Aside from the shining beacon that is first party Sony titles, mainstream game graphics are in a worse state than they've ever been. 480i PS2 games, 240p NES games, Gameboy color games—literally everything beats this gen of broken looking visuals. Your game's lighting or polygon count is rendered irrelevant when it's simultaneously filled to the brim with visual artifacts, and/or is so blurry that it looks like someone snuck into my house and covered my TV in vegetable oil while I was sleeping.

Despite me loving their content (having practically watched every single video on their channel), I'm so incredibly disappointed to see DF offer cover for this nonsense and help perpetuate it. There's more to video game graphics than "accurate lighting", but the foundry boys are willing to give up their left kidney and a mortgage just for a crumb of "R A Y T R A C I N G".

Art direction, animation, image quality, color grading—all of these individually are just as if not more important than lighting. For instance, I don't think it's difficult to argue that a game's animation work is infinitely more consequential than its lighting system in almost every single case. Hell, HDR (color grading) by itself can transform a game's visuals with 0 performance cost. But that doesn't help sell criminally overpriced NVIDIA GPUs I guess, so no one knows about that.

This all feels especially gross considering that the soul reason ray tracing is being forced into games—in spite of the mainstream hardware being wholly premature—is because publishers know it saves a shit ton on production costs, consumers be damned. Unfortunately, DF's close relationship with many studios is what's causing them to not even entertain this criticism, equating the backlash to some kind of luddism in a recent podcast. When one of the core aspects of graphics in general—i.e. image quality—is being objectively measured to have regressed to a degree almost never seen before in video games, and the most prestigious news outlet covering video game graphics is not even addressing the issue... I don't know, that kind of sucks. I think the closest they've gotten to acknowledging the issue is saying "developers abuse FSR", which is such a non-statement. Yes, FSR 2 & 3 looks ugly in 10/10 cases no matter the internal resolution, but you're not addressing the actual issue. Why are they resorting to abusing FSR? Because the underlying tech is a complete mess, that's why.

One thing I always find really amusing is when they complain about nasty sharpening filters. Every time I hear that I say to myself "Hey Alex/Oliver/Tom, why is there sharpness being applied in the first place?". It's almost as if it's compensating for something. Can't be the smeary, eye searing TAA, can it? We ever gonna address that? No? Okay. Game devs must've been compelled by an act of God to just randomly start adding visual-breaking sharpening filters to their games right around the time TAA became mainstream. But get this: if the game in question doesn't use ray traced GI, they go on to lament the game because it's not "taking advantage of current gen tech"—literally in the same damn video. Like, huh? You just complained about the image quality like five seconds ago, and now you're encouraging the use of tech that's going to further degrade the picture? Make this make sense. Am I the crazy one? Maybe I am, who knows. Rant over.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/1mqff3e/graphics_are_worse_than_ever_before/

Gamers are noticing

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5762518&forum_id=2!#49185887)