playing video games in 2026 completely indistinguishable from reality, maybe even realer than reality itself. Boy I was wrong, I was embrasaly, hilariously wrong.
I am 3 minutes in and oh the lies and exaggeration. Yeah there are lazy ass generic looking modern games, there have always been. Good modern games look amazing.
@optimusprime5686 I have to agree with you, but (I know lol, but) Companies after 2012 give or take, began to direct and pour money into shortcuts, cheap productions that looked expensive and into quantity of crappy looking games, rather than pouring money into breakthroughs and development of high quality looking games. If not because of greed, if not because of selfish, narrow, shallow and extremely short term thinking, by now we should have had games that have graphics completely indistinguishable from reality.
Welcome to the future. ROG Astral GeForce RTX™ 5090 OC Edition Gaming Graphics Card ($4215 / Amazon), maybe they messed up the 4090 ($1500/allegedly NVDIA, but their shop link from their webpage just dumps you to the store, didn't go searching- because bad web design UI)
I sincerely dislike how some developer relied so heavility on ai technologies they forgot to do their job. Those tools (in my opinion) were meant to help smaller dev team to create similiar quality games with less resources, not for AAA studio going on a cost reduction spree. What's more funny is that smaller studios seem to be more dedicated in doing things themselves and making the game actually fun.
"Which games from 10 years ago still look amazing?" Batman Arkham Knight, Death Stranding, Dying Light, Red Dead Redemption, Witcher 3 and many more. All those games tried to look as realistic as possible yet had their unique graphic styles, required pretty good PCs to run back then and still after many years anyone can play those games without feeling playing something that old or getting eye cancer.
I had to buy a new GPU specifically to run Witcher 3. Just like I needed to buy a new GPU for Oblivion. And when I say I needed to do that, I mean I couldn't even run those games on minimum settings all of a sudden. Why, it's almost like those developers released poorly optimized games and relied on newer hardware acceleration or, the tools available at the time... It's always been this way.
@f1jones544 Yeah it's kind of absurd how people go into full nostalgia mode and conveniently forget or rationalize how insanely unoptimized a lot of games were in the past. My whole first salaries of 2 months went into buying a PC to play HL2 at a bigger monitor (and even then my ATI X800Xt PE struggled occassionally). It also seems that surpringsly a lot of Gen-Z/Gen Alpha kids romanticize the "past" although they never had to try to get their hands at a Voodoo 2 accelerator just to see Unreal in it's whole glory and actually enjoy a lot of optimization (merely because consoles are so far behind PC hardware currently). The very fact that modern games like Witcher 3 (which also show signs of age if you compare them to modern titles like KCD2) are categorized as "old" just to conveniently prove a point is also ridiculous. Witcher 3 got updated and visually improved well into the 2020s ...
@leigel3Sure he made some mistakes on some of the games in this video but it still doesn't make the topic not true for most of the modern AAA games. Maybe you can make a better video!?😂
Most of why modern games looks blurry and with a lot of trails is not upscaling - it's switching to deferred rendering. Since MSAA doesn't work with it - a lot of new techniques were introduced for edge smooting. It all started with a most common - FXAA, which is basically MSAA but instead of super sampling edges it detected them in post-process filter and blured them. Later it was a bit smarter and sharper with SMAA which used depth buffer to detect edges so it didn't blur contrasty textures (FXAA blured almost everything since it relined only on a color buffer) and overall picture was a lot sharper, but it still struggled with thin objects espesially with shalow angles like electical wires or different kinds of railings, etc. So then reconstruction era began with the introduction of Temporal AA or TAA, which was actually a really clever idea: use alternating sampling points to extract more data that was possible with a static ones and merge previous rendered frames with a newly rendered once. First version were quite primitive, they didn't used motion vectors so naturally image had a lot of trails and also a lot of shimmering, since with each frame sampling point moved a little on a subpixel level. Later iteration started using motion vectors (those were already used to create a per object motion blur) to better understand were certain pixel was rendered on the previous frame and helped elliminating most of the trails and shimmering was also reduced a lot. And then TAAU was introduced, the principle was the same, but instead of rendering natively and using previous frame data to supersample the image, they lowered resolution but used previous frames to upscale it to native. Thanks underpowered 7 and 8-gen consoles!!! And only then in 2018 nvidia stepped in and decided that ML can improve that reconstruction and it actually did and by quite a margin. Of course not with the 1st version of DLSS.
they were running at approximately 480p/60 on smaller TVs than today where if you got close enough you could see the red/blue/green phosphors, it was easier to fudge and gamers were more willing to give the benefit of the doubt
@Matt-jc2ml you need less powerful hardware by using low level languages. So it might seem amazing but coders were better then, not that computers were bad. The reason we have faster machines is the bloatware of today's programs guzzling up resources. It's done on purpose to keep the hardware biz alive. If programs are tiny and use smaller amount of resources, then people won't upgrade to the latest model, causing sellers of hardware to go out of biz. Thus the reason for programs to be deliberately wasteful. It's a scam. You don't need fast computers, you just need less bloat. But to protect the hardware biz programmers waste resources on purpose by making programs big and slow. Same reason actors in hollywood are overpaid to keep the acting business expensive for filmakers. You can save money getting an unknown actor to make quality films but americans are lazy. They want to take shortcuts by getting only the well-known actors that people are familiar with rather than working with unknowns who have equal skill to the known ones and work for less money.
Back then, companies were built around the developers. It started with a group of passionate nerds who wanted to create something cool despite the limits of the hardware. They made a game first, then formed a company around it. Now it’s flipped. Companies often start without developers, then bring them in to make games aimed at impressing investors instead of gamers. It’s the difference between programming something you dreamed up and believed in versus rushing to build something someone else envisioned.
What game engines and tools did developers use on those old systems? The answer is they built everything themselves, John Carmack is famous for creating the technology required to power Doom and Quake but for a long time most studios had their own Carmack's who were laying their own foundations, you needed computer science wizards to invent the technology or there was no game. These days creating your own engine is a prohibitively enormous task, the benefits of adopting one that already exists and comes with a complete suite of plug n play tools that are compatible with the gamut of third party software used in the industry is immeasurable, but we've gone from engineers creating bespoke engines and tools for each project to studios doing what they can with mass market tech, and if recent surveys are anything to go by the people laying the current foundations of AAA games left school a few years ago, veteran engineers are being replaced by a rotating door of fresh faces who get used, abused and laid off. There's no longer a culture of innovation and redefining what's possible now there's a culture of "good enough", great art is lost behind fake frames, games are shipped incomplete and fixed later to varying degrees of success, ever increasing portions of games are outsourced at the cost of cohesion, remember the state games were being released in when developers were working from home during Covid? It was a disaster, anything that interferes with development is felt in the final product, and AAA is overflowing with interfering factors.
This conversation reminds me of Thief Dark project and Thief 2 Metal Age, the lighting and atmosphere is insane compared to the limited graphics, however the graphics and art style still had more originality put in to them; the further up in class the buildings you were robbing in a map got the more they went from straight up medieval all the way to 1800s and early 1900s, original ideas like that aren't seen in modern games imo, they had to add variations to style if the graphics weren't good enough and it really worked.
Having teeth for every citizen reminded me of Diablo 4's code that shared your inventory contents with every player in town and creating huge latency spikes.
DRM and extra launchers being the bane of gamers for nearly 30 years now. I remember how I cursed Steam back in the day. Always online being the third contender for 20 now. Thank the people from the Bay for Performance Patches.
Prioritization in Raytracing is the biggest contributor and the second contributor is failure to optimize for performance. Cyberpunk 2077 is probably one of the best examples of both. Game supports some of the best looking visuals with RT on but still looks incredible with RT turned off.
Damn I'm getting old - for me its like it hasnt even been 5 years since it released. But you're right, I will make sure to include a newer one next time :)
and one of the best-looking games of the decade. Ubisoft might be shit, but the engine they use for their AC games is fantastic. And it runs really well too (except for Unity at launch).
12:55 No, this is not the cost of upscaling. This is the cost of TAA, Temporal Anti-Aliasing that every Unreal 5 game uses nowadays. It predicts what will happen in the future in order to smoothen pixel and often fail when in motion, which causes big vaseline smearing effects. This is why it only happens when you move. Upscaling has nothing to do with it. In some games you can replace it with the older MSAA algo that requires more resources but will look better in motion. If you do it will look fine even if upscaled.
@the_true_pepol No, it's not even remotely the same thing. Anti-aliasing is a graphics technique that reduces the jagged edges of the objects and has absolutely nothing to do with frames or resolution.
