Architecture of Consoles (2020)

copetti.org

40 points·generichuman··7 comments

While most of the major consoles for the 9th generation are basically just locked-down PCs, there are still interesting innovations going on.

One of the interesting tradeoffs with AR/VR systems is that there is less emphasis on just frames-per-second, and more emphasis on consistent latency and low lag between user input and photons coming out of the screen. This may continue to drive a divergence between dedicated AR/VR systems and "normal" game consoles & PCs. The input requirements for AR/VR are also much higher than a game pad sampled at high frequency.

The transition to consoles "just" being locked-down PCs makes me a little sad. From a software engineering perspective I really like the idea of squeezing out raw performance from custom bare metal architectures.

Many consoles had quite a learning curve for developers. And you see some drastic improvement in quality between early titles in the console lifetime and the last major exclusives for them. (There are more than a few examples of poor quality ports from one platform to another though.)

Yeah, I think the learning curve and ability to optimize for the hardware is the draw.

Each article has been posted to Hacker News a few times before, worth going back and looking at the discussion. But really I love this blog, fantastic set of articles. I'm quite looking forward to the Vita and 3DS articles.

Copetti has great articles.

Related: a couple of good articles on the Xbox 360 architecture from Jon 'Hannibal' Stokes

https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/06/xbox360-1/

https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/06/xbox360-2/

This blog is gold. Kudos to the author.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com