10 Graphics THEN vs NOW That SEEM UNREAL 

Cyberpunk 2020 vs Cyberpunk 2024 lol

Why not compare Harry Potter to Hogwarts legacy? Lol that was such a weird choice to start with.

I get the logic of preffering better graphics over worse ones, but that doesnt change the fact that ive played some of the worst best looking games, and the best worst looking games, graphics dont fix a bad game and they dont ruin a good one imo

13:00 Ninja? You mean Nina :)

The wildest thing for me and my brother was using the graphic switch button (aka the back button) for Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Halo: Combat evolved where it would swap between original and new graphics. After having grown up with Halo, it blew our minds.

Would have been a great opportunity to talk about Resident Evil and their remakes.

GTA and Fallout have some of the biggest “then vs now” differences

The OG Gran Turismo vs GT7 is a unreal difference too

Even having played Spiderman, I dont know why this never clicked, but Insomniac should reboot the Prototype franchise. It would be amazing.

I prefer old graphics. Everything looks the same now, and all AAA publishers seem to care about are graphics, no matter how poorly a game runs.

The graphics keep getting better, the gameplay keeps getting forgotten.

You should make a list of older games that look better than new games.

Didn’t realize Ninja made it through all eight generations of Tekken. 😏

I’m excited to see how facial graphics improve in the next few years, because for a lot of games I feel like they have a really hard time escaping the uncanny valley.

Weve been pushing photorealism for a while, with textures at least and even lighting. When i look at new games and judge them "graphically" nowadays i tend to look more at the fluid, hair and cloth physics.

Wow look how different ninja is 13:03

why didn't you compare Harry Potter to Hogwarts legacy?

Resident evil.. walking into that mansion in the first game back in 97 or whatever was unreal.. mind blowing.. now look at it, and how good the new remakes are. We have seen a lot

The big deal about Deus Ex was never the graphics. It was about a fully voice acted game with a really cool multiple choice storyline. And I think the graphical difference between Indigo Prophecy and Detroit Become Human is pretty crazy.

Some great mentions would've been : Final Fantasy, Twisted Metal, Metal Gear, Mario, Zelda.....The OG's

this is like a list of "how games used to actually look vs how we imagined them looking when we played them"

When resources were little, people were more creative. Now it seems the solution is just more money coz the technology we have today can do pretty much anything you want.

The Tekken segment does make the argument that graphics aren't everything (which is not what you're claiming I know). Seeing those OG animations applied to current gen graphics just shows that the gameplay is what allowed us to overlook the relative unreality of the old graphics back in the day. If anything, devs have to work a lot harder now to make these much more realistic graphics move and act realistically. The old games relied on help from our imaginations to bridge the gap.

Man, I have no idea if it’s nostalgia goggles, but even with these truly amazing graphics, games just felt so much more interesting back in the day.

Graphics aren't the most important in a game. Gameplay and story should come first, I think

Spiderman 2 may have been empty, but that kid still managed to lose his damn balloon every couple of blocks

An example even within the same game: No Man's Sky has received quite the graphics glow-up since it's 2016 release. I wouldn't say it's completely unrecognizable, but it sure is a stark difference when you compare them side-by-side.

Graphics have definitely advanced really well, but I'm still waiting for an open world city with the ability to enter every building. GTA where every npc lives and has a genuine life. Imagine a mission where you have to run through a street but can jump through open windows, smash through any door, etc.

Playing games with my second grader has reminded me that graphics are not nearly as important as gameplay. He could care less if it's NES or PS5, just so long as it's fun.

Doom could have been added. Actually you could make an episode of any game series from first installment to the latest comparison (Aliens, Doom, GTA etc) Love the show, keep it up!

Back in those days, our eyes didn't see them as horrible graphics. We were so much happy to play the games and saw them as real. Though back in the day i liked those graphics I also imagined high polygon graphics like we have today.