@the_true_pepol Dude, the purpose of an upscaler is to make an image look sharper on higher resolution. The purpose of anti-aliasing is to make an image to look smoother, ie blurrier. Their result is OPPOSITE to each other.
> It predicts what will happen in the future in order to smoothen pixel and often fail when in motion, which causes big vaseline smearing effects. No, that's Frame Generation (or Motion Interpolation if you like). TAA involves re-using information from *previous* frames of video to enhance the current video frame. This is why it is blurry, it is accumulating information across multiple frames.
12:02 the ps4 was not getting games at 1080p 60 most of the time, usually 1080p30ish. using killzone shadow fall as a best case scenario (1st party sony, came out right at the start of the generation), it was hovering between 30 and 50 in the campaign. Far cry 4, which was an xbox 360 game, ran at 1080p30. not to mention that damn near every major release on console includes the quality/performance mode choice.
28:23 Sonic Unleashed looks great to this day! And Sonic Frontiers looked like a mess. I hope they have decided to return to that kind of art style for the next Sonic game.
Agreed. Not sure but I believe some of the devs worked on Star Wars BF1 & 2 with Frostbite engine & they look amazing still almost a decade later. Both engines have their problems but it shows that there are some devs still willing to put the hard work in to get the most out.
The yellow paint problem was something that was solved a Long time ago: Paint with light. Use light to show points of interest, and it does not look out of place.
Your solution isn't applicable in many situations. The yellow paint thing is good design, all they have to do is choose a colour that isn't yellow and keep it plausible in my opinion. The light trick is widely employed to this day, yes.
That's why I'm actually excited about games like Crimson Desert. Self-built engine and native quality focus instead of upscaling slop. Focus on creativity over what will sell. The game isn't even out and the devs already listen to the community and add/fix things that aren't liked. Really looking forward to playing the game on release.
I have to stop you on the Unreal Engine thing. It's a combination of issue when it comes to new games 1. The engine 2. Lack of documentation of the engine. I've been using it for a decade and still learning things about optimizing it. 3. Windows... Windows 11 is actually making games run worse 4. The Devs. They are not LAZY, they're inexperienced. Yes, due to UE, it seems like just make the game, but there is still a ton of optimization needed to make that game work even in Unreal or Unity that devs just don't know how to do without really studying the ins and outs of their engine. 5. Ray tracing.
Being inexperienced in your field after working in it for a decent amount of time is the definition of laziness. Any developer worth their salt who cared about the games they were making would put in the work to understand the engine they were using, same as a professional in any other field needs to quickly refine their understanding of a new tool. If a trainee doctor prescribes a new drug to someone who shouldn't have it, do we shrug and go "oh well, he's just inexperienced"? No, we tell him to get his shit together or he's fired. Accepting laziness and incompetence is how any industry starts to decline, and it absolutely shows in the state of today's games.
On the Ray Tracing point, I would not mind something like SSR w/RT Reflection fallback becoming the norm soon enough. Cubemaps are outdated for today's standards but full RT reflections are usually too heavy for modern affordable hardware. Perhaps this could be a good compromise? As an aside we don't need Path Tracing as the main things my eyes notice (from a consumer perspective) would be the Reflections and the FPS drop.
Ray tracing is a huge order of magnitude more expensive than traditional rasterization techniques. Where a reflection might have been faked with a pre-calculated cube map or sphere map in the past now they are calculating everything per pixel. With lighting it was often faked with baked light or ambient occlusion etc, but now they are going for full global illumination with ray tracing. But even with modern h/w this is still not totally a real time technique because the lighting is a accumulated over a number of frames, but if the geometry is moving during this accumulation period it can lead to noise and other artifacts. The real question is, are these techniques worth the performance cost, do they really look that much better. Do gamers even care.
No 4 is still lazy. Your the Dev. You are supposed to go into the program learn the ins and outs and put out a great product. If that's not possible fck the game engine and switch to something else. It's laziness anyway you put it.
I see a lot of people in the comments trying to make up excuses as to why they cannot achieve what was done decades ago even though they now have an abundance of tools that make the entire process for making games so much easier. Makes me laugh even more when you have recent massive break out successes of games made by solo developers or extremely small teams. 1, The Engine - some of these devs use the same engine and somehow make it work. Clair Obscur devs even mentioned watching RUclips videos to learn what how to do certain things in unreal during an award speech. What's different from them and you? 2, Lack of documentation - See above. 3, Windows - Shouldn't developers take this into account when it comes to optimisation? 4, Devs not lazy - I can understand this one. If I'm going to be doing an engine repair on a Formula 1 car, mid race, in a pit stop, I would definitely be working my arse off to get it done as fast as possible = Not lazy. But I will accept that I'm not a mechanic and also I don't work on the team who dedicate their lives to understanding every single nut and bolt in that engine bay. That other guy will get it done faster/easier. 5, Ray tracing is not mandatory. It's the developers choice to implement it.
It goes a bit deeper than devs just no optimizing, since dx 12 and Vulkan a lot of the work on shader compilation that used to be automatically are now expected to be handled by the engine developers, it was not a issue when shaders where manually written but today engines expected to use shader graphs, engine developers lagged behind quite a lot, Unreal only included a production ready solution last year, Godot had it for three years and Unity had it for six years, the big studios likely implemented solutions way before these engines, no amount of AI upscaling or frame gen will solve shader stuttering as those have to be done in the CPU and you cannot render the frame until is done unless you actually engineer around this. as for the new AA methods like TAA or other temporal methods, well developers just did not have alternatives as MSAA only works at the edges of polygons and blending alpha textures is quite expensive, this was not a problem back at the times of fixed pipelines so devs just clip them instead which fix the issue but it require a solution that goes beyond just polygons
At the same time you have the Finals and Arc Raiders. With bith games, you definitly know, its Arc Raiders or even more when you see the Finals you definitly know, its the Finals. But both are made in UE5
I think his point wasn't to say, that all UE5 Games look the same because it is UE5, but the developers not taking time and effort to make their game look distinctive.
Part of the reason older games look even worse now is because we aren’t playing them on a CRTV. The resolution and pixel count really affects the image.
Wow! Really informative content right here and explained in reasonablely simple terms... i love that ❤️👍. And now i know another reason i absolutely love wind waker lol.
I won't call this Dunning Kruger but it's not too far off that. You're mushing like 10 different concepts and complaints and observations together into vague conclusions. Misattributing things to GenAI in various places where it is not involved. The fact that frames are interpolated, for example, has nothing to do with "inferior" Art Direction. At all. 15:00ish. Those are two distinct complaints. There is no causal link between those two points. The uncanny valley stuff is downstream from where we are currently with regards to photo realism, and it's current popularity, but it's got nothing to do with generative AI at all. GenAI is not used seriously in any of these titles to generate character models much less responsible for inferior outcomes in the final assets. The character models you are complaining about being uncanny are....not the result of AI. Some of them predate the technology as it exists today. All over the shop with this video.
Lastly, AI Generation is NOT used to create assets in any meaningful workflow in the way you are claiming. Sorry but, nonsense. Certainly has nothing to do with character fidelity etc. You've got lots of good points in this video but because you have no sense of the actual workflow involved or how one technology leans into another you're connecting things like frame generation with art direction or generative AI with environment art (the two wires don't touch in the way you're claiming). It's used in pre-production and for mockups but that isn't ... inherited in actual asset creation or the like. GenerativeAI has absolutely no causal connection with...clutter in environment design. At all. What I think you imagine is that they just somehow use AI to generate layouts or something and it just isn't true at all. I think you need to separate your thinking more because one thought in this video doesn't follow from another and therefore none of it lands with someone who could possibly benefit from the critique. You can guess which industry I work in.
Yeah, this wasn't a well thought out argument, OS aren't suppose to be large. Only Windows 11 is bloated enough to compare with games, and that's because Microsoft wants it that way for some reason.
tried to watch , good points and alll that but the first 9 minutes or so ,was it really someone not letting you explain ur point or smth ???? "let me explain " "we have to go back "/" lets rewind " you will get more subs if u maintain the quality and drop uselles millenial phrases
@cristianmendoza2487 you're talking to a child. he only "hears" those things from millenials, because they're trying to talk sense into him. but in his youthful rebellion he only listens to the first words and then chooses to disregard the latter - that's why these words are marked for him as "millenial talk". children are such simple creatures.
