Thats apparently where the big money is. Also, there are lots of folks like me, who play only occasionally and therefore not needing to spend so much for a state of the art gaming PC, and get by with their 5+years old one.
But yes, if the high end PC gamer hardware would be standard ... that would allow for some serious graphical (and other) improvements.
I am finally back into game developement (as a side project) - and I am surprised again, how much hardware constraints limit game developement, too. Many things I want to do, are just not possible on the average machine (but thats the bonus from developing on average hardware, you find out about that early on).
I still dream of a voxel sandbox gameengine with integrated chemistry and physics. There are quite some projects promised that years ago, but apparently it is not yet possible with todays hardware. Maybe soon?
All dynamic lighting, dynamic shadows, no lightmaps. I guess it was a couple generations too early for that to work.
Maybe lightmaps are dying off now because game worlds are getting bigger and denser, and storage isn't getting faster as fast as GPUs are, so it's better to throw together something approximate and dynamic that can be rendered in 2 or 3 frames, than something perfect that can never move and has limited resolution at bake time.
You can see what this accumulation looks like for CP2077's SSAO in this Gamer's Nexus video: https://youtu.be/zUVhfD3jpFE?t=960 He attributes it to TAA but to me it looks like a clear example of the exact temporal accumulation technique described by the GTAO paper in order to get samples performance-efficiently.
This ("free" compute due to memory bottlenecks) is true for the last-gen consoles as well as modern cards.
So rather than a storage limitation, it's more a limitation of being able to get the data from system memory or even on-card GPU memory to the GPU cores fast enough since the cores now process it so quickly. A general increase in resolution of textures and towards 1440p and 4K displays has not helped with that issue.
Going along with that is a general trend towards PBR (physically based rendering) in all fields that use computer graphics - film/tv, 3D modelling, design, games.
The PBR philosophy is generally anti using tricks & hacks where possible. The reasons why are the reasons that PBR has been so widely (almost universally) adopted: PBR makes it easy for artists to create consistent and robust results, using understandable methods that mostly work how you would intuitively think they should, and the results automatically look good and are interoperable since there is a clear target - to emulate real light transport, materials and so on.
It's simply not feasible (or at the very least extremely costly in artist/dev labour) to be manually designing bespoke tricks to get each individual scene to look right. It's a "let the computer do the work" type of philosophy, which Cyberpunk seems to follow since they didn't even seem to include manually placed occlusion planes, for example (going by the original article).
So it's a combination of the hardware now being capable of it, having gradual software/algorithmic improvements to get better approximations to correct lighting, and a relatively wholesale overhaul of the entire graphics pipeline toward PBR, due to its substantial benefits. Then, since the PBR approach is highly compatible with ray-tracing inherently, ray tracing is the cherry on top, for now still only usable on top end hardware for realtime games.
Artists would just need to specify the procedural part, ie their editors would need to have that as well.
I think currently, the way artists work, they anyway have a lot of layers, and some of them are procedurally generated. I know people at least used to use something like "clouds" procedurally generated in Photoshop, and use that to apply some effects to the texture like wearing or staining. But in the end they "burn" the texture to bitmaps, and a lot less layers. Maybe that could be instead done on the GPU. Then the base texture becomes mostly flat, easily compressable, and the clouds can be procedurally generated, requiring no storage at all. It can still be deterministic, you can just store the seed.
Not everything can be procedurally generated on the fly (at least with a small algorithm that would run quickly enough on a GPU). At a certain point just providing compressed bitmaps becomes more efficient, especially since GPUs are highly specialised to work with exactly those. Everything is a tradeoff in real time graphics.
Possibly this explains the issues on ps4/xb1 hardware. If cp2077 were designed for the new generation of GPUs where those tricks are unnecessary, it clearly wouldn't backport well onto hardware that requires those tricks.
Skyrim doesn't use prebaked lights and shadows at all. That's why you generally only have a handful of active light sources per scene with everything else being filled in with ambient (interiors) or sky (exterior) light.
To me you've kinda proved my point. Nothing in that video strikes me as being "next gen" in terms of graphics. They have a decent filmic post processing filter and high res textures, I guess? CP2077 looks much, much better than that.
I do agree it does some things better, but it overall still looks "current gen."
Some humble thoughts:
The discussion on the SSAO suggests that the game's system uses GTAO - lots of features suggest at the least heavy inspiration from the technique (see "Practical Realtime Strategies for Accurate Indirect Occlusion" - relatively accessible paper).
The way the game's rendering is set up seems very carefully thought out. Namely, the relative lack of pre-baking and lighting "tricks." This accomplishes several things at once: It simplifies development of locations and assets - hugely important in a game with a scope this large, it makes the lighting/visuals of the game more robust and consistent in quality, and it also allows the integration of ray tracing effects without changing the artists' and designers' process.
Since even without ray tracing the game uses PBR and broadly physically plausible (though carefully designed) lighting, adding ray-tracing doesn't require a massive amount of extra work. All the information is already there, and it'll be much easier to make it look good.
All in all, reading this article has done just as much to convince me that the game is "next-gen" (at least in terms of graphics) as actually playing it has :)
As a comparison, the ENB mod for Skyrim allows dynamic lighting in that game, but to actually use physically plausible light locations rather than the base game's prebaked light maps essentially requires redoing the lighting for all the locations in the entire game (there are several mods that do indeed do this.)
Before CP2077 I still hadn't seen a game that definitely beat what you could accomplish with modded Skyrim for visuals - even in very recent games it was all still fundamentally done the same way. Good to see that essentially a decade of near stagnation has ended. It's a little vexing that the state of PC gaming is so dependent on the release of new consoles, though.
Edits: for minor fixes