Control and Resident Evil 2 Remake still look incredible and run well on fairly inexpensive hardware today. We don’t need globally illuminated Unreal Engine 5 games with individually modeled nostril hairs on each character that require graphics cards with prices in the three digit range
Graphics should just be kept at late PS4 level for the foreseeable future to keep games as accessible as possible
Graphics can be good while also being well optimised but the issue here is a big commercial engine like unreal is designed to cut labour hours not run well. Crapitalism.
Most new graphics technologies could with clever application be used to enhance a game however it may be that it’s used to cut dev time. For example:
The effects aren’t really intended to elevate the game but to reduce the cost of labour making them. An engine that both looks good and performs well takes a very long time to develop but instead you get the fuzzy ue5 mess where every game looks the same and runs terribly with perpetual stutter
There’s some truth to your post but I gotta push back a bit on this one. Raytracing isn’t so much a way to avoid having to generate lightmaps or cut costs so much as it is just an objectively superior option to lightmaps in terms of quality. In fact I would argue that Raytracing is maybe the singular reason games didn’t quite look good enough 5 years ago. Polycounts aside Raytracing is basically the number one thing that’s separated graphics in engine from prerendered cinematics that always seem to have that extra oomf. Lightmaps are largely generated by the computer anyway and even with raytracing both require an artist’s labor to light the scene. The only downside and why you’d ever opt for lightmaps over raytracing is performance cause rendering real time reflections at 120fps in 4k is expensive.