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captain carot on 05 November 2015
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bdbdbd said:
captain carot said:

Yes and no.

 

That's about the time when you achieve what. VGA came out 1987 with games starting to support VGA very slowly until 1990. Standardized SVGA was around 1989/1990.

Not to talk about the practical capabilities of video cards back then. I remember my first two monitors having 1024x768 max resolution when 2D games usually still were 320x200-320x240 and most 3D games 'high res modes' 320x400. ^^

That slowly changed around 1994/95. There was a huge difference between theoretical capability like SXGA having 1280x1024 with 8Bit color depth and what actually could be used for games.

If they had DisplayPort 1.3 current graphics cards could be 8K on paper. But not have the power for newer games in 8K.

People should remember that at the time the Voodoo 1 came out 320x200/240 still was usual for 3D games and that fluid 640x480 with 16bit colors was a breakthrough. With Voodoo 2 it was 800x600.

And at the time Voodoo 2, the Riva TNT and so on came out the Dreamcast was released in Japan.

That was a totally different thing from today.

 

@Pemalite:
386 came out in 1986 (productionwise). And VGA cards a bit later. So you wont find 1985 PC's that can run Kings Quest while the NES released 1983, though Japan only. :-p


While I agree with your point that you didn't get what was technically possible at the time, in the end this still boils down to what could be done with the high end hardware. You didn't really see the games start taking advantage of PC hardware before the game centric computers started to disappear. 

On consoles the cost per efficiency is on a whole different level, but on PC you're able to get more power when you're willing to pay for it. I think an editor on an PC magazine that commented Xbox 360 launch back in the day nailed it. He commented that he doesn't understand the fuzz around 360 being able to draw hundreds of characters on screen that all look the same, when on a PC you're able to draw hundreds of characters that all look different, though GPU capable of doing that costs as much a a 360.

What I really love about console hardware, are the technical tweaks used to boost on-screen performance. PS2 had insane VRAM bandwidth, GC CPU used L2 cache as a buffer to eliminate empty clock cycles, Dreamcast didn't draw off-screen (or behind an object) polygons, 360 CPU was designed to have low internal latencies, Megadrive's DMA controller was interesting enough to have it's own marketing term, SNES had a number of cheap special purpose processors to boost the performance of the weak hardware, to name a few.

 

Yeah, Dreamcast used the PowerVR that was released as PC graphics cards called Kyro. Don't know if you remember them, but a Kyro without HW T&L could be faster than a GeForce. Kyro was PowerVR series 3 though.

Thing about PC is as a gaming platform it needed about 15 years to really get on top. It had it pros like already decent 3D performance at least with an FPU though. But back then it was expensive and outdated quickly. That basically has changed within the last ten years. You still can play every game with a 100$/€ graphics card from 2010/11.

On the other side, console hardware is about maxing out what you have. Always has been. I remember seeing screenshots, not even videos, of Donkey Kong Country and at first thinking that's a next gen game. Like many did back then. At that time i already played on PC as well.

Now i've come to a point where looking what AMD or Nvidia are doing is interesting bu i just don't care anymore for the highest res or ultrahigh quality settings.