4 decades of graphics

[Matty]

Greetings for reference....evolution of game graphics...4 posts below.

First 1980:

[Matty]

1990

[Matty]

2000

[Matty]

2010s

[Matty]

2020s or current

[MikeHart]

I liked the 80s and a bit of the 90s the best. Why? Because the Art left room for your own imagination. These days it is like watching movies. No imagination needed.

[Naughty Alien]

I liked the 80s and a bit of the 90s the best. Why? Because the Art left room for your own imagination. These days it is like watching movies. No imagination needed.

..110% agree..its outstanding how boring and empty are most of modern games...i just cant see any surprises, such as one when HL2 came for example...all is just way too..perfect..

[plenatus]

@mike: i couldn´t say it better

[Coder Apprentice]

Cool, love the topic but the pictures with the dates are a bit misleading. In 2000 AMD/ATi relesed the first Radeon and next year the Geforce 3 came out both with programmable shaders. In 2005 XBOX 360 came out with it's back then very powerful GPU that was another very strong push towards shaders in games. So between 2000 and 2010 there was a huge improvement visually (tech wise) that those three pictures don't really represent. Also those pictures from the 1990s is more like pre 95 in my opinion. In 1996 we had Quake, Half Life in 98, and Max Payne was kind of at the end of the fixed function hardware and technologically belongs more to the end of the 90s. I would say that 1995 - 2000 is all the Sega Saturn, PS1, 3Dfx, Dreamcast level of graphics that dominated. Just look at "Wreckless The Yakuza Missions" game from 2002...very impressive shaders on the GF3 like GPU on the original XBOX.

Just my two cents.

[Steve Elliott]

@Mike +1.

[Xerra]

I'm going to agree with preferring graphics how they used to be. As someone who tinkers with making games that level of art is attainable to people like me. Nowadays a game has sometimes 20+ artists involved with the project and we're demoted to "indie coders" because we still long for the days when games were all about game-play and looking nice was an added bonus.

Games now have stupid system requirements outside of working on consoles with fixed hardware, and also persistently have stupidly long loading times as a result. Not to mention lazy coders who seriously don't give a shit about optimisation and assume players will just put up with this.

I'm not saying we have to go back to bat and ball style graphics from the Vic 20 era but there comes a point when something really can't look much better no matter how many sparkling particles you blow over it.

[Dabz]

The thing I like about 80's and to be fair, 90's graphics is that when a system came out, over its life time you could literally see developers getting to grips with the machine{s}, like, take the Amstrad, most games first released were Amsoft setups, and, graphically not the best usually, still fun, but... Yeah! As the years rolled on, if a game wasnt a speccy port, and developed for the machine, in the latter years, some looked really amazing!

Now even in the demo scene, you have Rhino and the rest from Batman Group really really pushing the machine further then anything...

Its amazing what these are doing with the machine, that Pinball Dreams one... Wow!!!

Dabz

[Matty]

Yes.  Once 3d came along all interesting perspectives seemed to fade away.  As soon as you simply needed to define a camera innovation began to take a back seat.

Mobile at first appeared to remedy that but then it went down a path of ads and micro transactions.

Yes the dates are a little off but I too prefer the era in the second screenshot post.

Imagination as mike hart said.

[Dabz]

Imagination as mike hart said

Totally agree, and I'm the same when it comes to book->movie cross overs, I just prefer to read the book, let my mind wander... Take Jurassic Park, I read Michael Crichton's novel first, and it was great, I couldnt put it down, and yet when I went to watched it at the cinema, it just wasnt as good, yep, the effects at the time were second to none, but, that sorta took over from the story for me, it lost something. Dan Browns 'The Da Vinci Code', such a clever book, watched the film... Again, something went missing in the transition.

Don't get me wrong, there are some pearler movies, one film I highly recommend is Circle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_(2015_film)), its quite an unknown film I think, and to be honest, its not very action packed, but, its a pretty deep inspection of the human psyche when it comes to survival.

So yeah, I think when media loses the audiences imagination, it sorta loses its purpose (soul?), for me anyway, give me a good book, my mind and I'm 99.9% a happy puppy!

Dabz

[dawlane]

Totally agree, and I'm the same when it comes to book->movie cross overs, I just prefer to read the book, let my mind wander... Take Jurassic Park, I read Michael Crichton's novel first, and it was great, I couldnt put it down, and yet when I went to watched it at the cinema, it just wasnt as good, yep, the effects at the time were second to none, but, that sorta took over from the story for me, it lost something.

Don't bother to watch Good Omens if you have read the book. It's totally pap, but then the book is one of the most difficult to translate to screen.
Note: There is a reason why books translated to the screen tend to be different. The first will be down to copyright, the second will be down to target audience. After all, if they had followed the Jurassic Park novel almost to the letter. Then it would have been given a much higher film classification rating and completely missed the target audience. i.e. kids.

I liked the 80s and a bit of the 90s the best. Why? Because the Art left room for your own imagination. These days it is like watching movies. No imagination needed.

For me it was more of the wow factor for pushing the boundaries of what could be achieved on limited hardware. In this day and age it's more of "how much realism" you can achieve on the lower spec graphics card without the whole thing becoming unplayable.