@veysmakaha1374 ahhh that explains a lot now lol I forgot that children are in fact simple creatures. I should’ve known this since I do have kids as well
![I Opened My Own Movie Store [Retro Rewind]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ac5uAUF4pSo/mqdefault.jpg)
The only things they're optimizing nowadays is shareholder profits.
Except they aren't even doing that because no-one buys their garbage so they're going broke.
that's capitalism for you
@Anti_Woke They kind of are in a way. It's not a million miles away from the same system as a crypto pump and dump. Certain people are making absolute bank while leaving others holding the bag and destroying entire ecosystems in their wake.
Love that others are seeing this shite!! My God! Just look at install sizes for games from all console generations. I have seen and own so many 7GB games that totally buttfuck 100GB games in graphics, fun, and innovation!!
Lost Odyssey. A complete master class on optimization and disc shuffle; EVERY bit counted and was important.
@Anti_Woke It's kind of both. For example, there are certain ways to make money WITHOUT customers needing to buy your product. But it's a very deep rabbit hole.
P.S. BASED nickname, comrade ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
(don't mind me using the word "comrade", I just like this word... and I'm also Russian :p)
One thing my game development teacher told me is something that will always stick with me. "Make a game fun before you make it look pretty."
Fun? How is that going to make money for shareholders!?
Ur telling me they didn't tell you to invest into ai and sell everything for it?
@zzerxes indie games ditch the idea of shareholders
@akramabbar684 As every developer ought to. Got any good ones you recommend?
@zzerxes terraria, mindustry, pizza tower (they’re actually good, no matter how the media tries to bias it.)
Arkham Knight to this day is breathtaking
fr and It was built using a modded version of unreal engine 3
@Folgee Both Arkham Knight and some of the Mortal Kombat games are real ones for taking an aging UE3 and maxing what they could for the time
Yes! And it runs even on potatoes! 🤗
you're breathtaking!
The map and rain yes, but the characters look so ugly!!
32:17 they forgotten that because all they're worried about is making the money
28:15 The best looking game from a decade ago was "The Order 1886", and I haven't seen anything better since.
Red Dead Redemption 2.
@noname7271No, Red dead is a blurry mess compared to that. It s about art design
Drive club ❤
wait, wait, your telling me the citizens in a city builder game all had modeled teeth ?!! Im a 3d artist my mind is blown. how in the world was that missed?! I am actually flabbergasted.
It ran as well as the first one so they figured eh ! Whole time that dev they fired was laughing !
I'm a Gamedev and 3D artist, and i would never even think about the teeth, i would just make a texture
I am guessing the models were pre-fabbed assets and purchased.
@Flip_Araujo not if you had to rush something and purchased a premade model that is already rigged animated and ready to go
@MildMisanthropeMaybeMassive That´s what I thought. Still funny though!😂
The one positive of the high RAM prices we are dealing with currently is maybe it will force more developers to get more creative with graphics design again.
or kill the gaming industry as we know it💀
Soon they will start to list what remote platforms you need to run the game. Get ready for the "internet connection matters more than the local DDR3".
@christianmosquera5191it already got killed right after the x360 and ps3😢
@TheConsoleDoctorNL I would say post rdr2
its the people who build the more healthier they are, the better their games
I feel like indie games are essentially repeating the rarely seen art of ”being smart with resources” and developing games for what matters than what people may not even care for
My experience is that 95% of indies never care (more precisely can't afford) about optimization and as result perform a lot worse than AAA games in terms of fps/graphics ratio. Let's be honest, there's no way that they will be outdevelop way bigger and smarter teams. Sometimes it might happen, but overall AAA have way more potential as along as they aren't as dysfunctional as EA.
Private companies, small companies and indie companies are probably the only ones able to truly do that nowadays. All the big ones need to reach so high margins that they literally can't afford creativity.
so many of my favourite games now are indies
Developers used to optimize their games. They don't do that anymore. They just rely on various technologies like upscalers and frame generators. Because of this, they can't put nearly as much quality into the games graphically than they used to.
1:57 SILENT HILL HOMECOMING
That thing about the teeth was absolutely ridiculous. It is crazy to think that devs sophisticated enough to model teeth at that polygon count would actually even consider it for a scenario you couldn't even appreciate it in is absolutely disappointing.
Moreover that they seem to have no concept of occlusion.
The citizen models were bought assets maybe?
It's just poor programming skills. I'll argue the skill set, expertise, and devotion of development teams have gone down hill in the past 15 years. Just look at dev teams then compared to dev teams now.
@jlzimmerman75 Devs don't make 3d models, that's what 3d modelers do. Basically they forgot to add a low LOD (level-of-detail) version model of the people without teeth. Or you could say they didn't spend the time to create low LOD models for everything.
Uncanny Valley is why little kids run away from their favourite costumed characters at like, Disneyland! Even that young, their brains are telling them something is wrong and the character existing in this reality is "wrong."
The thing is, back then we had games and now we have benchmarks only.
We have floor heaters and "on" switches with fancy graphics. (Proud owner of a 3090 GPU).
NoMoreAmerica the desktop can overheat a 3090. Those things are a bit insane.
After FF7, every developer had to put out a 150 hour + Opus.
It's one thing if it's a game like Horizon where you can have fun killing the dinosaurs and see that you've spent 500 hours and aren't even halfway through the game and it's another when you just stack on uninteresting quests just to get to over 150 hours.
The Ninja Gaiden games have a playtime around 20-25 hours and they are some of the best games in graphics and story.
I'm sorry but GTA Vice City was the best in the series because it kept to telling a story. After Vice City Rockstar just started making a huge map and stacking on quests, and giving you girl friends and other diversions just to add to the time it takes to finish the game.
Red Dead Redemption 2, it is a fantastic game but it is a text book example of this.
This is precisely the same dynamic seen in the performing arts - a simple glove puppet can be highly immersive for an audience if done well and nobody ever says 'it's not realistic' (think Southpark), whereas an incredibly complex, full scale animatronic dinosaur, to use an example I've seen, can completely fail to capture the viewer because it attempts to look real and therefore any small flaw proves it is nothing of the kind and so breaks immersion.
This teaches that if you set consistent rules for the universe the story takes place in, the audience will accept those rules and a glaring lack of realism without any conscious effort, they choose instead to focus on the story and emotional content etc. However, if you set the rule of the fictional universe as "just like reality" you will always fail because any flaw will immediately ruin the illusion - and there will _always_ be a flaw because a fiction is, by default, not reality. It is therefore self defeating to attempt to recreate reality in this way because all it does is draw the audience's attention to every detail that proves otherwise.
It's like sitting at a piano, bragging about being as good as Mozart then playing a little tune - people will shake their heads and laugh whereas if you say "This is a little tune I wrote," they'll listen attentively and enjoy it.
Watching the main push of the gaming industry fail to recognise this dynamic while it has been understood for millennia in other artforms has frustrated me for years.
Yes, its the principle why cartoons, illustrations and animations work so wel.
You have time
"Two moving lines with a ball in the middle"
My guy, that is a square.
Good description of the uncanny valley. Because we all knew the square was supposed to be a ball.
That's why I'm only rocking a new-gen budget GPU so I can play mid 2010s games at ultra. Good stuff
how do i tell you they making those games also unplayable, hard to explain here there are videos about it tho
Big brain move
@luissuarez8961 what
@DelPo-f7b ruclips.net/video/g6OuVpenoMI/video.html
Agreed. I think generally avoiding newer games and instead playing those 5-10 years old isn't just better value for money, (because you avoid paying a premium for recent releases) but arguably just as much fun, because most of the bugs have been fixed, there's plenty of DLC (often included with the main game), the player community is smaller, but more stable, so potentially friendlier and more chill.
This video was pushed to my algo, I watched the whole thing thinking it was some bigger channel with tons of views only to see it has less than 1000 views. Excellent work, dude! Subscribed instantly
Thank you so much!
Same here, this man deserves wayyyy more subs
Agreed definitely should be very popular
Absolutely same here.
bro's going places!
I remember hearing a story from the Guilty Gear devs that they "broke" UE4 to make the anime cell-shaded look. That is the kind of ingenuity you don't see often.
Ingenuity costs an extra $1 and that's basically a crime because you stole from the shareholders.
Why is Zbigniew Stonoga in 4:47?
