Yeah there’s been a drop off for sure. Clearly it hasn’t been steep enough for game studios to not lean on anyway, though.

One potential forcing factor may be the rise of iGPUs, which have become powerful enough to play many titles well while remaining dramatically more affordable than their discrete counterparts (and sometimes not carrying crippling VRAM limits to boot), as well as the growing sector of PC handhelds like the Steam Deck. It’s not difficult to imagine that iGPUs will come to dominate the PC gaming sphere, and if that happens it’ll be financial suicide to not make sure your game plays reasonably well on such hardware.

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martinald 2 days ago | parent [-]

I get the perhaps mistaken impression the biggest problem games developers have is making & managing absolutely enormous amounts of art assets at high resolution (textures, models, etc). Each time you increase resolution from 576p, to 720p to 1080p and now 4k+ you need a huge step up in visual fidelity of all your assets, otherwise it looks poor.

And given most of these assets are human made (well, until very recently) this requires more and more artists. So I wonder if games studios are more just art studios with a bit of programming bolted on, vs before with lower res graphics where you maybe had one artist for 10 programmers, now it is more flipped the other way. I feel that at some point over the past ~decade we hit a "organisational" wall with this and very very few studios can successfully manage teams of hundreds (thousands?) of artists effectively?

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MindSpunk 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

This hits the nail pretty close to the head. I work on an in-house AAA engine used by a number of different games. It's very expensive to produce art assets at the quality expected now.

Many AAA engine's number one focus isn't "performance at all costs", it's "how do we most efficiently let artists build their vision". And efficiency isn't runtime performance, efficiency is how much time it takes for an artist to create something. Performance is only a goal insofar as to free artists from being limited by it.

> So I wonder if games studios are more just art studios with a bit of programming bolted on.

Not quite, but the ratio is very in favor of artists compared to 'the old days'. Programming is still a huge part of what we do. It's still a deeply technical field, but often "programming workflows" are lower priority than "artist workflows" in AAA engines because art time is more expensive than programmer time from the huge number of artists working on any one project compared to programmers.

Just go look at the credits for any recent AAA game. Look at how many artists positions there are compared to programmer positions and it becomes pretty clear.

	▲	kasool a day ago \| parent [-]
		Just to add to this, from a former colleague of mine who currently works as a graphics programmer at a UE5 studio: most graphics programmers are essentially tech support for artists nowadays. In an age where much of AAA is about making the biggest, most cinematic, most beautiful game, your artists and game content designers are the center of your production pipeline. It used to be that the technology tended to drive the art. Nowadays the art drives the tech. We only need to look at all the advertised features of UE5 to see that. Nanite allows artists to spend less time tweaking LODs and optimizing meshes as well as flattening the cost of small triangle rendering. Lumen gives us realtime global illumination everywhere so artists don’t have to spend a million hours baking multiple light maps. Megalights lifts restrictions on the number of dynamic lights and shadows a lighting artist can place in the scene. The new Nanite foliage shown off in the Witcher 4 allows foliage artists to go ham with modeling their trees

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cosmic_cheese 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That depends a lot on art direction and stylization. Highly stylized games scale up to high resolutions shockingly well even with less detailed, lower resolution models and textures. Breath of the Wild is one good example that looks great by modern standards at high resolutions, and there’s many others that manage to look a lot less dated than they are with similarly cartoony styles.

If “realistic” graphics are the objective though, then yes, better displays pose serious problems. Personally I think it’s probably better to avoid art styles that age like milk, though, or to go for a pseudo-realistic direction that is reasonably true to life while mixing in just enough stylization to scale well and not look dated at record speeds. Japanese studios seem pretty good at this.

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spookie 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, its flipped. Overall, it has meant studios are more and more dependent on third party software (and thus license fees), it led to game engine consolidation, and serious attrition when attempting to make something those game engines werent built for (non-pbr pipelines come to mind).

It's no wonder nothing comes out in a playable state.