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:

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.

I just bolded the part that you seemingly overlooked. Those old console games were programmed much more hands-on, and programmers could choose all the colors and shades they specifically wanted. But try doing this when you have the choice of millions of colors and have to bring that down to 12 or 16 bit (4096 and 65538 colors), especially when it's supposed to look "realistic". That's simply an impossible task.

I did all the part before that to explain why those consoles looked vibrant despite having very limited RAM and explained how they did it. But the thing is, that's simply not possible on modern 3D graphics.

Remember when I gave you the size of a screen on the SNES above? Since it's all 2D in a 2D engine, all fits into those 64 KB. No need for a framebuffer, no need for extra space for the textures, some post-processing, and so on. And since you see so much more detail in 4K, especially with HDR10, you can't cheap out on the textures unlike in the 7th gen without it looking very uncanny or just plain bad. Back then, the only the colors really got muted as the resolution and processing power was too low to include and see all the details anyway. But that's gonna become a problem this gen after 2022 at the latest.