I think that’s more an accident of computer history than anything else. The Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, Nintendo Famicom/NES, and many others span multiple generations of game consoles and are all use 8-bit processors, cartridge media, etc. These systems were all small speed increases, allowing for more colors, more sprites, better resolution, but not big changes. There was basiclly a whole decade of small changes to 8-bit systems and then a decade where we went from the release of the NES (1983) to the Playstation (1994). And now were back to mostly incremental advances.
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Wait, how is “Remaster” a genre?
Also, I can still play plenty of PC games in their original form, or buy the supper shiny 4k remaster versions for another $60. (Or just get the free community mod.) I don’t see how giving consumers a choice to “inserting old discs into new consoles” will stop companies from trying to milk more money out of an old franchise now that they know they can get people to pay for it.
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Color palette made the NES > SNES upgrade feel a lot bigger than it was.
The CPU was “wider” by double, but less than twice the clock speed.
In sheer power by the numbers there was a bigger gap between the Xbox and the Xbox 360.
I agree, my point was that that decade from the NES to the Playstation was the strange unusual period and not the norm. In both the time before that and the time after that we saw only small changes that improved systems by small amounts.
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The point I was trying to make was exactly what you’re saying - once upon a time console generations were big deal shifts in technology but now they’re more akin to upgrading your computer every few years.
Which to me doesn’t make sense as the changes are becoming incremental and the return on increased investment (either as a consumer in better hardware or as a developer in making games that take advantage of better hardware) seems minimal?
To wit: biggest change to me as a consumer from the PS4 to the PS5 is a more interesting control scheme. That seems like a very incremental change that’s not worth investing in an entirely new console for?
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Well, you just sort of explained the state of consumer technology in general. Not only has the pace of improvement slowed for practical reasons, but we’ve crossed a point in terms of baseline functionality where there isn’t too much in terms of big wow improvements left to practically pick off.
We’re just not in a situation where doubling up the available colors, or drawing a line more smoothly, or improving sound modeling is that big of an improvement anymore.
This isn’t really a console thing. Even just sticking with gaming. Upgrading your PC every couple of years used to see vast improvements, like a jump to 3d. These days it usually results in the same performance in the same games, with incremental tweaks. And in large part people don’t do that with gaming PCs anymore. Part of why that’s been the case is the primacy of cross platform development, and how the consoles were weak and outdated compared to PCs even when they launched. So the baseline for development was often particularly weak tech from a decade back.
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The significant change between the PS4 and the PS5 will be the beefier GPU. On its face Sony is touting ray tracing and 4K as the big features but i think this is them holding back saying that their console will have much better VR capabilities. Right now that’s the space in gaming that has the most potential to explode. There’s decent VR adoption but its far from being mass market.
Personally i’m not interested in VR but i do think there’s a lot of potential there and them having a much more capable system than their PS4 Pro is required.
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Yeah, Moore’s Law is over and it used to be that small increases in computing power had huge impacts on graphics - if you doubled the number of polygons the hardware could deal with, it was a radical visual improvement. Now you’d not even notice. The raytracing is new, but fairly subtle, given how good game developers have gotten at faking it.
AAA will continue to get more expensive because expectations keep increasing, even if computing power doesn’t. Which means fewer AAA developers (as there’s only so many the market can support), which means less innovation from that sector. But on the plus side, indie games can look more and more like AAA games, albeit with smaller scope, and they do push innovation. (Though they also tend not to survive in this market.)
It’s all a bit ugly. People keep talking about another video game crash, but if that happened, I don’t see how whatever emerged from the wreckage would be any different from what exists.
Given the cost of development, only releasing on one platform is commercial suicide, unless the game is especially cheaply made (e.g. Nintendo games), or the console owner is willing to fund it as a loss-leader (e.g. Shenmue).
