Digital Foundry Video: Hands-On With Xbox Series X + Impressions + Xbox One X Size Comparisons + Official Specs + Ray Tracing

[Bofferbrauer2]

Nu-13 said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

How about that whole "real is brown" thing? hat that got enforced because due to lack of memory, as the color palettes had to be reduced to fit into the small RAM of the last gen consoles, which resulted into those muted colors. Something that's pretty much the inverse of HDR, which adds colors and thus further increases the memory needs for the next gen.

Lmfao meanwhile the wii and all consolea that camr before had colors to spare.

ROFL! Yeah, no.

NES had only a total palette of 64 colors (6 bit, though 10 were black, resulting into 54 colors total), and even that one was divided into palettes of 25 colors (5 bit including 7 black colors) for backgrounds and even just 3 + transparency (2 bit) for sprites as it's VRAM was too small for more. And even then having more than a couple sprites at the same time caused flickering because VRAM overflow.

SNES had a 32000 colors palette(15 bit) in total, but of those only 256 could be visible at once (8bit) in low resolution, or even just 128 colors (7 bit) with high resolution, while sprites were limited to 16 (4 bit) to save on memory.

Speaking of sprites, they were also limited in size and numbers, otherwise the VRAM would again overflow. Same with the screen resolution, which was only 256x240 on the NES and on the SNES (SNES also had higher resolutions, but those were interlaced, so only every second line or row or even both were actually used).

Let's have a closer look at the SNES for a while. The SNES has a total of 64 Kilobyte of VRAM. Calculate 256*240*8, which results in 491200 bits or exactly 60 Kilobyte for the background of a SNES game. it could have sprites of up to 64x64 in 4 bit color depth, which is exactly 2 kilobyte, so only 2 different of those could exist without screen flickering. Thus most used smaller sprites, for instance 8x8 sprites are just 32 byte tall, meaning 128 of those can fit into 4 kilobyte. And 128 sprites at once are also the maximum it could show based on it's specs.

The reason why older games are more colorful is not due to them having lots of colors, but because programmers could choose by hand exactly what colors they wanted, while the lack of VRAM imposed restrictions on things like resolution and the sprites. Once we reached millions of colors, that just wasn't feasible anymore, and instead the bit depth got simply reduced to not tax the memory too much. The strong compression of those textures to fit into the tiny VRAM further deteriorated their colors, and they looked very muted as a result.

Last edited by Bofferbrauer2 - on 18 March 2020