The moment GMan’s mouth fucking moved in Half Life when he talked. 🤯
Tbf these games were made with crtvs in mind and crtvs blurred the edges making things look smoother. They only look so blocky nowadays because newer tvs have better resolution so you can clearly see all the blocky edges.
I have never in my life seen someone refer to CRT TVs as crtvs and it’s really fucking with my head lmao
It’s a habit I picked up from my dad lol
He always called them crtvs because he thought the “tube” part of cathode ray tube was unnecessary when using the acronym. You know it’s a tube because what else would a cathode ray be in?
I liked it better when I thought it meant Cathode Ray TubaVision
Cathode Ray TubieVision
Anymore = ever again
Any more = any further
They’re two different things.
They don’t make games that look like that anymore, even though we thought the graphics couldn’t get any more realistic back then.
Bruh, english has thousands of words with multiple means and the same spelling. You understood the meaning.
“Oh no, they’re trying to teach me about grammar! I must resist knowledge!”
You know everyone was scanning your comment hard to see if you made any grammar mistakes.
@ThirdWorldOrder @otp Right. Lol
I can tell your apart of the grammar police.
I used to have a subscription to Game Informer magazine. I very specifically remember the multi page preview for the upcoming game, Oblivion. The pictures they had in there, I swear to God, were actually pictures of trees and grass. The fidelity was unparalleled and it was the peak of what games could do. Idk why that article sticks out so much, but it felt like the top of the mountain.
Hah I get that but it was for half life 1 and I thought the graphics were amazing. Rainbow 6 rogue spear was my first PC game and I thought that was the pinacle of graphics… fuck I’m old.
For me it was reading in Playstation Magazine that there were melting ice cubes in the then upcoming Metal Gear Solid 2. I’m not even sure PS2 had been released yet at the time, so I was just awe struck thinking wow it’s getting so powerful and detailed that even ice cubes in a sink are accounted for.
Dayum, rogue spear, you made my heart aching from nostalgia
If you want a real nostalgia kick go here:
https://youtu.be/ZiSTywA6fHY?si=6mGUbtMeqV4OG_vC
I remember the game disc doubled as a sound track of you put it in a CD player.
I think even at the time we could all tell that Oblivion’s faces had fallen down the mountain on the way up a couple of times.
I had Quake running with software 3D, got a 3DFX board and patched Quake to run with hardware 3D and the results just blew my mind…
I remember upgrading to a voodoo 3dfx card around the time transparent water was possible in Quake. The graphics blew me away and the ability to see players in the water gave a ridiculous advantage.
I remember the graphics “blue” me away too - I mean that lovingly. That the graphics colours looked much cooler compared to on the Riva TNT (actually this is my memory of Quake 2 (particularly Q2DM1),).
I’m still torn over which look I prefer.
I can relate, but by the time Oblivion came out I was already starting to get jaded about graphical fidelity. What I can tell you is that I ogled over a similar preview for Morrowind, and actually built my first PC specifically targeting the recommended specs to run it in all its glorious glory!
Tale as old as time I suppose
Christmas of probably 98 or 99, my older brother gave my younger brother and I his PlayStation. He had Final Fantasy VII, and that was probably when I popped my graphics cherry. I was astounded when I went back to play it years later.
And then you look at it again now and realize the truth
Didn’t get the “graphics can’t get any better” idea, however, when Quake came out, and we turned on GL graphics, it really hit me that eventually graphics could, eventually, be actually realistic. Like, it is hard to explain to people born after this era the INSANE leap forward Quake was.
Oh, man, I’m about to relitigate an almost 30 year old nerd argument. Here we go.
I thought Quake looked like crap.
It’s brown, and blocky and chunky and in software mode at 320x200 it’s barely putting together a readable, coherent picture at all. Compared to what the peak of legacy tech was at the time, which was probably Duke Nukem 3D, I thought it was a genuine step backwards.
Now, it played well, it was fast and they got a ton of mileage out of the real 3D geometry to make crazy and cool level designs. But visually? Hot garbage.
You’re right that the game changer was actually 3D acceleration, and Quake did come to life when it started hitting HD resolutions of 480p or (gasp) 800p, comparable to what we were already getting in Build engine games and 2D PC games elsewhere, but the underlying assets are still very, VERY ugly. To me it all came together in Quake 2, which was clearly built for the hardware. That’s when I went “well, I need one of these cards now” and went to get a Nvidia Riva.
I have no complaints about Quake’s sound design, though. I can hear it in my head right now. No music, just sound effects. I don’t know what that shotgun sound is taken from, but it’s definitely not a shotgun and it sounds absolutely amazing.
Oh, and on the original point, I’m not super sure of “graphics can’t get any better” beign a thing that I thought, but I do remember when somebody showed me a PS2 screenshot of Silent Hill 2 gameplay in a magazine I mocked them for clearly having mistaken a prerendered cutscene for real time graphics. Good times.
I will agree with you. Quake came out and really stretched the hardware of the time.
I can remember timedemos on a 486/80-- a slow machine for the time, but one that would not be absurd for an ordinary home user- and it was pulling less than 1 frame per second, on a machine where Heretic was playable and had a richer, more exciting world. I could see, yes, the enemies are actually made of polygons instead of scaling sprites, but you gave up so much else for it.
I wonder if multiplayer, even more than the “true 3D” is what gave it the sticking power. The lack of story and olive drab level design didn’t matter there as much.
