I always differentiate this in my head as “earliest proven example” and general industry trend and also into actual 0-improvements and diminishing returns and when I think about it it goes back so much more.
For general industry trends 2019 is the point of actual 0 improvements. Things lke CONTROL, Metro Exodus and the RE2Make look entirely indistinguishable from things released today. But then so does MGS V or even Ground Zeroes all the way back from a decade ago.
The point of diminishing returns sets in by 2007 first with Crysis though. Sure it was so much of a ressource hog nobody could run it at full fidelity but it’s laughable now and every bell and whistle added after doesn’t really do anything. Everything from 2019 could look like Crysis and that would be no difference at all. Then by 2010 the industry has basically caught up, Bad Company 2 doesn’t even look meaningfully different from 6 and Red Dead Redemption 2 manages to differentiate itself from 1 mostly by using the better part of a decade to get horse balls.
Youre totally right, it was Crysis. By the 2010s all games were basically on the same level, and we didn’t see any real qualitative leaps. Not at all coincidentally, that’s also when we started to see lo-fi indie games find mainstream success.
By 2010 we had people talking about the end of Moore’s law and indeed we only got ~100 times more transistors in top of the line graphic processors compared to 2007, should have been 512 times according to Moore’s law.
Price went up 10x or 6x when you account for CPI inflation when you compare the 8800GT to the RTX5090.
Fat chunk of that performance improvement went towards increasing display resolution. Personally I’m good with Full HD gaming on desktop but I really wouldn’t want to go back to SD or VGA resolutions.
I always differentiate this in my head as “earliest proven example” and general industry trend and also into actual 0-improvements and diminishing returns and when I think about it it goes back so much more.
For general industry trends 2019 is the point of actual 0 improvements. Things lke CONTROL, Metro Exodus and the RE2Make look entirely indistinguishable from things released today. But then so does MGS V or even Ground Zeroes all the way back from a decade ago.
The point of diminishing returns sets in by 2007 first with Crysis though. Sure it was so much of a ressource hog nobody could run it at full fidelity but it’s laughable now and every bell and whistle added after doesn’t really do anything. Everything from 2019 could look like Crysis and that would be no difference at all. Then by 2010 the industry has basically caught up, Bad Company 2 doesn’t even look meaningfully different from 6 and Red Dead Redemption 2 manages to differentiate itself from 1 mostly by using the better part of a decade to get horse balls.
Youre totally right, it was Crysis. By the 2010s all games were basically on the same level, and we didn’t see any real qualitative leaps. Not at all coincidentally, that’s also when we started to see lo-fi indie games find mainstream success.
By 2010 we had people talking about the end of Moore’s law and indeed we only got ~100 times more transistors in top of the line graphic processors compared to 2007, should have been 512 times according to Moore’s law.
Price went up 10x or 6x when you account for CPI inflation when you compare the 8800GT to the RTX5090.
Fat chunk of that performance improvement went towards increasing display resolution. Personally I’m good with Full HD gaming on desktop but I really wouldn’t want to go back to SD or VGA resolutions.