I am probably unqualified to speak about this, as I am using an RX 550 low profile and a 768P monitor and almost never play newer titles, but I want to kickstart a discussion, so hear me out.
The push for more realistic graphics was ongoing for longer than most of us can remember, and it made sense for most of its lifespan, as anyone who looked at an older game can confirm - I am a person who has fun making fun of weird looking 3D people.
But I feel games’ graphics have reached the point of diminishing returns, AAA studios of today spend millions of dollars just to match the graphics’ level of their previous titles - often sacrificing other, more important things on the way, and that people are unnecessarily spending lots of money on electricity consuming heat generating GPUs.
I understand getting an expensive GPU for high resolution, high refresh rate gaming but for 1080P? you shouldn’t need anything more powerful than a 1080 TI for years. I think game studios should just slow down their graphical improvements, as they are unnecessary - in my opinion - and just prevent people with lower end systems from enjoying games, and who knows, maybe we will start seeing 50 watt gaming GPUs being viable and capable of running games at medium/high settings, going for cheap - even iGPUs render good graphics now.
TLDR: why pay for more and hurt the environment with higher power consumption when what we have is enough - and possibly overkill.
Note: it would be insane of me to claim that there is not a big difference between both pictures - Tomb Raider 2013 Vs Shadow of the Tomb raider 2018 - but can you really call either of them bad, especially the right picture (5 years old)?
Note 2: this is not much more that a discussion starter that is unlikely to evolve into something larger.
This describes my thoughts pretty well - in short, the chase for better graphics tends to hamstring innovation and other creative ideas; we end up playing mostly the same games but with better graphics. But I wanted to add something else, so I figured I’d use your comment as a jump-starting point.
The never ending race for better graphics that end up giving us diminishing returns, also ends up setting in us on a race of pure computing power where I feel like efficiency comes second - or not at all. It doesn’t help that poor optimization is also so common in a lot of games.
I don’t want to shill for Nvidia, but the response to the launch of the 4XXX generation was a pretty good example of that, and how a big part of the issue is also consumers. The 4060 card has great power consumption, to the point of being on par with the 1660, while performing about 2x better than it, and 1.5x better than a 2060. And to put it another way, it’s sightly better than the 3060 while using between only 60% and 70% of its power. Yet, the card was widely trashed, by both reviewers and consumers, most of which (both former and latter) never mention the efficiency of the card. A quick look up of performance videos on YouTube, will show you how people will usually just show FPS, VRAM usage, and maybe memory usage too; quite a few will only show you FPS; a surprising amount will show you pretty much anything you can think of except GPU power usage.
This is especially worrying and disheartening, when I think about how we seem to be on the verge of an energy crisis.
Most (major) games nowadays don’t look worlds better than the Witcher 3 (2015), but they still play the same as games from 2015, while requiring much better hardware with high levels of energy consumption.
And would even require Windows Eleven soon, banning older CPUs!
I agree with you. One factor I still have hope for in that angle are new handhelds. We had Switch, we had Steam Deck and its newer competitors. And they all judged by their battery life and also has small screen where gfx don’t matter as much. Players on a long roadtrip or shift intuitively chose less consumptive games over those eating the battery in a hour. I wonder if Steam can make a special category for energy-light games, just for that obvious reason. And it, in reverse, inspiring devs to make games to cater to that usercase. I can dream.