Why do games have a million graphical settings now?

[Mirai]

I am trying to play Cyberpunk and idk what half of these even mean. What is the **** is "Convolutional Neural Network" and how am I supposed to know if its any different from "Transformer Model"?

Back in my day you just had to choose your Resolution and Anti-Aliasing. Now I spent more time playing with the settings than I do playing the game

It's to make it attractive for enthusiasts, experts and other types of gaming professionals. They can tinker with these settings, their graphics cards, the CPU overclocks and different drivers and feel fulfilled when they get that extra 2-3 fps.

 

[TrueSeeker]

Just buy a top of the line GPU then you don't have to worry about changing settings
This is mine.
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Great Scott! Temutravelling is real!

 

[Polymathic]

I feel in the vast majority of cases modern games have far less settings than older games

 

[HerZeLeiD]

I feel in the vast majority of cases modern games have far less settings than older games

The PS3 and Xbox 360 era PC ports had barely anything to tweak. Then you get the last couple of Resident Evil and Call of Duty games with really in depth settings that surpasses even the old PC exclusives from the past.

The funny one is the Metro franchise. Known for being quite impressive visually for their time yet every Metro game has only presets to choose from! You cannot even get around changing stuff in the config files manually except for maybe changing the FoV and motion blur.