6 ms·

> Code was constantly being profiled using raster bars. For those wondering: we'd change the background color from, say, black to blue for the "physics" part,

> Code was constantly being profiled using raster bars. For those wondering: we'd change the background color from, say, black to blue for the "physics" part, to green for the "drawing" part, to purple for the "audio rendering" part... All in the same frame, while the frame was being drawn. So you'd see on the border of your screen (usually outside of the drawing area you'd have access to) approximately which percentage of each frame was eaten by "physics", graphics, audio etc. and how close you were to missing a frame. And it was quite "hectic" typically these color "raster" bars would jump around quite some from one frame to another. But yeah there was indeed something very special about having a pixel-perfect scrolling for a 2D game running precisely at the refresh rate (50 Hz or 60 Hz back then). And it wasn't just scrolling: games running on fixed hardware often had characters movement set specifically in "pixels per frame". It felt so smooth. Something has definitely been lost when the shift to 3D games happened: even playing, say, Counter-Strike at 99 fps (was it even doing that? I don't remember) wasn't the same. People don't understand that their 144 Hz monitor running a 3D game still doesn't convey that smoothness that my vintage arcade cab does when running an old 2D game with pixel-perfect scrolling while never skipping a frame.

masfuerte 3y ago
Not just that. You hit a key and the game could react in literally the next frame. There was an immediacy you don't get now.
- PaulKeeble 3y ago
  Ever since the xbox360 era of games the game world has been updating in parallel with the rendering of the prior frame at the very least, that pipeline is quite commonly 3 frames long now. That is a lot of latency to get some macro concurrency.
- dllthomas 3y ago
  Metal Slug on the PS4 was jarringly unresponsive compared to my expectations, though I'm not sure I've played it on an arcade machine in 20 years so maybe it's my memory or physiology at least partly to blame.
  - josephg 3y ago
    Strangely enough, I had the same experience with diablo 4 until I turned down some of the graphics settings. I'm not sure if it was some DLSS / frame generation thing or what, but the game felt sloppy to me. Especially in comparison to something like diablo 2 which feels razor sharp. I wish modern game developers & graphics pipelines would spend more effort optimizing input latency. I'll stop noticing the graphics 2 minutes into playing the game. But if the input is laggy, I'll feel that the entire time I'm playing. And the feeling of everything being a bit laggy will linger long after I stop playing.
    - alex7734 3y ago
      > But if the input is laggy, I'll feel that the entire time I'm playing. You've already bought the game at this point so most devs don't care.
      - josephg 3y ago
        They care a lot if they get bad reviews online. That translates directly into sales. An insane amount of money and effort that goes into most AAA games. It seems like a stretch to accuse the industry of not caring about the quality of the games they make.
        alex7734 3y ago
        Well, yes, I explained myself horribly. What I meant is that most people are way more sensitive to graphics than anything else. A lot of people will never play a game that is ugly but don't seem to mind laggy inputs. There are a lot of games that, even without "real" input lag, have tons of animation dampening/inertia to the point that it makes them IMHO unresponsive, just to improve the "cinematic feel" and avoid characters instantly changing direction. If you prefer responsiveness to having the player character spin be perfectly smooth, well, sucks to be you, because prettier games sell better. Obviously this doesn't apply to fighting games or competitive shooters or anything like that where responsiveness is the point of the game.
mrob 3y ago
A lot of that smoothness was the lack of sample-and-hold blur on CRTs. Gaming LCDs now have modes that strobe the backlight to simulate this effect. Additionally, the importance of sample-and-hold blur declines as the frame rate increases. A 360Hz LCD displaying 360fps motion can look reasonably sharp even without strobing. Blur Busters has detailed explanations, e.g.: https://blurbusters.com/blur-busters-law-amazing-journey-to-future-1000hz-displays-with-blurfree-sample-and-hold/ https://blurbusters.com/blur-busters-law-amazing-journey-to-...
orbital-decay 3y ago
> People don't understand that their 144 Hz monitor running a 3D game still doesn't convey that smoothness that my vintage arcade cab does when running an old 2D game with pixel-perfect scrolling while never skipping a frame. The actual motion-to-photon delay (measurable with a high-speed camera) in a well optimized competitive FPS is somewhere around 20ish ms or less these days, so it's on par with it in regards to the input lag, and overall it's far smoother because of the higher frame rate, better displays, and way more thought put into tiny nuances competitive players complain about. A proper setup feels extremely smooth, responsive, and immediate.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  There’s a big difference in latency on a 10k$ machine and my “non-budget but on a budget” 3k$ machine. You can’t realistically expect people to pay pro-gaming prices.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > The actual motion-to-photon delay (measurable with a high-speed camera) in a well optimized competitive FPS is somewhere around 20ish ms or less these days, so it's on par with it in regards to the input lag I.e. more than two frames between input and output. That is quite a lot, and AFAIK a large regression.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    It’s the exact same amount of time - why would the frame count matter?
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      1 - 2 frames is a lot of time and latency this big is perceptible in many tasks, fast-paced videogames being just one of them.
      - kaba0 3y ago
        It was in reference to high refresh rate screens - 1-2 frames is not much at 144+ Hz.
proc0 3y ago
I think the difference is that 3D is inherently continuous (because it is simulating a 3d space) and requires another layer of abstraction on top of the controllers to work intuitively. 2D on the other hand is pixel based which is usually discrete (the world units are uniform in pixels), and also the character movement is 1:1 mapping on the controller. These two factors make 2D feel more responsive, and I'm guessing that once VR gets better it will close the abstraction gap and make the controller mapping (body/hand movement) 1:1.
- hypertele-Xii 3y ago
  Using pixel coordinates for 2D space is like sizing web elements in pixels - it's just plain wrong and will look vanishingly small on future higher-resolution monitors.
  - zogrodea 3y ago
    Wasn't it common practice on older systems like, say, the SNES Sega Genesis? A design responsive to multiple resolutions wasn't really a thing back then as far as I know.
    - hypertele-Xii 3y ago
      Imagine the richness of retro gaming today if they had had the foresight to design for resolution independence. Now only a vanishingly tiny subset of the best of the best games have the financial incentive or dedicated modding community to release in high definition.
  - smokel 3y ago
    It's just plain wrong from today's perspective. Back when pixel sizes were predictable, one could exploit this at all levels. Pixel artists would (and still continue to) consider every individual pixel, performing anti-aliasing by hand. Animations would be timed in relative to the (fixed) framerate, leading to optimal smoothness. Reaching this level of fluidity is only recently possible again, at the cost of vastly higher hardware requirements. Most people haven't even experienced this, because of the suboptimal period we have been in for some time now. You win some, you lose some.
squarefoot 3y ago
> People don't understand that their 144 Hz monitor running a 3D game still doesn't convey that smoothness that my vintage arcade cab does when running an old 2D game with pixel-perfect scrolling while never skipping a frame. There are great examples even outside of the gaming world. I wish there were videos around on how fluid were Scala Multimedia presentations on a bare Amiga 500 in the 90s. An 8MHz clocked machine (7.16 MHz here in the EU for PAL synchronization) that in that field would outperform gear costing at least an order of magnitude more. It was hugely successful back in the day in many local TV stations.

