Graphics Tricks from Boomers | Hacker News Reader

Graphics Tricks from Boomers

arnaud-carre.github.io

137 pointsatan227 comments

I really do miss this old regime of utilizing the entire machine in games. There is a fantastic video of one of the original Naughty Dog developers talking about the optimizations they did for the original Crash Bandicoot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o), and some of the less conventional tricks they did to enable 3D gameplay on the PS1. I've always wondered what the true limit of performance optimizations is in games. Obviously modern systems have a lot more systems to compete and share memory between, but there have been obvious cases where performance has had low priority. Also under consideration is the constantly morphing landscape of PC hardware and software architecture. Given a fixed hardware, like the PS5 or Xbox, with the hardware of a high end gaming computer, what is the true limit a game could reach.

I'm sure if things were super highly optimized, you could do things like run Cyberpunk 2077 at its maximum fidelity level on something like an i3/rtx 2060. But at a certain point, you're just not gonna get fully pathtraced lighting without something like RT cores, or you're gonna have to settle for something that isn't quite as photorealistic to hit 60fps.

Aside, may enjoy this video: https://youtu.be/Qvlb-Yo6Rqo?si=HW1TrDdcC2WQgvya

This is exactly the reason why most game studios prefer to target game consoles.

If that were true, then these games would only land on the particular console they decided on. But most game studios develop in either UE5 or Unity and release for all consoles and PC, so what you say sounds wrong.

Lots of console games never make it into PC.

In fact the whole drama that is currently going on with PlayStation and XBox fans is about games being released into PC, given the stagnating growth of user base in their consoles.

Meanwhile Switch doesn't even care PC exists, other than for the devkit.

Lots? Which ones?

People mostly don't write custom game engines any more, so they don't care about platform specifics. And game studios care about sales, so it doesn't make any sense to not distribute on multiple platforms!

The reason why Xbox and PlayStation have games that only exist on their console is because they secure that contractually, and they pay a ton of money for that.

And Nintendo releases Mario and Zelda only on the Switch for that exact reason.

I miss 68k assembler. Doing Amiga demos or Polytechnic work on a ST.

I ended up doing Mac 68k and C after Poly in the early 90s.

Pretty tired of “everything from the 20th century is boomer”.

Baby boomers were born in the 50s after world war 2, crypto used to mean cryptography, serverless uses servers and posting on 'social media' used to just be called putting something on the internet, but everything is destined to become the most nonsense version of itself.

And the plot to Idiocracy becomes more and more probable

And ‘content’ used to be called… well, actually, that word was only used to distinguish the ‘content’ from the medium of transmission or the particular web or magazine layout being used, or something. Now people say ‘I love your content’, or even ‘I’m gonna get my phone out and consume some content’ which would have sounded utterly bizarre until very recently.

There is a weird tendency for distinctly technical words to leak out and become common outside their original, very specific context. With the meaning warped, of course. Not a technical term, but I guess the most on-topic example here would be ‘hacker’. I guess ‘coding’ works too.

‘Influencer’ would be another. It originally was a term used to describe others, in much the same way as, say, ‘celebrity’ would be; now it’s common to see individuals proudly describing themselves as ‘influencers’. There’s something slightly disturbingly self-analytic about it. Like speaking in the third person.

Anyway… </old man yells at cloud>

(I’m not even old!)

In a word, objectification

It's quite frightening how fast these spread and infect the conversation (even though they're low stakes).

Corpos and propagandists especially love how words can shape thinking. For some time already it's en vogue to label all on-prem systems as legacy, as if repeating it will make it come true.

> Corpos and propagandists especially love how words can shape thinking.

Oh yes. Which is why it's not so silly to care deeply about how language is used. They are 'just words', but we think (to some extent) in words and we certainly converse in words. Therefore, words are a significant part of what controls societal attitudes.

Transient tech turnstiles can't compete with unmetered timeless techniques and vintage products made immortal by repairability.

Name-calling could reduce a renaissance of proven products, or further stoke interest in past-futures.

Everything older than me is boomer, everything younger is zoomer.

Signed, Millennial or gen X

We didn't ask for these either. Enjoy being part of the game; y'all (boomers) maintained it

Definitely wasn't the silent generation, we all love gram-gram

As someone frustrated with the state of Rust game dev, I wish more people would work on the cutting-edge Rust graphics stack rather than all this retro graphics stuff. I'm trying to build something hard and the foundations are sand.

I guess you can wish, but you can't direct people to work on it unless you're paying for it. Why are you yourself working on this rather than either using a more mature stack or working on the foundations?

People have different interests and that's fine. I have zero interests in any new languages including Rust but I'm happy you enjoy it.

Not to be rude, but why not just pick a more established language and ecosystem? It seems a bit strange to pick something nearly esoteric, expecting there to be solid foundations for anything, much less game development.

Why Rust? Because I wanted to use far more concurrency than usually seen in games to overcome the fundamental performance problem in metaverse clients. The graphics stack works well enough to do this.[1] But it needs to get faster and do a few more things. Basically, I need three.js for Rust. I sort of have it, but the Rust crate has been abandoned, has bugs, and now I have to maintain it.

For a while, there was much enthusiasm for Rust game dev.[2] But it kind of ran down.

[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/7usCE3v2RrWK6nuoSr4NHJ

[2] https://arewegameyet.rs

As someone that has been in and out of game development culture since the demoscene days, former IGDA member, I don't see that taking off that fast.

Khronos isn't in an hurry to care about Rust's existence, only now they are starting to acknowledge C++ in specifications and related SDK efforts (for Vulkan and ANARI specifically), alongside C, let alone something else.

The biggest engine growth in 2024, for Unreal and Unity refugees, was Godot, written in C++, while most studios that made a banner of adopting Rust seem to have gotten back to C++ and Unreal.

I like the boomer throwback of using a poster image that opens a new page to view the videos instead of just embedding the video. Wonder if this was intentional or lack of polish with the blog template

Might be intentional. I see some sites doing it to speed up page load because the normal YouTube embed is several MBs of JavaScript IIRC.

One neat fix for that is to use https://github.com/paulirish/lite-youtube-embed

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