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Comment by swang | Hacker News Reader

HD is hard. Game companies are barely got to 1080p/60fps for their games with most of them cheating to get near that quality. This next generation they may be able to just throw process cycles at it for the PS4/XBone. I can't imagine how long it will take to get to the 4K/60fps quality rate.

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Which is funky, because I was playing games in 1600x1200@60fps in <2003.

And 3d games < 2003 were rubbish graphically compared to today. There was minimal AA and AF. There were almost no particle effects, shaders were just being thought about. Physics in games were a joke until HalfLife2.

Yes, and? Those were the limits of the hardware. Mobile phones have better GPUs now.

Doesn't change the simple fact that you could run the most advanced games of the time at high resolutions. Everyone was saying the Wii was outdated at launch, and they were right.

Nintendo seem to have always aimed to not compete on graphics and hardware. It's been a smart move while they have managed to engage third party developers to make "decent" games around their headline titles but now they aren't being so successful (thanks to much easier cross-platform dev for console/pc freezing them out of the main console market and the rise of smartphones eating into the mobile market) getting good developers on board their strategy is starting to look hollow.

Which is a real shame because historically they have been exceptional at competing on fun, but you can't justify a £200 console based on the possibility of 1 or 2 first party games a year.

My issue was in talking about quality of graphics by qualifying it with screen resolution and frame rate.

My point was that these are irrelevant: we've been playing games at higher resolution than that for a while.

It was a rather pedantic jab, and for that I apologize. My point stands, however.

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