I still remember the first time a character's feet lined up when they walked up stairs. Couldn't believe it lol. I wish I could remember what game it was but it was SO long ago. I do remember later being similarly impressed by MGS2 stairs

You know everyone was scanning your comment hard to see if you made any grammar mistakes.

I have never in my life seen someone refer to CRT TVs as crtvs and it's really fucking with my head lmao

Emulators have filters for that, though.

Btw, is there something similiar for wine? Not vkbasalt, because dxvk can create issues with too big address space in older games.

We peaked when we had full hd. After all what could top full high definition... fuller high definition? That would just be silly.

GPUs are getting better, but the demand from the crypto and ML AI markets mean they can just jack up the price of every new card to higher than the last so the prices have stopped dropping with each new generation.

I think even at the time we could all tell that Oblivion's faces had fallen down the mountain on the way up a couple of times.

I had Quake running with software 3D, got a 3DFX board and patched Quake to run with hardware 3D and the results just blew my mind...

Hah I get that but it was for half life 1 and I thought the graphics were amazing. Rainbow 6 rogue spear was my first PC game and I thought that was the pinacle of graphics... fuck I'm old.

Man for me it was playing Halo CE on the original Xbox, you could see the individual blades of glass on the ground texture! I was absolutely blown away haha

Honestly, a good CRT shader is a real game changer for emulation. Many emulators have the ability to add a mesh grid over the top of the image, but this is just about the worst way to try to emulate a CRT; It doesn’t actually emulate CRT pixels, and the black grid laid on top of everything simply reduces the overall image brightness.

For an example of a good CRT shader, consider looking into CRT Royale. The benefit to a shader is that it’s actually running each frame through a calculation before it reaches your screen. So it is actually able to emulate a CRT properly. Shaders can actually emulate the individual red/green/blue pixels of CRTs, emulate the bloom around white text, emulate the smearing that occurs with large color differences, etc… It really does make old games much more pleasant to look at.

We hit diminishing returns a while ago. It will be much harder to find improvements, both in terms of techniques and computation.

Consider that there is ten years between Atari Pitfall and Wolfenstein 3D, ten years between that and Metroid Prime, and ten years between that and Mass Effect 3, and then about ten years between that and now. There's definitely improvement between all those, but once past Metroid Prime, it becomes far less obvious.

We've hit the point where artistic style is more important than taking advantage of every clock cycle of the GPU.

Oh, man, I'm about to relitigate an almost 30 year old nerd argument. Here we go.

I thought Quake looked like crap.

It's brown, and blocky and chunky and in software mode at 320x200 it's barely putting together a readable, coherent picture at all. Compared to what the peak of legacy tech was at the time, which was probably Duke Nukem 3D, I thought it was a genuine step backwards.

Now, it played well, it was fast and they got a ton of mileage out of the real 3D geometry to make crazy and cool level designs. But visually? Hot garbage.

You're right that the game changer was actually 3D acceleration, and Quake did come to life when it started hitting HD resolutions of 480p or (gasp) 800p, comparable to what we were already getting in Build engine games and 2D PC games elsewhere, but the underlying assets are still very, VERY ugly. To me it all came together in Quake 2, which was clearly built for the hardware. That's when I went "well, I need one of these cards now" and went to get a Nvidia Riva.

I have no complaints about Quake's sound design, though. I can hear it in my head right now. No music, just sound effects. I don't know what that shotgun sound is taken from, but it's definitely not a shotgun and it sounds absolutely amazing.

Oh, and on the original point, I'm not super sure of "graphics can't get any better" beign a thing that I thought, but I do remember when somebody showed me a PS2 screenshot of Silent Hill 2 gameplay in a magazine I mocked them for clearly having mistaken a prerendered cutscene for real time graphics. Good times.

Curious to hear more about your stance on view distance because you felt it needed to be mentioned twice.

I can't imagine anything about increased potential being inherently bad in an of itself, but it does present more opportunities for level designers to fall short by under-utilizing the spaces.

There is a level of charm that came from the compromise forced by technical limitations which pushed a lot of detail into sky boxes and other 2D workarounds to simulate a 3D space. Even so, it was always frustrating when you became aware that those details would only ever be unavailable to explore up close.

TBF it hasn't gotten much better than that in the 22 years since. Beowolf was cool, though.

1999 Aliens vs. Predaror had:

• actual 3D waves. The mesh for the water surface was actually transformed and reacted to your character moving through it creating waves—you could slosh the whole small pools around by running around in them. No shader trickery there.
• explosion fireballs that were 3D and freaking reacted to the environment. Throw a grenade on the floor, the fireball is hemispherical. Throw in into a ventilation shaft, you get a pillar of fire shooting out from the opening. It was absolutely mind-blowing!
• physics engine that allowed physics-enabled objects to be thrown around, bouncing from the walls etc. In 1999. Bizarrely, the objects couldn't rotate so they always retained the same orientation. It saw use in level design where you could destroy the supports of some stone blocks and let them fall down to block some large pipes.
• flame thrower flame reflected from the walls. You could shoot around a corner or set yourself on fire in confined spaces with it.
• no apparent limit for texture resolution. I remember people modding it with 1k and 2k textures (originals were like 64x64 or 128x128). In 2002.

Some did and some didn't. I'm pretty salty as the FF7 remake because, to me, it feels like it's missing the heart of the original game. And the chocobo shit which I loved. I just wish they'd stop cheapening things when they remade them ffs. They just make them look nice and it feels like they put no other effort into it. Which is idiotic because they already have the whole game mapped out. Just remake it how it fucking was goddammit >:(

Meanwhile, BG3, the new Spiderman games, and the new Zelda games were (to me) fantastic. The perfect mixes of gorgeous graphics and actually solid gameplay that felt like they had some love and soul put into them.

So it's a mixed bag and at the end of the day pretty graphics can't trick people into liking games that should have been better. We complain about Skyrim being ported all over the damn place but at least they don't drop half the original content every time. That's such a sad low bar but there it is.

They looked better than in HD, but no one in their right mind thought that was peak performance. It was just better than anything we'd seen so far.

That's because it's actually an N64 screenshot, which was more powerful than the PS1.

It's Castlevania 64.