Back in the 2010s, it felt like we were witnessing a race to the most "realistic" graphics possible. As consumer hardware and game dev tools got more powerful, the piss filter faded into obscurity as lens flare, more detailed textures, and a push to make the most of next-gen gaming PCs came to the fore. We saw an influx of video games striving for a hyper-realistic look back in those days, that were inevitably followed by even better-looking remasters of themselves as time went on. For a while there, more realistic meant better, but I was hoping that school of thought had disappeared.
Graphical fidelity hasn't stopped progressing, but I really thought we were past that quite narrow-minded view of "objectively" good or bad video game graphics. Now, Nvidia is preparing to boot DLSS 5 into our games, and it somehow feels like we've taken a backstep.
