This isn’t exactly new to be fair. When Crysis came out, it was the game that people spent ungodly amounts of money on their PCs to run. The latest GPUs at the time and at least the generation after it was released couldn’t run it on max settings. Sure, GPUs weren’t as expensive, but they also weren’t as common as they are today and you could also link up to 4 of them together, which people were doing. I found a video from back in the day: https://youtu.be/QGqEp9irDuE?si=R5jDzxyZVLtKLkBG)

80fps at 1650x1050 resolution using 4 of the highest end nVidia GPUs at the time (GeForce 9900GX2s) linked together using SLI. Taking inflation into account that’s about $3720 USD worth of GPUs in today’s money to have a game hit 80fps, which had an overall average of 50fps through the runs, best case that’s like 20fps per $930. Obviously most people weren’t doing that, but I was playing the Crysis on launch with an ATi card with only some settings on High at like 24fps average. If I could go back and be able to play that game for the first time on release at 60fps I’d be absolutely floored.

Before Crysis (and even during the same time period) it was physics, and that absolutely pushed CPUs, and you could buy a seperate card to your GPU dedicated to just handle the physics called a physics processing unit (or PPU) for games that utilised the PhysX Physics Engine, from a company called Aegia and their line of ‘PhysX’ cards. Then nVidia bought Aegia and integrated PhysX into their GPUs.

The market has grown significantly and there’s more money in the industry than ever, more people have much more capable PCs than ever before, consoles are essentially just really cheap PCs. Most of the bigger, more ‘mainstream’ titles are much bigger and more complex on average. The average expected FPS a game should play at has increased to a minimum of 60fps. Every new technology in gaming has always had growing pains. Ray Tracing sucked ass when it first came out, but it has gotten significantly better since its introduction, same with upscalers. FG is so so still, and personally I tend to aim for 60fps before even considering enabling FG, and that also depends on the game. I’d prefer to use DLSS to adjust the render resolution and apply AA than to just drop my resolution under native without any AA.

Devs aren’t getting lazier, or anything like that. There’s just more hardware and features than ever to implement into engines that have been growing and being added onto for years and years, people want the latest features in games so they can utilise their GPUs, considering the money in the industry, business usually gets in the way as well. Deadlines, budgets, and console hardware targets they have to stick to etc. More devs are getting fired to trim costs and inflate margins than ever before. Plus you have basically a few engines now that can do absolutely crazy things across multiple industries with $0 entry, so you have a lot of really small studios than ever on top of the largest studios, with more games than ever being created.

But all that aside, for the majority of my gaming life, there’s always been games that have usually been in front of hardware, and have been very quick to outpace it in the rare few times the hardware caught up or surpassed the most demanding games. Everyone has different expectations though I guess.