If we assume the faith of most games gets decided by a board of directors based on a short 10-slides pitch, it’s easy to see that videos and screenshots, made up numbers and popular hashtags (openworld, moba, ai) are what lets them be greenlit. Pertnering up with AMD/NVIDIA so they patch drivers for your project alone, so your game at least launches, is pro and not a con.

EA doesn’t have fly wrinkles and we do, with the help of AI, in Betamax 9k MetaHD.

The only way to get under surface for a tripple A game publishers is test groups, but I don’t think this can touch the question of gfx/performance/effort because everything is presented on capable hardware, scenes handcrafted to impress, and it’s hard to point out anything about visuals unless they are hella ugly.