masfuerte 3y ago

Not just that. You hit a key and the game could react in literally the next frame. There was an immediacy you don't get now.

PaulKeeble 3y ago
Ever since the xbox360 era of games the game world has been updating in parallel with the rendering of the prior frame at the very least, that pipeline is quite commonly 3 frames long now. That is a lot of latency to get some macro concurrency.
dllthomas 3y ago
Metal Slug on the PS4 was jarringly unresponsive compared to my expectations, though I'm not sure I've played it on an arcade machine in 20 years so maybe it's my memory or physiology at least partly to blame.
- josephg 3y ago
  Strangely enough, I had the same experience with diablo 4 until I turned down some of the graphics settings. I'm not sure if it was some DLSS / frame generation thing or what, but the game felt sloppy to me. Especially in comparison to something like diablo 2 which feels razor sharp. I wish modern game developers & graphics pipelines would spend more effort optimizing input latency. I'll stop noticing the graphics 2 minutes into playing the game. But if the input is laggy, I'll feel that the entire time I'm playing. And the feeling of everything being a bit laggy will linger long after I stop playing.
  - alex7734 3y ago
    > But if the input is laggy, I'll feel that the entire time I'm playing. You've already bought the game at this point so most devs don't care.
    - josephg 3y ago
      They care a lot if they get bad reviews online. That translates directly into sales. An insane amount of money and effort that goes into most AAA games. It seems like a stretch to accuse the industry of not caring about the quality of the games they make.
      - alex7734 3y ago
        Well, yes, I explained myself horribly. What I meant is that most people are way more sensitive to graphics than anything else. A lot of people will never play a game that is ugly but don't seem to mind laggy inputs. There are a lot of games that, even without "real" input lag, have tons of animation dampening/inertia to the point that it makes them IMHO unresponsive, just to improve the "cinematic feel" and avoid characters instantly changing direction. If you prefer responsiveness to having the player character spin be perfectly smooth, well, sucks to be you, because prettier games sell better. Obviously this doesn't apply to fighting games or competitive shooters or anything like that where responsiveness is the point of the game.