Ech szkoda gadać, szkoda szczępić ryja
a myślałem że zwariowałem ale nie tylko ja to widzę
Evolving backwards is an oxymoron.
so the main issues with graphics are these right now:
1. they don't remove clutter [both in polygons you'll NEVER see, but also in set dressing]
2. either no Focus OR too Obvious on what is the path... even by shading something with higher importance
3. the Vaseline'd taxidermy of NPC characters
4. Drag 'n Drop Asset-Flips causing Aesthetic Dissonance
5. Instagram Filter Marketing over Depth [Ubisoft's watchdogs did this BTW, gamers were not happy]
Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!
Watchdogs situation was hilariously bad, they reduced the texture quality on PC to make it look similar to the console releases of the game but a dev managed to sneak in the high quality version of the textures that were shown off in trailers for the game. You had to do some shenanigans with the game files to get the game to use the high quality textures.
Ubisoft stupidly wanted graphical parity across all platforms, they wanted the PC release to not outshine the console releases of the game, they wanted to intentionally make the PC release ugly.
1. They do! and this actually baked in modern graphics rendering pipelines.
2. Thats a matter of taste I guess.
3. Thats mainly due to temporal rendering tricks to !optimize the game! If they rendered everything in realtime even a 5090 would melt.
4. You have any idea how many assets a modern game has? millions and your saying they need to build all of that from scratch? Yeah dream on..
5. Thats the one thing I agree on but only a hand full of studios do this.
@FullFledged2010 0. kinda referencing what is said in the video more than anything, but thank you for your points.
1. true, there is occlusion culling as an example I can bring off the top of my head. though it is more about visual clarity over "realism", where there is tons of items IN-screen [that really have no reason thematically or mechanically to be there besides eyte-candy] as an issue...
though what is ALSO brought into the engines are those power hungry tools that devour performance for breakfast. which in turn seem to be used more so than anything else because with optimizations... like occlusion culling, you have to keep the performance up WHILE keeping the visuals up as well without fail.
also apparently in games like resident evil 9 [at least on the switch, though that might be some specific porting shenanigans.] with it's in-box design... it seems to run quite great... while some other games run terribly open world. though another thing that is odd... why does it seem like the requirements go up, when the graphical fidelity seems similar to or even just the same? [specifically on PC from 2010 to 2026]
2. I am referring to the yellow paint type of hinting being TOO obvious, which to some ruins the idea of a game and makes it feel like it is on rails and more movie-logic bound.
3. uhm, why does having the dead look in an NPC's face happen to be an issue of temporal anti-aliasing? at all? that is more a graphical design choice and expressive faces CAN exist in lower-resolution versions... that is what is referenced.
4. this is true... but some people might want to decimate the triangles and restructure the topology of the movie-grade assets, into low-poly game assets. takes more time, but for those of us who don't have anything close to the 5090... much appreciated. mind you I am still on a GTX 1070... might update with a steam machine later... but that will be much later.
5. I think that everyone can agree that deceptive marketing practices are bad... especially if they don't deliver on it. though yes, thank you for saying that!
Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!
I'm playing Arkham Knight right now and I swear, it might be the greatest graphical feat ever conceived. It's just so beautiful to look at and has amazing direction. The immersion is fantastic, you really do feel like you're in Gotham City.
Try playing the game on hardware for its time.
and it runs great
@592Johno It plays great on the Playstation 4, that's 2015 technology. But the PS4 version mostly avoided the technical problems of the PC version's initial release, thankfully.
Batman has a good artistic direction (don't know if you call that this way in english) this is why you feel it is incredible.
Now be honest : go at different spots, do nothing (no fast pace action) and just really look at the textures... Nothing special... It looks good because everything is dark, meaning you can "cheat" on all graphics settings, you cannot see any difference. Just put some fog, reflection etc. and that's all.
Not to mention the area itself, clearly not the same as rendering NightCity for instance...
Point is that, like in the video, you cannot compare things not related to each other. B:AC focus on atmosphere meaning you put effort in it (gameplay is really poor in comparison to CP2077) so obviously recent game cannot put the same effort in the same area otherwise all games would be unplayable (this is literally what happened before using DLSS).
I'm a 3d Artist working in the AAA industry. And I think you have a lot of things wrong.
1) Teeth in NPCs in Cities Skyline do affect performance, but not as much as the number of polygons, since those polygons were occluded by other surfaces, they aren't rendered. Still, they do create draw calls in memory and possible lighting computation that the GPU has to work. Still, my guess is that they didn't create proper LODs for them; those teeth are very similar to a basic teeth set in character modelling, when they created the base body for a NPCs, they probably forgot the teeth were there. With LODs, the engine replaces meshes with lower resolution and mipmapped textures to make things run smoothly (You probably seen this with trees/rocks in games, that suddenly look much better as you get closer to them), probably the LODs weren't properly set up, but also can count for buildings and whatever over 3d meshes they had. That also means that it doesn't matter that the community opened the 3d files and saw the teeth if the file only had the LOD0, because that level of detail is only meant to be used when the camera is very close to an object.
2) Devs aren't lazy because we don't want to make proprietary engines; that's a job and business decision. If you have a proprietary engine, mantaining said engine is entirely up to the company, that cost a lot of money, and also makes it very difficult to hire new people, because you have to train them and they might program or design in a way that is not totally compatible. The rise of engines like Unity or unreal allow programmers to know a programming language, know how to apply it, be hired anywhere and start working much faster. Also, it helps if a newcomer has to work on a previous person's code. Most programmers who arrive at a new engine made by another guy that left the company would totally trash the other guy's work, wouldn't understand a thing and probably would try to start from scratch, costing even more money. Using Unreal or Unity eliminates that, and you're sure to have support from the parent company (like Epic in the case of Unreal), and artists like myself can work more comfortably since we already know how to navigate, move, tweak and configure stuff. Making a new engine isn't always the solution, especially since studios have limited budget and time given by their parent companies.
3)Upscaling is crap, totally agree with that, but I assure you that we devs are still using a lot of tricks that would blow your mind to optimize. Most gamers don't know what "optimizing" is, and they think is a vague term to "make the game run better", but without knowing how exactly we do that. But trust me, we do. Hardware nowadays is more complicated and varied from user to user, that's why performance is so different among PCs, but Console games usually run like butter, because they're usually designed to THAT specific hardware.
The "Unreal Look" is not an Unreal problem, believe it or not. It has to do with art direction; Yoshi's Crafted World or Hi-Fi Rush are made in Unreal Engine 4. But most of the time, studios want a 'realistic' look, and Unreal excels in light, reflections and stuff. The grainy part is due to upscaling; thank Nvidia for that crap. But if you wanna make a stylized game in Unreal, you can! You can create all kinds of shaders, but Unreal is heavily made towards correct physically-based rendering texture pipelines (PBR) that means, realistic light behaviour in materials. So, if you want something different, that means extra work, and probably extra graphics load.
The reason why Nvidia and other companies push so hard into this technology is simply that progress has stagnated, graphics reached a certain plateau, and if you see CPUs f, ex, they barely improved in recent years. Same as GPUs, that basically add more VRAM, create table-sized graphics cards that barely fit in pc cases and called it day, because they can't make transistors any smaller, we reached a scale where electrons start behaving in a quantum way and that creates power leaks, too much heat and components fail, And it wouldn't be feasible for consumer technology to make computers much bigger, because that would end laptop businesses, or you would need a data center rack to fit your components. I think that when new alternatives (better alternatives, like bismuth) to silicon start mass producing, progress will make larger leaps.
4)Unreal DOES NOT do ANYTHING automatically, no matter how many times Epic says that in their flashy trailers. Lumen and Nanite need A SHITLOAD of research to properly adapt our working pipelines, and they need ANOTHER SHITLOAD of tweaking, rendering tests, and so on to be feasible.
5) Upscaling doesn't eliminate the need for optimizing, in the slightest; you're simply wrong there. Draw calls, physics and light computing, material shading calculations, texture maps loaded in memory, pathfinding, behaviour, and a really, really long etcétera take most of the computing power; polygons actually don't mean as much as years ago nowadays. Polygons are cheap. But the rest isn't, and those things aren't affected by resolution. So yes, we do still need to optimize. A lot. There are better scaling technologies than DLSS that can run a lot better, but they have their own setbacks. There's also a big problem with BRDF. You can learn about it here (don't worry, it's explained for beginners) ruclips.net/video/qZtNU-4yqtI/video.html
6)We Devs HATE GenAI, or at least the 100% of coworkers and internet friends that I have, we hate it. I used it for generating portraits for Dungeons and Dragons for my friends, but for work? I wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot stick. And 90% of people in the industry would agree. So no, we don't use it. To prototype, we use gray textures or our own libraries, and concept art is made by concept artists (those who hate genai even more than the rest). GenAI takes all the fun, interesting and enjoyable parts of our work and leaves the boring, dull, technical and unfulfilling.
