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.

  • Kir
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    1 year ago

    This is part of the problem, not a justification. You are saying that companies such Nvidia have so much power/money, that the whole industry must spend useless efforts into making more demanding games just to make their products relevants.

    • RiikkaTheIcePrincess@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Right? “Vast wealth built on various forms of harm is good actually because sometimes rich people fund neat things that I like!” Yeah sure, tell that to somebody who just lost their house to one of the many climate-related disasters lately.

      I’m actually disgusted that “But look, a shiny! The rich are good actually! Some stupid ‘environment’ isn’t shiny cool like a videogame!” has over fifty upvotes to my one downvote. I can’t even scrape together enough sarcasm at the moment to bite at them with. Just… gross. Depressing. Ugh.

    • LanAkou@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, its too bad that that’s always true for every game and not just ~30 AAA year.

      Too bad Dave the Diver, Dredge, and Silksong will never get made 😔