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NGL, I don't feel like the Xbox 360 or Wii are really "retro". A lot of the games still hold up decently well from a visual standpoint imo. Obsolete? Sure. Old? Sure. Retro? Nah.
I think the GameCube generation is the border of "retro". That's where you still had some games that looked old (like Animal Crossing), but you also had games that still look relatively good (like Pikmin). Imagine calling Crysis "retro". That's the same generation we're talking about.
I'm also saying this as someone who remembers the N64 fairly well.
I mean, the 360 can run GTA 5...
And skyrim! Anything retro can't do that
Yeah Skyrim was only released 14 years ago! Wait-… wait, oh no 👴 ⏰
The Xbox 360 had 512 MB of RAM that it shared between its CPU and GPU. I have 128x that amount of RAM in my PC right now. That's the same multiple as the difference between the 360 and the N64.
Imagine calling Crysis “retro”.
This is a video that came out back in 2007. He is using 2x of the highest end GPU you could buy at the time in SLI to run Crysis at 720p with an average of 27 FPS:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PSI9nvIXaF4
Meanwhile here is a demo using the highest end GPU you can buy right now to render a forest at 4K resolution and 60+ FPS (16x more pixels and more than 2x the fps, if we're keeping track):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7tp4eg0ax8
Most of the maps in Crysis were a few hundred feet across. The forest map in the video above is 4 square kilometers.
Crysis is retro my dude. It is as old now as Super Mario World was when it released.
This is a good example of how powerful hardware is now and how games that run like shit don't have much excuse other than horrible management.
The engines themselves have gotten better at pushing pixels too.
Remember all the hype about Euclideon "infinite detail" stuff back in the early 2010s? How they had a data structure that pre-sorted their voxel data in such a way that they could switch between rendering big and tiny voxels depending on the player's point of view, seamlessly and in real time?
We have that now, just with polygons instead of voxels, which actually makes it even more technically impressive since Nanite has to maintain the mesh's coherence (though I guess in some ways Nanite is a bit worse, since there's only so much it can reduce a mesh before it disappears, whereas you can just keep making voxels bigger and bigger).
This is one of the things that makes the forest demo above possible (if you look at the asset on FAB you can see they list Nanite as a requirement).
You are right, it's all very impressive tech, but most UE5 games still suffer from TAA. Maybe at 4K+ it looks great, but at lower resolutions it's like the screen is coated in a thin layer of Vaseline. The push for realistic graphics, left graphical fidelity behind.
as SMW was when Crysis released*
Xbox 360 is 20 years old as of Nov 2025.
some games that looked old (like Animal Crossing)
There's a good reason for that one: the first animal crossing game was originally made for Nintendo 64, though that version was only released in Japan. GameCube got a port of it and that port (plus some extra features) is what released in English.
Yes, it's like they now are the "retro consoles" no matter their age, no other will enter that realm.
The golden age of sorts.
Sorry my dudes, the xbox 360 was also part of my childhood
Nah, no copium here. It's mainly just an observation about how "retro" tends to be a couple generations behind whatever the current generation is, and in the past, that's been very obvious on the basis of graphics capabilities. However, while we have a lot of fancy new rendering tricks and significantly more powerful hardware, most Xbox 360 games still hold up decently well. As such, imo, Xbox 360 will become "retro" if/when VR takes off or a brand-new rendering technique (like gaussian splatting) becomes commonplace. I think that's what it'd take for me to see it as "retro".
i feel like we have the terms vintage for REALLY old stuff, retro for quite old things, and then there's a term missing for stuff that's from ~1990-2005-ish, which is what the xbox 360 and wii fall into.
you can associate the periods roughly with materials: vintage is solid wood and steel, retro is thin wood/wood veneer and thick beige plastic, and the new category is thin black/white plastic
~1990-2005-ish
1990: Mega Drive, SNES, Neo Geo
1994: Sega Saturn, Playstation
1996: N64
1998: Dreamcast
2000: PS2
2001: GameCube, Xbox
2005: Xbox 360
2006: PS3, WiiThose are all consoles normally considered retro, except for maybe that last gen. I think the era that's missing a term is 2005-2015, but there's actually not a whole lot happening in those years. PS4 and Xbox One? The age of cheap gaming PCs?