Question Why do games look the same/worse. But require insane setups these days?

[dontlistentome]

I think the point of diminishing returns kicked in. Yes you can keep increasing how good a game looks at 1080p 60 fps on a $200 dollar GPU. But at some point the incremental gain you get is far outweighed by the increase in cost. You can tell when this happens because a reviewer will need to put a circle around an area of a game screenshot so you can know where to look to see the improvement. Sometimes when I look at a screenshot like that I think "Yeah the shadow of that crate looks more realistic than in the previous generation of this game. Too bad I won't notice it when I play the game". If it was an improvement worth anything then no one would need to point it out to you. You would notice it immediately.