It’s funny, because often they aren’t prettier. Well optimized and well made games from 5 or even 10 years ago often look on par better than the majority of AAA slop pushed out now (obviously with exceptions of some really good looking games like space marine and some others) and the disk size is still 10x what it was. They are just unrefined and unoptimized and try to use computationally expensive filters, lighting, sharpening, and antialiasing to make up for the mediocre quality.
The irony is it is optimized in several notable cases, like cyberpunk 2077 and most major ue5 engine based games. It’s just all the mipmap levels from distant to 4k up close really add up when the game actually has a decent amount of content.
I wonder how many people really run games at settings that require the highest detail. I bet a lot of people would appreciate half the DL size or more just to leave 'em out and disable ‘ultra’ settings.
It’s funny, because often they aren’t prettier. Well optimized and well made games from 5 or even 10 years ago often look on par better than the majority of AAA slop pushed out now (obviously with exceptions of some really good looking games like space marine and some others) and the disk size is still 10x what it was. They are just unrefined and unoptimized and try to use computationally expensive filters, lighting, sharpening, and antialiasing to make up for the mediocre quality.
The irony is it is optimized in several notable cases, like cyberpunk 2077 and most major ue5 engine based games. It’s just all the mipmap levels from distant to 4k up close really add up when the game actually has a decent amount of content.
I wonder how many people really run games at settings that require the highest detail. I bet a lot of people would appreciate half the DL size or more just to leave 'em out and disable ‘ultra’ settings.