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r(ul)etro
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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NGL, I don't feel like the Xbox 360 or Wii are really "retro". A lot of the games still hold up decently well from a visual standpoint imo. Obsolete? Sure. Old? Sure. Retro? Nah.
I think the GameCube generation is the border of "retro". That's where you still had some games that looked old (like Animal Crossing), but you also had games that still look relatively good (like Pikmin). Imagine calling Crysis "retro". That's the same generation we're talking about.
I'm also saying this as someone who remembers the N64 fairly well.
The Xbox 360 had 512 MB of RAM that it shared between its CPU and GPU. I have 128x that amount of RAM in my PC right now. That's the same multiple as the difference between the 360 and the N64.
This is a video that came out back in 2007. He is using 2x of the highest end GPU you could buy at the time in SLI to run Crysis at 720p with an average of 27 FPS:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PSI9nvIXaF4
Meanwhile here is a demo using the highest end GPU you can buy right now to render a forest at 4K resolution and 60+ FPS (16x more pixels and more than 2x the fps, if we're keeping track):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7tp4eg0ax8
Most of the maps in Crysis were a few hundred feet across. The forest map in the video above is 4 square kilometers.
Crysis is retro my dude. It is as old now as Super Mario World was when it released.
This is a good example of how powerful hardware is now and how games that run like shit don't have much excuse other than horrible management.
The engines themselves have gotten better at pushing pixels too.
Remember all the hype about Euclideon "infinite detail" stuff back in the early 2010s? How they had a data structure that pre-sorted their voxel data in such a way that they could switch between rendering big and tiny voxels depending on the player's point of view, seamlessly and in real time?
We have that now, just with polygons instead of voxels, which actually makes it even more technically impressive since Nanite has to maintain the mesh's coherence (though I guess in some ways Nanite is a bit worse, since there's only so much it can reduce a mesh before it disappears, whereas you can just keep making voxels bigger and bigger).
The foliage you see in that forest demo is Nanite geometry.
You are right, it's all very impressive tech, but most UE5 games still suffer from TAA. Maybe at 4K+ it looks great, but at lower resolutions it's like the screen is coated in a thin layer of Vaseline. The push for realistic graphics, left graphical fidelity behind.
as SMW was when Crysis released*