vetz wrote:

When you get out of the forest and see the sunlight for the first time my jaw dropped to the floor because of the graphics. It's just extremely beautiful.

It is an amazing looking game but I was way more blown away by FarCry; Crysis for me went from wow to meh too quickly, but then I guess that's game-play related and not relevant here.

I've had my world rocked by many games but the one that stands out for me is Gothic 3. I still think it's the best looking game I've laid my looking orbs on, and that's comparing it to Crysis - and Witcher 2!

I do remember getting a Geforce 2 MX for my birthday because a hardware T&L card was required in order to play Black & White. I don't think I really played it for long though.

I play new games all the time. I own Crysis, it looks pretty good to me, but I wasn't blown away by it visually, even on high details. I was actually more impressed with the visuals of MOH Airborne and COD:WAW.

I always thought Halloween Harry had great graphics and effects for VGA (although that's probably due in large part to its developers being Amiga fanboys, and doing much of the work on an Amiga)

Transport Tycoon was another one that I thought had nice graphics.

Morrowind was probably the first game that made me really go 'wow' when I saw the pixel shaded water.
Oblivion was impressive when you climbed a hill and looked out over the valley and the tower, just the sheer draw distance made for amazing views. Unfortunately it wasn't as good a game as Morrowind so I didn't play as much of it; and I'd much rather play Morrowind with mods that give better graphics than Oblivions anyway.

More recently, Anno 1404 had gorgeous graphics.

Oblivion really blew my mind back then- I took this years ago on an 8800GT. Maxed out everything, hard to get near this even today...

so no... Crysis wasn't so revolutionary as Oblivion was to PC game graphics.

Crysis seemed to be more about presenting a bunch of crap on screen at once, trees, cheapish looking buildings etc. Half the stuff wasn't really that individually detailed though to be honest. Just a ton of the same stuff. To me WAW and Airborne just looked more realistic. Eventually I will play Oblivion. I'm sure its going to eat a lot of my free time up once I do.

vetz wrote:

I'm surprised nobody but me has mentioned Crysis so far. Go to any other forum and everyone will mention that game. People don't play newer games much here I take it? 😜 😉

When you get out of the forest and see the sunlight for the first time my jaw dropped to the floor because of the graphics. It's just extremely beautiful.

Hey... 🙁
I did mention it 😜

Need for Speed II SE, when I bought it I played it in software mode but when the menu was idle for a while it started a video showing how the game looked in 3Dfx, two weeks later I had my Diamond Monster 3D. 😁

vetz wrote:

I'm surprised nobody but me has mentioned Crysis so far. Go to any other forum and everyone will mention that game. People don't play newer games much here I take it? 😜 😉

When you get out of the forest and see the sunlight for the first time my jaw dropped to the floor because of the graphics. It's just extremely beautiful.

I didn't even bother with Crysis until the price of hardware (complete system, not just video card) that was capable of playing it at smooth framerates with everything set to the maximum came down. I still don't understand why they released that game with such high settings that no hardware of the day could take advantage of.

There's Metro 2033, but man it's such a hog even with 2 Geforce 460's I had to turn the settings down to get good frames.

New games can't impress me anymore. Everything looks similar, and some worse than the others.You can say oooh and aaah....but that is all there is to it and all wear down very fast.

Games that impressed me most are those which I was initially exposed to and grew up together. All are PC games. Consoles are specialized platforms and I expect nothing less than good stuff from them, so I can't be really impressed with 'em.

1. I was impressed with Police Quest 1's EGA graphics when I got my brand new VGA monitor and a VGA card. The colors were simply astounding.

2. Countdown - 256-colour "digitized" VGA graphics with live actors and synced speech!

3. Commanche Maximum Overkill - almost every gamer classmates of mine were absolutely blown away looking at the review pictures in a local newspaper!!!

4. Wolfenstein 3D - Very impressive pseudo-3D rendering. The grand daddy of the latest 3D FPSers, including Cry....sis. Every great 'uns have a very humble beginning. Doom was beautiful but it didn't have an impact like that of Wolfenstein 3D but I enjoy DOOM2 more than Wolf3D.

5. I think I was hooked to the Dune II - The Building of a Dynasty RTS game.

6. GODS - the wonderful bitmaps of the Bitmap Brothers.

7. Somehow, I was impressed with Descent more than DOOM. Maybe the complete freedom of movement in all 3 axes.

8. I remember saying "ooooh" looking at level 4 design onwards of Prince of Persia.

9. The surprising 256-color King's Quest V - simply gorgeous!

10. Links - I think it was THE best golf game at it's time, graphically. Nothing else came close to it. I don't like golf, but I remember spending insane amount of time with it.

