In year-end tradition, Digital Foundry focuses on the state of the art in determining our most important best-of list: the 2025 Graphics of the Year Awards. While great gameplay factors into our picks, these selections by and large honor how game developers technically master their target platforms.

From full path-tracing routines to squeezing performance out of dated hardware, these 2025 games will push your favorite gaming PCs and consoles to their limits. In DF tradition, our "top ten" list is unordered until reaching the very top three, so this article's order is alphabetical until reaching the top of the 2025 heap.

Honourable Mentions

This year's honourable-mention list is a special one for 2025, as it revolves entirely around Nintendo Switch 2 exclusives and ports. Switch 2 has already been a fascinating platform since its June launch, owing to its variety of ports and exclusives, but for this specific list, we hone in on three specific categories.

Mario Kart World, Kirby Air Riders and Fast Fusion: Switch 2's best racing exclusives deserve separate kudos for maximising the Tegra T239 in different ways. Mario Kart World has a Xenoblade-like approach to time-of-day transitions across its new-to-the-series open world setting, which offers dramatic sunset and evening coats of paint without costing any performance. These pre-baked lighting conditions as mixed with cube map reflections and distant level-of-detail settings combine to push enough of a technical envelope, all while locking to a series-standard 60fps frame-rate.

Kirby Air Riders followed in November as the first-ever Bandai Namco game to employ the developer's new, proprietary SOL-AVES engine. It too locks to 60fps while applying material-based reflections, clever lighting and tasteful particle effects to deliver arguably a more "next-gen" visual make-up than even Mario Kart World - albeit in more limited, less open environments.

And the future-racing intensity of Fast Fusion barely missed the top-ten list due to its aggressive, image-degrading use of "tiny DLSS" to messily upscale its pixels. Otherwise, its shaders, effects, massive levels and indirect lighting uniquely exploit Switch 2's chipset and continue developer Shin'en's streak of unbelievable results on lesser hardware.

Panic Button ports: This year, the studio behind Switch 1's "impossible" ports of Doom Eternal, Warframe and others did similar magic for some of Nintendo's biggest first-party Switch 1 game upgrades to Switch 2. And they continued to earn their reputation for Switch hardware mastery while immediately adding value to early Switch 2 console purchases. These boosts to resolution and performance made games from Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Splatoon and other series look and feel the way they always should have - with smoothed-out, crisper-resolution results in Link's Awakening and Echoes of Wisdom being particular highlights among the boosted games.

Star Wars Outlaws: This doesn't merit a best-graphics entry on graphics alone, but for what's been squeezed out of Switch 2, Outlaws absolutely merits an honourable mention in terms of sticking closely to a 30fps refresh, making the most of a solid DLSS implementation and adding Switch 2's only hardware-based ray tracing experience this year. Thanks to its combined graphical techniques and solid performance, SW:O is currently Switch 2's best "impossible port," surpassing solid launch-day ports like Cyberpunk 2077 and Street Fighter 6.

Dying Light: The Beast

We needed to revisit this game after its uneven launch on PC before giving Techland's latest first-person parkour game a spot on this list, and that's because its ray tracing implementation has since been upgraded from something broken at launch to something impressive.

The company's in-house engine appears to employ a software-based global illumination model for its lower-end RT settings, and the result outpaces the rudimentary lighting found in Dying Light 2's time-of-day system. With so much verticality and tactility, a performant RT model applied to all of the objects players can bump into and interact with adds significant weight to the game - all without taxing your CPU's frame-rates in ways we've seen in some of this year's rougher Unreal Engine 5 titles.

Scale up to "hardware RT" as an option on compatible PCs, and the same full-coverage lighting model looks even fuller thanks to pixel-perfect results. This means the game can eschew artificially and glowing light sources while players explore a post-electricity apocalypse. Natural lighting and material effects enjoy an incredible visual payoff via reflectivity across a variety of surface material types, making the game's indoor spaces feel truly lived-in and abandoned. Then, imagine that precise lighting combined with pitch-black environs and flashlight reliance, at which point this engine's new reliance on RT is less "too dark, can't see" and more interesting on a mechanical, limited-light basis.

