No Ray

Graphical fidelity in games has definitely come a long way since I was a kid, but more and more it's becoming clear that there isn't much further they can go.

Last week, Capcom finally released an update to three of their recent Resident Evil games. "Resident Evil 7" and the remakes of "Resident Evil 2" and "Resident Evil 3," all games that were originally released between 2017 and 2020, were updated to better take advantage of modern graphics technology.

Most notably, the games now features the ability to implement "ray tracing," which is a lighting effect that makes shadows more realistic by calculating how light sources would reflect off of surfaces as though they were in the real world.

Naturally, as I recently upgraded my gaming PC, I was eager to replay one of my favorite games in literally a new light. I downloaded the new version of the game, messed with the settings to determine what my graphics card could handle, and ran a casual run of "Resident Evil 2" to appreciate the higher fidelity.

The result though, if I'm being perfectly honest, was not all that noticeable. In most cases, turning on ray tracing created a virtually imperceptible difference in the game. Without having a side-by-side comparison, you'd likely never be able to tell whether it was on or off.

Even more, where it was noticeable was not necessarily better. Sure, ray tracing objectively creates a more realistic virtual environment. That can't be denied. However, "Resident Evil 2's" environments weren't designed around shadows behaving realistically. The most notable effect of having ray tracing on was that some of the game's dark corridors and rooms actually got brighter. So while it is more realistic, that comes at the cost of some of the game's spooky atmosphere.

The whole experience exemplifies something that I've noticed for a long time in gaming. Specifically, that graphics just aren't going to get much better than they are now.

Ray tracing may be a technical marvel of modern computer processing, but at the end of the day it barely moves the needle on what games actually look like. In fact, graphic fidelity in general has seen diminishing returns for years now, requiring increasingly advanced technology to produce increasingly marginal improvements.

Another recent example can be seen in the recent announcement of a remake of "The Last of Us." The original version of "The Last of Us" was made for the PS3 back in 2013. It was soon remastered for the PS4, to take advantage of that system's superior hardware. Now, with the relatively new PS5 setting the hardware standard, the game is getting a full on remake due out later this year, rebuilt from the ground up in the same engine as its recent sequel. And while I'm sure it will feature better textures and lighting and all that stuff, looking at the remake side-by-side with the original really shows how far we haven't come in the last nine years.

I feel a swell of pity for the younger generation of gamers if being able to see a little more grey in the beard of their rugged and disheveled protagonist is the extent that nine years of graphical advancements has to offer them.

In comparison, in same span of time back in the 90s, I watched the gaming industry go from 2-D games working with a few hundred colors to creating entirely new genres as they mastered 3-D technology.

I remember the wow factor of playing the Super Nintendo for the first time back in 1990 and experiencing the graphical marvel of seeing "Super Mario World's" various sprite layers moving independently of each other. It was a groundbreaking advancement over its 8-bit predecessors.

Then, just six years later, Mario was running and jumping in fully 3-D environments on the N64. The Super Nintendo was impressive, but the N64 was a literal game changer.

By the turn of the century even the 3-D games had moved past their blocky polygonal origins and started their approach to photorealism. I really feel like graphical fidelity plateaued back then and the whole industry has been limited to incremental improvements since.

It is unlikely that we'll ever see technology advance so dramatically in such a short span of time ever again. Outside of perhaps a quantum leap forward in VR technology, it's difficult to see where we even go from here. Sure, we can always get higher resolutions and more realistic rendering, but to what end? Being able to see every strand of hair on a character's head moving independently in the wind may make for a nice effect, but you can't make a game out of it.

In the meantime, I've rolled back to the previous version of "Resident Evil 2." The new version looks nice, I suppose, but it also broke all of the mods I had installed and being able to replace the looming Mr. X with Thomas the Tank Engine is definitely a more significant graphical change than some slightly better shadow physics.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and mostly uses his new gaming PC to play 20+ year old games, as you do.