As a kid in the 90s, I couldn't really tell the difference between the capabilities of the SNES or Genesis and a hand-drawn cartoon on TV. As far as I could tell, if it was 2D, those machines could process it, but my brother and his friends just a few years older than me could tell where the limits were. When Mortal Kombat got big, I thought that was the end state for video game graphics. Everyone's just going to do that, because you can't get more real than real people, I thought. Early 3D graphics did age more poorly than the best pixel art the SNES and Genesis had to offer, and we knew at the time that that would be the case too. After years of revisiting those 2D games via emulation, a trip to a local Barcade reminded me of how important scanlines were to the art style of most games from the era, and now I basically only emulate those games with scanlines on and the most accurate emulation available when I'm playing anything earlier than the PS2.

Half-Life 2 was insanely impressive, and the thing that sold it most was the big real-time G Man head at the beginning of the game. Valve took cutting edge research in animating faces during dialogue and implemented it into the game in a way no one had seen before. It did wonders for selling the "realness" of what you were looking at. Just 3 years later, we had Crysis, a game pushing graphics so far that no one could even build a machine that could run it at max settings at the time, but even on medium settings, it was the best-looking game I'd ever seen.

Nowadays, I can look at a Digital Foundry video with side by side examples of ray tracing on and off, with them explaining to me how and why it's so much better, and I often can't really tell the difference unless I squint. I did see an Alan Wake II example that seemed pretty noticeable, but mostly only in the side-by-side, and if I was in the market for Alan Wake II, I likely wouldn't notice what I was missing when ray tracing is turned off. The things that make games look best to me now are when they can add all of that fidelity to the textures and animations of human beings, like in Death Stranding, because we're wired to more easily detect when a human being isn't real than anything else.