The biggest knock against this impressive game is its current console-port situation, which eschews seemingly every software RT toggle - even on PS5 Pro, a deficit we hope can be addressed in a future patch. Whether that appears before or after the game's advertised past-gen console launches remains to be seen - let alone how exactly this current-gen, RT-filled makeup can even work on Xbox One or PS4.

Earthion

Like our Switch 2 picks in the Honourable Mentions list, Earthion appears in our top-ten list in part because of how much it squeezes out of its target platform. But this side-scrolling bullet-hell shooter ranks higher than those because it rewinds well past modern systems to run on the Motorola 68000 - as in, original Mega Drive and Genesis hardware.

While its initial launch this year was for PC and modern consoles, Earthion will receive a physical cartridge version for Sega's 16-bit console sometime in 2026 - and we've already seen the game run at a flawless 60fps on original hardware. Its 60fps cadence is crucial, as we have seen many simpler-looking Mega Drive shooters suffer from flicker and other visual breakup when pushing high sprite counts. Yet the appropriately named development studio Ancient has demonstrated utter mastery of Mega Drive performance in Earthion's execution.

By leveraging a larger ROM size than was readily available in the mid-'90s, Earthion can render larger quantities and sizes of sprites throughout its slick arcade-shooting levels, and the Ancient team clearly had a blast doing so. Gorgeously rendered pixel-art cinema sequences play out between every action-filled level, resembling classic '80s anime. Ships and background elements scale into and out of view during combat in dramatic fashion. And parallax scrolling crams a variety of tasteful, unified-palette materials in scrolling level backgrounds, as Ancient understands how to technically impress without distracting players from the game's spaceship-piloting demands.

Earthion's musical icing on the cake comes in the form of chiptune legend Yuzo Koshiro (Streets of Rage series, Actraiser) turning in a major-key synth-blasting delight of a soundtrack - again, running on original hardware. Koshiro-san's FM synth mastery hasn't faded after all these years, and this OST delivers hopeful reach-for-the-skies major-key melodies that make the game's die-and-retry combat worth coming back to.

Ghost of Yōtei

In the immediate wake of Yōtei arriving in our testing labs, we were surprised to learn that the game had included ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) without any prior warning or advertising. We've discussed that at length - even with the members of the Sucker Punch development team responsible for its implementation - but that handsome, current-gen step up to per-pixel lighting is only one reason Yōtei makes our year-end list.

Freed from base PS4 as a target platform, Sucker Punch takes its open-world Japanese adventure series so much further. This year's engine upgrades its sweeping landscape vistas with remarkably increased draw distances, and those fields now sport higher densities of foliage that more naturally react to players' movements. It's easier to look across the game's open world and make out distant scenery, whether to bask in the view or to organically gather your bearings and steer your horse towards your next important objectives.

Additionally, PlayStation 5 Pro's PSSR upscaling system is at its best as combined with Sucker Punch's proprietary engine, and on either PS5 system, players can access a ton of visual options - arguably too many - to dial in fidelity and performance with results that prove this game out as the Sony first-party graphics game of the year.

Mafia: The Old Country

Though we've seen a number of Italian renditions in 3D video games, none have taken on Sicily, and maybe that's because its particularly idyllic environs needed an ambitious graphical approach to do them justice.

We get that and more from Hangar 13's Unreal Engine 5 stunner, which surprisingly sees the studio move away from its own in-house, high-quality engine that we loved in Mafia: Definitive Edition from 2020 and towards Unreal Engine 5. At least in one respect, we understand why, as UE5's Nanite system keeps geometric object density incredibly high for all buildings and terrain that players approach in this open-world, mid-1900s adventure.

Level-of-detail (LOD) push-out reaches near-horizon extremes, more so than the highest-settings version of Cyberpunk 2077. This combination of massive vistas and solid performance is worth praise in 2025 in part because it delivers such balance in a year where Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered couldn't muster the same.