I think long term, absolutely. At the time, though, very few people were playing online, and a lot of the praise heaped on Quake was for the single player game and the visuals, which I never got.
I mean, I was on a Pentium 133, so I could play it pretty much as intended, I just thought it looked ugly. At that point in software mode I didn’t find it looked any better than Magic Carpet, which had stuff like animated waves and water reflections, and you could make a 3D volcano come out of the ground in real time. It’s pretty nuts how far the 3D characters took it.
Side note: Magic Carpet is a technological marvel and we don’t talk about it enough. Peak non-accelerated 3D environments ever, right there.
For me it wasn’t a video game but adjacent - I saw Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in 2001 and thought “well, that’s it, computer graphics have achieved photorealism and nothing could possibly ever be better.”
Needs to be seen on a CRT. :)
Unreal on a Voodoo3 had fucking reflections on the walkway, and I watched that damn intro over and over.
1999 Aliens vs. Predaror had:
- actual 3D waves. The mesh for the water surface was actually transformed and reacted to your character moving through it creating waves—you could slosh the whole small pools around by running around in them. No shader trickery there.
- explosion fireballs that were 3D and freaking reacted to the environment. Throw a grenade on the floor, the fireball is hemispherical. Throw in into a ventilation shaft, you get a pillar of fire shooting out from the opening. It was absolutely mind-blowing!
- physics engine that allowed physics-enabled objects to be thrown around, bouncing from the walls etc. In 1999. Bizarrely, the objects couldn’t rotate so they always retained the same orientation. It saw use in level design where you could destroy the supports of some stone blocks and let them fall down to block some large pipes.
- flame thrower flame reflected from the walls. You could shoot around a corner or set yourself on fire in confined spaces with it.
- no apparent limit for texture resolution. I remember people modding it with 1k and 2k textures (originals were like 64x64 or 128x128). In 2002.
Because we were stuck on “how did they put a whole world in the TV?!” And hadn’t gotten to “but why they triangle?”
3d was huge, it didn’t matter that it was ugly.
It is my opinion that we reached peak graphics 6 or 7 years ago when GTX1080 was king. Why?
- Games from that era look gorgeous (eg Shadow of Tomb Raider), yet were well optimized to run high/ultra at FHD on RX570.
- We didn’t need to rely on fakery like DLSS and frame generation to get playable frame rates. If anything, people used to supersample for the ultimate picture quality. Even upping the rendering scale to 1.25 made everything so crisp.
- MSAA and SMAA antialiasing look better, but somehow even TAA from that era doesn’t seem as blurry. Today, might as well use FXAA.
Graphics today seem ass-backward to me: render at 60…70% scale to have good framerates, FX are often rendered at even lower resolution, slap on overly blurry TAA to hide the jaggies, then use some upsample trickery to get to the native resolution. And it’s still blurry, so squirt some sharpening and noise on top to create an illusion of detail. And still runs like crap, so throw in frame interpolation to get the illusion of higher frame rate.
I think it’s high time we should be able to run non-raytracing graphics at 4k native and raytracing at 2.5k native on 500€ MSRP GPU-s with no trickery involved.
We peaked when we had full hd. After all what could top full high definition… fuller high definition? That would just be silly.
- We didn’t need to rely on fakery like DLSS and frame generation to get playable frame rates.
If truly believe what you wrote, then you should never look into the details of how a game world is rendered. It’s fakery stacked upon fakery that somehow looks great. If anything, the current move of ray tracing with upscaling is less fakery than what was before.
Sure, all graphics is about creating an illusion.
But there’s a stark difference between optimization like culling, occlusion planes, LOD-s, half-res rendering of costly FX (like AO) and using a crutch like lowering the rendering resolution of the whole frame to try and make up for bad optimization or crap hardware. DLSS has it’s place for 150…200€ entry-level GPU-s trying to drive a 2.5k monitor, not 700€ “midrange” cards.
But there’s a stark difference between optimization like culling, occlusion planes, LOD-s, half-res rendering of costly FX (like AO)
and using a crutch like lowering the rendering resolution of the whole frame to try and make up for bad optimization or crap hardware.There is not a stark difference if you were to describe the techniques objectively and not twist it to what you feel they’re like.
There are so many steps in the render pipeline where native resolution isn’t used. Yet I don’t here the crowd complaining about shadow map size or how reflections are half res. Upscaling is just another tool that allows us to create better looking frames at playable refresh rates. Compare Alan Wake or Avatar with DLSS with any other game without DLSS and they will still come out on top.
DLSS has it’s place for 150…200€ entry-level GPU-s trying to drive a 2.5k monitor, not 700€ “midrange” cards.
Just because you’re unhappy with Nvidia’s pricing strategy doesn’t mean you should slander new render techniques. You’re mixing two different topics.
That was Killer Instinct for me.
For me it was the water in farcry 1
I never thought they looked anything like realistic back then, but I did think that they looked beautiful.
I was little when the OG Ace Combat game came out on the PS1 right? Polygonal jet engines & everything lol
Until i was like 11, whenever i saw real pictures of actual aircraft that were in the game i thought they were fake because their engines weren’t polygonal enough 🤣🤣🤣
I remember when they started talking about “photo realistic” graphics…whatever that actually means.
In flight sim world “photo realistic” meant actual aerophotos as textures for the ground.
Looked passable…
…From 30000 ft altitude. From 1000 ft it was laughably horrible🙃
