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SvennoJ on 18 March 2020
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Nu-13 said:
Bofferbrauer2 said:

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.

Just listen to yourself. You made the ridiculous claim of muddied colors because of limited memory when much weaker consoles had vibrant colors everywhere.

It's not that hard to grasp what he's trying to say.

Vibrant colors has nothing to do with it. When you make a realistic looking game with realistic lighting model with a lot of shade areas, high contrast, details in dark areas, and you are limited by 8 bit color, you kind of have to switch to a muted color scheme not to turn everything into a color banding mess. To improve color fidelity at a high range of brightness, like HDR (real or simulated), you need to have your entire rendering pipeline in FP16. The more passes you make for more effects, the more screen buffers need to be doubled in memory size.

HDR increases memory by 2x, 4K by 4x compared to 1080p. Thus from 1080p 8 bit, to 4K HDR, your screen buffers take 8x the memory!

RDR2 had fake HDR, likely due to memory constraints.