And while Mafia: The Old World's implementation of software Lumen and ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) includes some artefacts common to UE5, including blobby SDFs and overdarkening of spots, it's still otherwise a stunner on a lighting-and-shadow basis, owing to the game's incredible art and handsomely lit countrysides. Max it out on a powerful PC, or enjoy the game with mostly reasonable frame-rates and performance mode options on base consoles.

Metroid Prime 4

As the Switch 1 era draws to a close, Retro Studios sends it off in dramatic fashion with its most optimised and visually stunning shooter yet. In the brief period since our reviews of its Switch 1 and Switch 2 versions went live, we've come to further appreciate how this game makes the most of its power-limited base platform.

Simply put, MP4 is a lighting masterwork - a prime (pun intended) example of how pre-baked lighting inside carefully crafted environments, whether fully indoors or exposed to outdoor elements, can implement attractive lighting phenomena like emissive lighting while also organically leading players. Games like this live or die by how lighting guides players' attention to both primary paths and more secretive, bonus-filled paths, and Retro Studios clearly still understands this assignment four games into the 3D search-action series.

It's all the more stunning that Switch 1 can deliver so much ecosystem diversity within large exploration zones at a steady 60fps, building upon the already impressive likes of Metroid Prime 1 Remastered to push the 2017 console to its limits. And Switch 2 further exploits its processing advantages in its own version, in terms of raising texture resolution and total pixel counts whether players favour 1440p visuals at 60fps or still-solid 1080p imagery at an incredibly fluid 120fps.

Routine

This debut game by indie studio Lunar Software has been in development for over a decade, and it while sneaks onto this year's list with a December release date, it deserves its slot as one of the better Unreal Engine 5 implementations we've seen this year. Players must navigate an abandoned space colony while contending with pitch-black corridors, and the game's combination of analogue-styled monitor interfaces and realistic, highly detailed surface materials evoke a graphically supercharged take on the haunting Alien: Isolation.

Screens-within-screens are a true Routine highlight, with dated monitor refresh elements like limited refresh rates and monochromatic panel characteristics living inside a fantastically lit and shadowed environment. This eerie quality is often in players' faces thanks to the embedded tube-styled screen in players' gun and multi-tool, which adds a consistently cool and unique effect to the game's exploratory gameplay.

Silent Hill f

When leveraging Unreal Engine 5 features like Lumen, horror games have the added challenge of skipping direct illumination for their lighting, lest they look overblown and less atmospheric. How can you harness modern lighting techniques in an attractive-looking way while dealing with the light-bounce realities of diffuse lighting?

Silent Hill f's PC and console versions answer this by masterfully balancing art, tech and performance. The town and village sequences in historic Japan are grounded with copious foliage and era-appropriate physical objects like bicycles and appliances, and these are combined with a strong handling of their material properties that looks convincing even while employing the technically limited Software Lumen lighting model. These qualities also apply to trippy and terrifying enemies that differ from common horror-game archetypes, with marionette-like creatures moving convincingly and creepily towards players.

We would have loved to rank this higher, but SHf's fumbles with PSSR on PlayStation 5 Pro, traversal stutters on base consoles and shader-compilation issues on PC temper our overall excitement on this otherwise fantastic horror-series revitalisation from Konami.

3. Death Stranding 2: On The Beach

This year marks the first time Guerrilla Games' Decima Engine has been used with PlayStation 5 as a base platform - and Kojima Productions wastes no time pushing its latest iteration beyond the restrictions of PS4 compatibility.

On a detail basis, Death Stranding 2 emphasises both the macro and the micro. Zoom in on Sam Porter's suit, and expect to see thread-by-thread textures in utmost fidelity, along with similarly impressive rendering of materials like metals and plastics on other finely modeled objects. Then step outdoors to explore larger and more expansive regions than ever - rivers, forests, sandy expanses and more - in the game's Mexican and Australian biomes. Decima's texture-displaying techniques and algorithmic terrain generation combine for endless, tangibly craggy mountain passes that somehow don't bring PS5 hardware to its performance knees.

