So...I decided I wanted to go into this, since as we discussed, back in the day, the transition into 3D gaming with gen 5 was pretty mind blowing. 3D games existed before that. Heck, when looking it up, they kinda expand back to the 1970s. I'm mostly gonna start my focus on the 1990s since that's what I'm aware of, and because that's when 3D went mainstream though. Because keep in mind, even if 3D games existed in the 70s and 80s, they weren't the norm, and most games were rather 2D. I mean, when I got into video games, the big debate was sega vs nintendo, and sonic vs mario. Sega did what nintendidn't with 16 bit blast processing, but then even the super nintendo console had 3D games like star fox, Mariokart, and doom. My own introduction to 3D games came from Doom on the 32x. And yeah, it was pretty mind blowing at the time. With that said, my original start of the 3D genre was gonna focus on 1992 with wolfenstein 3D, as that was doom's direct precursor. So let's start there:
1992
Yeah, this kinda looked like that old windows 95 screen saver many of us were obsessed with back in the day. Pretty primitive, but it worked.
Posted this above, but this is what games looked like back then. Very primitive, but yeah, kinda interesting. Gotta start somewhere, ya know?
1993
This video looks like it was done with a more modern engine, but yeah, doom was pretty primitive too, but it looked leagues above wolfenstein. Back in the 1990s, tech advanced so fast that a game that looked mind blowing one year looked dated the next. Doom basically obsoleted wolfenstein pretty quickly to the point of it becoming a relative footnote.
Posted this above too, but this is what SNES games looked like in 3D. Nowhere near as good. But again, gotta start somewhere.
1994
Yeah 1994 brought doom II, which was more doom. It worked, but it wasn't a huge graphical enhancement, even if it did expand the sandbox by quite a bit.
1995ID software was cooking in the 1990s and in 1995, they brought hexen, which was like doom but more medeval. FUn fact, doom was supposed to be more medieval but a lot of that was cut for the more science fiction theme. We did see doom the dark ages lately 30 years later, but yeah.
For the most part, games were still 2D during this era. I got my first exposure to doom through the 32x around this time though.
1996
1996 was the more breakthrough year for 3D to the masses. Again, while PC gaming had stuff like wolfenstein, doom, etc, most gamers were playing mario and sonic during this time on their genesis and SNES. but 1996 marked the transition to gen 5. And yeah, it was mind blowing.
On PC, advancement continued with the release of quake, another medieval style FPS from ID. it kinda bridged the gap between heretic/hexen and doom, although future quake entries had significantly more sci fi settings.
But yeah, consoles got a huge boost too through the N64 and the PS1.
Obviously, the graphics on the console released trailed quake, but they still arguably beat doom. So it was pretty impressive. Again, keep in mind, like 99% of games most of us played before this point were 2D. Mario went from this to what you see above. Mind blowing.
1997
ID still had it. And I wanna remind you, we're now at the 5 year mark from Wolfenstein 3D. All the change we've seen happened over FIVE YEARS. That's like comparing a 2021 to 2026 game today. Meanwhile we still treat cyberpunk 2077 which is now 6 years old as some sort of holy grail of graphics. Yeah...
The N64 came out swinging with a lot of good games during this time frame too. Consider the following:
Star Fox 64
And note how blurry it is, I mean, we discussed this the other day, but most N64 games were 240p at the time. Most footage I'm showing has been upscaled significantly from what it looked like back in the day to most. Of course it didnt look that bad on CRTs intended to run at 480p and were able to blur things well enough where it didnt bother us much.
Doom 64 was the REAL doom 3 before we had Doom 3. Or Doom 2.5. But yeah. Again, go back and compare this to Doom 1&2. Again, only a 4 year difference...
So yeah, N64 was cooking. Again, those games never kept up with PC at the time, but it did bring 3D to the mainstream for a lot of us console peasants back in the day.
