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Proprietary hardware for consoles was ass, actually

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
Ahh, remember the old days when every console had their own hardware and wasn't just a PC stuffed into a box! When engineers actually put their love and soul into a console and it resulted in industry defining hardware and architecture?

Nah, me neither. Proprietary hardware for consoles actually kind of sucked.

The Sega Saturn, what should have been a slam dunk for Sega considering how much of an innovator they were in the 3d video game scene, with titles such as Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA and Virtua Racing. The company that produced some of the most impressive eye candy arcade games in the early 90s, who was leagues ahead of every other company in the jump to 3d gaming. But then they got infected with the retard virus, and went with a totally weird, obscene, complex design that they expected everyone to understand and utilize. 2D games for the Saturn were difficult to make, and 3D games moreso.

The N64 had the exact same problem and while 3D games looked and played far better on the N64 than they did Saturn, the cartidge based storage format, all the expansions, and in general a confusing architecture is why the Saturn and N64 languished in the PS1's success. It was a simple and easy to develop for architecture with CDs for all the developers storage needs, and it's one of the many reasons for the PlayStation's success.

Not to mention both the N64 and Saturn are notoriously difficult systems to properly emulate thanks to their retarded architecture making reverse engineering them a bitch. N64 guys specifically got so fed up they decided it'd be easier to DECOMPILE the games and port them to PC. With Jak getting a decompilation as well, seems like the same thing is happening to the PS2. Which is good, because the PS2 is also a terribly engineered system.

"buh buh my 155 million units sold" shut the fuck up. It was engineered poorly as Sony focused all of their efforts on the 'EmOTIoN EngINe" and as a result that system was significantly harder to make games for than the PS1, and was weaker than the competition to boot. While the Xbox and Gamecube's visuals have aged gracefully on HDTVs thanks to their adoption of progressive scan over interlaced, the PS2 being weaker resulted in it using 480i which looks like SHIT on HDTVs today. Not to mention just like N64 and Saturn it falls into the category of being a bitch to emulate. Needs a shitton of power and a bunch of patches and graphical fixes for everything since the PS2's GPU rode the short bus and had their own special way of doing things. But hey, at least the hardware was unique and all the games weren't using that gosh darn industry leading Unreal Engine 5!

Or how about the PS3's Cell, an idea which sounded badass and awesome on paper! Power your console using a supercomputer processor, therefore you can have all the powerful processing and calculations you needed for the advanced games coming out at the time. It's genius!



It WAS genius... if you liked worse performance on games than 360 and expensive prices due to hardware being far harder to produce. Oh yeah, can't forget the fact that OVER 17 YEARS LATER Sony STILL can't find a good way to get PS3 games emulated on PS5 thanks to the fucking abysmal system design. even if RPCS3 is a thing that exists, the fact that the system's OWN CREATORS can't reverse engineer it to work with future hardware is just sort of proof that this whole proprietary hardware thing was fucking stupid.

"ah, but the engines. Everything using UE5 will make games all look the same!"

First of all, the new Spongebob game uses the same UE5 engine that's powering some of the most realistic looking games on earth. It's not the engine that determines the way a game looks, it's the developers art direction and vision for the game. Second of all... Forspoken came out a couple months ago with a totally new custom engine. Looks generic, plays generic, main protagonist speaks like they're a Marvel character, and the game fucking killed the studio who worked on it. Custom engines don't make a game automatically good.

In reality, every console using X86 is nothing but a good thing, and every gaming using either UE or Unity is also a good thing. Ports are identical to the one on the other console, games are easier to make, and even if they don't 'code to the metal' like they used to, games still look better than ever with more advanced systems and algorithms powering the stuff you play today. Unreal Engine allows better looking games to be made than ever while still giving the developer full artistic control over their project, and games STILL have varied artstyles.

Let's leave Cell and Emotion Engine in the past, people.
 
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Gaiff

Gold Member
I can see the points for both sides. While the hardware of the N64 had some very questionable decisions, it also produced some gems when properly used like Pokémon Stadium, OOT/MM, the Banjo games, Perfect Dark, and a few others. Likewise, Playstation had some impressive titles such as Vagrant Story or some of the Megaman games for 2D titles.

