in 2025 you either make a down payment on a house or you buy a mid-range PC over the years video game Graphics have evolved far beyond what we ever could imagine to be possible pores in the skin motion capture technology photorealistic shadows and Reflections that adjust themselves properly in real time and that was 2018 now we have pores in the skin motion capture technology photo realistic shadows and Reflections that adjusts in real time at sub 60 frames per second with the most powerful gaming GPU on the market Market accompanied with ghosting popping input leg flickering motion blur without motion blur what the happened I'm a simple gamer and I like to think that I play a variety of different genres The Last of Us dongan rompa Silent Hill Red Dead HTI girl Karen fortnite but in recent years I found myself using mods more and more just to get my games to run well back in 2017 I owned a $600 PC and I played pubg Skyrim assassin's creed and Borderlands on it all the time but nowadays it's hard to run any modern title on a PC under $1,500 or at least it's hard to make the games look good yes of course technology and Graphics evolve over time but it's clear that things have gotten a little disproportionate especially when the beefiest dump truest gpus struggle to run games and don't even break the 60fps Mark I'm talking of course about the rapidly spreading virus in gaming right now known as bad optimization but what killed optimization why do developers not care for their games to run good and look good at the same time and instead exclusively prioritize making them appealing to the eyes well like many topics it's not so black and white and there are a lot of reasons and starting with the first 13th reason why upscaling technology in the past few years artificial intelligence has evolved at an alarming rate AI is being used everywhere we have ai generated videos like this Coca-Cola ad I got AI generated essays AI generated songs AI generated comments which is worthy of a whole different video in itself and of course AI generated Graphics well not completely AI generated upscaling technology in video games works like this the game runs at a lower resolution like 1080P and then it gets upscaled to a higher resolution like 1440p in theory this will make your game look like it normally would at base resolution but that's not necessarily true even on a quality setting some problems just become glaring in fortnite there's some serious Shadow flickering and fuzziness going on in some areas and in red Ion 2 it may not seem too different at first glance but look at how the game looks when it starts raining what the f AI has to guess what the game will look like at a higher resolution and as a result the game will never look like how the developers intended with upscaling on I really care about vision and artistic Direction and I can't help but feel like dlss and FSR are quick and easy solutions to improve frame rate but molest the original concept dlss or deep learning super sampling and video's upscaling technology has settings you can choose from such as quality balanc performance and Ultra performance what this does is lower the base resolution of the game so instead of upscaling 1080p to 1440p it'll upscale 720p or 480p to 1440p the lower the base resolution the more inaccurate the upscale and for real who the hell even plays on performance modes dlss is only enabled on RTX cards anyway and I'm pretty sure all of those cards are capable enough for gamers to not have to submit to the worst case scenario to enjoy a video game oh another AI generated solution modern Nvidia gpus are utilizing is the brand spanking new frame generation method what this does is it takes two frames from your game and will use AI to interpret what a middle frame would look like so basically your frame rate will go from 30 to 60 this will inevitably cause input lag but for laid-back Gamers who use wireless controllers that won't be much of an issue since wireless controllers obviously have input leg already so it really depends on what game you're playing now I already know a lot of you guys are probably thinking just one nend up scaling frame generation this is the future of gaming now I can play GTA 6 on my RTX 20 shitty TI and my response to that is short-term Solutions cause long-term problems and it's already happening yes upscaling technology allows Gamers to not spend a bajillion dollars on a new GPU but what it also does is encourage developers to not optimize their games since they know hey Gamers will just turn dlss on anyway to make the game Run good I just beat the Silent Hill 2 remake it came out this October and it was nothing short of mind-blowing it was also PC blowing because my computer sounded like a Russian bomber jet trying to run the damn thing still loved it to death though and was rooting for it at the Game Awards come on Rob winner is come on Luke Roberts Melinda J if we check the recommended specs for Silent Hill 2 it suggests using dlss to play the game at a high setting on the recommended graphics card Silent Hill 2 looks incredible but it's also Silent Hill 2 the entire game is set in these limal spaces so it shouldn't be too difficult to run even if it looks realistic well if we install the Sunny Hills mod which turns the town of Silent Hill into a normal small town on a beautiful day we can see the actual draw distance for the game enemies pop in pretty close to James but the areas that are loaded in are actually surprisingly far away what's strange about this is that in the unmodded game the fog is thick and so close to James you never even see the buildings that are actually loaded in rendering most of the map like this at once is not only pointless because it takes a significant chunk of performance straight out of your game for no reason at all but it's also ironic because the fog