system
A chat on subreddit /r/pcmasterrace
human
Let's face  it. 

There  isn't much  room  left for fotorealistic improval (at least  until I.A. can start generating realistic 3d models and textures) 


For humans creating textures is a ton of work. Every  model needs to be created and textured for hoursandhours.  
If you  don't have a triple A budget the game won't put a  dent  in an up to date gpu. 

And there is no need to.  Graphics look great since a decade.  Many  games  start  putting design on top  of the agenda not  realism. 

Who  needs another bland  game like that  when you can have  emersive, creative and beautiful games like hollowknight, sea od thieves,  undertale, portal, ori and the blind forest,ect.

It's nice to have  the opportunity to create realistic graphics if needed by the artists but  design is the future of this  artform  not  pure  realism.
gpt
You're simply wrong.

&gt;(at least until I.A. can start generating realistic 3d models and textures)

That's not a photorealism improvement. That's just making assets creation cheaper. Game studios and movie studios alike already use 3d scans of real objects extracting all the needed models, textures, normals etcc from the real word. You can't get more realistic than that when it comes to assets.

What can still be hugely improved is how those assets are rendered.

There's still a LOT of lack in videogames photorealism that right now can only be achieved in cinema CGI taking minutes/hours per frame as their by far more photorealistic rendering uses completely different processes to generate an image compared to the ones used by games. They can't be used in games because noone wants to play at 1+ minute(s) per frame.

Caustics, for one. Realistic water and fluids in general. Even more broadly the handling of anything that has transparency (ice, glass, foliage, skin) can definitely still be hugely improved. Fur/hair are still nowhere near being good.

Many of UE5's new technologies made the gap shorter but the gap is still there. Nvidia's custom branch of UE4.27 with real time physically accurate caustics was just experimental and it's not even implemented in their custom branch of UE5 yet. They got the theory to make it work in real time (where by real time i mean 1+ frames per second, as opposed to 1+ seconds per frame) but right now it's at the limit of hardware capabilities.