I think increasingly the dominant factor in a game's graphics is the style, not the power of the engine. Give me Mario Odyssey-level graphics and good color and texture artists over a bland grey shooterfest with 100x the graphics power used any day.
Not that everything modern falls into the latter category. Some are both 100x the graphics power and also beautiful. But I would submit, not more beautiful in proportion to the additional effort put in. We're well into diminishing returns on the graphics front at this point. Great games can run on the Nintendo Switch. Heck, great games can run on the XBox 360.
> Give me Mario Odyssey-level graphics and good color and texture artists over a bland grey shooterfest with 100x the graphics power used any day.
Kinda like PC's back in the day with Max Payne 1 against Unreal 2 engine games.
MP looked far more realistic due to a vastly better artwork on textures.
Not that everything modern falls into the latter category. Some are both 100x the graphics power and also beautiful. But I would submit, not more beautiful in proportion to the additional effort put in. We're well into diminishing returns on the graphics front at this point. Great games can run on the Nintendo Switch. Heck, great games can run on the XBox 360.