The PS3 with its alien architecture also produced some killers in the form of Killzone 2/3, the Uncharted 2/3, inFAMOUS, and a few others.

The main drawback of the PS3 especially is that its esoteric architecture made it a bit of a nightmare for 3rd party devs and even for Sony themselves when they attempted BC for it. It's a bit of a bummer now that many PS3 classics are stuck on the machine and your only other avenue is emulation but PS3 emulation is still incredibly demanding and far from perfect.

I mainly game on PC but ain't gonna lie and say I didn't enjoy the major differences between platforms. They all had their identities, strengths, and weaknesses and produced wildly different results even for the same games. It was cool because having two platforms was really worth something whereas now, getting only one of the PS5/SX gets you like 99% of the stuff on the other. Having a decent PC also makes the SX wholly redundant and as of late, even the PS5 but to a much lesser extent.

Still, I appreciate the more streamlined and consistent approaches being used now. I feel the quality is overall higher and everything is more cohesive. It's less interesting but also less chaotic.
 
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diffusionx

Gold Member
You seem to be conflating a bunch of things. First, those arcade games from Sega you laud so much, they were built on entirely custom, proprietary arcade boards, it was simply impossible to do otherwise. The PSX was just as proprietary as a Saturn, one just had an elegant design and the other, not so much. The PSX was not "PC style" in any way shape or form, with custom GPU and CPU, the CPU used MIPS architecture not x86. Look at PC parts in the 1990s, you were not getting a PC down to console prices and it was a waste of silicon anyway, so console makers had to go their own way. It wasn't feasible until the early 2000s to stuff a PC into a console, and even then only barely as MS lost gazillions of dollars doing it with the original Xbox.
 
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DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Dog Reaction GIF
 

EverydayBeast

thinks Halo Infinite is a new graphical benchmark
PS3 is the son of ps2 yes it has red flags like yellow light of death, heavily scrutinized internal hardware but look at its games they’re untouchable.
 

phant0m

Member
PS2 still the GOAT so….nah.

PS3 was a very rough time time though and to this day is very hard to emulate and few exclusives actually ported (RIP MGS4)

That’s not a “proprietary hardware” problem though, it’s an “this architecture is insane” problem. PS2, Saturn, SNES, N64 all easy to emulate and have been for years.

IMO I preferred that era because owning different consoles actually meant something. More exclusives and completely different versions of some titles. Today everything is basically the same shit with a different logo/color on the box. Unless you're going to frame or pixel count the only thing that really matters in Xbox vs PS is where your friends play.
 
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Vick

Gold Member
What a load of nonsense.

Silent Hill 2 PS2 soft shadows took 20 years to get ported on PC, Resident Evil 4 got worked on every single day for close to 10 years by arguably the best modding team in gaming history, and it's still missing GameCube effects. Cell allowed some PS3 exclusive games to look a good generation ahead of the competition:




uncharted-drake-collection-comp.jpg


adam-littledale-forest.jpg


stariwell-door-spray-start.png


stairwell-burst-1.png


hallway-vent.png


cabin-climb-end.png


tate-mosesian-uncharted3-chapter18-the-rub-al-khali-01.jpg


tate-mosesian-uncharted3-chapter18-the-rub-al-khali-06.jpg


tate-mosesian-uncharted3-chapter18-the-rub-al-khali-04.jpg


tate-mosesian-uncharted3-chapter18-the-rub-al-khali-02.jpg


Which, no matter how impressive recent Sony exclusive were, was absolutely not the case later on.
Uncharted 3 at times looks like a current generation game with its extensive use of (baked) global illumination, HDR, volumetric lighting, artifact-free ambient occlusion unlike SSAO on most current gen games, procedural and entirely real-time ocean affecting with real physics the entire cruise ship (and its hundreds of assets) serving as the player's playground, artifact-free reflections, clothing simulations, insanely high quality POM at times untouched by even most current gen games, high quality DOF, lots of samples for its per object and camera motion blur, the best sand simulation on any game on any platform to this day (with grains of sand falling into Drake's footsteps), some of the the most insane levels even seen in a game like the burning chateau, sinking ship and falling plane, all running at a stable framerate at the same native resolution of some Series S games.

