I truly don't know how to explain this to anyone who wasn't around then.

The moment GMan’s mouth fucking moved in Half Life when he talked. 🤯

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.

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.

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.

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.

At least we were happy back then

Someone already mentioned those graphics were optimized for old CRT TV's, but also consider the fact that it was simply the best wed seen, and it blew our minds.

Just imagine what top notch realism will be 20 years from now, assuming it's not all DLC for the same old stuff, obviously.

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."

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.

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.

Needs to be seen on a CRT. :)

https://youtu.be/_PVTo8z3pl4

Here's a decent impression of the times: http://i.imgur.com/mAUyo.jpg

But back in the day (2003-ish) we still had amazing things to look forward to:

translucency (windows were not see-through)
realtime lighting and shadows (shadows were blobs below a model)
metallic reflection, and reflections in general (though working mirrors existed since at least Duke Nukem 3D, but those were a hack; copy the room and player model and flip them around to create the effect of a mirror)
further viewing distances (though this isn't a positive, IMO)
physics (everything was static - models moved, but did not rotate (much))
inverse kinematics

It's crazy how far we've gotten, but view distances spoil everything (IMO), and graphical improvements have slowed down (not stalled, but definitely slowed down) with Ray Tracing becoming wide-spread being the last big graphical improvement (since 2018).

I remember when the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was being claimed by people as an animated movie that was so photorealistic, you wouldn't even be able to tell you were looking at animated characters.

Unreal on a Voodoo3 had fucking reflections on the walkway, and I watched that damn intro over and over.

~~This~~ These caused protests

Even back in 1999 we could tell the difference between in-game graphics and pre-rendered cutscenes. Nobody thought that the blocky model shown here was as good as it got.

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 🤣🤣🤣

That was Killer Instinct for me.

https://images.app.goo.gl/zCwdkzufsNTRqR4k8

That's got phong shading for a start. Was pretty advanced for a PS1 game. Before that each poly had it's own normals, so everything looked blockier. Think Tekken 3 vs Tekken 2.

I never thought they looked anything like realistic back then, but I did think that they looked beautiful.

In crt they look great though

My entire life when I heard someon say that it would get under my skin. The only ceiling has always been to make it so realistic, we can't tell the difference.

For me it was the water in farcry 1

At least the game is fun and functional, unlike buggy cash grab games nowadays

I remember when they started talking about "photo realistic" graphics...whatever that actually means.

Red faction series destruction mechanics be like, nobody in AAA scene even tried to mimic it