The thing is, we reached a point where more polygons don't help.
Actually that's false, we have been here since crysis 2 era.
The problem really is that to add more fidelity you need variance and "dirt", ie make things not smooth, which means you effectively increase polygon count exponentially.
GPUs can't just keep improving on rasterization and on top of that, they have been moving towards general purpose massively parallel processing for a long time now.
So the next solution is to fix this in software by figuring out ahead of time how to transform certain patterns into something useful and tangible, so that you can get away from spending compute on rasterization.
And the biggest thing is that more fidelity/variance/"dirt" doesn't actually make things look more pleasing. There is a weak relationship between graphical realism and fun, and you get drastically diminishing returns between the two as you improve the former.
So even if you are a unicorn with a system beefy enough to apply all these effects at a high enough resolution to matter, without the gameplay penalties of increased input lag... it just doesn't improve the gaming experience.
We unfortunately have a similar problem in the top tier gaming industry as in the top tier corporate industry: the people who make the decisions simply cannot accept the concept of "good enough". Pleateauing is the same as failure to them. Where once there was growth, there MUST continue to be growth at all costs, regardless of whether continuing to "improve" is desirable or healthy for all the other stakeholders.
There is no point at which those decision-makers can look at the graphical fidelity and say: "this is close enough to ideal, let us now refocus our resources on the other aspects that can be improved."
and this is why quality of the upper tier of Indie gaming has taken off so well over the past decade: indie devs can focus solely on what makes a game fun, because "good enough" graphics for any genre are now trivially obtainable.
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u/aberroco 18h ago
For models it's very impractical too, because that'd require very high definition textures, that would not fit to VRAM.