Let's also not forget:




All of this, and much more, was very obviously only possible because of proprietary hardware.
Does it sucks we can't properly enjoy many games at their best today via emulation? Yes, sure, but not enough to trade what these games gave us at the time.
 
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baphomet

Member
It seems like you are equating quality of emulation with quality of architecture. Those are 2 completely seperate things. With the correct documentation perfectly emulating Saturn/N64/PS3 would be trivial at best.

PS2 probably had as many or more 480p games as the GC. And unlike the GC there's at least a couple of 1080i games on PS2.
 

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
. PS2, Saturn, SNES, N64 all easy to emulate and have been for years.
well ofc the SNES is easy to emulate

The PS2 has far more issues though and unlike Gamecube and Wii you can't just pop a game into PCSX2 expecting it to work. Ace Combat 4 for instance still has this weird glitch with the sun that hasn't been corrected.



Jak looks weird on PCSX2 and requires hacks and fixes to look identical to the PS2 version (hence why people just said 'fuck it' and decompiled everything to work on PC)
dRXbRfT.png

Ratchet has a glitched menu background, GT4 has flickering textures, KH has visual artifacts in subtitles.... This kind of tinkering and configuration makes PCSX2 a bitch to work with, especially in comparison to Dolphin where you can literally just pop a game in and BAM it works. THIS IS A 20+ YEAR OLD CONSOLE. THIS IS A 20+ YEAR OLD EMULATOR. The fact that we're still having fixes and hacks and all this BS just to get games running and also the fact that no competing emulator or open source fork has come out makes you wonder if it's the emu devs fault or the system's fault for being so difficult to figure out 20 years after the fact
For 2D stuff, yeah.
that game was also on saturn.....

petty thread
that's my whole thing, i make response threads to shit that annoys me
 

Buggy Loop

Member
rollerken_400x400.jpg


But seriously, what's expected? The dawn of 3d, everything had to be invented, everything had to be found, many different solutions, no such things as an API consortium. Needed balls of steel to make a 3D console back then, you didn't have the likes of Nvidia-AMD that have been making it for decades. Hell, the "standard" pipeline we see nowadays didn't take form till like Geforce 256, even that has changed a lot.

Anyway, a fun read from a dev :
 

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
Uncharted 3 at times looks like a current generation game with its extensive use of (baked) global illumination, HDR, volumetric lighting, artifact-free ambient occlusion unlike SSAO on most current gen games, procedural and entirely real-time ocean affecting with real physics the entire cruise ship (and its hundreds of assets) serving as the player's playground, artifact-free reflections, clothing simulations, insanely high quality POM at times untouched by even most current gen games, high quality DOF, lots of samples for it’s per object and camera motion blur, the best sand simulation on any game on any platform to this day (with grains of sand falling into Drake’s footsteps), some of the the most insane levels even seen in a game like the burning chateau, sinking ship and falling plane, all running at a stable framerate at the same native resolution of some Series S games.
yes i know. first party developers can make the ps3 games look good. The same statement rings true for PS5 games a decade later. Guerilla games made the best looking game of all time and they did it on boring PC like hardware.
First party developers are but a fraction of the people who are ultimately going to be making games for your console, though. And when everyone else is visibly complaining that your super secret sauce architecture is impossible to learn and use you probably should have reconsidered your approach
Also:
Silent Hill 2 PS2 soft shadows took 20 years to get ported on PC, Resident Evil 4 got worked on every single day for close to 10 years by arguably the best modding team in gaming history, and it's still missing GameCube effects.
Do you unironically think that bad PC ports don't exist or something? Both the games you listed were made by Japanese studios, it's incredibly plausible. most western PC ports were far better than the console versions and had better sound thanks to EAX.

funny image but i fail to see the cringe here.
 
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Corndog

Banned
Ahh, remember the old days when every console had their own hardware and wasn't just a PC stuffed into a box! When engineers actually put their love and soul into a console and it resulted in industry defining hardware and architecture?

Nah, me neither. Proprietary hardware for consoles actually kind of sucked.

The Sega Saturn, what should have been a slam dunk for Sega considering how much of an innovator they were in the 3d video game scene, with titles such as Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA and Virtua Racing. The company that produced some of the most impressive eye candy arcade games in the early 90s, who was leagues ahead of every other company in the jump to 3d gaming. But then they got infected with the retard virus, and went with a totally weird, obscene, complex design that they expected everyone to understand and utilize. 2D games for the Saturn were difficult to make, and 3D games moreso.