You called Nina from Tekken "Ninja", lmao.

Max Payne 1 blew my mind when it first came out lol

Thanks for the walk down memory lane. Built my first 486DX2 PC in 1992. Played most of these older games. 👍🏼

The original Nier is still on of my favorite games of all time. I feel like even though graphics weren't there, older games were so much more memorable

Even better than graphics are physics, the Euphoria engine used in gta4/5 and force unleashed does more for immersion than grahpics ever could.

Microsoft Flight Simulator should really be on this list, I'm not sure there is a bigger THEN vs NOW anywhere.

You make a good point - we can't trust demos of Unreal 5 games too much. Until the next gen consoles come out, & we see actual gameplay, it's wise not to get our hopes up too high.

The first time I played Tekken 1 is etched in my memory. At 14, I was dining with my parents at a pizzeria on Spain's south coast, a summery place fringed with palm trees and the beach just a stroll away. It was about 9 p.m. when we entered and I spotted a Tekken arcade machine. My excitement was palpable. That evening, the pizza tasted incredible, and those 100 pesetas (roughly 60 US cents) were the best spent on any game.

meanwhile crysis 3 still holds up well today despite being 11 years old

I can think of two big, very natural reasons Stellar Blade looks better than Nier.

Did Falcon call Nina Ninja? Lol, rare for him to misread so it jumped out. Great vid, I love old games and graphics and appreciate many games from PS1 and early PC 3D.

If the gameplay and stories could also keep up with the graphics we'd be living in gaming Utopia. But we can't have it all I guess 🤷‍♂️

HL2 beginning is perhaps THE BEST opening in any game ever made. It's so atmospheric.

Just remember that all these beautiful demos will run at 30fps on consoles.

13:04 “Look at Ninja, for example” lol

The Serious Sam games, some of the most awesome fun I ever had, single player, LAN multiplayer and online multiplayer. The games were jaw dropping to be hold to me, as I was new to PC gaming and had a machine powerful enough to run Serious Sam and Serious Sam 2 maxed out at 1280x1024. The only other game to get the more play time online and just at home multiplayer than Serious Sam was Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and its expansions. That game I was a part of a pretty highly ranked clan, and it was a blast.

I was playing Castlevania: SoTN on my 360 earlier this week, and was wow'd switching between the original graphics and the enhanced ones. And I remembered playing the original disc game on my PS1 in the 90's. We really have come far.

Lego games are slept on in terms of graphical quality. Compare Complete saga to Skywalker saga and it's night and day

10 best Fishing Minigames in actual Games when?

2 ideas for you: - Try to do the opposite: then vs now... finding game that are 10 years (ish) old that look better than new recent games. - compare current real-time game with old(-ish) pre-rendered 3d movies (toy story, Final Fantasy, ...?) have fun, thanks for the videos !

Probably my favorite gameranx videos.see how video games graphics are then and now is amazing.word up son

13:03 It's Nina, not "Ninja"! 😂

Old Games have good graphics too

Dam I remember playing Serious Sam when it first came out. I think it's actually aged quite well. It's a game that has a scene ingrained into my head forever... when Sam approaches a sand hill *hears faint screaming* "Uh Oh!" Suicide bombers run over the hill in waves... ARHHHHHHHH!" *BOOM!" "ARRRHHHHHHHH!" "BOOM!" "ARRRHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

"Look at Ninja" LMAO, I don't mean it in as an offense, but hearing that was really funny.

Far Cry 2004 to Crysis 2007 is a whole different world

For years i thought the face of max Payne 1 was Johnny Knoxville

I vividly remembered standing in my boy room mesmerized by the graphics of the cut scenes in Rage Racer (Ridge Racer 3) for PS1 and thinking wow one day the gameplay will look that awesome! And here we are today where it’s starting to become realism without any uncanny valley’s.

