How and why did we become so obsessed with graphics?

[Belfaborac]

(nvidia has those as an official job position, community manager or something like that)

No point in singling out the greens; both sides have them, as well as several (maybe all) of the third party partners on both sides.

 

[Shrek]

I would even argue that too much resolution makes movies look too realistic, one sees the actors imperfections.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

Of course, but that's a question of how much thought and work has been put into making the game scalable and hence playable at all levels. It's not a point against also having mindblowing graphics at the high end in one and the same game.

If it can have both, great, but it seems like that can be a tough thing to pull off, or perhaps schedule doesn't always allow for it. Most reviews understandably don't bother testing at lower resolutions, so data at less than Ultra can be hard to come by outside of folks like RandomgaminginHD, who I like but isn't terribly rigorous. I don't play much AAA, and nearly never when new, so can't speak from experience here.

I would even argue that too much resolution makes movies look too realistic, on sees the actors imperfections.

Yeah, I remember that conversation when 4K TVs were becoming common. Some of it comes down to production and filming technique, I think. There were also complaints of "flatness" and/or soap opera effect, like the image was so sharp and saturated at 4k that depth-of-field was lost vs. 1080p.

 

[wolf]

The question is simple: why?

I've always been fascinated by 3d rendering, and love to be at the forefront trying out the latest, slickest technology and techniques in games, and even tech demo's. I suppose that's quite personal to me. I also find rendering hardware fascinating, and have likely an unhealthy obsession with GPU's in general - being the heart and soul of a gaming machine.

At a lower level, it's immersion, and that of course heavily depends on the games art style, narrative, quality of story and acting etc etc, it has to all come together, but treating my eyes to a high level of visual immersion is a driving force behind video games to me, or I'd be playing board games, or outdoor games, or something I guess. Not that I don't have hobbies outside of gaming, but yeah the visual experience, to me personally, is fairly paramount in video games.

Why are we so obsessed with graphics that we pay huge amounts of money for pretty, but soulless games and remakes of the same game that we already own?

Well I don't personally pay huge amounts for them, in fact I rarely buy a remaster/remake at all unless I was personally invested/nostalgia from the original/s / franchise. Seems like a relatively lower effort way to make money from a capitalist standpoint, new coat of paint, and resell the same content to more people.

Why do we jump at each other's throats when someone appears to have different preferences when it comes to graphical features? Why is it so hard to peacefully coexist?

There's so many iterations and ways this can happen, and a couple that I suppose bother me. I could care less what other people buy, I assume they chose wisely based on their own needs and purchase criteria, and I come quite unstuck when people seek to criticise what I bought, for myself, based on my own buying criteria, just because they wouldn't have bought it. I made the right choice for me, and other peoples choices weren't right for me, it's pretty simple.

I also come unstuck, as you'd know from our interactions, when XYZ rendering techniques come under scrutiny from people who don't/can't use them, I find that to be of little value, and weight my acceptance / value of those comments accordingly. Partly it's also because I prefer to be more positive about things overall, I'd rather offer more gentle and balanced criticism, and also offer up a positive where possible, than play into "XYZ is dogshit / useless / stupid" that seems to happen so often across the web.

Also: when did it all start and how?

For me? as early as I can remember. I literally have core memories as a young child based around graphics cards and game rendering, currently 36 years old. In relation to video gaming and game graphics, I look back on my life very fondly.

 

[AusWolf]

I also come unstuck, as you'd know from our interactions, when XYZ rendering techniques come under scrutiny from people who don't/can't use them, I find that to be of little value, and weight my acceptance / value of those comments accordingly. Partly it's also because I prefer to be more positive about things overall, I'd rather offer more gentle and balanced criticism, and also offer up a positive where possible, than play into "XYZ is dogshit / useless / stupid" that seems to happen so often across the web.

That's the other side of the coin, I guess. Like you said with GPUs, just because something works for you, it doesn't mean it works for everyone. You may find something of value that others don't, and that's fine. For example, a lot of people bashed motion blur when it was new (some still do, I suppose), but it doesn't bother me at all. We're all different, we see things differently and attach different values. This is why I don't like those Hardware Unboxed style graphical comparison videos where they try to make an objective measurement between different features by doing a pixel-deep analysis. You may describe how accurate an image is towards any initial expectation, but you can't describe how good it looks in an objective manner. These two things are not the same, not to mention "good" is a value judgement, which is subjective by nature.

