The “diminishing returns” narrative is 100% bullshit. Modern game devs are simply incompetent, lazy, cheap, and dishonest. They use temporal rendering to hide shit design and skip out on optimization. They model everything with way too many polygons and then just drop it all directly into games with no consideration for rendering budgets. They slap on DLSS, producing horrific motion blur and artifacts and input latency, and then they blame performance issues on you not having a $2000 GPU. They flock to UE5 for convenience and ease of use and saving money, using crap systems like lumen and nanite, and then they refuse to tailor the engine to their needs. Worst of all, they say you’re crazy for noticing any of this. Meanwhile, source engine games from a decade ago have superior image clarity versus anything made today. But you wouldn’t know it from game trailers, which are always played with a controller to hide motion blurring during faster movement.
The “diminishing returns” narrative is 100% bullshit
It is 100% valid because I 100% do not have the eyesight level necessary to even see the difference between 1080p and 4k. That's if I even owned a system capable of running and displaying such a high end picture. I don't imagine I'm alone in not spending thousands every other year to maintain a top of the line rig/monitor set up.
If a majority of people run your game on Medium settings, than the money you spent milking out the Ultra end is usually wasted. Double so if the System Requirements end up so high it scares off potential customers.
It doesn't matter if it happens because they are lazy and bad at their job, what matters is that it is wasted money/time on something that will not show anywhere near the return in sales.
And I'd wager you are not missing much in the slightest using that compared to a brand new 8k Giga System out in 2024. Whereas the jump from 2003 to 2013 would have been a massive difference.
There are absolute diminishing returns of graphical power whether from price, human limits, or technological breakthroughs.
They flock to UE5 for convenience and ease of use and saving money, using crap systems like lumen and nanite, and then they refuse to tailor the engine to their needs.
Which is funny since Epic says they should tailor it to their needs and that it is made for their fortnite and even there we can see lumen and naninte not really giving what you want on stylized game, it works best for the movie/architecture stuff, but we all know once a company go to UE5 they fire their engine devs, haha
Worst of all, they say you’re crazy for noticing any of this. Meanwhile, source engine games from a decade ago have superior image clarity versus anything made today.
But the source engine games and mods require you to do the hard work of in order to get the optimization, we need 9 years of dev time in order teach idiots to use UE5, haha.
Still it would not surprise me if part of the marketing budget went into shilling and gaslighting regarding this.
I wouldn't say the diminishing returns argument is bullshit. The work required for marginally more fidelity, at an asset level, has been increasing exponentially with each generation. As scene density increases, the asset count also increases. Couple the two and either budgets balloon or significant comprises must be made. The compromises often result in more generic looking assets (owing to extensive outsourcing with minimal art director, the use of photogrammetry at some stage of the pipeline or parametric tools drawing on a common data set). The pursuit of realism is a matter of diminishing returns, and it reduces creative freedom.
Same with the computational cost of rendering techniques. Compare early stencil shadows with PCSS. Now compare PCSS to RT shadows. The former is a significant leap, the latter not so much. Same can said for AO, reflections and GI. The problem with a lot of approximations is they usually proved to be unstable or heavily constrained. Cryengine's SVOGI, for example, can impose substantial constraints on how you build environments, especially interiors, and still suffers from ghosting and artifacts.
Rasterization based approximations had decades to mature and still weren't great. Developer laziness is inexcusable, but the biggest sin was selling real-time raytracing, which is desirable for any number of reasons, as viable multiple hardware generations too early and doing so before the associated tech had matured. And it was done to sell GPUs, not games.
the use of photogrammetry at some stage of the pipeline or parametric tools drawing on a common data se
Unless your game is a stylised Nintendo game, it's always cheaper to use photogrammetry, which will give you 1:1 realistic topology, and with today's pipelines you can use your smartphone for asset capture. It's also how Capcom managed to cut millions out of the budget of the newer Resident Evil games -- they talked about it in an interview a while back, using LiDAR for a bunch of the baked in scene decoration to avoid having to model the assets manually.
The real cost in "realistic" art assets is in retopology and baking a usable mesh into your runtime, which, funnily enough, requires a lot of time downscaling the mesh to work well within the engine pipeline (ergo, creating various LODs). But it's till faster/cheaper than manually making the asset, if you're actually a good modeler.
But as Current Horror pointed out, a lot of studios are now bypassing the optimisation phase by using Nanite to do the work for them, even though it results in horrible performance, which they attempt to bypass with frame generation and motion blur, using horrible temporal anti-aliasing to hide the bad optimisation, which results in smeary ghosting, which is really apparent in a ton of games.