1998
And while the N64 and PS1 would plod along for a few more years, we were already breaking boundaries and surpassing that. On PC, we had this:
Half Life
Yeah, this was EVENTUALLY released on the PS2 for us on console. But they had this kinda stuff on PC back in 1998. Again, this is a mere 6 years after Wolfenstein and 5 years after doom, and we were already starting to see the beginnings of gen 6 style graphics. Mind blowing.
And consoles werent doing bad either. Remember the sega dreamcast? Released in 1998 in Japan.
Keep in mind, just FOUR YEARS BEFORE THIS, we were playing this on our genesises. Again, the 90s were a magical time where graphical advancement was mindblowing. Jensen Huang things ray tracing can do that nowadays, but no...just no.
1999
Meanwhile let's look at what PC was cooking up.
Yeah this is where we got into the era of the first true multiplayer games and arena FPS. Q3 and UT99 were the two big ones. And again, this was gen 6 graphics back then. On the low end side of gen 6 for sure, but still.
2000
2000 actually feels like somewhat of a lull. A calm before the storm. Still, the PS2 launched around this time, bringing those nice graphics PC has had since 1998 to consoles finally. A few games from the time:
29 game compilation
2001
This is where gen 6 REALLY took off and we got the game cube and Xbox. A few games from the time:
Halo Combat Evolved
Again, note that console games were 480p at the time so were still rather blurry. And note how badly it looks compared to some other upscaled footage. This is why I crap on DLSS in the modern era.
Same game, but yeah. Again, devs: we don't want to look at blurry crap. We dont care how good the game looks, if it's blurry, it looks like garbage.
Anyway, another one I wanna include is this:
007 Agent Under Fire
This was my first PS2 game, and MAN coming just 4 years after goldeneye, yeah it's mindblowing in retrospect. We got THAT much advancement that fast. We're not even at the 10 year mark from wolfenstein 3D. We're at the 5 year mark from super mario 64.
Meanwhile PC had this:
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
It was a huge jump from Wolfenstein 3D, but honestly, it just felt like more quake 3 to me at the time.
2002
Yep, we finally got battlefield, which was pretty insane at the time. Looked amazing too.
There wasn't a ton ton of advancement through gen 6 on console. But 2002 still had a decent selection of games come out.
Yeah, we got a lot of WWII games back in the early 2000s. It was kind of a thing back then...
2003
2003 also didn't massively advance graphics a ton. Still, we did see next gen releases of previous gen IP that looked quite good
2004
Honestly, 2004 is where gen 7 officially started for PC gamers. Sure, console gamers would be stuck at that same 2000sish standard of visuals for another year or two, but yeah things were already advancing on the PC side of things with mindblowing graphics. This is why I always mark the era of "modern gaming" around 2004ish. After a decent period of relative stagnation, yeah, things really advanced here. As far as doom 3 goes, this is a full 11 years after Doom 1. So....yeah. Note how far we came in just a decade. I'd honestly say these 2004 games look closer to modern games 20 years later than games from 10 years prior to this point.
2005
2005 was really cooking graphically. The 360 launched around this time so some of these games came immediately, and some the next year. But yeah. 2004 walked so 2005 can run. Games around this time started feeling like movies. I'd say this is around where we started hitting diminishing returns with graphics on the whole.
2006
We seemed to hit a plateau around this time visual wise for most games. And honestly, things didn't start improving as a whole until around 2010-2011ish. Still, there was that ONE game that set the bar for visuals...
2007
Yeah, this was MINDBLOWING at the time. And it was totally the great PC killer game at the time too. One of the last of its kind. There's a reason the meme used to be "but can it run crysis?" Yeah. I mean, I admit, at this point it does look a bit dated, but it's almost 20 years old, what do you want? Point is, these kinds of games look closer to the modern day than say, the 1990s games from 10-15 years ago. heck, Crysis was just miles above even like half life 2 and doom 3. And keep in mind, Halo combat evolved was just 6 years before this.
