> Now if we had custom fast/ray-casting technology
No offence but I just cannot understand this viewpoint. A game is about fun, about gameplay. Pretty graphics do little for that (IMO) once the novelty's worn off, and can easily start to get in the way. A game's tech is mostly decoration (I said mostly, sometimes it can help). The real breakthrough in games would be in their depth of interaction, and that would take some kind of comprehensive model of humans and human experience, and more. We're not getting that soon.
I used to think like you. But the way a game looks definitely has impact on the way the gameplay feels. Smoke particles out of a gun, the slight tilt of your viewport. The flash that reflects of the walls. These things have an incredible impact on gameplay even if mechanically it makes no difference.
Vision is one of our most important senses and discounting it and saying well it shouldn't matter because gameplay is the most importing is shortsighted. Graphics are a huge part of gameplay.
Some of it can get in your way. I usually turn off bloom and blur, I get a higher FPS and my peripheral vision is already running a native blur function, so why waste resources on another process doing the same thing? A lot of technological innovation ends up being spent on style points for the sake of making a sexy trailer and getting pre orders. When Battlefield 3 came out with all the engine improvements, many users ended up hating all the blue and shiny flashes with everything and blur and bloom that got in the way of actual game play.
Sometimes people running lower specs might even play better than someone running higher specs, if that means the higher spec has more grass textures that better hide character models or something like that. Those sort of improvements are improvements for the sake of vanity, and are generally panned by a game's core players.
No offence but I just cannot understand this viewpoint. A game is about fun, about gameplay. Pretty graphics do little for that (IMO) once the novelty's worn off, and can easily start to get in the way. A game's tech is mostly decoration (I said mostly, sometimes it can help). The real breakthrough in games would be in their depth of interaction, and that would take some kind of comprehensive model of humans and human experience, and more. We're not getting that soon.