Hardware Sprites (Gaming)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Thursday, May 25, 2017, 20:00 (2525 days ago) @ Cody Miller

It is not hard to hit 60fps. The NES was doing that with a CPU running at 3mhz or something like that.

You simply need to scale back the complexity of your simulation.

Yep.

The hardware sprite era had very different types of tradeoffs for the devs, though.

Those systems don't work by having a GPU render a frame that then gets sent to be output. Instead, the graphics hardware is just set up with data describing what sprites are at what on-screen locations, and it produces the image pixel-by-pixel as it gets sent to the TV; you give it an on-screen coordinate, and it tells you the color of that pixel.

So the graphics hardware was always running in sync with the video signal. Since the video signal was 60Hz, the graphics hardware always produced frames at 60fps.

Rendering itself was never a bottleneck, so tradeoffs that would result in a 30fps game didn't have as much bang-for-the-buck to give, and were effectively leaving half the system idle half the time. Those systems also had very little memory, so you didn't necessarily have enough stuff to work on to make it worth blowing more than 16ms on anyway.