7) Stock assets are used basically in prototyping. In all the productions I've been to, we create everything from scratch, buying things can save you once in a specific case, but most of the time, stock assets create more problems than offer solutions. Most of the time is easier to create an asset from scratch than to hammer-fit a bought one into your modelling/texturing/rendering pipeline. So no, wrong again.
I agree that looking for distinct artstyles is the way to go, trust me, most people in the industry do. But 100% of the time, our hands are tied by decisions above our pay grade. We devs are gamers too. We are gamers that loved games so much that we wanted to learn to make them. So we're conscious about what the public feels because we feel the same way, and we know even more bad things/bugs/glitches/fails/crap that the average gamer does. But we don't call the shots in the AAA industry. Sometimes you're lucky, and you get a director who wants to do interesting things, and sometimes the suits meddle and don't want to "experiment" with their investments. It sucks. I know.
Well, sorry for the long post, but for God's sake, research a little bit before claiming certain things like absolute truths.
First of all - you don't need to apologize for the long post, in fact I do want to thank you for the incredibly detailed answer. Really it gave me a lot of insight, especially from an actual Developer.
I'm just a frustrated gamer myself and don't claim to have as much inside knowledge as you do. The things I'm listing in the Video are purely from my point of view as the end consumer who just sees the final thing and wonders what happened.
One thing I definitely want to apologize for is if it came across that I called ALL developers lazy and like they are not talented anymore - thats not what I intended to say. When I said 'lazy design' it wasn't directed to you but at the guys who force these unoptimized, rushed deadlines on you. In fact at this point seems that we are on the same side, the gamers who get a product that feels subpar and you as a developer, which actually breaks my heart, because you want to do unique things but gets blocked by guys above your paygrade.
Regarding the technical details - thank you for making me aware of my mistakes, and I will make sure to not do them again (I'm watching the Video about the BRDFs as of typing this reply).
Thank you for taking your time and also thank you for doing the hard work behind the scenes 🤝
This reply needs so many more likes as it's exactly what people need to hear. They love to blame things which they don't have a complete understanding of, yet they don't bother to fill those holes in their knowledge to better understand the issues at hand.
Unreal Engine in its many iterations has been the workhorse of the gaming industry and can produce a near infinite amount of gameplay experiences with an unlimited amount of art styles. It's not the engines being used and it's (typically) not the developers.
The main problem with the AAA space is publishers and their investors meddling with development, pushing for specific release windows regardless of the many issues that can arise in development in an effort to meet their quarterly projections.
They are using a model that is too close to TV and Movies, static forms of media which don't have to undergo rigorous tests whenever a change is applied.
It is kind of ironic that you would mention Threat Interactive as he would personally disagree on your point of "The Unreal Look not being an Unreal Problem." Anyway, my question from a consumer's perspective is, why is realism slandered pretty hard when discussing visuals in gaming? I will concede that from a developer standpoint it is definitely easier to develop a stylized game and market it to its target audience but I do think that there is definitely potential for smaller devs to learn from past AAA to see how to achieve a better visuals/performance ratio in titles that go for realism. For example, I believe that having GT7 tonemapping or Frostbite level SSR would be a pretty big win for the industry standard engine, however I would imagine that Unreal wouldn't allow for that.
Now I understand that a 3d Artist like yourself has to deal with Unreal as that is what you have to work with at the end of the day. However, it is crazy to me (from a consumer's perspective) that AAA devs would take this engine, make next to no modifications to it, and enable every performance hogging feature under the sun while smearing the image with TSR and/or do a Randy Pitchford by telling us that "the game is unoptimized just use DLSS." I am aware that the scenario that I just outlined is far from every UE5 studio and some like Genki, Hazelight, and Embark Studios actually did a good job with the engine considering the resources at hand (although The Finals and ARC Raiders are on the Nvidia RTX branch). The point is that I am tired of being sold a game that generally looks and runs worse than its last gen or cross-gen counterparts, uses upscaling or RT as a crutch, and then charging top dollar for it.
My apologies if this turned from an art style vs realism comparison to a rant about optimization as I am probably wrong or misunderstanding a few points. I get not every game is going to be Need for Speed 2015 level optimized but I just think that making games that look good and run well on modern affordable hardware should have been figured out a while ago...
I'd love to see you put what you've said here into a video. Great points all round and it shares some vital insight into the current state of gaming.
I work in the industry as artist too, 21 years.
I agree with almost everything you say except... "We Devs HATE GenAI"
Actually a bunch of us like it lol. We just don't say so because the people who don't like it are so vocal and emotional about it. Especially the concept artists who like you say feel very threatened by it, But I think unnecessarily. They will be fine because we still need actual human made concepts.
Gen Its great for ideation though, For brainstorming ref or allowing non-artists a way to convey what they're thinking of to actual concept artists.
I wouldn't use it in in game assets though (and most companies wont let you anyway) but there are AI tools that actually do aid in the process by automating away tedium and allowing you to focus on the creative stuff.
I'm happy for AI tools that do things like masking, batching, Uvmapping, mesh optimizations etc. It will allow us to focus on more artistic areas and to create more content than we could have before.
I will say the whole AI conversation is interesting because the people I know who are most against it are usually extremely left wing socialist communist types who have been speaking for decades about this utopia where no one has to work anymore and everyone has an equal ability to create.
But when it turned out that AI was potentially coming for their jobs first and not blue collar jobs, and when it started giving uneducated people the power to create art assets... Suddenly this vision isnt so desirable after all😆
It’s the same reason quality in just about everything is going down. Profits, shareholders, money money money money money.
It's not that simple. Greed has always existed. In the 70s & 80s we exported manufacturing to the 3rd world. We were told that cheaper products would be worth the loss of jobs. Today, cheap products aren't a choice. 1st world companies need to find a way to out-cheap China, all while paying the most in the world for labor and while dealing with the most strict environmental and other red tape. The global median income is around $5k a year, and we're feeling that equalization the hardest. I split my time in my wife's 3rd world country and their quality of life is skyrocketing.
But at the same time if you look at AAA game dev companies they struggle to make money these days. Dev budgets have exploded but revenues have not.
12:02 develpers
the word Optimisation doesnt mean anything in 2026
It means “turn on DLSS and Multi frame gen!”
These days it means "do it yourself in the options bRoOo" or "Just go PlAy sOeMtHing eLsE bRoOoo"
They have no interest in polishing products. I see it all the time in my line of work (We'll fix it in post!) or you could just tighten up and fix it now you absolute horseradish.
Theirs AI to do it all for you lol
@BattleCorgiTV I play KCD2 at a steady 60-72 FPS(capped it there) with maxed out settings and no DLSS turned on, while struggling to get a steady 30-40 on MH: Wilds and STALKER 2 at mid settings with DLSS on.
Interesting thing about frame-gen is that it's only a thing for newer graphics cards too, ie the ones that should have zero issues with running games at the best settings, and not for those of us that have older hardware.
So, that tech kinda misses the mark...
@Cr0wsMurd3r absolutely agree 100 percent. It should be looked at as a way to help future proof current gen cards for future games that tax resources more heavily due to beautiful next gen graphics, not a freakin crutch for underpaid, under talented, under caring, overworked devs lol
I hate frame gen is because when a character blinks, I'm immediately taken away from my immersion cause the character blinks like a lizard with sets of eyelids
Daaamn are you running upscalers from 2019, these issues are fixed on dlss, and intelXESS
This does not happen on dlss 4 or 4.5....
sorry I meant frame generation
@n@nakkipatukka123int taken and deleted my troll comment. ;) I'm ambivalent in terms of FG. On one hand it's an obvious technology that I eagerly awaited to arrive in games (it has been around for video since the early 2000's), and in some games in works very well, but in too many games the implementation isn't just right. Objects missing motion vectors is the biggest problem IMO, which leads to the warping you described, and to annoying ghosting (even of UI elements, which would be extremely easy to exclude from the FG). Also it makes uneven frame times even more visible, which makes it practically unusable in the majority of UE5 titles, which are notoriously choppy.
Nevertheless it's here to stay, since it's the only reasonable way to get the motion clarity coming with really high frame rates without drastically reducing graphical fidelity. I believe the future is actually something like Lossless Scaling already does (or tries to do), where you just set a fixed target like your screen's maximum refresh rate, and the frame generation takes care to fill it up based on whatever inconsistent base frame rate it receives.
