4 ms·

This was the point I stopped playing games, around 1997-8. I was a student, with a franken-PC cobbled together from hand-me-down parts from my brother and dad.

This was the point I stopped playing games, around 1997-8. I was a student, with a franken-PC cobbled together from hand-me-down parts from my brother and dad. There was just no way I could keep up with the new games that were coming out, especially not ones that I could play over LAN with my friends, who had things like Voodoo2 cards. The speed with which CPUs were improving was amazing. In the 4 years I was at university PCs got about 5 times faster. The SGI Indy workstations in the labs went from being something quite amazing to being run-of-the-mill. And the comparison between the edit systems at the campus TV station that were bought at the beginning of my time there and at the end was night and day. I remember the first would take about a minute to render one second of slow-mo. The one we bought in my final year could do that sort of thing (and lots of effects) in realtime.

jandrese 6y ago
I started school in 1995 with a Pentium 75 with 16MB of RAM and "S3 Trio64" graphics. The machine came with a bunch of games, but was too fast to play some of them. There was a really buggy Robocop game and a space shooter that ran so fast they were basically impossible to play. Doom and later Doom2 ran buttery smooth on it. By the time I graduated I had it overclocked to 100Mhz and had to add a Matrox G200 to try keep up. Even then it was too slow for most games. Compare that to today where my machine is running with a 7 year old i5-3570k and it can still run pretty much everything.
megameter 6y ago
The nature of PC gaming really changed in the 90's. Through the later years of the Amiga's commercial life, most games were focused on the lowest common denominator because markets were small and everyone wanted to pick up the largest userbase, and the computers likewise had some balance of capabilities, with gaming features existing as one of several considerations. What I think changed was that as the scale of everything picked up, it became increasingly possible for a gaming enthusiast market to emerge, distinct from general computing and console gaming. In the late 90's not only did the specs accelerate very quickly, but the media started pushing to cover this enthusiast segment(e.g. Maximum PC, PC Accelerator). Where previous graphics advances were mostly focused on larger RAM usage and had clear benefit everywhere(higher resolution, color depth, etc.) the ordinary computer user in the 1990's had no reason for a GPU except to play games or engage in 3D content creation and visualization. A high-end PC from 1996 or so is basically competent at doing everything that was envisioned in the 1970's, if not in practice, then certainly in theory - the things that come after, are there because we started looking for ways to keep applying more computing power. With games it's been simple: more detail on models and textures, more expensive lighting computations, more accurate physics and more complex animations. The progressive enhancement of the web to the degree that it taxes a modern machine, on the other hand, is like a fitness function that has become overly relaxed. And I think that's a divergence that really occurred in the late 90's when standard RAM sizes grew to the 10's of megabytes - enough to comfortably multitask provided all applications are optimized for memory size. Once you have multitasking, feature bloat can set in.
anthk 6y ago
Well, in 1999-2000 once you get into emulation surely you could play a lot of games again. Once you got ZSNES/Callus who cared about lots of games. Except Max Payne, but well, that was an excuse to get a new Geforce 2 :D. Also, some Linux games bundled in the distros were damn addictive and run under anything. Abuse, Nethack, Crack-Attack...
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  xbill, ksokoban, FreeCiv.
  - anthk 6y ago
    And ltris ( a drug), frozen bubble, lincity...

jandrese 6y ago

I started school in 1995 with a Pentium 75 with 16MB of RAM and "S3 Trio64" graphics. The machine came with a bunch of games, but was too fast to play some of them. There was a really buggy Robocop game and a space shooter that ran so fast they were basically impossible to play. Doom and later Doom2 ran buttery smooth on it. By the time I graduated I had it overclocked to 100Mhz and had to add a Matrox G200 to try keep up. Even then it was too slow for most games. Compare that to today where my machine is running with a 7 year old i5-3570k and it can still run pretty much everything.

megameter 6y ago

The nature of PC gaming really changed in the 90's. Through the later years of the Amiga's commercial life, most games were focused on the lowest common denominator because markets were small and everyone wanted to pick up the largest userbase, and the computers likewise had some balance of capabilities, with gaming features existing as one of several considerations. What I think changed was that as the scale of everything picked up, it became increasingly possible for a gaming enthusiast market to emerge, distinct from general computing and console gaming. In the late 90's not only did the specs accelerate very quickly, but the media started pushing to cover this enthusiast segment(e.g. Maximum PC, PC Accelerator). Where previous graphics advances were mostly focused on larger RAM usage and had clear benefit everywhere(higher resolution, color depth, etc.) the ordinary computer user in the 1990's had no reason for a GPU except to play games or engage in 3D content creation and visualization. A high-end PC from 1996 or so is basically competent at doing everything that was envisioned in the 1970's, if not in practice, then certainly in theory - the things that come after, are there because we started looking for ways to keep applying more computing power. With games it's been simple: more detail on models and textures, more expensive lighting computations, more accurate physics and more complex animations. The progressive enhancement of the web to the degree that it taxes a modern machine, on the other hand, is like a fitness function that has become overly relaxed. And I think that's a divergence that really occurred in the late 90's when standard RAM sizes grew to the 10's of megabytes - enough to comfortably multitask provided all applications are optimized for memory size. Once you have multitasking, feature bloat can set in.

anthk 6y ago

Well, in 1999-2000 once you get into emulation surely you could play a lot of games again. Once you got ZSNES/Callus who cared about lots of games. Except Max Payne, but well, that was an excuse to get a new Geforce 2 :D. Also, some Linux games bundled in the distros were damn addictive and run under anything. Abuse, Nethack, Crack-Attack...

29athrowaway 6y ago
xbill, ksokoban, FreeCiv.
- anthk 6y ago
  And ltris ( a drug), frozen bubble, lincity...