Look back down from the summit of Mount PC Gaming in 2023 to the base camp of 2013, and you’ll see quite a view. BioShock Infinite, Battlefield 4, Metro: Last Light and their bloom-soaked ilk were objects of life-affirming beauty in their day. They were the reasons we bought new graphics cards. And now look at them! A bunch of silly old garbage. What was the point in even making them, eh, Ken Levine?
As much as time’s stripped away the lustrous sheen from 2013’s triple-As, when you look back at them what’s striking is that the way PC graphics have evolved in the intervening decade has been pretty linear. That is to say, we’ve seen a continued refinement of the same techniques developers used back then – cheaper anti-aliasing with better image quality, more efficient texture streaming, smarter procedural generation, resource-friendly HBAO.
Native resolutions crept up slowly and 4K became less of a niche, but that hasn’t fundamentally changed the way our games look today. Ray tracing and AI-powered rendering techniques like DLSS and FSR have been the only notable disruptive techs in that time, opening the door to big leaps forward in specific areas (in the case of ray tracing, that area was the neon-lit puddles that have found their way into every game since 2019, no matter how shoehorned). So although the graphics of 2023’s most expensive PC productions look significantly higher in fidelity than their forefathers did a decade ago, the really big disruptive tech breakthroughs have been few and far between. If you don’t agree, consider what 1993 looked like in PC gaming compared to 2003. Cheers for that one, polygons. The decade ahead, though, looks like a very different proposition.
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Denne historien er fra August 2023-utgaven av PC Gamer.
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BITING BACK
The tooth is out there in adventure TEETH OF GLASS
SMOKE ALARM
THE INVISIBLE SMOKE FACTORY is back in a Flash
MECH ME OVER
Move over Mario, here's mech-based platforming in ARMORED SHELL NIGHTJAR
"I like Pillars of Eternity better than Baldur's Gate III"
PILLARS OF ETERNITY deserves a bigger space in the CRPG pantheon
"A harrowing dark fantasy about hapless, bright-eyed children"
Spelunking into hell with MADE IN ABYSS: BINARY STAR FALLING INTO DARKNESS
THE IMMORTAL LOCK
A massive, meaty game in a single horrific Quake map.
NEW MANOEUVRES
Building a dedicated sim racing space in an average family house
OVERWATCH 2
Save me space girl.
REET GOOD TIME
THANK GOODNESS YOU'RE HERE is a riotous recreation of Yorkshire
THE PLUCKY SQUIRE
How many games let you make friends with a MtG card?