Halo MP Is now Free to Play (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, August 03, 2020, 17:08 (1359 days ago) @ Cody Miller

No I wasn’t talking about wireless signal encoding/decoding, and I’m not talking about the travel speed of electricity. Again, this stuff is way out of my area of expertise, but the way I understood the explanation was that for any console, there’s a bare minimum amount of time that it takes the various chips and processors to speak to each other about anything at all. The amount of information and complexity of the processing will add to that time, but no amount of efficiency or simplification can get the processing time below that floor. So when dealing with things like frame rates, developers need to treat that floor as a sort of constant tax. So the less time the console has between frames, the larger a percentage of that time is taken up by this minimum processor floor. Basically, 60 FPS is more than twice as difficult as 30fps, and 120fps is more than twice as difficult as 60fps, etc. Its a non-linear scale.

Oh, I think I understand you now. I've not heard of this but I'll look it up for sure. But my suspicion is that this is a very low number… after all these are machines that do billions of things every second.

Yeah and I would suspect it’s a smaller problem now than it was when I read about it 5-6 years ago. But it probably also varies from console to console. The PS3, for example, was famous for having all this untapped horsepower due to bandwidth bottleneck constraints. The individual components under the hood could process information faster than they could share that data with each other. That’s not the exact same thing as I was referring to above, but it might be related. I’d need to check with someone who knows what they’re talking about, lol.