Legend of Zelda Windwaker, cellshading never gets old.
I wasn't keen on the aesthetic when they first revealed Wind Waker, but after I played it, it became one of my favourite Zelda games.
BoTW and TooTK use it too, no?
Just like Okami keeps feeling ageless with it's Japanese ink drawing looks.
I hate cell shading.
It's 6:30, I just woke up to go to work, and I'm watching your video while I take a dump.
Ok
cool
It really makes you wonder what the thousands of developers are even doing at AAA studios.
4:47 STONOGA
POLSKA GUROM
@zwariowanywiktor8784myślałem że się przewidziałem
zdziwko zlapalem mocne i od razu zaczalem przegladac komentarze xD
Upscaling is the piss filter of the 2020s, but on a anti consumer basis.
7:26 do you remember how Naughty Dog were showing off back then with Drake taking off his jacket(or suit) instead of there being a screen transition 😃
32:28 More like they can't notice because THEIR PCS CAN'T HANDLE IT and they have to push the graphics settings to their lowest
Great video with awesome explanation! Thank you Nick
10:00 Back in the day, an experienced developer started with low geometry and little details. Had a well running system and then worked their way up to the limit of performance. The exact opposite of what you describe
yeah this whole video was thrown together lazily. i don’t think he did any research. its ironic because just like the games hes complaining abt, the overall premise of the video is sound but the execution is lazy and relies on presentation quality.
18:47 - they forgot to add upbeat song for us to notice
The Secret of Monkey Island aka Monkey Island 1!
This 36 years old game has timeless graphics and is one of the most atmospheric games ever.
I was blown away as a 7 year old boy when my neighbor showed me "the pirates game" when I pestered him for PC games. I could not really play it because I could hardly read and I didn't understand any English. But still the game fascinated me in a way that's hard to describe. It just grabbed me and took me in.
Whe I saw the movie Pirates of the Caribbean for the first time I immediately thought of Monkey Island. This simple game gave me the same vibes as a big budget Hollywood movie. At the time it really felt like I participated in a pirates adventure.
It's hard to believe how much atmosphere, feel and style they were able to transport with 320x200 pixels and simple MIDI sound. In my opinion the soundtrack also aged like fine wine and is still amazing.
The developers really cared for their product and wanted to give you the best experience possible despite the technical limitations at the time.
Soo AI Wasn't the Problem nor was UE5 But the Devs itself! I knew it!
In a way it's a consequence of it being an easier option, easier options tend to make people lazy the easy way is always the most popular way
@jenpachi2408 And as far as UE itself is concerned, the problem is that the engine is built from the ground up around Epic's experimental implementations of different rendering features, and deviating from these features requires devs to invest an insane amount of hours to rewrite half of the engine.
It's thanks to hiring university graduates instead of competent passionate people. They stretched the quality workers too thin between too many studios and games.
@rattlehead999nah id imagine it's poor allocation of budget
People are hired into different roles, what's more likely is they just don't hire many people to specifically work on the games optimization because they feel its a waste of money.
@kitecoco3 Not just optimization, but the quality of most games, 2025 was incredibly strong, but 2020-2024 were very weak years, with only a few gems in each.
Otherwise yes, the stronger the hardware gets, the less devs will optimize, it's just how software development is. But at the same time, there is a threshold which you must not cross in terms of saving time and money on optimization.
0:22 I remember those good old hyped days, I remember those promises, always waiting for a better, more realistic games. I'm 38 years old now and I honestly thought my nephew who is only 9, would be playing video games in 2026 completely indistinguishable from reality, maybe even realer than reality itself. Boy I was wrong, I was embrasaly, hilariously wrong.
The amount of power needed to that doesn’t yet exist, but i am a little older (44) and back when i was on my genesis i thought the same thing. Lol
I am 3 minutes in and oh the lies and exaggeration. Yeah there are lazy ass generic looking modern games, there have always been. Good modern games look amazing.
@optimusprime5686 I have to agree with you, but (I know lol, but) Companies after 2012 give or take, began to direct and pour money into shortcuts, cheap productions that looked expensive and into quantity of crappy looking games, rather than pouring money into breakthroughs and development of high quality looking games. If not because of greed, if not because of selfish, narrow, shallow and extremely short term thinking, by now we should have had games that have graphics completely indistinguishable from reality.
4000 dollar for a 4090? Who pays that much? It was half as much at launch
Welcome to the future. ROG Astral GeForce RTX™ 5090 OC Edition Gaming Graphics Card ($4215 / Amazon), maybe they messed up the 4090 ($1500/allegedly NVDIA, but their shop link from their webpage just dumps you to the store, didn't go searching- because bad web design UI)
I sincerely dislike how some developer relied so heavility on ai technologies they forgot to do their job. Those tools (in my opinion) were meant to help smaller dev team to create similiar quality games with less resources, not for AAA studio going on a cost reduction spree. What's more funny is that smaller studios seem to be more dedicated in doing things themselves and making the game actually fun.
6:39 that music just brought me back dude
"Which games from 10 years ago still look amazing?" Batman Arkham Knight, Death Stranding, Dying Light, Red Dead Redemption, Witcher 3 and many more. All those games tried to look as realistic as possible yet had their unique graphic styles, required pretty good PCs to run back then and still after many years anyone can play those games without feeling playing something that old or getting eye cancer.
I had to buy a new GPU specifically to run Witcher 3. Just like I needed to buy a new GPU for Oblivion. And when I say I needed to do that, I mean I couldn't even run those games on minimum settings all of a sudden. Why, it's almost like those developers released poorly optimized games and relied on newer hardware acceleration or, the tools available at the time... It's always been this way.
@f1jones544 Oblivion is old, the preceding game in the series being Morrowind.
@f1jones544 Yeah it's kind of absurd how people go into full nostalgia mode and conveniently forget or rationalize how insanely unoptimized a lot of games were in the past. My whole first salaries of 2 months went into buying a PC to play HL2 at a bigger monitor (and even then my ATI X800Xt PE struggled occassionally). It also seems that surpringsly a lot of Gen-Z/Gen Alpha kids romanticize the "past" although they never had to try to get their hands at a Voodoo 2 accelerator just to see Unreal in it's whole glory and actually enjoy a lot of optimization (merely because consoles are so far behind PC hardware currently).
The very fact that modern games like Witcher 3 (which also show signs of age if you compare them to modern titles like KCD2) are categorized as "old" just to conveniently prove a point is also ridiculous. Witcher 3 got updated and visually improved well into the 2020s ...
This is the very reason why I prefer playing the older games from 10 years ago
The older games 10 years ago are from 20 years before that.
5:14 must’ve been the wind
Yeah, it was the wind
6:37 the music is a sign from above to play the Witcher 3 AGAIN
this made me realize a lot of stuff man. good video
9:40 KCD2 is in CryEngine, not Unreal.
Not only that., the game actually runs great even on old computers. But this loser had to create a fake video where it runs at 10 fps.
KCD2 is painfully mid woke trash.
And Cyberpunk is Red Engine. Funny how they show 3 games in a row that aren't in UE5.
@jacobcornwell4981next cyberpunk is going to be unreal though. But UE4 games nowadays run great, so hoping UE5 will be as well in the future.
@leigel3Sure he made some mistakes on some of the games in this video but it still doesn't make the topic not true for most of the modern AAA games. Maybe you can make a better video!?😂
Most of why modern games looks blurry and with a lot of trails is not upscaling - it's switching to deferred rendering. Since MSAA doesn't work with it - a lot of new techniques were introduced for edge smooting.
It all started with a most common - FXAA, which is basically MSAA but instead of super sampling edges it detected them in post-process filter and blured them.
Later it was a bit smarter and sharper with SMAA which used depth buffer to detect edges so it didn't blur contrasty textures (FXAA blured almost everything since it relined only on a color buffer) and overall picture was a lot sharper, but it still struggled with thin objects espesially with shalow angles like electical wires or different kinds of railings, etc.
So then reconstruction era began with the introduction of Temporal AA or TAA, which was actually a really clever idea: use alternating sampling points to extract more data that was possible with a static ones and merge previous rendered frames with a newly rendered once. First version were quite primitive, they didn't used motion vectors so naturally image had a lot of trails and also a lot of shimmering, since with each frame sampling point moved a little on a subpixel level.
Later iteration started using motion vectors (those were already used to create a per object motion blur) to better understand were certain pixel was rendered on the previous frame and helped elliminating most of the trails and shimmering was also reduced a lot.
