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. 🤯
- I still remember the first time a character's feet lined up when they walked up stairs. Couldn't believe it lol. I wish I could remember what game it was but it was SO long ago. I do remember later being similarly impressed by MGS2 stairs
- Going back even farther I remember my mind being blown when the rain in Ninja Gaiden on nes changed directions
- The weather effects and condensation on Samus's visor in Metroid Prime had this same feeling. It's been quite a while since such minor graphical details in a game held me in such awe.

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.
- 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.
- 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!"

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?
  
  Cathode Ray TubieVision
- Emulators have filters for that, though.
  Btw, is there something similiar for wine? Not vkbasalt, because dxvk can create issues with too big address space in older games.
- I think it depends... Definitely with 2d games, but for instance, the heads and fists in Goldeneye (N64) always looked blocky
  
  Playstation textures used a lot of dithering. Composite connections blurred them out, but they look awful on modern displays.
- Composite connections more than CRTs. An RGB SCART connection reveals so many sins.

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.
- GPUs are getting better, but the demand from the crypto and ML AI markets mean they can just jack up the price of every new card to higher than the last so the prices have stopped dropping with each new generation.
  
  Intel saving us with their gpu prices, too bad they didn't made good drivers YET
- 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.
  
  There's a saying in computer graphics: if it looks right, it is right. Meaning you shouldn't worry if the technique makes a mockary of how light actually works as long as the viewer won't notice.
  
  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.

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.
- 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.
- Man for me it was playing Halo CE on the original Xbox, you could see the individual blades of glass on the ground texture! I was absolutely blown away haha
- 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.
  
  Dayum, rogue spear, you made my heart aching from nostalgia
  
  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.
- 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

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.
- Honestly, a good CRT shader is a real game changer for emulation. Many emulators have the ability to add a mesh grid over the top of the image, but this is just about the worst way to try to emulate a CRT; It doesn’t actually emulate CRT pixels, and the black grid laid on top of everything simply reduces the overall image brightness.
  For an example of a good CRT shader, consider looking into CRT Royale. The benefit to a shader is that it’s actually running each frame through a calculation before it reaches your screen. So it is actually able to emulate a CRT properly. Shaders can actually emulate the individual red/green/blue pixels of CRTs, emulate the bloom around white text, emulate the smearing that occurs with large color differences, etc… It really does make old games much more pleasant to look at.
- We hit diminishing returns a while ago. It will be much harder to find improvements, both in terms of techniques and computation.
  Consider that there is ten years between Atari Pitfall and Wolfenstein 3D, ten years between that and Metroid Prime, and ten years between that and Mass Effect 3, and then about ten years between that and now. There's definitely improvement between all those, but once past Metroid Prime, it becomes far less obvious.
  We've hit the point where artistic style is more important than taking advantage of every clock cycle of the GPU.
- This is even earlier, the 80s, but I remember getting a not especially good game called The Halley Project for my Apple II, but I would load the game over and over again because the intro had a song with real vocals and guitar, something basically unheard of on an Apple II, or virtually any other computer at the time.
  So I loaded it. Over and over.
  And this is no different.
- Graphics 20 years from now will be incrementally better, but not mind-blowingly so. We're rapidly approaching games that are 20 years old still looking pretty decent today.
- It’s so hard to go back. Possibly impossible, to remember what it was like to see those things from that point in history.
  
  It's still happening, there's just so much of it now we're more aware of what the improvements actually are on a technical level, that we've come to expect it even before release of the lastest thing. And it's mostly disappointing now because we're chasing that same high.

At least we were happy back then

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."

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 then 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.
  
  Fyi, quakes' music and sound effects were made by Trent Reznor (nine inche nails). There were definitely nin logos in Quake 2. He described the "music" not as music but ambient sounds to make things creepy but also contributed the sound effects, presumably for the shotgun also.
  
  I appreciate what you're getting at, but I also think you forget how grey Duke 3d was.
  I agree Quake was too brown and grey, but the idea it was 'visually hot garbage' is definitely an outside take. We finally had 3d models that weren't sprites, not to mention how impressive prerendered Lightmaps were for the time.
  I will agree that GLQuake was when the graphics really were at their best.
  
