[looping8]

It's strange, even though the graphics of San Andreas definitely don't look good, this somehow looks worse to me. It's like smoothing out the outdated models and making them higher resolution makes them seem worse. Not blaming the developers of this, just surprised that a much stronger engine ends up looking worse somehow, maybe it's just the initial shock?

[Karliss]

I can think of a couple reasons.

* Fidelity level (in terms of resolution, color amount and similar) needs to match with the amount of information within drawing. One example of this are some of the games during transition from EGA to VGA which allowed to use more colors. Just slapping a color gradient on everything doesn't necessarily look better than more stylized look carefully using a limited color pallet.

* Inconsistent quality level. While some of the assets are much higher resolution, not all of them are. This makes the older assets look worse compared to everything being equally low resolution. The mismatch can be caused not only by asset quality level but also lighting techniques.On hand you have sharp high resolution shadows on the other there are still some low quality textures and geometry.

* Higher resolution textures makes it easier to notice bad texture tiling and low resolution geometry. With a high resolution textures perfectly projected on low polygon it's much easier to tell how blocky they are and where the edges are, compared to using more blurry textures.

[tentacleuno]

It's most likely because the game seems to use the textures from an existing installation. You can't just enlarge textures and have them look the same.

I'm sure they could do some AI upscaling, but that probably wouldn't improve the situation much. GSG tried that for the Definitive Edition, and look how that went.

It would be interesting to see a new texture pack made for it, which focuses less on nostalgia and more on fidelity.