existed in the first few Silent Hill games for this exact reason the PlayStation 1 didn't have the power to load distant areas and to hide the hardware shortcomings team silence slapped a bunch of fog onto the game which fortunately gave it a more ominous tone but conveniently improved performance as well the fog in the Silent Hill 2 remake is still present to provide a bleak tone for the game's visuals but the Developers aren't utilizing it to its full potential some games make distant buildings look horrendous to save performance instead of just outright making them disappear and the silal 2 remake doesn't even do that fine details still appear on the distant objects but we never would have even seen it in the unmodded version because of the fog sure you could say dlss and frame generation are excellent solutions for gamers to not spend a fortune on a new card to run these games but as we can see from the recommended specs there are also solutions for developers to not make basic fixes for their games because they're thinking well why would we make our game Run good when dlss can do it for us the RTX 490 can't even play Silent Hill 2 at 4K which is the industry's current mainstream resolution at 60 frames per second that is not only crazy but it's unacceptable when it's clear that there are obvious fixes that will make the game in question run better without using upscaling but despite all the graphical issues it still should have won something at the game awards godamn it and Silent Hilton and the game award for audio design goes to S Saga the PlayStation 5 Pro which is the best console on the market for gaming and over ,000 in Canada if you want the disc attachment uses its own AI upscaling technology known as pssr or Playstation spectral super resolution I remember when the PlayStation 5 was revealed back in 2020 they were preaching that this is a huge step for gaming because developers don't have as many graphical limitations anymore to how they want their game to look because of the convenience of power Developers are now making more limitations because of these short-term Solutions like upscaling and frame generation to optimize their game for them pssr is not good for the future of console gaming think about it consoles don't allow for advanced graphical customization on PC you can select the texture quality draw distance Shader quality Reflections and on Console you can choose between performance or quality in-depth Graphics customization will never be a thing on consoles because they're made with the intention to be convenient so now that we have pssr what's stopping these companies from making an unoptimized video game using pssr to make it run a stable 30fps and then calling that the quality setting this right now when some games can't even play 60fps at 4k on the fattest GPU on the market is not good and will only give future developers an incentive to use shortcuts while making the game's visuals Ray tracing two words that's been crammed into every gaming Tech presentation ever since 2018 so here's a quick explanation of what raay tracing actually is raay tracing is a graphics technique that simulates how L behaves in the real world to create photorealistic frames prior to Ray tracing explosive entrance into the industry in 2018 developers would have to make their own lighting techniques in the game to simulate as accurately as possible how the light and Reflections would behave the thing about raay tracing is that in most modern games you won't even notice a difference most of the awe you'll get from a game that's Ray traced is the placebo effect whispering in your ear that the game looks way better this is cyberpunk with Ray tracing on Max and this is cyber Punk with Ray tracing off as you can see there is a graphical upgrade with Ray tracing but more importantly there's a huge dent in performance Ray tracing has actually existed for a very long time though the initial idea for it was thought up in 1968 and Pixar started using it in their animated films beginning its reign in A Bug's Life from 1999 granted they only used it for like two shots but regardless they did use Ray tracing that's why 3D animated movies from the early 2000s still look better than modern-day stylized games now that we have the technology to implement raate tracing in video games though it's a pro and a con in some games that don't have detailed casting effects like Minecraft raate tracing is an enormous upgrade but in games like cyber Punk it looks great in some scenes but most of the time you probably won't even notice it it's true that raate tracing is an option you don't have to enable it but the support of this new expensive technology means that downfall of an old but gold method of creating reflection I'm going to use halflife 2 for this example in halflife 2 Val's playar Reflections to create convincing looking water while this can be expensive to Performance if used on a large face of water like an ocean for example it's great for something small like a puddle now you guys may be saying Justin don't be a dingus you Dingus technology needs to evolve over time otherwise we'll be stuck in the same place forever and I 100% agree with you you're not wrong I just think that a lot of modern developers are putting all of their chips into Ray tracing even though most modern gpus still struggle to run games with Ray tracing on in Star Wars Outlaws for example there's no option to turn rate tracing off you can only lower and enhance the quality all I'm saying is that while I would like to get to the point where every game automatically has R tracing on I just feel like most Gamers aren't there yet since a lot of people still use GTX 1080s RTX 2080s and whatever the AMD alternatives are I don't really know so why limit your audience there should absolutely be R tracing options but I think that