Yes, they’ve never been terribly important to me. I buy beefier video cards but that’s because they end up being useful longer, not because I want to run 1080p at 90fps.
I’ll echo it depends. But sometimes modern graphics can just wow you. I have never had a top of the line PC or anything, but I have PS5 and the next gen enhanced version of Control, in Graphics Mode with ray tracing, just makes my jaw drop in some scenes. It really enhances the entire game, IMO.
The recent Microsoft Flight Simulator is an example of that for me. The graphics are the experience in that game.
I’ve been seeing some examples comparing characters from the original Mass Effect games to images of the remastered version and I’m hard pressed to figure out which ones look better. Maybe the difference will be more pronounced when the graphics are actually moving but the static images don’t seem to be a big improvement so far.
I’m more interested in the art direction of a game than I am in pixels per inch or frames per second. But I can’t deny that having decent graphics is important for a wide variety of games. Doom (1993 & 2016) was enjoyable not just for it’s frantic game play but also the graphics were pretty good. I think at times game developers are going a little overboard at times and concentrate a little too much effort in some areas. Did anybody really need to spend time making sure a horse’s balls shrank when the weather got cold?
The only thing I’ve particularly noticed about the graphics in the Mass Effect series is that the draw distances get longer over time.
I just watched a terrible early 1980s action movie. The bad guys used a lot of high tech phones, machinery and computers. The phones were carried in small suitcases; the computer graphics were the best Vic-20 had to offer.
For me, it’s been over ten years since an improvement in graphics made a big difference to game play. Admittedly, I spend much more time reading than gaming these days.
I’ll echo the sentiment that for me good graphics these days are more about good art direction and aesthetic than being the most realistic. Until computers can generate in real time visuals that match a film at the same resolution, with every single minor physics issue taken care of such that I can’t perceive that it wasn’t a filmed live actor, then I might be impressed and get back on the train to always want the best quality graphics. But right now, I think most games have better aesthetics with worse graphics, because the more cartoonish the art style, the less I care that they get every single detail right. When you make game graphics close to realistic without any particular art style, everything that isn’t perfect is simply a glaring error.
Agreed. Take any still screenshot of say, Cyberpunk 2077. Looks great. Sometimes damn close to photoreal. But once you make it move, it falls apart. I’ve not seen a game that had character animation that was so good that it was at super convincing. Occasionally there will be small snippets where they get it 99% right and I’m like “whoa”, but that’s rare. I’m pretty sure the reason you can’t see your character in reflections in CP2K is because your character model and animations are so janky that it would look laughable.
Probably. But part of that is because CP2077 is a first person game and first person games tend to use distorted and weird models to fake the first person perspective. There’s numerous examples of games where someone managed to break out of the first person perspective and see the model and the legs are all twisted or the have giant snake arms, etc. The times you see V’s body is because they go into 3rd person and use a different model but, you if walked past a reflective surface and saw your first person model, it would look awful and it probably wasn’t worth the effort (especially on top of all the other issues) to link a 3rd person reflection model to your first person movements.
I do agree that human models are still the weakest point of graphics, undoubtedly because our brains are so wired to identify every minor detail or expression that the bar is much higher than having a horse or car pass as “real” in our minds.
I have not played Cyberpunk(considering it…not sure if it is that great), but I will say that two games had the best facial animations.
Witcher 3
Red Dead Redemption 2
Very impressive animation on the faces. I think Red Dead 2 might have been better, but Witcher 3 was pretty hard to beat.
Yeah, I’m always impressed when you’re not in “cutscene mode” and the character’s faces are still well animated. Cyberpunk was pretty good in that regard as well. Agreed on RDR2 animations, very nice, but their facial textures just seemed very, plasticky?
It’s the equipment that we’ve become accustomed to using. I set up my new monster machine from Digital Storm over the weekend. I have a Virtual Reality compatible Gforce card with 6 Gigs of memory of its own in a machine with 16 Gigs of memory. My monitor is a 32 inch CDW new generation UHD with a resolution of 2400+ by 1600+. “Crystal Clear” hardly does it justice, yet I’ve grown used to it in two days! 
That was one of the novel points about Portal (and Portal 2): Despite being a first person game, you often could see your character from a third-person perspective (never quite exactly face-on, but from any other angle).