And then TAAU was introduced, the principle was the same, but instead of rendering natively and using previous frame data to supersample the image, they lowered resolution but used previous frames to upscale it to native. Thanks underpowered 7 and 8-gen consoles!!!
And only then in 2018 nvidia stepped in and decided that ML can improve that reconstruction and it actually did and by quite a margin. Of course not with the 1st version of DLSS.
they were running at approximately 480p/60 on smaller TVs than today where if you got close enough you could see the red/blue/green phosphors, it was easier to fudge and gamers were more willing to give the benefit of the doubt
Also 30fps was an acceptable standard
This was an amazing video, haven't watched a video till the end in a while ❤
The enemy of art is the absence of limitation.
*looks at my damp basement in scotland* god he’s right!
mass effect background music at the start
And this is why a haven't bought AAA game in years, and why i focused more on retro games.
Last big game that was wort my money was Elden Ring.
Great video. You answered exactly what I wanted to know. Thanks!
Wow, amazing retrospection and analyze. Thank you, you open my eyes more.
1:04 NASA launched rockets on hardware less powerful than a gameboy lol
I don't believe they went to the moon. It was faked.
@UToobUsername01 even in that case, they still launched rockets on less power than the gameboy
@Matt-jc2ml they had to code in assembler that's why they could do it.
@UToobUsername01ok? They still did it. That doesn't change what I said
@Matt-jc2ml you need less powerful hardware by using low level languages. So it might seem amazing but coders were better then, not that computers were bad. The reason we have faster machines is the bloatware of today's programs guzzling up resources. It's done on purpose to keep the hardware biz alive. If programs are tiny and use smaller amount of resources, then people won't upgrade to the latest model, causing sellers of hardware to go out of biz. Thus the reason for programs to be deliberately wasteful. It's a scam. You don't need fast computers, you just need less bloat. But to protect the hardware biz programmers waste resources on purpose by making programs big and slow. Same reason actors in hollywood are overpaid to keep the acting business expensive for filmakers. You can save money getting an unknown actor to make quality films but americans are lazy. They want to take shortcuts by getting only the well-known actors that people are familiar with rather than working with unknowns who have equal skill to the known ones and work for less money.
Back then, companies were built around the developers. It started with a group of passionate nerds who wanted to create something cool despite the limits of the hardware. They made a game first, then formed a company around it. Now it’s flipped. Companies often start without developers, then bring them in to make games aimed at impressing investors instead of gamers. It’s the difference between programming something you dreamed up and believed in versus rushing to build something someone else envisioned.
What game engines and tools did developers use on those old systems? The answer is they built everything themselves, John Carmack is famous for creating the technology required to power Doom and Quake but for a long time most studios had their own Carmack's who were laying their own foundations, you needed computer science wizards to invent the technology or there was no game.
These days creating your own engine is a prohibitively enormous task, the benefits of adopting one that already exists and comes with a complete suite of plug n play tools that are compatible with the gamut of third party software used in the industry is immeasurable, but we've gone from engineers creating bespoke engines and tools for each project to studios doing what they can with mass market tech, and if recent surveys are anything to go by the people laying the current foundations of AAA games left school a few years ago, veteran engineers are being replaced by a rotating door of fresh faces who get used, abused and laid off.
There's no longer a culture of innovation and redefining what's possible now there's a culture of "good enough", great art is lost behind fake frames, games are shipped incomplete and fixed later to varying degrees of success, ever increasing portions of games are outsourced at the cost of cohesion, remember the state games were being released in when developers were working from home during Covid? It was a disaster, anything that interferes with development is felt in the final product, and AAA is overflowing with interfering factors.
Great video. Well done dude
It all peaked with GTA IV... released in 2008!
This conversation reminds me of Thief Dark project and Thief 2 Metal Age, the lighting and atmosphere is insane compared to the limited graphics, however the graphics and art style still had more originality put in to them; the further up in class the buildings you were robbing in a map got the more they went from straight up medieval all the way to 1800s and early 1900s, original ideas like that aren't seen in modern games imo, they had to add variations to style if the graphics weren't good enough and it really worked.
define insane: lacking sanity? No, you're wrong.
Having teeth for every citizen reminded me of Diablo 4's code that shared your inventory contents with every player in town and creating huge latency spikes.
Reminds me of Final Fantasy XIV with glamour system IIRC :D
DRM and extra launchers being the bane of gamers for nearly 30 years now. I remember how I cursed Steam back in the day.
Always online being the third contender for 20 now.
Thank the people from the Bay for Performance Patches.
Prioritization in Raytracing is the biggest contributor and the second contributor is failure to optimize for performance.
Cyberpunk 2077 is probably one of the best examples of both.
Game supports some of the best looking visuals with RT on but still looks incredible with RT turned off.
Lol wut Cyberpunk barely looks like an 2016 game. It flopped very badly for a reason. It's trash.
incredible? that means it's not credible.
Love the video, and special shout out for using the Deus Ex soundtrack 😊
I subscribed to your channel, for this video alone. I can't wait to watch the rest of your videos.
Funny you say modern AC yet show unity which is from 12 years ago.
Damn I'm getting old - for me its like it hasnt even been 5 years since it released.
But you're right, I will make sure to include a newer one next time :)
and one of the best-looking games of the decade. Ubisoft might be shit, but the engine they use for their AC games is fantastic. And it runs really well too (except for Unity at launch).
Bro it was not 13 years im not that old bruh it's not true stop
Ubisoft is capable generation defining games
@Jay-jb2vrwhat were the last UBI generation defining games?
12:55 No, this is not the cost of upscaling. This is the cost of TAA, Temporal Anti-Aliasing that every Unreal 5 game uses nowadays. It predicts what will happen in the future in order to smoothen pixel and often fail when in motion, which causes big vaseline smearing effects. This is why it only happens when you move. Upscaling has nothing to do with it. In some games you can replace it with the older MSAA algo that requires more resources but will look better in motion. If you do it will look fine even if upscaled.
Who cares, it's basically the same thing, TAA is just even worse
@the_true_pepol No, it's not even remotely the same thing. Anti-aliasing is a graphics technique that reduces the jagged edges of the objects and has absolutely nothing to do with frames or resolution.
@NaySan works different, result is the same. So yeah it's the same thing
@the_true_pepol Dude, the purpose of an upscaler is to make an image look sharper on higher resolution. The purpose of anti-aliasing is to make an image to look smoother, ie blurrier. Their result is OPPOSITE to each other.
> It predicts what will happen in the future in order to smoothen pixel and often fail when in motion, which causes big vaseline smearing effects.
No, that's Frame Generation (or Motion Interpolation if you like). TAA involves re-using information from *previous* frames of video to enhance the current video frame. This is why it is blurry, it is accumulating information across multiple frames.
12:02 the ps4 was not getting games at 1080p 60 most of the time, usually 1080p30ish. using killzone shadow fall as a best case scenario (1st party sony, came out right at the start of the generation), it was hovering between 30 and 50 in the campaign. Far cry 4, which was an xbox 360 game, ran at 1080p30. not to mention that damn near every major release on console includes the quality/performance mode choice.
PS4 Pro did alot more at 60, but yeah even first party games like Knack and big-box games like Skyrim ran at 30.
Great analysis! Thank you.
Great video, you've got my sub. Thanks.
I feel this video will blow up
The world will be a better place if it explodes. right on!
28:23 Sonic Unleashed looks great to this day! And Sonic Frontiers looked like a mess. I hope they have decided to return to that kind of art style for the next Sonic game.
It was a mess but I gotta say... you hit the bong and it's kinda sick haha
Embark are masters of the Unreal Engine.
Agreed. Not sure but I believe some of the devs worked on Star Wars BF1 & 2 with Frostbite engine & they look amazing still almost a decade later. Both engines have their problems but it shows that there are some devs still willing to put the hard work in to get the most out.
@mancofett7048 yes former Battlefield developer. Makes you wonder what Activision with CoD is doing with thousands of people working on the game.....
Your content is amazing man!!!!
Great video, well done, earned a sub
The yellow paint problem was something that was solved a Long time ago:
Paint with light.
Use light to show points of interest, and it does not look out of place.
Your solution isn't applicable in many situations. The yellow paint thing is good design, all they have to do is choose a colour that isn't yellow and keep it plausible in my opinion.
The light trick is widely employed to this day, yes.
@J2-pe6wzalso you can use stuff like something being messy because someone else used the passage before for example
There is a word, and it's devolving
Thumbnail= Arkham Knight, Arkham Kniht in the entire Video = .