The thing is, a lot of indie studios make a ton of photorealistic walking sims using photogrammetry or LiDAR on no-nothing budgets. It's not the "realism" that is costly, it's actually making a functional, optimised game out of those realistic assets that is costly, but most studios do not put in the time to do so.
Yes. It's cheaper to build film sets and fly scouting teams to multiple exotic locations for months on end to capture approximations of your art direction, than hand author assets. But realism isn't costly... Look past the criticisms of dunning-kruger infused youtube videos man, and you'll see that asset creation is incomparable to the basic textures on primitive geometry of a couple generations ago. Production has changed in a way that not only stifles creativity, but lends itself to poorly polished and poorly performing games. All in the pursuit of "realism", where many prefer the aesthetics of last generation. That's the definition of diminishing returns.
which will give you 1:1 realistic topology
Photogrammetry doesn't produce "realistic topology" - there isn't such a thing. Topology refers to the mathematical structure of geometry, primarily in regards to how it deforms and renders. Outside of the handful of deforming meshes, the only concerns are 1) Density, 2) Correctness (manifold geometry, excessive concavity, micro-triangles introducing overdraw, incompatibility with the rest of your pipeline, etc.) By necessity, retopology sees heavy automation. LOD generation, with very few exceptions, is done parametrically, with engines providing the functionality in engine. Seen that Simplygon logo at startup? That's one middleware that provides such functionality. The entire retopology/unwrap/baking process can, and often is, entirely automated by the likes of Houdini TOPs for certain classes of photogrammetry assets. Again, by necessity given the sheer number of assets modern games require.
The time spent on photogrammetry is primarily clean up - whether it be removing objects from environments, filling areas not available for imaging or fixing the myriad artifacts that the process produces - it's far from perfect. That is IF you can find a 1:1 analogue for what you want in your game, which brings me to this notion:
Unless your game is a stylised Nintendo game
Because even half the assets released in a third of games in a year are viable candidates for photogrammetry? Sure. Overlooking that games are already criticized for looking generic, a by-product of excessive photogrammetry, art direction is still a thing, and is more important than fidelity in regards to appeal. One key concern is consistency - that the style and fidelity of assets is consistent throughout a scene. Introduce photogrammetry, and every hand authored asset now has to target that level of realism lest it stick out like a sore thumb. Even when utilising scanned materials as bases, maintaining that level of realism is time consuming and limiting.
Now consider how environments are actually constructed. The majority of game worlds rely on modularity - utilizing instanceable geometry along with trim textures/geometry, topped off with a small number of versatile tiling textures. This isn't just to speed up environment creation, it's to reduce required GPU bandwidth. Real world objects seldom conform to this approach, outside of surface scans used as tileables, and photogrammetry results in unique texture data per asset. Wonder why games have ballooned in size and constantly suffer from streaming hitches? Look no further.
a lot of studios are now bypassing the optimisation phase by using Nanite to do the work for them
Nanite is an alternative to traditional triangle rasterization as to allow more complex geometry than traditional LOD systems can practically provide. Better handling unoptimized scenes is a side-effect, not it's purpose or a recommendation. Outside of Unreal, mesh shaders are being used for the same reason, with similar results - additional overdraw. See Alan Wake 2. It's a new approach, with the associated growing pains, but "realism" demanded more geometry, so here we are.
Long term, it'll be resolved. That's not to say it's a substitute for optimisation, or was billed as such. It's just a convenient scapegoat. Ironically, Unreal does have some major architectural issues. The entire streaming system is built with Fornite in mind - with the idea of of a persistent server side world. The actor system/tick handling is poor for complex non-linear worlds, resulting in game thread congestion, and the actual streaming is far too course for large, dense worlds. The collaboration with CDPR is at least seeing some progress there - here's to hoping more games benefit from it moving forward.
Yes. It's cheaper to build film sets and fly scouting teams to multiple exotic locations for months on end to capture approximations of your art direction, than hand author assets.
We just use an iPhone and gaussian splatting. You don't even have to go outside, you can even use AR captured imagery as well:
https://youtu.be/UdCKeO4c_xM
EDIT: Just wanted to address this part because I forgot something...
Production has changed in a way that not only stifles creativity, but lends itself to poorly polished and poorly performing games. All in the pursuit of "realism", where many prefer the aesthetics of last generation. That's the definition of diminishing returns
This is true, and part of the point, but also we see that on the flip side we have games like Bodycam, made by two guys, one of whom was 17 at the time when they started, and it looks more realistic than any AAA shooter and most people are none the wiser to how it was made. Mostly UE5 Blueprints and asset packs made from laser-scanned entities.
