I'm happy for vram requirements to go up. Way up. I wouldnt mind textures needing 20+ gb of vram on textures. My issue is - some or actually a lot of these games that use that much vram don't look better. Sometimes they don't even look nice. That's the main reason I'm very skeptical about the whole "we need more vram". For what? For worse looking games?
With that said jedi looks actually nice, but it's not one of the games that hog vram, it plays fine even on 8 gb cards.
Well I think you're right but also that part of this is a twisted view on things.
Its like boiling a frog in hot water right. We slowly get our increased fidelity so we might not appreciate it as much, the wow effect isn't there. Some titles stand out, others don't, some stand out on their art design, some because of particle effects, yet others because they're great at showing you a huge open world with great view distance. Again others stand out because they started combining these qualities, because all game design is in a way iterative even between publishers/studios that compete. Everyone builds on the ideas of others. Today we get games that can combine qualities and
still produce highly playable FPS - the Crysis days are definitely behind us, no studio wants to go there anymore and frankly they don't have to.
We get many assets on screen and many more draw calls on the API, and
still load the game up further with HD textures and mods. We have a Total War game that encompasses the campaign map of
three games now including all of their factions. Etc. etc. We can play Riftbreaker with 200+ aliens on screen at north of 120 FPS. Games finally use all our CPU cores.
All of these new games are on a new level of fidelity, its just that baseline that was elevated, but you still need to
combine qualities of things we've learned from the past to make something stand out. And even then you're not catching as much attention as you used to get because the baseline is elevated regardless. The games will always require talented art design and game design to really make them special. Those don't require a specific increase of VRAM. The new baseline however, does - irrespective of how well a game is optimized.
I think a lot of people keep forgetting, and this is where corporate/big publishers drop the ball entirely, too, that you really dó need dedicated, motivated and talented teams to make truly good content. You need to give them time, resources,
creative freedom, and a whole lot more to facilitate a truly great title.
I then look at studios like Larian (Divinity OS, Baldurs Gate 3) and I see something the way its meant to be done. You can just feel the love there if you watch any content they put out. Everything else looks, feels, secondary to making a great game, they're in their own little safe bubble doing their thing. That's the dedication you want to see and those are the only games/studios where I have some semblance of faith left, to be honest. This is also why indie devs tend to produce mechanically much better games. They love what they make, and they want to explore the concept. And by combining great art design with solid mechanics and gameplay, you really do get something bigger than the sum of its parts, the game might even 'look better' just because it all clicks, not because it uses whatever high resolution of assets.
