Hacker News Reader

Comment by cwbriscoe | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the difference went into FPS rather than improved graphics.

And loading times. I think people already forgot how long you had to wait on loading screens or how many faked loading (moving through a brush while the next area loads) there was on PS4

Did you forget that on the N64, load times were near instantaneous?

The N64 was cartridge based.

If only we could just ship a 256GB NVMe SSD with every game and memory map the entire drive like you could with cartridges back then. Never have loading times again.

Also: I think it got less common on the N64, but games on SNES and NES and other old home consoles routinely accessed static game data, like graphic tiles, directly from the cartridge ROM. Without loading it into system RAM at all.

So there literally were no "loading" times for these assets. This might not even be realistically possible with NAND flash based SSDs, e.g. because of considerations like latency.

Though directly accessing ROM memory would also prevent things like texture block compression I believe.

PS4 wasnt too terrible but jumping back to PS3... wow I completely forgot how memory starved that machine was. Working on it, we knew at the time but in retro spect it was just horrible.

Small RAM space with the hard CPU/GPU split (so no reallocation) feeding off a slow HDD which is being fed by an even slower Bluray disc, you are sitting around for a while.

PS3 loading times IME were better than the PS4.

Bloodborne when it came out was around 1 minute between deaths.

This is correct. Also, it speaks to what players actually value.

Also FPS just requires throwing more compute at it.

Excessively high detail models require extra artist time too.

I have played through CP2077 with 40, 30 and 25 fps. A child doesn't care if Zelda runs with low FPS.

The only thing I value is a consistent stream of frames on a console.

When given a choice, most users prefer performance over higher fidelity

I would like to see the stats for that.

> "When asked to decide on a mode, players typically choose performance mode about three-quarters of the time,

From PS5 Pro reveal https://youtu.be/X24BzyzQQ-8?t=172

Seems like an overgeneralization. I get it when FPS players want the best performance: players have FOMO of the best reaction time and the games are more built for fast action than contemplative scenery watching.

I wonder if players of single player action/adventure games make the same choice. Those games are played less (can be finished in 10-30 hours instead of endlessly) so the statistics might be skewed to favor performance mode.

> I wonder if players of single player action/adventure games make the same choice.

Anecdotally, I do. Because modern displays are horrible blurry messes at lower framerates. I don't care about my input latency, I care about my image not being a smear every time the camera viewport moves.

Children eat dirt. I'm not sure "children don't care" is a good benchmark.

Yeah. Case in point: "Zelda: Ocarina of Time" was at the time and several years afterward often labeled as one of the best games ever made, despite the fact that it ran with 20 FPS on NTSC consoles and with 16.67 FPS on PAL machines.

I'm sure it would have been even more successful with modern 60 FPS, but that difference couldn't have been very large, because other 60 FPS games did exist back then as well, mostly without being nearly as popular.

Yes PS5 can output 120hz on hdmi. A perfect linear output to direct your more compute at.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com