The N64 had the exact same problem and while 3D games looked and played far better on the N64 than they did Saturn, the cartidge based storage format, all the expansions, and in general a confusing architecture is why the Saturn and N64 languished in the PS1's success. It was a simple and easy to develop for architecture with CDs for all the developers storage needs, and it's one of the many reasons for the PlayStation's success.

Not to mention both the N64 and Saturn are notoriously difficult systems to properly emulate thanks to their retarded architecture making reverse engineering them a bitch. N64 guys specifically got so fed up they decided it'd be easier to DECOMPILE the games and port them to PC. With Jak getting a decompilation as well, seems like the same thing is happening to the PS2. Which is good, because the PS2 is also a terribly engineered system.

"buh buh my 155 million units sold" shut the fuck up. It was engineered poorly as Sony focused all of their efforts on the 'EmOTIoN EngINe" and as a result that system was significantly harder to make games for than the PS1, and was weaker than the competition to boot. While the Xbox and Gamecube's visuals have aged gracefully on HDTVs thanks to their adoption of progressive scan over interlaced, the PS2 being weaker resulted in it using 480i which looks like SHIT on HDTVs today. Not to mention just like N64 and Saturn it falls into the category of being a bitch to emulate. Needs a shitton of power and a bunch of patches and graphical fixes for everything since the PS2's GPU rode the short bus and had their own special way of doing things. But hey, at least the hardware was unique and all the games weren't using that gosh darn industry leading Unreal Engine 5!

Or how about the PS3's Cell, an idea which sounded badass and awesome on paper! Power your console using a supercomputer processor, therefore you can have all the powerful processing and calculations you needed for the advanced games coming out at the time. It's genius!



It WAS genius... if you liked worse performance on games than 360 and expensive prices due to hardware being far harder to produce. Oh yeah, can't forget the fact that OVER 17 YEARS LATER Sony STILL can't find a good way to get PS3 games emulated on PS5 thanks to the fucking abysmal system design. even if RPCS3 is a thing that exists, the fact that the system's OWN CREATORS can't reverse engineer it to work with future hardware is just sort of proof that this whole proprietary hardware thing was fucking stupid.

"ah, but the engines. Everything using UE5 will make games all look the same!"

First of all, the new Spongebob game uses the same UE5 engine that's powering some of the most realistic looking games on earth. It's not the engine that determines the way a game looks, it's the developers art direction and vision for the game. Second of all... Forspoken came out a couple months ago with a totally new custom engine. Looks generic, plays generic, main protagonist speaks like they're a Marvel character, and the game fucking killed the studio who worked on it. Custom engines don't make a game automatically good.

In reality, every console using X86 is nothing but a good thing, and every gaming using either UE or Unity is also a good thing. Ports are identical to the one on the other console, games are easier to make, and even if they don't 'code to the metal' like they used to, games still look better than ever with more advanced systems and algorithms powering the stuff you play today. Unreal Engine allows better looking games to be made than ever while still giving the developer full artistic control over their project, and games STILL have varied artstyles.

Let's leave Cell and Emotion Engine in the past, people.

I mostly agree. I do hope we have several different game engines for developers to use though.
 
Yes, Sony did all the right stuff with PS1. Ken Kutaragi knew what was up. But i can’t help but think that if the N64 used CDs and courted developers to make whatever they wanted, would all those japanese developers stick with nintendo?
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
Exclusives weren't enough? You needed to be sure the hardware inside the box was specialized and wacky?
Why do you think there was so many exclusives? And it wasn’t that wacky. There are baseline standards to machine code. Yes different processors have different registers and some special features but they use the same basic principles.

The PlayStation and Saturn were special cases in a time where 3D was super new with no standards and c was taking over the development world.

But unlike today all consoles had a specific “ look “ it was part of the charm. I could tell what console it was on just by looking at a screen shot or hearing the sound.
 

Kataploom

Gold Member
I mostly agree. I do hope we have several different game engines for developers to use though.
We do, but most of them are not public to use and of the ones that are, some are too heavily focused on specific types of games, others don't have the quality necessary for important projects and the others are the usual ones people use mine Unity, UE, GameMaker, Godot, etc.
 
