> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
IMO it's because a lot of these newer games just don't need that much horsepower. BG3 is not one of them, but looking at the broader industry.
A lot of times were seeing maaaaaybe a 5% bump in fidelity or graphics quality in exchange for 400% less performance.
Like ray tracing. Does Ray tracing look good? Yes. But not that good. Its not the PS1 to the PS2. I've seen baked lighting indistinguishable from Ray tracing in 99% of scenes.
Its just not a good trade off with modern games usually. Unless they really optimize them.
The only people still optimizing games is Nintendo from what I've seen.
There is an interesting discussion about the need for ray tracing in one of the later Digital Foundry videos. The argument goes that sometimes baked lighting is impractical due to the size of the maps and how much dynamic lighting you need. The latest Doom game is one such game where light maps would be 100s of GBs. But I guess most other games are fine with baked lighting.
There's also much cheaper methods of dynamic lighting that aren't real time ray tracing. You can approximate, you can cheat, and it will look almost as good.
IMO it's because a lot of these newer games just don't need that much horsepower. BG3 is not one of them, but looking at the broader industry.
A lot of times were seeing maaaaaybe a 5% bump in fidelity or graphics quality in exchange for 400% less performance.
Like ray tracing. Does Ray tracing look good? Yes. But not that good. Its not the PS1 to the PS2. I've seen baked lighting indistinguishable from Ray tracing in 99% of scenes.
Its just not a good trade off with modern games usually. Unless they really optimize them.
The only people still optimizing games is Nintendo from what I've seen.