Currently trying to refund the new Indiana Jones game because it's unplayable without raytracing . My card isn't even old, it's just 8GB of VRAM is the absolute minimum apparently so my mobile 3060 is now useless. I miss when I used to be able to play new games in 2014 on my shitty AMD card at 20fps, yeah it didn't look great but developers still included a very low graphics option for people like me. Now you need to be upgrading every 2 years to keep up.
I'm finding the latest in visual advancements feels like a downgrade because of image quality. Yeah all these fancy technologies are being used but its no good when my screen is a mess of blur, TAA, artifacting from upscaling or framegen. My PC can actually play cyberpunk with path tracing but i can't even begin to appreciate the traced paths WHEN I CAN'T SEE SHIT ANYWAY.
Currently binging forza horizon 4 which runs at 60fps on high on my steam deck and runs 165fps maxed on my PC with 8x msaa and it looks beautiful. And why is it beautiful? Its because the image is sharp where I can actually see the details the devs put into the game. Also half life alyx another game that is on another level with crisp and clear visuals but also ran on a 1070ti with no issues. Todays UE5 screen vomit can't even compare
All games these days know is stutter, smeary image, dx12 problems and stutter
TAA, dof, chromatic aberration, motion blur, vignetting, film grain, and lens flare. Every modern dev just dumps that shit on your screen and calls it cinematic. Its awful and everything is blurry. And sometimes you have to go into an ini file because it's not in the settings.
Chromatic aberration! When I played R&C: Rift Apart on PS5 I was taking screenshots and genuinely thought there was some kind of foveated rendering in play because of how blurry the corners of the screen looks. Turns out it was just chromatic aberration, my behated.
Hate film grain too because I have visual snow and I don't need to stack more of that shit in my games.
Dev: should we make our game with a distinctive style that is aesthetically appealing? Nah slap some noise on the screen and make it look like your character is wearing dirty oakleys and has severe astigmatism and myopia that'll do it.
I despise TAA. I remember back when I played on PS4, I could immediately spot a UE4 game because they almost always had awful TAA ghosting.