Oh God I don’t think this anymore. RUclips is really shoving me in this echo chamber.
what? that new games are unoptimized?
Well what do you believe?
What you believe doesn't matter, it's objective reality.
Huh, what are you going on about?
I never got the "NASA computer" analogy. The US just recently upgraded from 7" floppy for nuclear weapons systems! What are you on about? 27:06
I’m not a gamer and can’t use any of this info in my life but still watched this to completion, very well made, very compelling articulation. Subbed
That's why I'm actually excited about games like Crimson Desert. Self-built engine and native quality focus instead of upscaling slop. Focus on creativity over what will sell. The game isn't even out and the devs already listen to the community and add/fix things that aren't liked. Really looking forward to playing the game on release.
I have to stop you on the Unreal Engine thing. It's a combination of issue when it comes to new games
1. The engine
2. Lack of documentation of the engine. I've been using it for a decade and still learning things about optimizing it.
3. Windows... Windows 11 is actually making games run worse
4. The Devs. They are not LAZY, they're inexperienced. Yes, due to UE, it seems like just make the game, but there is still a ton of optimization needed to make that game work even in Unreal or Unity that devs just don't know how to do without really studying the ins and outs of their engine.
5. Ray tracing.
Being inexperienced in your field after working in it for a decent amount of time is the definition of laziness. Any developer worth their salt who cared about the games they were making would put in the work to understand the engine they were using, same as a professional in any other field needs to quickly refine their understanding of a new tool. If a trainee doctor prescribes a new drug to someone who shouldn't have it, do we shrug and go "oh well, he's just inexperienced"? No, we tell him to get his shit together or he's fired. Accepting laziness and incompetence is how any industry starts to decline, and it absolutely shows in the state of today's games.
On the Ray Tracing point, I would not mind something like SSR w/RT Reflection fallback becoming the norm soon enough. Cubemaps are outdated for today's standards but full RT reflections are usually too heavy for modern affordable hardware. Perhaps this could be a good compromise? As an aside we don't need Path Tracing as the main things my eyes notice (from a consumer perspective) would be the Reflections and the FPS drop.
Ray tracing is a huge order of magnitude more expensive than traditional rasterization techniques. Where a reflection might have been faked with a pre-calculated cube map or sphere map in the past now they are calculating everything per pixel. With lighting it was often faked with baked light or ambient occlusion etc, but now they are going for full global illumination with ray tracing. But even with modern h/w this is still not totally a real time technique because the lighting is a accumulated over a number of frames, but if the geometry is moving during this accumulation period it can lead to noise and other artifacts. The real question is, are these techniques worth the performance cost, do they really look that much better. Do gamers even care.
No 4 is still lazy. Your the Dev. You are supposed to go into the program learn the ins and outs and put out a great product. If that's not possible fck the game engine and switch to something else. It's laziness anyway you put it.
I see a lot of people in the comments trying to make up excuses as to why they cannot achieve what was done decades ago even though they now have an abundance of tools that make the entire process for making games so much easier. Makes me laugh even more when you have recent massive break out successes of games made by solo developers or extremely small teams.
1, The Engine - some of these devs use the same engine and somehow make it work. Clair Obscur devs even mentioned watching RUclips videos to learn what how to do certain things in unreal during an award speech. What's different from them and you?
2, Lack of documentation - See above.
3, Windows - Shouldn't developers take this into account when it comes to optimisation?
4, Devs not lazy - I can understand this one. If I'm going to be doing an engine repair on a Formula 1 car, mid race, in a pit stop, I would definitely be working my arse off to get it done as fast as possible = Not lazy. But I will accept that I'm not a mechanic and also I don't work on the team who dedicate their lives to understanding every single nut and bolt in that engine bay. That other guy will get it done faster/easier.
5, Ray tracing is not mandatory. It's the developers choice to implement it.
It goes a bit deeper than devs just no optimizing, since dx 12 and Vulkan a lot of the work on shader compilation that used to be automatically are now expected to be handled by the engine developers, it was not a issue when shaders where manually written but today engines expected to use shader graphs, engine developers lagged behind quite a lot, Unreal only included a production ready solution last year, Godot had it for three years and Unity had it for six years, the big studios likely implemented solutions way before these engines, no amount of AI upscaling or frame gen will solve shader stuttering as those have to be done in the CPU and you cannot render the frame until is done unless you actually engineer around this.
as for the new AA methods like TAA or other temporal methods, well developers just did not have alternatives as MSAA only works at the edges of polygons and blending alpha textures is quite expensive, this was not a problem back at the times of fixed pipelines so devs just clip them instead which fix the issue but it require a solution that goes beyond just polygons
Its all about PROFIT now, not creativity.
the algorithm has blessed you. good luck, and dont lose your head
At the same time you have the Finals and Arc Raiders. With bith games, you definitly know, its Arc Raiders or even more when you see the Finals you definitly know, its the Finals. But both are made in UE5
I think his point wasn't to say, that all UE5 Games look the same because it is UE5, but the developers not taking time and effort to make their game look distinctive.
@RogerDeelaw and hes right with that, I justr wanned to point out these incredible games lol
@xerlmx "bith" and "wanned" don't mean what you think they mean.
The Unreal Maple Tree from its default asset pack is the single biggest "this is an Unreal Engine game" giveaway in the whole toolkit.
Part of the reason older games look even worse now is because we aren’t playing them on a CRTV. The resolution and pixel count really affects the image.
need for speed rivals and Titanfall 2 are my favourite realism looks
The Titanfall 2 campaign is my Half Life 3.
Wow! Really informative content right here and explained in reasonablely simple terms... i love that ❤️👍. And now i know another reason i absolutely love wind waker lol.
The Adventures of Tintin is one of the best game that Ubisoft ever created !
Technology 📈
Talent 📉
I won't call this Dunning Kruger but it's not too far off that.
You're mushing like 10 different concepts and complaints and observations together into vague conclusions. Misattributing things to GenAI in various places where it is not involved.
The fact that frames are interpolated, for example, has nothing to do with "inferior" Art Direction. At all. 15:00ish. Those are two distinct complaints. There is no causal link between those two points.
The uncanny valley stuff is downstream from where we are currently with regards to photo realism, and it's current popularity, but it's got nothing to do with generative AI at all. GenAI is not used seriously in any of these titles to generate character models much less responsible for inferior outcomes in the final assets. The character models you are complaining about being uncanny are....not the result of AI. Some of them predate the technology as it exists today.
All over the shop with this video.
Lastly, AI Generation is NOT used to create assets in any meaningful workflow in the way you are claiming. Sorry but, nonsense. Certainly has nothing to do with character fidelity etc.
You've got lots of good points in this video but because you have no sense of the actual workflow involved or how one technology leans into another you're connecting things like frame generation with art direction or generative AI with environment art (the two wires don't touch in the way you're claiming). It's used in pre-production and for mockups but that isn't ... inherited in actual asset creation or the like.
GenerativeAI has absolutely no causal connection with...clutter in environment design. At all. What I think you imagine is that they just somehow use AI to generate layouts or something and it just isn't true at all.
I think you need to separate your thinking more because one thought in this video doesn't follow from another and therefore none of it lands with someone who could possibly benefit from the critique.
You can guess which industry I work in.
All triple A games are bigger than the operating system I mean how big is win? 10-20GB
Yeah, this wasn't a well thought out argument, OS aren't suppose to be large. Only Windows 11 is bloated enough to compare with games, and that's because Microsoft wants it that way for some reason.
Games were always bigger than the OS.
wat a quality vid, hope you enjoyed the month to make it
I yearn for Tom Braider.
tried to watch , good points and alll that
but the first 9 minutes or so ,was it really someone not letting you explain ur point or smth ????
"let me explain " "we have to go back "/" lets rewind "
you will get more subs if u maintain the quality and drop uselles millenial phrases
Why you gotta hate on “millennials phrases”
@cristianmendoza2487 let me explain ..... but first.... lets rewind :D
@C@CrownSGM okay but that’s just him repeating nothing to do with millennials phrases lol
@cristianmendoza2487 you're talking to a child. he only "hears" those things from millenials, because they're trying to talk sense into him. but in his youthful rebellion he only listens to the first words and then chooses to disregard the latter - that's why these words are marked for him as "millenial talk". children are such simple creatures.
@veysmakaha1374 ahhh that explains a lot now lol I forgot that children are in fact simple creatures. I should’ve known this since I do have kids as well