Bitter responses for such a bitter OP, you've been warned.
What is the point of ever buying the top of the line graphic card? Clearly, no developers will ever support true PC quality graphics.
Then don't? Nobody asked you to, get an x50 or x60(Nvidia) or whatever AMD equivalents there are with the new numbering scheme. I will buy hardware I deem fit for my needs. I prefer my own options depending on my preferences, my own bruteforced AA methods or AO methods or resolution or [whatever] as I like.
"True PC quality graphics"
There is no such thing, do you buy a Ferrari first and then complain about the roads? You seem to overestimate GPUs which are at the end of the day just cheap rasterization hardware and that only goes so far. Anything that's exceptionally good quality - ray tracing/ray marching is very taxing and used very sparingly(Ambient occlusion, Reflections). Another point is - You can buy really expensive hardware but if it's limited by software API(DirectX11 currently) then what are you getting at? You're wasting resources doing the same work that can easily be done with lesser hardware by simply having better software and scheduling but I digress.
This whole 'oppression' complex the 'Master Race' seems to have developed is just ridiculous along with the hiveminded thinking, people with hardware beefy enough to handle something really STRONG is a very small number. SLI/Crossfire is a mess and inefficient at what it should be doing. I would suggest actually LEARNING a few things about how current hardware works, how software works and how real-time rendering works instead of relying on reminiscence by so called 'hardcore PC gamers' on the internet be it reddit, /v/ or SonyGAF. It goes a long way to KNOW how things work instead of bickering about 'something I heard from someone on the internet'
I think this is a serious question. PC graphic has not improve dramatically in the past decade. My Radeon HD 5850 can still run most game on medium to high. Ultra setting does look better but not that better, and certainly not 7 years worth better.
What utter nonsense!
So you think Doom 3 looks the same as any other game right now? Are we still using hard black Stencil shadows? Are we still using forward rendering? Are we not moving to physically based rendering now? Are we still using primitive physics effects? Are we still using static background/backdrops instead of rendering in 3D? Are we still using sprites for everything? Are we not slowly using more and more volumetric effects? Sounds to me more like you're looking in the wrong places.
What about framerate? If you think the performance difference between 30-60-120 is small you'd be horribly mistaken.
You want to go back to the era where there was ridiculous rendering API fragmentation along with certain APIs only working on certain brand of GPUs? PhysX PPUs? Change your GPU every year? Buy specific hardware to run specific games? Be my guest, keep me out of it, I have been playing PC all my life and will continue to do so, the last thing I want is even more fragmentation that will kill the platform.
We PC gamers all crave to someday have graphics that is so realistic it look exactly like real life.
Speak for yourself. Boring looking games is the last thing I want and artists know this very well.
If CDPR let us down, what hope is there for PC gamers?
There is no hope for PC Gamers who live in the fantasy land where they all have exceptionally great hardware and provide a huge market that the devs will care about and believe realtime graphics are going to reach actual CGI levels anytime soon. None.
Things like Star Citizen are huge exceptions that somehow collected millions and millions of dollars from the crowd all because of Chris Roberts and
when it's done your hardware won't be able to run it for many many many many years at an acceptable framerate. Good luck with that, you'll need it and a LOT of cash. Meanwhile the rest of the companies will continue to do business and create more entertainment products that can actually work on current hardware. You want dreamy graphics that your system won't be able to run for the next 5 years? Crowdfund it yourself, you expect that from AAA games made with investor money? You have some seriously unrealistic expectations.
I still fail to see how CDPR has anything to do with this. Witcher games have always been an artistic marvel, not a technical marvel, that crown belongs to Crytek. Witcher 2 again was an ARTISTIC feat, it had no "exceptional" technology. They did not invent something that has now become an industry standard or something that was really ahead of its time except the art pipeline, which should get credit where it's due. For comparison - Crysis 2 invented Screen Space Reflections which we now use and love.
