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I've given up all hope that more GPU is the answer to more fun. These days I spend my free time at a cabin in the woods, hand crafting a software rasterizer in

I've given up all hope that more GPU is the answer to more fun. These days I spend my free time at a cabin in the woods, hand crafting a software rasterizer in protest of all of this bullshit. Developers still don't realize how powerful that CPU is. Especially now in 2022... We were playing quake on a single thread with clock rates measured in hundreds of megahertz. How much faster is an AMD Rome system compared to the best you could buy in the mid 90s? Just do some linear extrapolation with those figures.

tetris11 5y ago
I still marvel at how powerful pure JavaScript in the browser is. I'm not even talking EMCAScript with its classes and other syntactic junk, just pure JS free of any bells and whistles or bloated frameworks or opinionated design strategies. Its ability to manipulate the DOM, including SVGs, in real-time, fully-introspectable, just blows my mind away.
- bob1029 5y ago
  You can also get a canvas to draw like butter these days. Gaming monitor refresh rate territory. With proper use of requestAnimationFrame I see 144 fps on my PC.
jhanschoo 5y ago
> We were playing quake on a single thread with clock rates measured in hundreds of megahertz. How much faster is an AMD Rome system compared to the best you could buy in the mid 90s? Modern games are also have much more detail in their textures, many more particles, and much higher screen resolution; not to mention physics and visual effects. No. of transistors may have risen exponentially, but aspects of games have increased exponentially and quadratically as well.
- bob1029 5y ago
  Agreed - but again, fun certainly has not increased by these same rates. Let's try this a different way: Is it possible there is some gameplay concept that is so engaging that even technical caveats like a 640x480 resolution would not severely impact the enjoyment of most players? What is the actual limit of this stuff if you flip the equation around? How much janky bullshit can a substantial portion of your target market put up with for the sake of fun in 2022?

tetris11 5y ago

I still marvel at how powerful pure JavaScript in the browser is. I'm not even talking EMCAScript with its classes and other syntactic junk, just pure JS free of any bells and whistles or bloated frameworks or opinionated design strategies. Its ability to manipulate the DOM, including SVGs, in real-time, fully-introspectable, just blows my mind away.

bob1029 5y ago
You can also get a canvas to draw like butter these days. Gaming monitor refresh rate territory. With proper use of requestAnimationFrame I see 144 fps on my PC.

jhanschoo 5y ago

> We were playing quake on a single thread with clock rates measured in hundreds of megahertz. How much faster is an AMD Rome system compared to the best you could buy in the mid 90s? Modern games are also have much more detail in their textures, many more particles, and much higher screen resolution; not to mention physics and visual effects. No. of transistors may have risen exponentially, but aspects of games have increased exponentially and quadratically as well.

bob1029 5y ago
Agreed - but again, fun certainly has not increased by these same rates. Let's try this a different way: Is it possible there is some gameplay concept that is so engaging that even technical caveats like a 640x480 resolution would not severely impact the enjoyment of most players? What is the actual limit of this stuff if you flip the equation around? How much janky bullshit can a substantial portion of your target market put up with for the sake of fun in 2022?