mrob 3y ago

A lot of that smoothness was the lack of sample-and-hold blur on CRTs. Gaming LCDs now have modes that strobe the backlight to simulate this effect. Additionally, the importance of sample-and-hold blur declines as the frame rate increases. A 360Hz LCD displaying 360fps motion can look reasonably sharp even without strobing. Blur Busters has detailed explanations, e.g.: https://blurbusters.com/blur-busters-law-amazing-journey-to-future-1000hz-displays-with-blurfree-sample-and-hold/ https://blurbusters.com/blur-busters-law-amazing-journey-to-...

orbital-decay 3y ago

> People don't understand that their 144 Hz monitor running a 3D game still doesn't convey that smoothness that my vintage arcade cab does when running an old 2D game with pixel-perfect scrolling while never skipping a frame. The actual motion-to-photon delay (measurable with a high-speed camera) in a well optimized competitive FPS is somewhere around 20ish ms or less these days, so it's on par with it in regards to the input lag, and overall it's far smoother because of the higher frame rate, better displays, and way more thought put into tiny nuances competitive players complain about. A proper setup feels extremely smooth, responsive, and immediate.

withinboredom 3y ago
There’s a big difference in latency on a 10k$ machine and my “non-budget but on a budget” 3k$ machine. You can’t realistically expect people to pay pro-gaming prices.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> The actual motion-to-photon delay (measurable with a high-speed camera) in a well optimized competitive FPS is somewhere around 20ish ms or less these days, so it's on par with it in regards to the input lag I.e. more than two frames between input and output. That is quite a lot, and AFAIK a large regression.
- kaba0 3y ago
  It’s the exact same amount of time - why would the frame count matter?
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    1 - 2 frames is a lot of time and latency this big is perceptible in many tasks, fast-paced videogames being just one of them.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      It was in reference to high refresh rate screens - 1-2 frames is not much at 144+ Hz.

proc0 3y ago

I think the difference is that 3D is inherently continuous (because it is simulating a 3d space) and requires another layer of abstraction on top of the controllers to work intuitively. 2D on the other hand is pixel based which is usually discrete (the world units are uniform in pixels), and also the character movement is 1:1 mapping on the controller. These two factors make 2D feel more responsive, and I'm guessing that once VR gets better it will close the abstraction gap and make the controller mapping (body/hand movement) 1:1.

hypertele-Xii 3y ago
Using pixel coordinates for 2D space is like sizing web elements in pixels - it's just plain wrong and will look vanishingly small on future higher-resolution monitors.
- zogrodea 3y ago
  Wasn't it common practice on older systems like, say, the SNES Sega Genesis? A design responsive to multiple resolutions wasn't really a thing back then as far as I know.
  - hypertele-Xii 3y ago
    Imagine the richness of retro gaming today if they had had the foresight to design for resolution independence. Now only a vanishingly tiny subset of the best of the best games have the financial incentive or dedicated modding community to release in high definition.
- smokel 3y ago
  It's just plain wrong from today's perspective. Back when pixel sizes were predictable, one could exploit this at all levels. Pixel artists would (and still continue to) consider every individual pixel, performing anti-aliasing by hand. Animations would be timed in relative to the (fixed) framerate, leading to optimal smoothness. Reaching this level of fluidity is only recently possible again, at the cost of vastly higher hardware requirements. Most people haven't even experienced this, because of the suboptimal period we have been in for some time now. You win some, you lose some.

squarefoot 3y ago

> People don't understand that their 144 Hz monitor running a 3D game still doesn't convey that smoothness that my vintage arcade cab does when running an old 2D game with pixel-perfect scrolling while never skipping a frame. There are great examples even outside of the gaming world. I wish there were videos around on how fluid were Scala Multimedia presentations on a bare Amiga 500 in the 90s. An 8MHz clocked machine (7.16 MHz here in the EU for PAL synchronization) that in that field would outperform gear costing at least an order of magnitude more. It was hugely successful back in the day in many local TV stations.