As video games develop more and more over the years, companies have been making them more and more realistic-looking. I can guess this is related to expectations, but am I the only one who doesn’t care about graphics? We could be using the same processing power to store worlds that have as much exploration potential as the Earth itself if we weren’t afraid to save on processing power by going back to 8-bit.
It depends on a lot of factors. Minecraft, despite its signature simplistic artstyle, takes a surprising amount of CPU power to run - a lot more so if you run mods. Even a Minecraft server, which doesn’t render graphics at all, takes a beefy machine and a lot of RAM.
It’s as much about graphical fidelity as it is quality of code, and unfortunately, there are a lot of game studios that don’t seem especially bothered about optimising their games. To the extent that you can fill, say, an Xbox’s hard drive with only two or three AAA games.
All that said, you’re right in that simpler graphics in general mean less work for the graphics card to do. Just that it’s not the only factor.