H3ADShOt3 said: This whole generation is under powered, 1080p 60fps should've been the minimal for these machines and they also should've been capable of 4K resolution. I wasn't too happy when I saw the performance of these consoles at first but I've learned to accept it to stay a console gamer.
This argument just isn't true. Although this generation started out with lower end hardware, right now the gap between PS4 and even Xbox One compared to current PC hardware is actually smaller than it was between PS360 and PC in say 2008.
In 2008 you could buy a HD48xx series card for between $200 and $300 which were around 5 times faster than PS360. You could even buy and HD4870x2 for $399 which was able to achieve 2000 gflops. That's PS4 level power, in 2008!
So right now what do we have? Even extremely high end cards off over $600 and that use more power than a complete PS4 and Xbox One console combined are only around 4 times faster than current gen consoles. So even with much more expensive cards available the gap has actually schrunk, with current gen consoles being cheaper and actually profitable.
So you are comparing inferior versions intentionally?
The NES was totally outdated when Kings Quest 5 came out. But feel free to compare some mid to late 80's PC-games with 2D graphics.
Same for Wolfenstein. SNES was basically 100% 2D by design. It was weak with raycaster engines and even weaker with polygons. But it could do 2D stuff that was hard to handle for PC's until years later.
About Descent, Doom etc., i played on a 486DX50 back then. Not what you'd call slow 93/94. Doom and Doom 2 already had some framerate issues sometimes and Descent ran like shit on high details when there was more than one enemy at a time, even with 8MB of RAM.
That was when the Playstation came out in Japan and had great looking games that ran perfectly fluid (for that time) like Ridge Racer, Tohshinden and so on.
PC pros were storage (floppy, hdd) especially for stuff like adventures and RAM for textured 3D titles as well as some 2D games.
On the other hand PC's for a very long time had weak spots.
Most of that disappeared over time.
He is right, you know. I already argued these over back then. SNES could output rather impressive 2D with it's multiple processors, but the thing is, that the resolution was so much lower than what PC (I assume it's the IBM-clones we're talking about) could output. Yoshi's Island wasn't possible on SNES without Super FX because sprites were too big for SNES to handle. It was as late as mid to late 90's consoles were able output resolutions PC's did since the 80's. The first HD games on consoles were seen in 2000's, whereas PC's have been HD capable since 1989.
If you mean emulators weren't capable to emulate SNES until years later, you're right. But that doesn't have anything to do with the system being powerful, but the multiple processor tech being bitch to emulate.
it is true, that RISC architecture is more efficient than CISC, and therefore is prefferred for applications that doesn't need complete instruction sets, but it's not suddenly going to make consoles rival head to head in graphics with PC.
I don't care about resolution anymore. I use to, when HD was a thing. Eventually, it became something companies just want to keep touting as an important feature. And a reason for you to keep on buying new TV sets. I just want the game to work right, and at 60fps. That's all I really care. SD HD FHD UHD it's all crap boring now. Just get the damn games working. And actually be good games, to like your series. Not worry about how many frogs jump threw a forest.
You would have been running it at a lower resolution though, maybe missing full wav based sound and you would have to endure long loading times. But it would still run. Unfortunatly, can't find video evidence of someone with a PC that old running it, most people these days run it in DOS Box or in a VM and nor do I have a system that archaic available either.
Graphically, the game would still look better than the NES version.
Note that those SX usually missed a mathematical coprocessor (FPU). My DX50 was way faster though still had issues sometimes.
A 486/386 wasn't what the PC was fully capable of on Doom's release. Doom was released in 1993. The SNES was released in 1991. So you would expect to use a PC that was released in the early 90's. Like... The 486 50mhz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVU1ZyYIWUE
Which handled Doom just fine. Again with higher Object and Wall resolutions than the SNES too.
Something to keep in mind though is that on Doom's release the Intel Pentium first arrived, using the Socket 4 interface.
captain carot said:
I could show a video with Rayman Legends running 1080p60 on Wii U, PS4 and Xone. Conclusion, all three have the same speed. Wouldn't make sense though.
Except the PC isn't limited to 1080p 60hz. What about 4k? 5k? 120/144hz?
captain carot said:
Or i could show SNES games with massive parallax scrolling, transparency effects and zooming effects a PC around 1990 could hardly handle or not at all. At the same time i could show Starglider 2, a 1988 game the SNES could've hardly handled without a SuperFX chip.
