Both real time ray tracing introduced in 2018, and real-time denoising with super-sampling / up-scaling / frame-interpolation, both of these have made meaningful visual quality improvements in the last 12 years. If you do a Google image search for “best games with ray tracing” and compare to “best looking games from 2011”, there is an obvious and sizeable gap in quality.
It’s still nothing like what we saw from say 2000-2010. I’m not sure exactly where the diminishing returns are given how much more powerful hardware is relative to a decade ago, been graphics development really has been disappointing. Maybe the explanation has a lot to do with training programmers on certain platforms that become outdated, or games with long development cycles being unable to take advantage of the tech that actually exists when they release.
I think games and graphics have some pretty inherent n^2 scaling which can make progress appear to have slowed down, despite large increases in computational performance.
Say your textures are 100x100px for example. If you double the size of your texture to 200x200px suddenly you have 4x as many pixels to deal with.