developers should still put a lot of effort into optimizing their games for when rate tracing is off so it still looks good and not muggy everywhere most people don't have the money to sink into a brand spanking new 490 that can actually utilize Ray tracing well so the rest of the gamers including console gamers are forced to be stuck with these subpar water effects and Reflections because the developers think that they can just glaze over it as fast as possible since there's an easy quick solution and that's to let Ray Trace do the work for them I love R tracing I love Shadow quality a lot of reflective surfaces but let's be real this is too much for what we can handle right now we can barely even run 4K open world games on the newest cards so why are we building video games for Ray tracing that is insanity and again if Ray tracing is an option that's great all I'm saying is the game should still look good for the people that don't want to have it enabled developers need to optimize their Graphics to where the gamers are at and not 100% to where the newest Hardware is of course optimize it so the games look as good as possible on that Hardware but don't make it impossible for everybody else because that's just a lose lose for everybody involved now these new games stalker 2 Remnant 2 Silent Hill 2 The Witcher 4 all have something in common and it's that they're all made in the Unreal Engine Unreal Engine 5 to be specific when Unreal Engine 5 was announced people thought it would be a huge leap for developers since it would handle a lot of the fine graphical details taking the work off of the programmers the flaw with ue5 is that the graphics are incredible but they're also expensive and unoptimized most of these Unreal Engine 5 Games suffer the same issues and that's not only bad performance but very blatant ghosting ghosting is when a frame lingers for a bit even after it moves on there's also some pretty clear flickering problems and the hardcore push for temporal anti-aliasing anti-aliasing is a graphics technology that's been around for a while to be fair which removes the jegged edges on objects with it off the game is completely raw each pixel is exactly where it needs to be at the cost of everything looking sharp what anti-aliasing does is it slightly blurs the image by softening the edges on objects and makes it appear less like a video game and more like a picture TAA is used pretty much everywhere now in modern gaming and if you stand still it looks pretty good but if you move it looks blurry and horrendous red de Redemption 2 is a great example for a game that's made with the idea that TAA will be enabled the game without it looks weird and with it on looks blurry it's clear that the developers didn't take the time to optimize the game without it and instead decided to really push for TAA but the problem is that TAA and Red Dead Redemption 2 isn't completely optimized either and just ruins the image when the game is moving which is you know most of the game stalker 2 an Unreal Engine 5 game is probably the perfect example of a game that relies on TAA to look good and it's clear that the game was made with TAA in mind because the trees are dithered without it on so basically if you want to play a modern video game you either th get sharp unrealistic and untouched Graphics or turn anti-aliasing on and get a main dish of blurry game with a side of ghosting anti-aliasing was not always this much of an issue though let's look at Skyrim with anti-aliasing off the game looks sharp sure but it still looks great while Reddit Redemption 2 with anti-aliasing off looks sharp and weird and like the developers never even wanted it to be an option it's another strange time for gaming in 2008 we had the notorious piss filter Trend where every game had a brown yellow color scheme in 2018 every game had to have a battle royale mode and in 2024 every game is made an Unreal Engine 5 and nothing runs as well as it should to prevent this from happening developers need to slow down and take the time to remove the unnecessary clutter that claps performance they need to think well how can we make this reflection look good without Ray tracing and they need to consider the broad audience of Gamers instead of what the loaded game journalists who can actually run the game at Max settings will say about it what do he but most importantly what do you guys think about all this how can developers fix this modern issue in gaming make sure to let me know what you think in the comments below and I'll check them out as soon as I possibly can as always thank you so much for taking time out of your day to watch this video and make sure to have a good one also I wrote a song about this [Music] I hate TAA shoppy game play for the price I pay I would think that most the I buy would run I can't trace no rays these mod games have back in the day iwear that I could if this is trip then there's something that I got to say what happened to my friends what happened to his friend what happened to my friends what happen to his friends when all of these games still look the same and I know that my PC isn't a blame oh no what happened to my friend what happened to his friends what happened to my friends what happened to his friends when all of these games still look the same and I know that my PC is into blame oh no it isn't [Applause] [Music] a genten that this will last forever what come on don't say that you're not old ryzen 5 3600 16 GB of ddr4 RAM and your graphics card is only 10 numbers under the best one on the market right now the RTX 2080 what's that clunky ass charger for baby that's for my phone oh come on what are you looking at now baby it's not what it looks like maybe she does the better graphics card and CPU but come on you're the fatter one don't be like that baby please talk to me it doesn't have to be like this