You had very good points until you start cock sucking unreal engine 5.

It is sure great and make game development easier with great multiplatform compatibility...

But you're very much dumb if your think that UE is the silver bullet for gaming... There's a reason why we always have a couple of dozen programming language being used concurrently at any given time and the reason is that different use cases are better with different implementations...

I've already posted this but I will say again, games are more than data processing, they are visual art and logic and if you have a fucking eye you can notice pretty quick that a loot of UE games have similar visuals... Now that can be because some devs cut cornes and use pre baked stuff but the issue stills...

Different engines with different specializations ARE A MUST if we want gaming to keep moving forward.
 
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phant0m

Member
well ofc the SNES is easy to emulate

The PS2 has far more issues though and unlike Gamecube and Wii you can't just pop a game into PCSX2 expecting it to work. Ace Combat 4 for instance still has this weird glitch with the sun that hasn't been corrected.



Jak looks weird on PCSX2 and requires hacks and fixes to look identical to the PS2 version (hence why people just said 'fuck it' and decompiled everything to work on PC)
dRXbRfT.png

Ratchet has a glitched menu background, GT4 has flickering textures, KH has visual artifacts in subtitles.... This kind of tinkering and configuration makes PCSX2 a bitch to work with, especially in comparison to Dolphin where you can literally just pop a game in and BAM it works. THIS IS A 20+ YEAR OLD CONSOLE. THIS IS A 20+ YEAR OLD EMULATOR. The fact that we're still having fixes and hacks and all this BS just to get games running and also the fact that no competing emulator or open source fork has come out makes you wonder if it's the emu devs fault or the system's fault for being so difficult to figure out 20 years after the fact

that game was also on saturn.....


that's my whole thing, i make response threads to shit that annoys me



lol, nice cherry picking 6 games with issues out of a library of 4,000+

Anywho, so much of that settings “tweaking” is captured in game profiles you don’t even have to worry about it. Seriously, download LaunchBox or Batocera — you just import your ROMs/ISOs, it picks the right emulators and settings and the shit just works. I’ve played dozens of games across PS2, PSX, N64 and GameCube with generally few issues.

Also, x86 or nothing? You are actually just a troll. The future is ARM, champ. Every portable device including the Switch and PC-savior Steam Deck use non x86 processors

Edit: Deck is not ARM, d’oh! (I was thinking it was because of the need for Proton as a translation/compact layer but it’s just for Win > *nix not x86 > ARM like Rosetta)
 
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64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
lol, nice cherry picking 6 games with issues out of a library of 4,000+
do you actually want me to read 4000 wiki pages of known issues with PCSX2 games?
Every portable device including the Switch and PC-savior Steam Deck use non x86 processors
RNlBztO.png

All handheld PCs use x86 architecture and quite a few of them manage to get great battery life while vastly outperforming most of the ARM chips out there.
whether or not x86 is here to stay i don't know, but the idea that you can say that the steam deck isn't using X86 when it clearly is... that's just sheer cap bro. Only troll is see here is you
 
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Lasha

Member
Also, x86 or nothing? You are actually just a troll. The future is ARM, champ. Every portable device including the Switch and PC-savior Steam Deck use non x86 processors

Portable devices use arm because it's designed for energy efficiency above all else. Apple switched to arm because it wanted to reduce exposure to third party suppliers for a core component of its PCs. Data centers are considering moving to arm for hypervisors to reduce energy usage. X86 architecture is much more powerful for everything else.

Steam deck uses x86 based chips. x86 is an architecture rather than a specific chip. The switch uses arm for the obvious reason of portability.
 

Loomy

Member
I said this in another thread, but there's a fundamental misunderstanding here of what the hardware makes possible vs art direction.

You don't need exotic hardware to get amazing looking games. Hardware in this gen is good enough for that. The problem that we're seeing is there's not a lot of risk being taken on the art direction. This isn't a new problem either.
 

Nocturno999

Member
Yes, hardware makers should avoid exotic architectures unless they find some amazing breakthrough.

Sony is still paying the price of the Cell architecture more than a decade later.
 