So many more comparisons you could do! I'd love to see a second part - GTA 1 vs 5, Fallout 1 vs 4 (especially with the next gen mod!), Morrowind vs Starfield, Red Dead 1 vs 2. Would also be cool to do a comparison with originals vs. remakes (FF7 comes to mind first).

falcon aways reaching. you never compare deus ex with cyberpunk son. Mankind divided maybe.

Unreal Engine has come so far, it's unreal

The “cool” thing about old graphics was the fact that the “rest” could be interpreted, similar to a book That's why old games have a charm that many of today's games can't match

I love these. Even for a casual gamer, this comparison is amazing. (just got a PS5 two weeks ago after a nine year hiatus)

Unpopular opinion: you're comparing constantly with games pre-2005, because if you'd compare with games of, let's say, a decade ago (which is still 10 years!), you wouldn't find any real significant updates besides a bit of atmospheric light play. Graphics just follows the Unreal engines, and a 15 year wait for an update is at the very least a bit disappointing. On the other hand, I'm still waiting for the first game that will truely take use of Unreal 5's photographic developments.

this list feels really dumb for some reason

All these technical advancements and people still pay $90/year for sports games that have been carbon copies of the same game since 2015. The same copied assets, the same physics engines, the same stadiums, same voiceover announcers, the same crowd noises. The only thing that changes is the background tracks which get shittier each year. But hey, uPdAtEd RoStErs!

A nice sequence to show in this regard is combat flight sims. • Starting with Their Finest Hour - Battle of Britain. 2d sprites that personally I had no way of hitting, shuffling about in a sort-of 3d space. • Chuck Yeager's Air Combat went 3D and was infinitely more playable as a result. But everything was made of obvious triangles, lacking textures. • Then on to something like the first IL-2 Sturmovik game (or if you prefer something older: European Air War or WWII Fighters), which had textures, damage models etc, but rudimentary ground LOD. • And right now there's DCS. I have not played it much, but some people are putting out some seriously cinematic stuff.

Not much anymore but in the 90s, wrestling games when the graphics got better every year. Fighting games like MK, SF, Tekken, etc

We're gonna see what Unreal 5 is capable of when Hellblade II drops

Twenty years ago I would not have believed that water in video games would be as primitive as it is today. Even with all the advancements, games are far from any photo realism. Look at modern games ten years from now and then it will be much more noticeable to those who think games look real. In fact, I would risk saying that many old games were still able to capture certain realism aspects with the graphical techniques used, not much different from the current generation. Games still look like cartoon pictures with strange effects, smearing, broken shadows and reflections, as well as post processing that really doesn't do much, with the exception of some mods that are on a different level. What is amazing from this point of view, is that games of today do not have much more realism in them at all once the veil is taken from one's eyes.

Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor are night and day with graphical improvements. UE5 is pure magic :)

Far Cry to Crysis was a pretty big jump and those games were only 3 years apart. Which is kinda mind blowing when you think about it. Graphics were moving so fast back in the day.

As someone that started on a Atari.... I'll just say that games are made by wizards ... 🎮 ❤️

Falcon, that "people walkin here" in the Spiderman comparison instantly makes this my favorite video of the year... Thanks for your great work my friend 👊

It's funny that you chose to highlight the spell particle effects from Harry Potter to the UE5 demo, because they're actually both just textures with transparency. There's just a helluva lot more particles now :P

So happy to see that Sean Ashmore is in Alan Wake 2! He was in one of my favorite underrated Remedy games! The reason I wanted an Xbox One because of Quantum Break. Still cool to this day.

The thing about old game nostalgia is that we remember the game play, not the graphics. I tried to play GTA San Andreas again (prior to the "remaster") and was amazed at how bad the graphics looked! When I played it the first time, about when it released, I didn't notice the graphics. There wasn't anything better running a PC at that time. Years from now, I won't remember the graphics of GTA V, just the game play. Maybe I'll try it again and be surprised at how bad it looks (compared to whatever games exist in that not so distant future).