  I totally disagree. I liked the design of quake a lot more than duke nukem. I liked the dark, dungeonesque aesthetic, and, even without GL particle physics, thought it was much better looking than it's predecessors. It was designed to look like huge temples to eldritch gods and it nailed that.
  Quake2 was a big improvement in PvP, however I think it had a lot of the same blockiness, the gibb was less impressive, and it suffered a lot of the same issues with color, just instead of brown/black/green/red, it was grey/green/yellow/red. Sure the polygons were smaller, and more numerous, time, and tech, had advanced. However it wasn't a huge improvement. I also preferred the sound design of the first, and not just the musical sound track, Quake 1 was much more eerie. It really wasn't until Q3 Arena that the color palate really opened up.
  Previous games looked like cardboard cut outs with higher quality pictures glued to them, in a world of plywood covered covered frames also with images glued to them. Quake was like mannequins passing though a brutalist architecture mock-up.
  However, 1996 I had and ATI Rage GPU. In 1997 I upgraded to a pent2 mmx with a voodoo that had a secondary 2d card supporting it. So I may have had a different experience.
  
  Gamecube resident evil 2002 graphics outpace some AAA games even today

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).
- Curious to hear more about your stance on view distance because you felt it needed to be mentioned twice.
  I can't imagine anything about increased potential being inherently bad in an of itself, but it does present more opportunities for level designers to fall short by under-utilizing the spaces.
  There is a level of charm that came from the compromise forced by technical limitations which pushed a lot of detail into sky boxes and other 2D workarounds to simulate a 3D space. Even so, it was always frustrating when you became aware that those details would only ever be unavailable to explore up close.
  
  Spyro the Dragon launched in 1998, a year and bit after that issue of Next Generation linked. Spurs was one of the first games to make use of varying levels of detail to expand the view distance.
  The level design of Spyro took advantage of this to encourage the player to explore the levels with Spyro’s glide jump by making interesting areas of levels in the distance more visible.
  The game received a lot of praise at the time for its graphics and gameplay.
- And even then it was amazing. Honestly, some games of the era just never lost relevancy, and I play a few myself to this day.
  (Picture - Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, 2003, the best lightsaber fighting game of all times)
- M2 EXCLUSIVE! Full specifications of 1997's hottest new 64 bit game machine
  To think what might have been. The M2 would have tough competition against the PlayStation and N64 but it would have been interesting to see what a 3DO successor would have done to the market at the time, especially if 3DO had stuck with the hardware licensing model.

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.
- TBF it hasn't gotten much better than that in the 22 years since. Beowolf was cool, though.
  
  Oh my god! I don't know anyone else besides me who liked Beowulf!

Needs to be seen on a CRT. :)
https://youtu.be/_PVTo8z3pl4

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.

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.
- And today we need ray tracing to mimic fraction of that power
  
  I'm sure there was some trickery going on behind the scenes, and it wasn't a true reflection.

~~This~~ These caused protests

Did games get any better though when the graphics got better? I remember being so hyped seeing PS3 game footage pre-2006, then after a few years it was like "oh shit, we have to go back!"
- Some did and some didn't. I'm pretty salty as the FF7 remake because, to me, it feels like it's missing the heart of the original game. And the chocobo shit which I loved. I just wish they'd stop cheapening things when they remade them ffs. They just make them look nice and it feels like they put no other effort into it. Which is idiotic because they already have the whole game mapped out. Just remake it how it fucking was goddammit >:(
  Meanwhile, BG3, the new Spiderman games, and the new Zelda games were (to me) fantastic. The perfect mixes of gorgeous graphics and actually solid gameplay that felt like they had some love and soul put into them.
  So it's a mixed bag and at the end of the day pretty graphics can't trick people into liking games that should have been better. We complain about Skyrim being ported all over the damn place but at least they don't drop half the original content every time. That's such a sad low bar but there it is.
- PS2 graphics were pretty on point. Upscale to a modern resolution, many of them still look decent now.
  Xbox 360 era we got a lot of normal maps added (so models looked a lot more complex than they were).
  PS4 added physically based rendering (ability to make parts of models look shiny without needing to separate them).
  And the new shit is ray tracing, which PS5 isn't really powerful enough to do, but honestly neither are most affordable PCs. We get nicer lighting at least, but we'll still be on the old render paths for a while yet.
  You still get improvements over time, but nothing is really going to compare to PS1 to PS2.
  