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radewagon

Member
Yes, hardware makers should avoid exotic architectures unless they find some amazing breakthrough.

Sony is still paying the price of the Cell architecture more than a decade later.
Funny thing is.... If it hadn't been for the Cell, early multiplats might have performed better on the PS3. The console might have been significantly cheaper. They might even have beat the 360 to market. Without the Cell's failure Sony wouldn't have had to go hog wild supporting some of the most amazing first-party content we'd yet seen. PS4 and PS5 are great systems with great content, but we don't get there without the lessons learned from cell.

So yeah, Sony's still paying the price for their hubris, but they're also still reaping the benefits of learning from it.
 
Ahh, remember the old days when every console had their own hardware and wasn't just a PC stuffed into a box! When engineers actually put their love and soul into a console and it resulted in industry defining hardware and architecture?

Nah, me neither. Proprietary hardware for consoles actually kind of sucked.

The Sega Saturn, what should have been a slam dunk for Sega considering how much of an innovator they were in the 3d video game scene, with titles such as Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA and Virtua Racing. The company that produced some of the most impressive eye candy arcade games in the early 90s, who was leagues ahead of every other company in the jump to 3d gaming. But then they got infected with the retard virus, and went with a totally weird, obscene, complex design that they expected everyone to understand and utilize. 2D games for the Saturn were difficult to make, and 3D games moreso.

The N64 had the exact same problem and while 3D games looked and played far better on the N64 than they did Saturn, the cartidge based storage format, all the expansions, and in general a confusing architecture is why the Saturn and N64 languished in the PS1's success. It was a simple and easy to develop for architecture with CDs for all the developers storage needs, and it's one of the many reasons for the PlayStation's success.

Not to mention both the N64 and Saturn are notoriously difficult systems to properly emulate thanks to their retarded architecture making reverse engineering them a bitch. N64 guys specifically got so fed up they decided it'd be easier to DECOMPILE the games and port them to PC. With Jak getting a decompilation as well, seems like the same thing is happening to the PS2. Which is good, because the PS2 is also a terribly engineered system.

"buh buh my 155 million units sold" shut the fuck up. It was engineered poorly as Sony focused all of their efforts on the 'EmOTIoN EngINe" and as a result that system was significantly harder to make games for than the PS1, and was weaker than the competition to boot. While the Xbox and Gamecube's visuals have aged gracefully on HDTVs thanks to their adoption of progressive scan over interlaced, the PS2 being weaker resulted in it using 480i which looks like SHIT on HDTVs today. Not to mention just like N64 and Saturn it falls into the category of being a bitch to emulate. Needs a shitton of power and a bunch of patches and graphical fixes for everything since the PS2's GPU rode the short bus and had their own special way of doing things. But hey, at least the hardware was unique and all the games weren't using that gosh darn industry leading Unreal Engine 5!

Or how about the PS3's Cell, an idea which sounded badass and awesome on paper! Power your console using a supercomputer processor, therefore you can have all the powerful processing and calculations you needed for the advanced games coming out at the time. It's genius!



It WAS genius... if you liked worse performance on games than 360 and expensive prices due to hardware being far harder to produce. Oh yeah, can't forget the fact that OVER 17 YEARS LATER Sony STILL can't find a good way to get PS3 games emulated on PS5 thanks to the fucking abysmal system design. even if RPCS3 is a thing that exists, the fact that the system's OWN CREATORS can't reverse engineer it to work with future hardware is just sort of proof that this whole proprietary hardware thing was fucking stupid.

"ah, but the engines. Everything using UE5 will make games all look the same!"

First of all, the new Spongebob game uses the same UE5 engine that's powering some of the most realistic looking games on earth. It's not the engine that determines the way a game looks, it's the developers art direction and vision for the game. Second of all... Forspoken came out a couple months ago with a totally new custom engine. Looks generic, plays generic, main protagonist speaks like they're a Marvel character, and the game fucking killed the studio who worked on it. Custom engines don't make a game automatically good.

In reality, every console using X86 is nothing but a good thing, and every gaming using either UE or Unity is also a good thing. Ports are identical to the one on the other console, games are easier to make, and even if they don't 'code to the metal' like they used to, games still look better than ever with more advanced systems and algorithms powering the stuff you play today. Unreal Engine allows better looking games to be made than ever while still giving the developer full artistic control over their project, and games STILL have varied artstyles.

