I am probably unqualified to speak about this, as I am using an RX 550 low profile and a 768P monitor and almost never play newer titles, but I want to kickstart a discussion, so hear me out.
The push for more realistic graphics was ongoing for longer than most of us can remember, and it made sense for most of its lifespan, as anyone who looked at an older game can confirm - I am a person who has fun making fun of weird looking 3D people.
But I feel games’ graphics have reached the point of diminishing returns, AAA studios of today spend millions of dollars just to match the graphics’ level of their previous titles - often sacrificing other, more important things on the way, and that people are unnecessarily spending lots of money on electricity consuming heat generating GPUs.
I understand getting an expensive GPU for high resolution, high refresh rate gaming but for 1080P? you shouldn’t need anything more powerful than a 1080 TI for years. I think game studios should just slow down their graphical improvements, as they are unnecessary - in my opinion - and just prevent people with lower end systems from enjoying games, and who knows, maybe we will start seeing 50 watt gaming GPUs being viable and capable of running games at medium/high settings, going for cheap - even iGPUs render good graphics now.
TLDR: why pay for more and hurt the environment with higher power consumption when what we have is enough - and possibly overkill.
Note: it would be insane of me to claim that there is not a big difference between both pictures - Tomb Raider 2013 Vs Shadow of the Tomb raider 2018 - but can you really call either of them bad, especially the right picture (5 years old)?
Note 2: this is not much more that a discussion starter that is unlikely to evolve into something larger.
I see where you’re coming from but I don’t agree, well at least not anymore. I used to. Thing is, we reached a point for me personally where an old game doesn’t necessarily look bad anymore, as my brain will fill on the gaps, even as an adult. I can hardly do that with any of the really old games, as they lack polygons and details, but anything more modern is good enough. Art style is more important than graphics quality. And art style doesn’t exclude realism. The same way a real life thing can look good or bad, even though both have real world graphics if you so want.
I also don’t think it’s as easy as to make every game comic or pixel art, for some genre it simply doesn’t work as part of the gameplay is immersion in the world. Thankfully though we reached a point where even indie developer can use something like Unreal Engine or Unit to create high quality games. In future this will advance further thanks to AI animation, voiceover, textures and even models.