In this regard, they managed to make a top-selling game that fools a lot of people into thinking it looks "real" without having spent an arm and a leg to do so.
It's possible to get creative, push boundaries and make use of these tools to build out fascinating, unique, or groundbreaking games using these tools and techniques, but as you stated, most studios do not do this.
The “diminishing returns” narrative is 100% bullshit. Modern game devs are simply incompetent, lazy, cheap, and dishonest. They use temporal rendering to hide shit design and skip out on optimization. They model everything with way too many polygons and then just drop it all directly into games with no consideration for rendering budgets. They slap on DLSS, producing horrific motion blur and artifacts and input latency, and then they blame performance issues on you not having a $2000 GPU. They flock to UE5 for convenience and ease of use and saving money, using crap systems like lumen and nanite, and then they refuse to tailor the engine to their needs. Worst of all, they say you’re crazy for noticing any of this. Meanwhile, source engine games from a decade ago have superior image clarity versus anything made today. But you wouldn’t know it from game trailers, which are always played with a controller to hide motion blurring during faster movement.
It is 100% valid because I 100% do not have the eyesight level necessary to even see the difference between 1080p and 4k. That's if I even owned a system capable of running and displaying such a high end picture. I don't imagine I'm alone in not spending thousands every other year to maintain a top of the line rig/monitor set up.
If a majority of people run your game on Medium settings, than the money you spent milking out the Ultra end is usually wasted. Double so if the System Requirements end up so high it scares off potential customers.
It doesn't matter if it happens because they are lazy and bad at their job, what matters is that it is wasted money/time on something that will not show anywhere near the return in sales.
I'm still using my 1080p 144hz TN panel from 2013; the extra frames was worth it over my previous monitor, a basic 21" 60hz screen.
The next worthwhile upgrade would have to be OLED, and I can't justify the price right now.
And I'd wager you are not missing much in the slightest using that compared to a brand new 8k Giga System out in 2024. Whereas the jump from 2003 to 2013 would have been a massive difference.
There are absolute diminishing returns of graphical power whether from price, human limits, or technological breakthroughs.
Which is funny since Epic says they should tailor it to their needs and that it is made for their fortnite and even there we can see lumen and naninte not really giving what you want on stylized game, it works best for the movie/architecture stuff, but we all know once a company go to UE5 they fire their engine devs, haha
But the source engine games and mods require you to do the hard work of in order to get the optimization, we need 9 years of dev time in order teach idiots to use UE5, haha.
Still it would not surprise me if part of the marketing budget went into shilling and gaslighting regarding this.
I wouldn't say the diminishing returns argument is bullshit. The work required for marginally more fidelity, at an asset level, has been increasing exponentially with each generation. As scene density increases, the asset count also increases. Couple the two and either budgets balloon or significant comprises must be made. The compromises often result in more generic looking assets (owing to extensive outsourcing with minimal art director, the use of photogrammetry at some stage of the pipeline or parametric tools drawing on a common data set). The pursuit of realism is a matter of diminishing returns, and it reduces creative freedom.
Same with the computational cost of rendering techniques. Compare early stencil shadows with PCSS. Now compare PCSS to RT shadows. The former is a significant leap, the latter not so much. Same can said for AO, reflections and GI. The problem with a lot of approximations is they usually proved to be unstable or heavily constrained. Cryengine's SVOGI, for example, can impose substantial constraints on how you build environments, especially interiors, and still suffers from ghosting and artifacts.
Rasterization based approximations had decades to mature and still weren't great. Developer laziness is inexcusable, but the biggest sin was selling real-time raytracing, which is desirable for any number of reasons, as viable multiple hardware generations too early and doing so before the associated tech had matured. And it was done to sell GPUs, not games.
Unless your game is a stylised Nintendo game, it's always cheaper to use photogrammetry, which will give you 1:1 realistic topology, and with today's pipelines you can use your smartphone for asset capture. It's also how Capcom managed to cut millions out of the budget of the newer Resident Evil games -- they talked about it in an interview a while back, using LiDAR for a bunch of the baked in scene decoration to avoid having to model the assets manually.
The real cost in "realistic" art assets is in retopology and baking a usable mesh into your runtime, which, funnily enough, requires a lot of time downscaling the mesh to work well within the engine pipeline (ergo, creating various LODs). But it's till faster/cheaper than manually making the asset, if you're actually a good modeler.
But as Current Horror pointed out, a lot of studios are now bypassing the optimisation phase by using Nanite to do the work for them, even though it results in horrible performance, which they attempt to bypass with frame generation and motion blur, using horrible temporal anti-aliasing to hide the bad optimisation, which results in smeary ghosting, which is really apparent in a ton of games.
