The Era of Detailed Gaming Rocks is Upon Us

Do we need that?

Lords of the Fallen screenshot taken by the author.

The world of video games, like other big entertainment mediums, is obsessed with chasing trends. They’ll do anything to try and “guarantee” hits in a volatile entertainment industry. When a new genre explodes onto the market everyone rushes to copy it. When the first game in a potential franchise is a big seller, it gets a million sequels until everyone loses interest. And then after a few years, it might get a reboot anyway.

This same relentless behavior also applies to graphics. New visual technologies are pushed, at first, to sell customers expensive new hardware — then more substantive games have to come out in order to establish visual tricks as “normal,” lest they risk falling into obscurity. The original Xbox era brought us bump and normal mapping, with shiny bumpy surfaces everywhere. Nvidia’s RTX cards made ray tracing possible at a consumer level, and it’s finally paying off with better reflections, shadows, and lighting.

And Death Stranding gave us…rocks?

While I have some problems with the way that Unreal Engine 5 was first marketed, one of its key selling points is a tech known as “Nanite.” It leverages the tessellation hardware inside your graphics card or console to intelligently manage geometric detail. It largely eliminates pop-in, and can also help…