Therefore, all (negative and positive) opinion is equally valid.

Other than that, I agree.

 

[Ferrum Master]

Yeah, I remember that conversation when 4K TVs were becoming common. Some of it comes down to production and filming technique, I think. There were also complaints of "flatness" and/or soap opera effect, like the image was so sharp and saturated at 4k that depth-of-field was lost vs. 1080p.

You understand it is all post production. And to this date many films are still done on Kodak Cine film. It is good up to 8K resolution.

 

[Apocalypsee]

IMO it all start, in PC gaming at least, when DirectX started to become mainstream, right about when DirectX 8 comes about with pixel and vertex shader. That's where for me graphics rendering start to become realistic and become in-focus for game devs. I already made this comparison before, just look at NOLF1 and NOLF2 differences in graphics where the latter supports DirectX 8 shader effects. Story wise people who played both will say the first one was much better and funnier than the 2nd, I tend to agree, but during this time the sequel already been pressured to released quickly thus having short development time so games comes out short and buggy (KoTOR1 and 2 comes to mind). Having DirectX 7 cards during this time (I'm using GeForce4 MX440 at this point) means you missing those effects. When I buy my first DirectX 8 card which was Radeon 9000 I spend like half an hour viewing 3DMark2001SE Nature test. It was amazing, Radeon 9000 proved not powerful enough to run some games then I buy GeForce4 Ti 4200. I noticed all the missing shader effects from games that I didn't see before, shining water effect and waves in C&C Generals, shiny larva in NOLF2 etc.

PC graphics peaked during Crysis/Metro2033 (not redux) era for me. Those two graphics engine was powered to run on PC, thus the game looks very proper on PC setup, and you know it was build with PC in mind where the settings made huge difference; low, medium and high setting made a huge impact in image quality and performance to cater vast PC hardware market. PC gaming after this is more like console port, Crysis 2 and 3 didn't have much difference in image quality difference but have massive amount of post processing that made the scene hard to render but made little difference (Crysis 2 overtessellation of simple bricks and water that underneath the map comes to mind).

I'm not buying into the remake/remaster bull. Tested Resident Evil 3 and GTA San Andreas remake/remaster both are turds. Resident Evil 3 especially they removed the iconic music makes the game bland, simplified puzzle, and removed some of the scenes. I still play original games with no mods, except for GTA series which I applied silent patch where it fixed some bugs in-game. Yes I'm all nostalgia, my avatar is Max Payne for crying out loud but if they ever released remaster/remake or whatever of it I would say hard NO. I have retro PC to play those games if they unable to play on new hardware and/or Windows. Maybe this sounds cheesy but all the blood, sweat and effort to make the original games with limited budget and technology is lost when being modernized.

 

[Deleted member 234997]

I just hate the softness of games these days, I have to downsample from something stupid like 5K.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I kinda feel like games get marketed for graphics because... The graphics are sort of what you see when being marketed a game. It's hard to market how a game feels, or go into a deep dive on a game's systems and mechanics on a 5 second YouTube or banner add.

What you can always do is show pretty picture and say "look at this picture, isn't it pretty? Don't you want this pretty shiney thing and be cool with the guys and hot to the ladies?"

99% of gamers aren't going to engage with a let's play or whatever before buying a game, they're gonna see pretty pictures and the general theme of the game and buy it if it looks good.

 

[LabRat 891]

*dawns aluminized helm*

Spoiler: Warning! Spicy opinion(s) ahead...

-Almost every 'founding' 3D accelerator company has links to the MIC.
-3D-accelerated simulations have exponentiated military and civilian training.
-"Ray-Tracing" as a graphics technology is the (literal) other side of the coin to 3D Sensing and Imaging.
-Hobbyist and Academic projects (using Wi-Fi, BT, etc.) have used 'Ray-Tracing technologies' to 3D Image, otherwise optically-occluded spaces.
-Hyper-realistic/cinematic graphics have already been used (worldwide) for Military/Intelligence propaganda and disinfo operations.