The thing is, a lot of indie studios make a ton of photorealistic walking sims using photogrammetry or LiDAR on no-nothing budgets. It's not the "realism" that is costly, it's actually making a functional, optimised game out of those realistic assets that is costly, but most studios do not put in the time to do so.
Yes. It's cheaper to build film sets and fly scouting teams to multiple exotic locations for months on end to capture approximations of your art direction, than hand author assets. But realism isn't costly... Look past the criticisms of dunning-kruger infused youtube videos man, and you'll see that asset creation is incomparable to the basic textures on primitive geometry of a couple generations ago. Production has changed in a way that not only stifles creativity, but lends itself to poorly polished and poorly performing games. All in the pursuit of "realism", where many prefer the aesthetics of last generation. That's the definition of diminishing returns.
Photogrammetry doesn't produce "realistic topology" - there isn't such a thing. Topology refers to the mathematical structure of geometry, primarily in regards to how it deforms and renders. Outside of the handful of deforming meshes, the only concerns are 1) Density, 2) Correctness (manifold geometry, excessive concavity, micro-triangles introducing overdraw, incompatibility with the rest of your pipeline, etc.) By necessity, retopology sees heavy automation. LOD generation, with very few exceptions, is done parametrically, with engines providing the functionality in engine. Seen that Simplygon logo at startup? That's one middleware that provides such functionality. The entire retopology/unwrap/baking process can, and often is, entirely automated by the likes of Houdini TOPs for certain classes of photogrammetry assets. Again, by necessity given the sheer number of assets modern games require.
The time spent on photogrammetry is primarily clean up - whether it be removing objects from environments, filling areas not available for imaging or fixing the myriad artifacts that the process produces - it's far from perfect. That is IF you can find a 1:1 analogue for what you want in your game, which brings me to this notion:
Because even half the assets released in a third of games in a year are viable candidates for photogrammetry? Sure. Overlooking that games are already criticized for looking generic, a by-product of excessive photogrammetry, art direction is still a thing, and is more important than fidelity in regards to appeal. One key concern is consistency - that the style and fidelity of assets is consistent throughout a scene. Introduce photogrammetry, and every hand authored asset now has to target that level of realism lest it stick out like a sore thumb. Even when utilising scanned materials as bases, maintaining that level of realism is time consuming and limiting.
Now consider how environments are actually constructed. The majority of game worlds rely on modularity - utilizing instanceable geometry along with trim textures/geometry, topped off with a small number of versatile tiling textures. This isn't just to speed up environment creation, it's to reduce required GPU bandwidth. Real world objects seldom conform to this approach, outside of surface scans used as tileables, and photogrammetry results in unique texture data per asset. Wonder why games have ballooned in size and constantly suffer from streaming hitches? Look no further.
Nanite is an alternative to traditional triangle rasterization as to allow more complex geometry than traditional LOD systems can practically provide. Better handling unoptimized scenes is a side-effect, not it's purpose or a recommendation. Outside of Unreal, mesh shaders are being used for the same reason, with similar results - additional overdraw. See Alan Wake 2. It's a new approach, with the associated growing pains, but "realism" demanded more geometry, so here we are.
Long term, it'll be resolved. That's not to say it's a substitute for optimisation, or was billed as such. It's just a convenient scapegoat. Ironically, Unreal does have some major architectural issues. The entire streaming system is built with Fornite in mind - with the idea of of a persistent server side world. The actor system/tick handling is poor for complex non-linear worlds, resulting in game thread congestion, and the actual streaming is far too course for large, dense worlds. The collaboration with CDPR is at least seeing some progress there - here's to hoping more games benefit from it moving forward.
We just use an iPhone and gaussian splatting. You don't even have to go outside, you can even use AR captured imagery as well: https://youtu.be/UdCKeO4c_xM
EDIT: Just wanted to address this part because I forgot something...
This is true, and part of the point, but also we see that on the flip side we have games like Bodycam, made by two guys, one of whom was 17 at the time when they started, and it looks more realistic than any AAA shooter and most people are none the wiser to how it was made. Mostly UE5 Blueprints and asset packs made from laser-scanned entities.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_Gh0x9mtIuQ?feature=share
In this regard, they managed to make a top-selling game that fools a lot of people into thinking it looks "real" without having spent an arm and a leg to do so.
It's possible to get creative, push boundaries and make use of these tools to build out fascinating, unique, or groundbreaking games using these tools and techniques, but as you stated, most studios do not do this.