Comment by bunderbunder
17 hours ago
I’ll admit I lost the plot a long time ago, but there’s a part of me that wonders if the main purpose behind the game engine and graphics card treadmill is to line the pockets of people who sell games engines and graphics cards. My subjective sense of the connection between technology and enjoyment as a player started to degrade about a decade back.
I think it was just studios competing with each other in the 2010s to see who could make the biggest most ambitious game worlds. Leading to ballooning dev costs and then a feedback loop of higher production costs leading to safer design decisions.
There was also a heavy emphasis on games being "cinematic" which necessitates photorealistic rendering.
AAA games have been pretty artless for a while now baring a couple exceptions.
It’s especially the “cinematic” bit that got me. It’s technically impressive, but isn’t as visually interesting as what lower budget games have been doing with less polygons and more inspiration.
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I'd it's more a convenient outcome of maximizing profits than premeditated. Not optimizing is cheaper for studios while Nvidia doesn't mind extra popularity for their DLSS feature.
Crysis 3 is over a decade old, still looks great and ran on hardware that wouldn't suffice for web browsing today. I haven't seen anything in games since then that justified a significant increase in system requirements.
What about hardware that could run crysis3 wouldn’t suffice for web browsing?
Well, it ran on my 9600GT, which I used in a desktop from 2016 and recently used that desktop with 16GB RAM for the last few weeks.
I was unable to see any site that used webgl, which is almost all games site and many charting and graphing apps.