The PC could do Parallax scrolling. It just wasn't ever used as the vast majority of systems didn't have hardware support. However it could be performed in software. And there were other hardware based work-around which allowed you to achieve a similar effect. (I.E. Tiled Approaches.) Moon Patrol from 1983. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFA8ZI1iX_c Commander Keen. - 1991. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUyQSfKRU1w Here. Take a look around. - http://qalle.net/dosgames.php
You could also get a PC with a Blitter Chip which gave you hardware accellerated Parallax Scrolling on the PC.
Transparency could be done, just not in hardware, that kind of support didn't occur in hardware until the 3D revolution in the mid 90's.
Matrox though, specialized in 2D accelleration, they had the best 2D hardware well into the 2000's.
captain carot said:
I've done all that shit like installing a f...ing mouse driver making start discs because of not enough free 640K memory, knowing my sound cards DMA and IRQ for game setups...
At the same time i played on SNES, Amiga and other systems. I still know the pros and cons of all platforms back then very well.
Or how fast my heavily overclocked Celeron B was outdated even after changing my TNT2 for a GeForce.
Not really relevant to the topic at hand. But I was also there. I remember having a Celeron 300A which happily overclocked from 300mhz to 450mhz with the flick if a switch. Or when Cyrix and IBM made x86 processors.
I remember upgrading an old 486 to a full-blown pentium with the use of a special adapter.
captain carot said:
Now, another comparison Hi Octane on a Pentium 200 vs Wipeout...
Meanwhile my newphews were playing this 1984 C64 vs PC
The Amiga 500 was a beast as well. We enjoyed playing on both PC and Amiga 500 anyway. Slower paced games on PC, anything with lots of sprites and parallax scrolling on Amiga 500. Plus the sound was better on Amiga, lovely chiptunes.
I have no clue though what the resolution was of those monitors back then. They were only 14" in size, our tv wasn't much bigger. 320x200 looked fine back then, look at how tiny that is now. That game cost me so much sleep :)
So you are comparing inferior versions intentionally?
The NES was totally outdated when Kings Quest 5 came out. But feel free to compare some mid to late 80's PC-games with 2D graphics.
Same for Wolfenstein. SNES was basically 100% 2D by design. It was weak with raycaster engines and even weaker with polygons. But it could do 2D stuff that was hard to handle for PC's until years later.
About Descent, Doom etc., i played on a 486DX50 back then. Not what you'd call slow 93/94. Doom and Doom 2 already had some framerate issues sometimes and Descent ran like shit on high details when there was more than one enemy at a time, even with 8MB of RAM.
That was when the Playstation came out in Japan and had great looking games that ran perfectly fluid (for that time) like Ridge Racer, Tohshinden and so on.
PC pros were storage (floppy, hdd) especially for stuff like adventures and RAM for textured 3D titles as well as some 2D games.
On the other hand PC's for a very long time had weak spots.
Most of that disappeared over time.
He is right, you know. I already argued these over back then. SNES could output rather impressive 2D with it's multiple processors, but the thing is, that the resolution was so much lower than what PC (I assume it's the IBM-clones we're talking about) could output. Yoshi's Island wasn't possible on SNES without Super FX because sprites were too big for SNES to handle. It was as late as mid to late 90's consoles were able output resolutions PC's did since the 80's. The first HD games on consoles were seen in 2000's, whereas PC's have been HD capable since 1989.
If you mean emulators weren't capable to emulate SNES until years later, you're right. But that doesn't have anything to do with the system being powerful, but the multiple processor tech being bitch to emulate.
it is true, that RISC architecture is more efficient than CISC, and therefore is prefferred for applications that doesn't need complete instruction sets, but it's not suddenly going to make consoles rival head to head in graphics with PC.
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
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.
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.
If I may nitpick here, that's callled view frustum culling, which wasn't introduced on the dreamcast, and rather was one of the very first optimizations in computer 3D graphics.
In this day and age, with the Internet, ignorance is a choice! And they're still choosing Ignorance! - Dr. Filthy Frank
If I may nitpick here, that's callled view frustum culling, which wasn't introduced on the dreamcast, and rather was one of the very first optimizations in computer 3D graphics.
I think he's referring to the unique way the Dreamcast's PowerVR hardware rendered polygons, not frustrum culling.