Let's leave Cell and Emotion Engine in the past, people.


The Saturn was at the time the best to do 2d by a good country mile, even if it required a bit of coordination between the VDPs. Hardware since then has been more about focusing on 3d while applying brute force through tons of RAM and if I'm correct relying on vector math for 2d a good chunk of the time.

As was said below though, it took a while for x86 to become cost-effective and capable for consoles. Heck it wasn't until the mid-90s before the PC began to catch up in friggin 2d.

Looking past the worst cases (i. e. the PS3), there were systems like the Sega Dreamcast that had unique features like tile-based rendering (that hurt ports like Sonic Adventure for systems that didn't have it).
 

skit_data

Member
While it’s way more practical and probably overall better for backwards compability, developer accessibility and R&D-costs I can still miss consoles being built the way they used to be. Last console generation was the worst, the Xbox One and PS4 consisted of pretty much the exact same components with some key differences (I guess it mostly came down to the RAM). This gen is at least a little bit more interesting in that regard, due to the clockspeed/CU count difference between the two. Then there’s the difference in decompression technology, that seems more like something that might take some time for developers to actually get t grips with.

TLDR; I consider this gen more interesting than the last. At least consoles are now equipped with something that sets them apart from a regular PC in the form of dedicated hardware decompression.
 

phant0m

Member
Portable devices use arm because it's designed for energy efficiency above all else. Apple switched to arm because it wanted to reduce exposure to third party suppliers for a core component of its PCs. Data centers are considering moving to arm for hypervisors to reduce energy usage. X86 architecture is much more powerful for everything else.

Steam deck uses x86 based chips. x86 is an architecture rather than a specific chip. The switch uses arm for the obvious reason of portability.

Apple’s ARM processors handily beat their x86 equivalents from Intel which is why they went that route. The M2 Pro is performs on par with a 7700X. Handily beats (about 3k points) the 5800X3D which barely a year ago was the “best CPU for gaming that money can buy”.

(source: geekbench scores….I know “you don’t play benchmarks” but the idea that ARM can’t go to toe to toe with x86 on execution horsepower is nonsense at this point)
 

ReBurn

Gold Member
Proprietary console hardware was good when there were still many proprietary PC platforms and X86 hadn't finished standardizing. Gaming on 8-bit and 16-bit computers in the 80's was wildly inconsistent. Sometimes it was great and sometimes it sucked. But consoles were at least consistent because gaming was specifically what they were made for.

Even though modern consoles are based on mainstream hardware they're still very custom and I think that's a good thing. The customized I/O, bandwidth/bus architecture, and guarantee of an SSD makes PS5 and XSX punch in a performance class as some more expensive PC hardware.
 

Celcius

°Temp. member
Before I say how wrong the OP is, here is what I want to know: How old is the OP? Did he mostly grow up with these x86 boxes or was he there when consoles made the transition from 2D to 3D, when high definition became a thing, when cartridges became extinct, when bump mapping was big news?

This sounds like something a teenager would say: "I played a ps3 with games struggling to hit 30fps, therefore custom hardware is bad!" A modern console with custom hardware could absolutely be a viable option.
 
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Loomy

Member
Before I say how wrong the OP is, here is what I want to know: How old is the OP? Did he mostly grow up with these x86 boxes or was he there when consoles made the transition from 2D to 3D, when high definition became a thing, when cartridges became extinct, when bump mapping was big news?

This sounds like something a teenager would say: "I played a ps3 with games struggling to hit 30fps, therefore custom hardware is bad!" A modern console with custom hardware could absolutely be a viable option.
Both the 'exotic hardware bad' and 'off the shelf hardware & Unreal Everything bad" threads from today scream teen to me.

Also, there's a lot of custom/unique hardware and software in the PS5 and Xbox Series architecture. It's not like they're slapping AMD CPUs and GPUs in there and calling it a day.

The reason you're never going to see a system launch with a modern equivalent of Emotion Engine/Cell/PowerPC processors is because
1. Cross gen needs to be easy/trivial going forward
2. Devs need to be able to get their games up and running on your system fast
 
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