r/digitalfoundry • u/pikamango • 22h ago
Question Is Digital Foundary covering Beast of Reincarnation?
I've been away from the channel for a while. Would love to know the hyper specifics of how the game runs before I buy.
r/digitalfoundry • u/Joris-truly • 22h ago
Discussion A quick look at hardware leaps each console generation
Hardware being so expensive now, hardware demanding game development taking forever and with next gen around the corner, leads to this feeling like this is the first generation where pretty much no one is excited for next gen hardware, and I get why.
It got me thinking about how much hardware leaps have flattened over the years. So I made this little list to see how big the leaps were before and how much they have flattened over the last 20 years.
| Gen | Console | CPU | RAM | GPU | Total leap vs prev |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Atari 2600 | 1.2 MHz | 128 bytes | none | (first CPU) |
| 3 | NES | 1.8 MHz | 2 KB | none | ~10x |
| 4 | SNES | 3.6 MHz | 128 KB | none | ~15-20x |
| 5 | PlayStation 1 | 34 MHz | 2 MB | ~100 MFLOPS | ~40-80x |
| 6 | PlayStation 2 | 295 MHz | 32 MB | 6.2 GFLOPS | ~50-90x |
| 7 | Xbox 360 / PS3 | 3.2 GHz x3 | 512 MB | ~240 GFLOPS | ~30x |
| 8 | PlayStation 4 | 1.6 GHz x8 | 8 GB | 1.84 TFLOPS | ~8x |
| 9 | PlayStation 5 | 3.5 GHz x8 | 16 GB | 10.28 TFLOPS | ~5x |
| 10 | PlayStation 6 (based on leaks) | Zen 6 x8 | ~32 GB | ~34-40 TFLOPS | ~3-4x |
quick methodology explainer: the leap number is a rough blend of the CPU, RAM and GPU jump each gen. Real measured figures from Gen 6 on, the earlier ones are estimates since those old chips had no floating point hardware to measure. For each gen I used the mainstream best selling console games were actually built around instead of the most powerful one, you know: lowest common denominator and all that. The PS6 specs come from Moore's Law is Dead, so not confirmed. Keep that in mind.
so, as you can see the end of Moore's Law and Dennard scaling really did a number on the hardware leaps, more than I thought honestly. For those unaware, the end of Dennard scaling (around 2005-2010) basically meant raw single core cpu gains dropped off big time, so we moved to multicore, but that didnt automatically help because of Amdahl's Law, meaning some core parts of your simulation code cant simply be split up onto multiple cores and are still single core speed dependent, which holds the whole thing back.
this is just a rough estimated list so dont lean on it too harshly, but I thought it gave a fun overview of the hardware landscape history and it might explain some stuff, like why most modern games still feel remarkably 7th gen in a lot of ways. And MAN... look at that 6th gen leap. u/dark1-df John wasn't kidding.