Anyway, 2007 was also a banging year for video games in general. Just a few other games that showcase pretty decent visuals from the era.
2008
After 2007, 2008 was a pretty mid year for gaming. Nothing really came close to crysis for another 4 years or so, and the 2007 games above were generally what games at the time looked like through 2012-2013 for the most part.
Yes yes, I know Fallout 3 isnt that good graphically, but it had SCALE like I had never played before at the time while still looking relatively decent. So it deserved an honorable mention.
2009
Again, after Crysis, things stagnated, it took YEARS to look better, and we mostly just got more of those 2005-2006 era visuals again and again. To be fair, after they hit that point, I can see where going further took time. At that point, we started seeing clearly diminishing returns.
2010
Yeah we didn't QUITE hit Crysis 1 visuals, but this is where we started getting close. This is where, just like in 2004 we started seeing the first "gen 7" type games on PC, we started going that way around 2010 on consoles. Most console games were stuck at 2006 era visuals still, but we did start seeing graphics make a jump again.
2011
Yeah this is where I'd say we finally matched/beat Crysis 1. Crysis 2 offered insane visuals, although some would argue Crysis 1 was better, due to Crysis 2 primarily taking place in NYC and urban environments being less impressive than the jungle. Kinda close though. Battlefield 3 also once again set the standard for quite insane visuals. Once again, it would take years for games to fully surpass this level of graphics IMO, even with next gen games coming soon.
Also, keep in mind, we're about equidistant from 2011 as 2011 is from 1996. Just go back and look at quake and super mario 64 again and compare it to this. YEAH. Again, this is the level at which games used to advance graphically. We dont see anything like this in the modern era IMO. Crysis 2 is closer to, say cyberpunk, than it is to, say, 2002 games.
2012
After 2011, 2012 was rather uneventful graphically. It was kind of a regression. Far Cry 3 looked pretty solid, but still kind of fell short of even Crysis 1.
I included planetside 2 for scale but it was never really a looker. BF3 and even BC2 looked better, but imagine having up to 2000 players fighting on a map the size of like skyrim, it was mindblowing at the time. And it did crush our PCs as well.
2013
Crysis 3 was, like all Crysis games at the time, rather mindblowing. It beat PS4/Xbox one era graphics AT LAUNCH.
In comparison I didn't find many PS4/Xbox one style games super impressive at the time. BF4, for example, felt like a regression from BF3 graphically in some ways.
GTA V
GTA 5 was actually a PS3/360 game. I know it was very quickly remastered and brought to next gen consoles and PC, but it was originally created for last gen hardware.
It was the year where "Crysis" style visuals went mainstream, but yeah. As you can tell, we've had that on PC for quite a while at this point. It's just that most games were stuck in the mid 2000s because of the hardware.
2014
Once again, we finally got that crysis 1 style visuals being pretty standard at the time. Actually better because the textures on new games could be pretty insane with 2 GB cards being standard and games using up to 4 GB on high end cards.
2015
EA did it again, bringing amazing graphics at the time to home consoles. I mean, it looks A LITTLE dated now. But keep in mind, 2026 is just as far away as the original Star Wars Battlefront II was back in 2004.
Have graphics advanced THAT much in the past 11 years? Not really.
And a lot of peopel gave Fallout 4 crap for graphics but I thought it looked pretty good. And comparing it to fallout 3, yeah, a huge quantum leap in just 5-7 years.
2016
This is where gen 8 REALLY got going with insane titles like Doom 2016 as well as stuff like Battlefield 1. Again, it goes to show it was still possible to push boundaries.
Once again, amazing. Still looks amazing today. Comparing this to like 2005-2006 titles, yeah, we still advanced in 10 years. Maybe not as much as the previous 10, but yeah.
2017
While kind of a mid game, no one can deny that the star wars battlefront EA games looked fricking beautiful. And honestly, the graphics still largely hold up to this day in my view.
2018
I still think this is one of the best games ever made in terms of sheer graphics and visuals.