Newer games - can't really point out - since game companies have left out focusing on gameplay and instead are focusing pushing out the most graphically impressive games, and instead of fully utilizing the graphics card's potential, instead started to program something even the next generation cards can't handle very well. It's sad to see, that to play everything at the highest setting requires the most expensive and most powerful card available today - and even then may not run everything at max in the options settings - the reason many players turn to console - no need to worry about upgrading graphics cardss every 6 months to play the next game.

But still, if I want to recall one modern game in 5 seconds, the thing that comes to mind is Titan Quest. Very Impressive. When you run on a jetty platform, you can see the water rippling around the wooden stands of the jetty due to the vibrations of the running action on the wooden platform.

Malik wrote:

and even then may not run everything at max in the options settings - the reason many players turn to console - no need to worry about upgrading graphics cardss every 6 months to play the next game.

???
pc games automatically detect your pc's power and set details level accordingly (that is what details options are for!) resulting way better gfx than consoles with no need to waste time configuring them. No need to worry about anything. They also give you possibility to set details higher if you upgrade in the future or if you already are an owner of a modern pc bought after many year of using some old crap. Console games will always look shitty no matter what you do. So wtf are you talking about??

Malik wrote:

and even then may not run everything at max in the options settings - the reason many players turn to console - no need to worry about upgrading graphics cardss every 6 months to play the next game.

That only happens if you are on the trailing edge of the curve. My 5870 has been powerful enough to play EVERYTHING at max settings @ 1920x1200 and I've had it for almost 3 years now. Its only now starting to show its age. Its MORE expensive to buy the cheapest hardware! That being said, its also most expensive to buy cutting edge. I bought my 5870 on sale when the 6xxx series was just released. The only game that has dropped below 50fps has been Metro and Skyrim. And 1/2 of that performance hit was because i only have 1gb of vram. having 2 would keep me @ 75fps.

luckybob wrote:

Its MORE expensive to buy the cheapest hardware! That being said, its also most expensive to buy cutting edge.

yeah cause it is always the middle option that is most economical.

Yeah but its hard to resist the bleeding edge sometimes. I paid way too much for a 7970 but couldnt be happier

luckybob wrote:

My 5870 has been powerful enough to play EVERYTHING at max settings @ 1920x1200 and I've had it for almost 3 years now. Its only now starting to show its age. Its MORE expensive to buy the cheapest hardware!

Interesting. My notebook has Mobility 5870 (which is somewhat similar to a desktop 5770). My i5-2500k desktop runs with 2 6950 in Crossfire. Still, I notice perceptible performance hits at the highest sertings. I game at 1920x1080 always. Maybe it's just that I expected silky smooth gameplay with older games and newer graphics cards at the max settings, not to mention new games and new graphics cards at max settings.

Edited i5-2500k (from 25000k).

Not gaming much lately, but when I did I actually got a 18.5" 1366 x 768 LCD. The main reason was because I wanted high frame rates on average video cards. Full HD is twice as demanding so when I would get 100 fps, at Full HD it would only be 50.

Once you start playing with AA as well performance can quickly go down during certain scenes.

Max Payne. I think I played it back in 2000/2001 on my original Time computer AMD K6-2 500MHz with integrated ATi Rage 128 and 128MB RAM. I remember at the time thinking wow. That same year played a demo of Age of wonders 2 and was surprised at the nice colours and 2D graphics. Good times..
The Sims was also beautiful graphically when it came out. It looked fantastic at the time. Surprised at how far the old PC was pushed. Didn't upgrade anything in it when we had it. Was a real workhorse (yahoo chat, gaming browsing 🤣).

Metroid Prime.

d1stortion wrote:

Metroid Prime.

Seconded! :D

Also:
* One Must Fall 2097
* Magic Carpet
* Mechwarrior 2
* TES III: Morrowind
* Gran Turismo 3
* Star Fox Adventures
* TES IV: Oblivion (Actually, the Shivering Isles expansion more than the main game.)

These games all impressed me graphically for various reasons, even though some of them technically weren't the best graphically for their time.

Older titles like Wolf3D and Doom didn't impress me because my first times playing them were without sound cards and the sounds ended up raping my ears. Later on when I finally sat down and really played these games with proper sound support, I had already played other games that were even more impressive.

Also, Skyrim didn't impress me because of graphical issues I constantly ran into (possibly due to outdated hardware) and TBH, I simply don't play a lot of modern games to be impressed by, and the ones I do play tend to be more retro-styled. :P