It occurred to me that games considered "old" in 2015 (say, from like 2005) looked a lot worse then than games considered "old" in 2021 (games from about 2011).

I mean if you think about it, is there really even that much of a difference between the graphics of a 2015 game and a 2020 game? Sure, there are differences there if you look for them... but it's nothing like the differences between a 2005 game and a year 2000 game.

I think we are quickly approaching a point where "old" games on GOG will start to look pretty modern in terms of graphics quality, if it hasn't happened already.

And I thought it will be about new method of games enhancement by neuronet. Oh well, next time then.

Yeah, I'm going to be honest, I'm with Cadaver here; I was expecting this thread to be along the lines of a project to give Akalabeth some SVG goodness.

And honestly, that comparison isn't very relevant in my book, because I can remember being envious of the 32 bit era of sprite graphical works that we never got here in the West because everyone got obsessed that two or more triangles together formed a polygon as if that was something magical and not something even the ZX Speccy pulled off.

Wonder Project J2 has aged better graphically than most of the N64's library, and it's a shame the system sucked at pushing sprites.

Well, there's a scummVM project that allows to mod SCI Sierra games, both EGA and VGA, to have to 4X resolution backgrounds and sprites from the originals. I made these attempts with it, upscaling the backgrounds for Colone's Bequest and Dagger of Amon Ra with ESRGAN:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgsvFsTugnU&t=2s&ab_channel=TheTomimt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AujABWC3E5E&t=5s&ab_channel=TheTomimt

Dagger of Amon Ra benefits from this more, for obvious reasons. For something like Colone's Bequest, it would be better to actually re-draw the art assets.

Well. If you really, really like the colors brown and grey, 2008-2015 games must be the absolute best! XD

More on that topic on tonight's special edition of "The Real Truths of 3D Graphics": our special guest, long time 3D developer Rohn Jomero gives us previously undisclosed insight into technologies clearly ahead of their time. Are shadow volumes, or so-called "Carmak's Reverse", the work of ancient astronauts/aliens? Don't forget to tune in at 23:00 CET. Can you please say that again in front of an Nvidia marketing rep? I dare you :P.

Have a +1 for the laughs

Amazing how you all missed the point.

The point I was making is the age gap between a year 2000 game and a 2005 game is 5 years, while the age gap between a 2015 game and a 2020 game is also 5 years. But a 2000 game looked pretty bad in 2005, while a 2015 game looks just fine in 2020 (even though the age gap is is exactly the same -- still just 5 years).

So the age distinctions between games are becoming much less important.

Never heard about this game, it looks superb and for me it aged very good indeed. Thank you for the information and links, this looks promising. 4K is a bit overkill for my liking but FullHD would be more than enough for me personally.

To comment on the specific time frames - different technological goals were pursued back then. When DX9/OpenGL 2.0 came out they brought about new possibilities of exploring graphical fidelity in 3D games. When DX12/Vulkan came out, they brought about new possibilities to explore lower 3D overhead on modern hardware and ray tracing. There were few other minor things as well, but mostly only these. So essentially what you are saying is true, yet hardly surprising.

I think what you mean is that significant increases in polygon count become less noticeable in high polygon models, which is true. The comparison between the 2000/2005 and 2015/2020 games is a bit unfair though, since there was quite a progress in console generations between 2000 (late PS1 era) and 2005 (Xbox 360 release).

We've definitely been in a land of diminishing returns for a while now. When I replay stuff like Bioshock and Dishonored at super high resolutions I honestly think they look 95% as good as new releases. Especially since new releases use TAA, which looks pretty blurry a lot of the time.

+1. I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing this. A lot of 2015-2020 era games are so badly smeary I find they actually look worse than 2007-2014 era stuff whilst ending up running about 75% slower with little to show for it once the blur is factored in. At first I thought it was just Depth of Field, but it's still there in many games even after DoF has been disabled and looks awful. I'll pick the "clean" look of the late 2000's over the "50GB in size yet still looks like you smeared Vaseline all over your monitor" modern look any day. Unreal 4 Engine in particular with TAA defaulted to on (and nothing ever explained in detail in those Ultra / Epic / High presets) consistently looks more blurry than the average UE 1-3 titles used to.

I saw those videos and they look very promising, as does the project overall! The thread about it on the Scummvm forums is not yet very active, hopefully development continues.