Godot Lead Developer On Video Game Graphics History

Software Developer Juan Linietsky, known as one of the original Godot Engine developers, recently shared a great rundown on video game graphics history, discussing the advancement of realistic visuals in games over the last 20 years.

To explain the history of graphics development and shed light on the techniques used by developers, Juan Linietsky began with Doom 3, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and explained how the increase of visual quality in the late 2000s was achieved by baking light bounces into lightmaps, a trick also utilized by Bethesda Softworks in 2010's Rage:

Juan then moved to 2013's GTA 5, saying that as games evolved into open-world and large environments became the norm, baking everything into textures was no longer practical. However, many other hacks can be done in open-world games to obtain good outside direct lighting, which can look very good even on old hardware.

Unfortunately, those tricks don't work as well in interiors, so you can tell games from that time because interiors look a lot less realistic and flat. In the image below, it's basically just direct light and SSAO:

The developer pointed out that open-world games always played at a disadvantage, as they had to coexist with more "restricted world" games, which could utilize techniques like light mapping and reflection probes, resulting in a significantly better look.

But even then, up to this point, most games still "looked sort of like paper." This is what distinguishes most of them from more modern ones, PS4 era and beyond. In 2012, Disney published the physical-based shading paper used for Wreck-It Ralph, which set a standard for physically-based rendering for game engines and tools, giving a huge boost to game art quality.

From here on, games look a lot more realistic, and this is why you don't see that much of a big jump in quality between PS4 and PS5 games. 

Juan then compared the stunning exteriors of Red Dead Redemption 2 with its challenging interiors to illustrate a key issue in open-world rendering: the ongoing difficulty with Global Illumination.

Concluding his analysis with a scene from Alan Wake 2, Juan highlighted that claims about ray tracing and path tracing having minimal impact are fair only for exterior scenes. In reality, these techniques make a significant difference in interior environments, and there's hope that the next generation of GPUs and game consoles will finally perfect this aspect.

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