The jump between Halo 3 and Halo 4 was night and day. Take the intro in Halo 4 and then play ❤

7:53 You know what definitely DOES hold up from Deus Ex? The music!

I'd say 2 jaw dropping one's for me are Halo 2 to Halo 2 Anniversary, that 10 year gap really shows how much better Halo games were able to look at that point The other one is Halo CE to Halo Infinite, a 20 year gap and it really shows

The biggest challenge with making things look "real" now is that we have such high resolutions that everything looks much too clean. That subway example? I've never been on any public transportation that was that clean. Even a fancy train trip, the seats have stains and lint. The carpets have discoloration or frayed edges or ripples. For me to buy that subway as real, there would need to be a good bit of ground clutter that is varied enough to not be obviously copy/pasted for each car.

PS1 games still look beautiful in my eyes. If you grew up with 8bit and 16bit consoles, the jump to 3d was gigantic.

I remember playing Max Payne and thinking my god what interactivity and life like scenes. Lol.

Spider-man 2 is one of the best looking games I've ever played. Its honestly insane how far we've come.

Have you seen how the Sims have improved with each game? If you compare the graphics of Sims 1 vs Sims 2 vs Sims 3 vs Sims 4,you'll notice much the graphics change. It makes me wonder what the graphics of Sims 5 will look like.

The difference between Helldivers 2 and the original blows my mind, I’ve never played the first one but I couldn’t believe how much different it was when I first saw it

I’m gonna need some more VRAM

Where is Mario? The NES brought kids like me to tears on Christmas. Then the 64 came out later and I had to RENT the console and a game for the weekend to have my mind blown with advancements…I remember the feeling as a kid going into “Karma” (My local and privately owned rental service) and loving to waste time looking around and hiding the cards for games I wanted to rent later. LOL

Who else saw the Red Hot Chili Pepper's music video for Californication and thought those graphic were great at the time? I remember seeing that video and thinking how cool it would be to play a game like that.

Driver 2 was a huge leap into the 3d world. They offered gta 3 on old consoles, at a huge cost to texture quality but was the future of gaming

Total Annihilation (1997) vs Supreme Commander (2008). The first title was really before 3D was a thing, but they made it work somehow. They created it to look 3d. Lots of reviews scored the graphics 10/10 for the time. Then came the spiritual successor and we got what they tried to in 1997: Fully zoomable, fully rotatable detailed 3 models that look good.

I first started gaming on the Atari 2600 and looking back at those games it's a little surprising how I found them fun. But I did. However, there is no way I would be able to last ten minutes playing one of them again today.

Unreal is impressive, BUT most Unreal Engine games have performance issues, at least I have personally on the PC the past couple years. UE5 is absolutely insane with the amount of detail, I just hope the optimization can get better for the games.

Little bit random but .. why is there not triple AAA studio covering the SCP Games? Like.. Imagine the original SCP game but with way more features, monsters, lore and stuffs. You could update it FOREVER knowing how BIG, scary and creepy the SCP possibilities are. I am so sad we only get like shooters as SCP games.

As a 90's "kid" i am, my first console was a super nintendo and ps1, i think that the games looked great because we have to think of what they had available at that time, most games were amazing for what they were, of course now we say they look bad but in that time they sure were something else, for example for me GT1 was amazing because there wasn't anything like that

I just finished a play through of the original Deus ex with the GMDX mod, would definitely recommend for new and returning players

I remember my first time creating fire and effect using particle generator in 3DGS A5 it was so wonderful. and compare it to today's engine damn that feel so ancient.

I've witnessed the evolution of tech firsthand with everything including video games , 60,s to 2024 , pong back in the 70,s was cutting edge now I play games on my ps5 , hard to believe, but keep improving till it hits a wall

I would have loved a bonus mention with Cyberpunk 2077 vs Starfield flipping the narrative on its head. The older looking so much better than the new.