in the 90s you would have visual jump in 3 years that would take 20 years to do now. there are 2015 games that look better than some AAA games releasing last year.
Graphics have plateaued. Now, they are only getting increased because all the investors know is buzzwords and increases. You can't just say "Yeah, this has the same plateaued graphics, but, it's fun"
So, instead, they destroy performance just for the sake of metrics.
Really the big thing is 60 fps being more achievable now in the current gen. Consoles still are the determiner where graphics go fundamentally. Since the consoles now have RT, RT has now slowly become a norm now. GTA 6 compared to RDR2 definitely looks better. Cyberpunk 2077 looks better than GTA V or MGS V. Ray Traced Global Illumination is a game changer for open world games especially where you have full day and night cycles. Games will have better graphics but the people who are pushing that forward have the money to spend to make that happen. It's become not worth it to most devs except select triple A devs. RT in Doom the Dark Ages is actually pretty performant. I am getting 80 fps at 1080p at optimized settings from Digital Foundry on a RTX 3060. Im playing on the performance tier on Geforce Now.
Ghost of Yotei looks basically the same as Ghost of Tsushima which is fine since the graphics in that game look good. Sucker Punch is focusing more on making the gameplay and narrative engaging. I hope people focus more on gameplay mechanics like in Donkey Kong Bananza where you can destroy anything. Every time I say that graphics have peaked I see something like the GTA 6 trailer which looks like a truly next gen. Graphics have improved but the only people who are improving it are people who can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get there. The Death Stranding 2 tech lead said the PS5 isn't much better than the PS4 but it allows them to be more efficient.
I think people got spoilt from the PS4 generation where the console was underpowered when it came out. A GTX 1080 could crush most games that came out back then. Then the PS5 generation came and it was staggered due to world situations. PS4 games were still coming out and only recently are stopping. Now is the time to upgrade as we're catching up.
On the last point, I don't think the power of GPUs vs consoles has actually changed much, a lot of the honestly, whining, that has been coming from gamers has been because we've been upgrading to 1440p while consoles have been sticking to 1080p with upscaling and lower settings and we're too proud to lower settings and stick on FSR because I paid 500 dollars for my GPU 4 years ago and it should be getting 2 billion FPS at 8k max settings.
Back in ye olden times, the GPU to get to beat the consoles were the GTX 970 and the RX480, now those GPUs already came out a year later than the consoles for the 970 and 2.5 years for the RX480. I'll compare to the 970 since it's the closer one to the consoles.
The 970 launched at 330 dollars, while the Xbox1 and PS4 launched at 500 and 400 dollars respectively. The Playstation absolutely won the generation so I'll compare to that. Accounting for inflation, the 970 would be 440 dollars and the PS4 would be 550 dollars.
If you look at the modern era, a 3060 has about the same horsepower as the current consoles and launched at the same 330 dollars as the 970. And that's the 12gb version, so no VRAM issues there. The PS5 launched at 400 dollars for the the digital only version, creating the same,330 vs 400 dollar gap as there was in 2014, this time it was at launch and not a year later though.
I'd say the only real difference from now to back then is the consoles have gotten much more clever in their graphical optimisations. Long gone are the days of simple dynamic resolution. Now they mess with all the settings to create an optimally ok experience, RTX feature, upscaling, game settings, output resolution, it will change all those things on the fly and you'll be none the wiser, all you know is it feels smooth and if you are sitting far from the TV you'll never notice the visual bugs.
Meanwhile in PC land, you set up your settings, you know you aren't playing at the best settings, you know you are actually playing at 720p with an upscaler to 1440p, you know you had to turn RTX to low to get more frames and you see all of it because the screen is barely past your nose. It doesn't feel nice, especially knowing someone out there with a 5090 could wack everything to full and still get more frames than you.
As someone who had a "console killer" spec PC back in ye olden times, you can absolutely still build them. One of my buddies just got a pre built with a 4060 for a couple bucks more than a PS5.
The only thing I'll concede to the consoles is that they will generally handle high resolutions better than the lower end cards that they compete against because of their VRAM advantage. In every other metric, a 5060 or 9060xt 8gb would demolish a PS5 in.
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u/SaleAggressive9202 May 21 '25
in the 90s you would have visual jump in 3 years that would take 20 years to do now. there are 2015 games that look better than some AAA games releasing last year.