Not my thing but a lot of people loved the detail of Red Dead Redemption 2.
Far Cry 5 also looked pretty good.
Atomic Heart also released in 2018. I played the demo of this one but never bought the full game. I still might in the future, but it does look amazing for its time as well.
As we can kinda tell visuals for gen 8 kinda leveled off after 2015-2016 or so though. Id say the only one of those that looked significantly better was BF5 and even then....compared to BF1 and battlefront 2? It was better, but not worlds better. Still, BF5 has been my "this is the best looking game ever" game for a while even after 2018.
2019
Metro exodus also looked pretty mind blowing at the time. Once again, I kinda feel like since 2016 it's kind of just diminishing returns.
2020
It's kinda sad but 6 years later, this is still considered the best game ever made graphically. It's the one game that made ray tracing really stand out, but it's one of the only ones to have done so IMO, and it still looks beautiful even without ray tracing.
Does eternal look that much better than 2016? A bit, but not mindblowingly so. Either way cyberpunk clearly won this year.
2021
Most games after 2020 never matched cyberpunk's visuals. Halo infinite is probably the best from that year in my view.
BF2042 was like a downgrade from BF5. BUT...it still looks better than bad company 2 and BF3 arguably (the map in the video is a BC2 map).
This game popped up when I looked for the best looking games. Never played it but it looks nice.
2022
Kind of a mid game but popped up as one of the best looking ones. i got this free with my current GPU. I found it rather mid though. Looked great though.
2023
Alan wake 2 looks pretty impressive. Frontiers of pandora looks okay. Not too amazing. Starfield looks okay.
2024
So this is the ONE game from 2024 of the ones recommended that I really felt stood out. I never played the full game but did mess with the benchmark a while back. It was pretty impressive.
Still, for the most part other games look kinda mid.
Looks only a bit better than Battlefront II.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Visuals remind me of metro exodus or battlefield 5
I mean, thats the thing. We started getting these kinds of visuals late last gen. You could argue these newer ones look a little better, but still, outside of wukong I dont think any of them are a decent leap from the likes of say, BF5, or Cyberpunk. Most games kinda plateaued in my view.
2025
Right now doom the dark ages is considered the best looking game out there. It does look great at max settings, but keep in mind this requires beefy hardware to pull off. On like a RX 6650 XT im running on low, with FSR on, and using sharpening to compensate. It looks good even on that, but is it really that appreciable of a boost over 2016 or eternal? Arguably not really. There IS improvement, dont get me wrong. But we're also seeing the costs required to get it. The price of hardware to pull off improved visuals is going up, while GPUs have barely advanced per dollar for the past 3 years by this point.
Does look impressive, but I can tell you in practice this game has significant issues with blur at long range that makes spotting enemies hard. Looks great at a cursory glance but in practice some aspects of the visuals are just...bleh.
Anyway I wont do 2026 since the whole year hasnt happened yet and the best examples (resident evil reqiuem and crimson desert REALLY don't look that good in practice.
Conclusion
With that said, what can I conclude?
Well, to some degree I advise people to look for themselves, but as I see it:
1990s- regular, rapid improvements.
2000s- slower but significant improvements that happened in bursts. The mid 2000s from 2004-2006 were the most mindblowing. 2010-2011 saw the next jump but that was the 2010s.
2010s- Once again, graphics seemed to improve in a five year cadence. 2010-2011 were amazing, but we didnt see another jump like it until around 2016. And then Cyberpunk in 2020 was a pretty huge jump that still holds up today.
2020s- To be fair I focused on the games that were allegedly the best on the market. And they do look good, but very few of them are truly mind blowing to me. Many of them look about as good as late 2010s titles to me, and I feel like we've reached a level of stagnation here.
A lot of games use FSR or DLSS on more modest hardware that makes the visuals worse. As I said, I dont care how good Doom the dark ages looks if it's blurry AF. We saw this even with old games. Like, a lot of those games look way better than they did at the time because again, 240-480p in practice.