DS2 can also push PS5 consoles to their particle-rendering limits with all-consuming forest fires, artfully arranged candles or sweeping fireworks displays - each of which plays out with proper, reactive lighting that introduces dramatic light-and-shadow play without any form of ray tracing. The same attention to lighting detail benefits cinema scenes and interior sequences bathed in proper indirect lighting. And we see even more geometric detail and complexity in the series' signature tar-engulfing systems along with other fluid-simulation systems.

2. Assassin's Creed Shadows

The most impressive Assassin's Creed game since 2014's AC Unity features the kind of technical rendering capabilities that you'd expect to see on the top of a year-end graphics award list. And in many ways, AC Shadows handles these features better than most other games on this list - including a ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) implementation that covers specular and diffuse virtual geometry.

Where it really takes the series up a notch is its fuller approach to feeling next-gen. Take the physics of destructible objects. Where many games might swap a complete object with a crumped or destroyed model after being shot or blown up, AC Shadows instead supports non-defined cut points, so that doors, boxes, blocks of wood and other significant geometry can be realistically sliced and destroyed by your character's weaponry. It's exciting for an open-world, play-how-you-want series like Assassin's Creed to have newly interesting physics.

Other crucial elements move, sway and fall more realistically on higher-end systems, as well. The handsome hair-strand system makes hair move and shine in convincing ways as paired with the game's RTGI. The Atmos wind-simulation system unifies grass and foliage reactions to breezes. Cloth simulation fits with the aforementioned physics, due to how cloth moves and reacts to either being touched or sliced.

Playing this game on a high-end PC, a PlayStation 5 Pro or on either base PS5 or Xbox Series X at a lower frame-rate setting better ensures enjoying as many maxed-out visual settings as possible. As such, it's harder to wholeheartedly recommend AC Shadows on Xbox Series S or Switch 2 due to those ports' cutbacks - though the game's scalability to those platforms is still commendable, even if they require a few too many cuts to lovely features like hair strands and RTGI.

1. Doom: The Dark Ages

When it launched in May, Doom: The Dark Ages caused a commotion over its requirement of RT-capable graphics hardware, whether on PC or consoles. Yet as soon as we went hands on with id Software's latest first-person shooter, we were immediately impressed by the game's ability to deliver a full ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) model at an incredibly performant level, enough to scale to the weaker Xbox Series S console without missing a frame-rate beat.

Thanks to how well the game handles both direct and indirect lighting, its visual profile delivers surprising coherency to its massive, semi-open combat zones. Otherworldly constructions of stone and metal are crushed together in ways that, thanks to id Tech 8's per-pixel lighting, blend together to look like the stuff of ultimate heavy metal album covers. And the levels' increased complexity compared to other modern Doom games would have been impossible to manage on a file-size level if the designers had to rely on massive pre-baked files - another way, then, that id Tech 8's RT defaults deliver performant, stunning environments.

Like AC Shadows on this list, D:TDA covers its characters with hair-strand simulation and fills its worlds with reactive, physics-based destruction - which not only means objects frequently blow up but also that enemies and their corpses continue reacting to the resulting debris. To add more to that sensation of physical realism, the game's bodies of water benefit from true wave-physics simulation amidst gorgeous sky and weather rendering. And the CPU-bound efficiency of id Tech 8 is so high that the game can push more 3D-rendered enemies on-screen than ever before, all rushing around with independent AI routines.

On top of all of that, path traced lighting on higher-end PCs adds nuance throughout the game's lighting while covering the entirety of outdoor regions. D:TDA does well to scale down to lower-end systems by culling features like ray-traced reflections, somehow still combining the computationally expensive concept of RTGI with locked, steady 60fps frame-rates. Yet there's also a massive higher bound to future-proof the game's rendering on powerful PCs for years to come.