  Games have gotten prettier, no argument, but I still feel like we're playing the same games we were playing 20 years ago just with slight QOL improvements.
- I saw some arguments over the last few years. It seems that the gaming industry focused so hard on good graphics that they forgot how to make the rest of the games. Honestly some faithful re-releases with updated graphics of ancient 8 and 16 bit games, would probably sell fairly well.
  
  Sure if you consider the industry to only be AAA size games

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.
- But we also knew that those pre-rendered cutscenes took at least a week to render and didn't think the games themselves would ever look that good.
  Edit: after giving it more thought, that should instead be "dreamed of the day gameplay would look that good" because the overall trend was obvious.
  
  Toy Story came out in 1995 but nobody then expected we would have graphics like that in real time for a long time to come. There were claims made at the time comparing the graphical abilities of the PS2 and Xbox generation to films like Toy Story and they were widely derided at that time.

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.
- What game is this? I didn't know that PS1 could do phong
  
  Maybe it's not phong. Possibly gouraud? My memory is getting hazy since it's like 25 years since any of this was current and actually spoken about in those terms.
  
  It's castlevania 64, on the N64. Not a ps1 game at all. The N64 was a lot more powerful than the PS1, it was just held back by the cartridge limiting texture sizes.

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

In crt they look great though
- They looked better than in HD, but no one in their right mind thought that was peak performance. It was just better than anything we'd seen so far.
  
  Child imagination and crt picture do wonders, while i agree with you that it wasn't peak performance, my childhood memories show me that this picture was way better than current AAA titles
- Actually, the early 3D didn't look 'great' even on CRT. Particularly PS1 had affine texture mapping and a very "wobbly" low precision geometry operations, in addition to the obvious limitations of polygon count and texture resolution. It was "neat" and "novel" to see that be attempted, but it felt in some ways kind of like a step back from where 2D games had gotten by that point. Both visually and control wise (very awkward control/camera schemes were attempted back then).
  Much of the "but it looks great on CRT" applies to pretty deliberately crafted pixel art given knowledge of how NTSC or PAL feeding into a CRT behaved. The artistic design knew precisely how it was going to be presented and used that for interesting tricks in how things got blurred (e.g. faux translucency by putting stripy sprites on top of each other and letting the blur fake the translucency). In the 3D land, the textures and models were going to be distorted before presentation so they couldn't do a lot of "leaning into the CRT" in their design. Consolation being that the hardware could now actually pull off the efects they were formerly relying on the CRT blur to pull off.
  
  I'll second that... I always found PS1 3D games to be pure eye-cancer even when played on a CRT TV back in the day. N64 was good-but-not-great by comparison.
  The first time I thought I was seeing real life on the screen was NFS3 on PC, which... well, looking back, I was clearly wrong, but it's decent-looking at least. The next time was when I briefly mistook my cousins playing NFL2K on Dreamcast for a Christmas day football game back in '99, and I feel like that generation of console (Dreamcast/PS2/Gamecube/OG XBox) is about where 3D games are, graphically at least, still palatable.

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

Graphics peaked with the original Lara Croft and her triangular bosom. It's been a steady decline since then trying to make things look round. Just accept the triangles.
- that's for sure
- It's the eco friendly way to go

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.

That screen shot is very generous to ps1 graphics
- That's because it's actually an N64 screenshot, which was more powerful than the PS1.
  It's Castlevania 64.
  
  PS1: nice textures, shit resolution
  N64: shit textures, nice resolution

For me it was the water in farcry 1
- Water in morrowind and alien vs predator 1999

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.
- 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🙃

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