And even then, I would advise people. Look at say, a mid 90s game and compare it with a mid 2000s one. NIGHT AND DAY difference. Compare a mid 2000s one with a mid 2010s one. Also a pretty big difference. Not AS big but big.
Compare say, BF1 in 2016 to BF6 in 2025 and....not gonna lie, I actually think BF1 looks better in practice. Maybe the visuals of BF6 are technically better, but again, I dont feel like things meaningfully advanced a ton since then. The same can be said of doom 2016 vs doom the dark ages. I actually kinda like 2016 in practice better, not gonna lie. I know the newer one is supposed to be better, but it's not worlds better.
On the other hand, compare GTA V to cyberpunk and its a pretty big difference. Still, despite 7 years we're talking 2 generations of console differences there, a late gen 7 vs an early gen 9 game.
if hard pressed, yes, 2020s games at the high end of the spectrum do look better. I just understand that for the most part, those games 1) are few and far between with the average game having more late gen 8 era visuals, and 2) require supercomputers to properly run with all the eye candy on. Consoles tend to get a stripped down experience, and my own PC probably gets roughly base PS5 tier visuals. So...idk.
Here's the thing, to make the kinds of advancements we've seen over time work, each console typically is 6-10x more powerful than the previous gen. It used to be possible to generate that level of performance uplift in the past. Nowadays, things have stagnated. 2020 era hardware has gone UP in price and is still rather mainstream. The same 3060 and 6600 tier cards that were common back then are still go tos now, with now the 5060 and 9060 xt being favorites. Even then, they're quickly going up into the whole $300-400 zone, or $400+ for 16 GB RAM. So again, things are stalling out.
I admit, even at the time, a lot of these games didnt feel worth it either. If you played say, fear on low it looked last gen. So did quake 4, etc. And sometimes you didnt get to properly max the games out for years after. But idk, I felt like the visual impacts were a lot heavier back in the day, and a lot more noticeable. Nowadays, it literally takes me around 5 years to notice a game looks dated. And again, given im not particularly playing the best of the game games listed for the most part, games from 7-10 years ago still look beautiful to me. Like I can play those 2016-2019 era games and still consider them relatively modern. It really comes down to me not particularly playing the most CGI looking 2020s games that much. And trust me, outside of those selected few games, most look...rather mid and more like late gen 8 games to me.
So are graphics still advancing even in the 2020s? yes. Are they advancing as fast as they used to? No. Are the advancements particularly accessible to average gamers? Not particularly given 3060/4060/6600/7600 tier hardware is about average and most games dont push things that much. And yeah. This is why I'd rather developers focus less on raw graphics and more on performance and accessibility. Even smartphones can pull off 2005-2010 era graphics decently now. The top end ones are probably closer to around 2010-2015 era graphics. The steam deck and switch 2 are around PS4/PS4 pro level respectively. Consoles have kind of plateaued, and pushing next gen ones next year isnt likely to net anything close to a 8x power increase. CPU wise might do a 2-3x increase AT BEST, probably closer to 1.5-2x given the power envelope. And I think PS6 specs leaked out are 2x PS5 specs. Things arent advancing like they used to.
This isn't to say there isnt room to improve. Modern games still look quite good even compared to stuff from 10 years ago on the average (keep in mind I cherrypicked the BEST 2016 games, the average ones were a bit more modest, probably closer to 2013 era visuals, whereas average games today are closer to like 2018-2019 era visuals). But yeah, the ceiling isnt as high.
Anyway, I just wanted to share that to give my perspective of why I aint super impressed with modern games. I didnt even touch game play but game play wise a lot of them are pretty mid. Visually, things are improving, but not as far as they used to. I'd say we're likely not gonna see something greatly beat cyberpunk until 2030ish. kinda sad how a 6 year old game is still considered the most impressive, by now even crysis's graphics were pretty mainstream by 2013.