In my personal nutter 'spiracy theorist opinion:
Gaming was 'guided' this direction as a sort of mass-distributed 'crowdsourced development' effort.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

I feel the laser focus on graphics wouldn't be so bad if for instance Nvidia would show you up front in each game where they indicate a huge boost of FPS using DLSS 3, the amount of latency increase as well. Players should want to know what the total performance cost is of not only high end graphics in games, but also the use of modern GPU features. Why, obviously because they are not only locking that feature to the latest gen of GPUs, they are also charging a hell of a lot for them. It does no good to have FPS boosted up to 80+ or more if it feels like you're playing at 40 FPS.

 

[bonehead123]

Well, I have been known to obsess over a lot of things in my life, but fortunately for me, pc graphics/resolutions/FPS/refresh rates do NOT fall into that category

But as the saying goes: "Whatever floats your boat" !

So if you don't have anything else in your life to focus on or get all weepy-eyed about, well, then I feel really sorry for ya

 

[ty_ger]

I think it is partly a buy-in thing. Once you buy into something, you are invested, it becomes easy to become addicted, and it is easy for it to progress towards more and more and better and better. If you try to convince yourself that graphics don't matter, you devalue your experience and time. So you continue.

I don't think that graphics had to be the thing, but I think it was easy for graphics to become the thing. Graphics is a huge part of the experience, and audio and other peripherals have already been pretty-well perfected.

 

[AusWolf]

I think it is partly a buy-in thing. Once you buy into something, you are invested, it becomes easy to become addicted, and it is easy for it to progress towards more and more and better and better. If you try to convince yourself that graphics don't matter, you devalue your experience and time. So you continue.

I'm not saying that graphics don't matter. The question is only why it matters more than anything, and why it is a basis for arguments for some of us.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I'm not saying that graphics don't matter. The question is only why it matters more than anything, and why it is a basis for arguments for some of us.

-Because PC building.

Because unlike other forms of media like movies and music, our particular form of media is especially dependent on hardware to output a functional, useable experience.

People put a lot of money into their hardware, a lot of people on this board assemble their own PCs, they invest a bit of themselves into the machine. When that machine doesn't live up to expectations, or they do not have the finances to upgrade a machine, they can become irrationally tribal and rather than admit their machine is inadequate, will attack the game for being "poorly optimized" or that new fangled feature X "sucks and doesn't make the game look better".

Like Yoga and Veganism and owning a Truck, PC Building is a "lifestyle" and people make it part of their personality. Attack their PC and you aren't attacking an inanimate object, you're attacking them as a person.

 

[Vayra86]

-Because PC building.

Because unlike other forms of media like movies and music, our particular form of media is especially dependent on hardware to output a functional, useable experience.

People put a lot of money into their hardware, a lot of people on this board assemble their own PCs, they invest a bit of themselves into the machine. When that machine doesn't live up to expectations, or they do not have the finances to upgrade a machine, they can become irrationally tribal and rather than admit their machine is inadequate, will attack the game for being "poorly optimized" or that new fangled feature X "sucks and doesn't make the game look better".

Like Yoga and Veganism and owning a Truck, PC Building is a "lifestyle" and people make it part of their personality. Attack their PC and you aren't attacking an inanimate object, you're attacking them as a person.

Interesting perspective. I think it is definitely true for a subset of PC building enthusiasts, but honestly that subset exists everywhere, and its a subset of people characteristics more so than the hobby. There are just a lot of unpleasant people with unpleasant personality traits. Ourselves not excluded.

Also I don't see how it explains the focus on graphical output. Sure, there is a link with the hardware you have to use to get it - and I get what you're saying - 'can you run X at setting Y and resolution Z'. But then there's reality: the vast majority of games simply runs on anything, even at any resolution, just at lower FPS. Games are built for a common denominator (consoles!) and then PC quality settings are splashed on top, the advantage of running top end settings isn't that pronounced, and sometimes even counteracts good gameplay. Many gamers turn multiple post processing effects off. And not because they can't run them.

I think the hardware enthusiasts are not necessarily gaming graphics enthusiasts. Two different camps there, for sure. Hardware enthusiasts definitely take pride in their PC. Gaming graphics enthusiasts take pride in running games at top end settings.