> Games are never hard realtime
Depends how high your standards are! One of the things that makes playing old games on the original hardware really satisfying is how consistent they are.
Depends how high your standards are! One of the things that makes playing old games on the original hardware really satisfying is how consistent they are.
Today, a PC game has to work on a large range of hardware that has come out over the past 5+ years. And there are GPU features that are only available on certain cards, like hardware ray tracing and things like DLSS and FSR for upscaling.
And the game engines are incredibly more complex today to handle modern expectations, with dynamic lighting and shadows, huge maps, etc.
It doesn’t matter what your standards are. Hard realtime just isn’t realistic or even possible any more, except maybe in a game that would be considered truly primitive by today’s standards.
And that was just the sound cards. Writing for different hardware became so much easier when OpenGl and DirectX came into being. Suddenly I just had to write to these APIs.
I think I'm disagreeing with you. Supporting multiple hardware configuration way back when was so much harder than doing it today.
/me shivers at the recollection
We have way better hardware abstractions in the OS today, which I would agree makes modern development easier overall.
Different world. So much easier now.