They were big changes, though, at the time, in that context. There were doublings (and more) of memory, processing power, etc. When you’re working with few colors at a low resolution, adding a few more colors and increasing the resolution has a huge visual impact. If you’re only using a few hundred polygons for a character, being able to double that is a very big change. Now you could double it (starting at a point that’s thousands of times more powerful than previous consoles) and it wouldn’t make a difference, visually, as that’s not where the barriers are to realism (nor pleasingly stylized graphics). That’s a very new development.
A guess a “market niche” is a genre, now?
Because with remastered versions and new versions for incompatible consoles, you’re potentially selling the same game to the same person multiple times. (And the dev costs of these “new” games isn’t remotely the same as developing a game from scratch.) This has been a big part of the appeal of new consoles, for game publishers - it spurs increased game sales. If they can just stick the same old game in, they’re buying it once - or, effectively, not at all, because you increase the odds that they’re buying used games.
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Looks like one should be landing an imperial shuttle on that console. Is the landing bay decorative or functional?
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nes: 6502 @ 1.8 Mhz
snes: 65816 @ 3.58 Mhz/
close enough.
Not to mention that multiplying two 16 bit numbers on a 8 bit machine takes more than 4 ops.
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A valid pedantic point but there still is a more massive difference between the first two Xbox generations.
But somehow, subjectively, it doesn’t feel like the same or greater gap. Agree?
Heck, there’s a massive difference between the 360 and the One. Not just in resolution, but in the clarity, the fidelity of the on-screen objects, number of on-screen objects, and other markers of improved quality.
“8 bit”: small sprites, limited number of colors
“16 bit”: large sprites, thousands of colors on screen.
This advantage changed how the art directors approached the games:
Now, the PS5 will have ray tracing. If the designers do it correctly, a player will have little trouble telling a raytraced ps5 game from a ps4 game. It won’t be subtle.
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Hmm [meditates]
I don’t buy that the difference between an 8-bit and a 16- (or 32- or 64-) bit CPU makes a fundamental difference. But it’s certainly true that the SNES represented a leap in what developers could do, and more to the point, it was improved in highly specific ways that developers wanted (more sprites, more control over them, more colors, etc). OTOH it was a leap from sprite-based 2D games to slightly better sprite-based 2D games, so pretty comparable to modern console “generation” increases.
The N64 transition was the fundamental change, but to my mind that was the point at which you kids should get off my lawn. That’s when it changed from “here’s what developers have been asking for” to “developers: here are the new technical table stakes for your game to even get published”. Developers were sort of asking for advanced 3D, in that some cutting-edge PC games were doing it, but largely it’s just been an albatross, and now you can’t hope to sell a game unless it has at least an 8-figure production budget and appeals to an increasingly narrow demographic.
Which is fine. But that is why consoles are now irrelevant outside a niche hobbyist community. I’m not counting Nintendo consoles there, but neither is the rest of the world, really, in relative terms.
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“Some” cutting edge PC games had been doing it for years. Many arcade cabinets had been doing it longer. And the PlayStation had been doing it since 1994. A full 2 years before the n64. The first dedicated consumer 3d cards were kicking off around then. DirectX launched a year before the n64, and its direct3d component would launch the same year.
Nintendo didn’t invent that, or initiate the switch. Even for consoles. They were sort of late to the game. And to my memory both players and developers were chomping at the bit for Nintendo to “finally” do 3d.
While each individual console appears to be a smaller piece of the market than PC, consoles taken together still account for over 2/3 of the video game market. And you might not have noticed but that’s not exactly a niche market these days.
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Rackmount?
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I’m not hugely tech savvy, so I would love these game stations to simplify my online life and make the one player to rule them all.
If the gaming aspect is asymptoting, it sure would be cool if they could make the console be one-stop shopping for internet-based entertainment. Make the console be a real music streamer with optical out for a DAC; include a real browser; have a built-in media server and USB inputs for drives that work thru an actual video app like VLC. Easily bundle live TV subscription services like Sling, sports packages etc. Same for Roku,etc Bluetooth, casting, etc… Real whiz-bang.
Be nice to have one box that does it all and figures out all the updating for you. The PS4 has pretty nice GUI interfaces right now They are kinda part way there already.
