Computer graphics

Recently my thoughts are turning around the importance of computer graphics. Many people dismiss graphics quality as not so important, in a sort of counter reaction to computer game marketing hype, which tries to sell you bad game with pretty screenshots. Even in good games, players have a tendency to admire the nice graphics for about 5 minutes, and then forget about them. But by getting used to them so fast, our level of expectation is rising without us noticing it.

I just cleared out a cupboard of old PC games, some of them more than 5 years old. And when I look at the graphics of a typical game where the requirements say "Windows 95/98", they look downright unplayable to me. I downloaded the 5 year old Asherons Call yesterday (more on that another day), and the graphics are just plain ugly. I already made fun of how ugly the EQ1 characters look in comparison to EQ2 in an earlier post.

I buy a new PC every 2 years, and I always do a 3DMark benchmark on them. And those benchmark pretty much follow Moore's law. The 4 year old computer I just gave away had a score of 1100, the 2 year old one is at 2650, and this years model scores 5550. And while my computer graphics power quintupled in the last 4 years, the graphics engines also improved. As far as I can make out from the screenshots of EQ2 and WoW, hills will actually look round, and not like the rough polygons we are used to. The strange thing is that we never complained about the rough polygons, because they looked better than what we had before. But once you played in a virtual world where the trees are not just two planes in a cross setup, the old graphics look quaint. And when I review such a game with outdated graphics, I tend to downgrade it for its looks. (Currently fighting hard to see the merits of AC behind the uglyness).

Nevertheless I'm not absolutely insisting on photo-realistic 3D graphics. Graphics that achieve a more comic look, like cell-shading, are okay with me. Even pretty 2D graphics are good, even when they are old, as 2D graphics didn't undergo much of a technological change in the last couple of years. It is just the old, bad, 3D graphics that seem ugly to me now. And I wonder how this years games will look to me in 5 years. The more you approach perfection, the less room there is left for improvement, so maybe the future change will not be that obvious as the change of the last 5 years.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:01 AM Permanent Link