In any case, modern consoles are making heavy use of some type of upscaling to keep at resolutions above 1080p, sometimes to even to get above 720p.
So did consoles in the good old days. The vast majority of PS3 and Xbox 360 games upscaled from 540p or 600p to 720p. The difference is that back then, upscaling was done with either nearest-neighbor or bilinear interpolation, and today, the upscaling methods are more sophisticated and produce superior results.
You seem pretty emotionally invested in proving that there was never any point that games were more optimized in the past
Emotions have nothing to do with it. I do a lot of engineering-level hardware evaluation as part of my job, and I write a lot of code, so I just see it as people are saying a bunch of things that are factually wrong or make no sense, especially YouTubers who were little kids in the days they're trying to be nostalgic about. When this whole hue and cry about "optimization" started, I checked out some YouTube videos, and, to use one example, this pimple-faced kid was going on and on about how "well-optimized" Battlefield 3 was. I was absolutely dumbstruck, because i remember when the game came out, and it ran like absolute shit. The Frostbite engine was a shambling heap of garbage that ran inconsistently even on high-end hardware. I kept watching, and the kid was, IIRC, showing how buttery-smooth it ran on an "old GPU," and IIRC, the "old GPU" was a 960, which came out 4 years after BF3. I don't think he was trying to say the past was better because if you waited 4 years to buy a computer, games would run well, I think he just had no clue what he was talking about and didn't even think to look up how BF3 ran on current hardware.
and that standard changes based on time and platform, and we could just end up disagreeing on the standard
Sure, some stuff has changed. 640x480x16bpp was fine in 1998 and intolerable now. But 15 fps never looked good. A GPU being obsolete when it was 3 years old sucked. Over time, games run better and better on older and older hardware...but this is worse, somehow? We've gone from my 4-year-old GeForce 2 being completely unable to run Doom 3 to my 4-year-old 6700 XT being able to run the latest games at 60+ fps, HD resolutions, and looking absolutely brilliant...and I'm supposed to be outraged that I can push that to 120fps by using frame gen? I'm supposed to be furious that I can push the settings higher if I use upscaling? I think it's just nostalgia. When people say games were better optimized in the good old days, it's like when Boomers say cars were built better in the 1960s. They just weren't. The body rusted out in 4 years, the drive train was shot by 60,000 miles, and they cornered like a sofa strapped to a Radio Flyer. These supposedly "optimized" games ran like ass on 3-year-old GPUs. A good chunk of them wouldn't even run at the highest settings on any hardware in existence. What was better about that?
I think the main reason people, especially YouTubers, are hyperventilating about "optimization" is that the PS4 has been the lead platform on nearly all games for 11 years. So for a very long time, as long as you had a decent GPU from 2016 or later, it would absolutely scream on any marquee title. It is only just now, in the last year or two, that a tiny number of games have come out that either have no PS4 version, or the PS4 is an afterthought. The games everyone bitches about, like Alan Wake 2 and Space Marine 2, have no PS4 version. They're targeting the PS5, and in some cases, pushing it pretty hard, so a PC that was utterly clobbering games is suddenly only adequate. In the case of the 6700 XT, it's gone from being about 7x faster than the target platform to being 1.3x faster.
This is mostly what I'm talking about. AW2 is a great looking game, but this is the first time I've seen this upscaling option. Apparently it's required to run the game at an acceptable framerate on a decent rig, which is bullshit IMO. Nobody's talking about running it above 1080p and on Ultra.
Alan Wake 2 runs at 60-70 fps at 1080p medium on the 4-year-old Radeon 6700 XT with no upscaling or frame generation
Another thing that's special about this game is that requires a GPU with mesh shader support. It means that it's almost unplayable on Nvidia's 10 series cards.
The 10 series GeForce is now eight years old. EDIT: Alan Wake 2 can still manage 60-70 fps on a 1070 at 720p.
