MudMan

You can absolutely do that. You can also fit 16 frames of the Xbox 360 game into a single frame of the Xbox Series X game.

Sometimes people forget how much bigger a 4K target is compared to a 720p image, so I added a bit of a visual aid below. Those two screenshots are to scale, displayed at the native resolutions of their respective platforms. Just keep in mind that the big one is from a 1440p 21:9 monitor, so on a 4K TV the picture would have two of those stacked on top of each other.

It's good that this is smaller, because If you squint you can also notice the Xbox 360 game is extremely blurry and looks like it's in black and white. That's because it is. The 360 had 512megs of ram, to share between the CPU and the GPU. The Xbox Series X has 16 gigs, so 32 times more, and it's running a cool 300 times faster. 360 games were compressing textures within an inch of their lives to fit them into that tiny slab of memory, stripping color data among other things.

Computers are not magic. If you want to draw 15 million pixels of a wall and not have it look like soup you need data for each of those pixels. If you want that data to fit in less space you have to either spend resources compressing and decompressing it or you need more storage to put it in. Or you can draw it procedurally, I guess, but then you're back to the performance problem.

On the other thing, it's not "just buy more storage, brah", it's that storage has to ramp linearly with memory. If you are trying to build huge worlds running at hundreds of frames and streaming data at gigabytes per second out of a SSD you're going to need to put those assets somewhere. The problem isn't (just) that games are big, it's that the ability to move those big assets has grown a bit faster than the ability to make cheaper, faster storage for the same price.

Games aren't big because developers are lazy, they're big because physics and engineering are hard and not every piece of technology improves at the same rate. But hey, on the plus side, storage HAS gotten cheaper. By the end of its life the PS3 was shipping 500 GB. The PS5 and Xbox Series ship 32 times more ram but only 1.5 to 2x more storage because storage is where everybody is skimping to contain costs. That's not commensurate with the increase of visual fidelity or asset size, but at least you can add more for relatively little money, especially on PC.

EDIT: Sorry, this client didn't like the picture going in. Link to an example below from a random image hosting site. Follow it at your peril, I make no claims about its safety.
https://ibb.co/Ss7RfzW

No, it wasn't. They were VERY glad to suggest that password sharing was a feature, not a bug, while they were trying to drive cable TV out of business and establish a leadership position against other streaming services. They also allow you to watch on multiple screens, download files to watch offline on the go and, crucially, actively provide discounted accounts to watch on multiple locations even after reneging on the promises they made during the user acquisition stage. Nothing they do is consistent with the service being tied to households instead of accounts except trying to charge you extra for it. Hey, I know that tech start ups will eventually try to pee on me, but don't come here to tell me it's raining.

So I say again, Netflix doesn't get to arbitrarily limit tech and back out of features just because they engaged in a suicidal business model in the pursuit of endless growth, and they don't get to redefine my social relationships for me. I am the client here, and I get to say when their offer has enshittified enough that I no longer want it.

For now, I don't want their overpriced premium tier anymore. It's back to UHD BR for me if I want something to look shiny. And the moment they try to enforce their dumb password sharing rule I'm out entirely. I feel zero remorse or sense that I'm taking advantage of them for this. If anything, they are the ones "breaking things", so they have the responsibility to fix them.

Hey, I wasn't the one who switched the system to a username and passwod authorization. My "household" isn't defined by the physical location anymore than their account system is. Friends and family groups don't work however Netflix wants them to work for monetization purposes. There are blood relations who don't sleep under the same roof but hang out daily. There are friend groups that share a roof. There are couples who spend weeks at a time apart but still live together.

It's not my fault that Netflix borked the business model and then tried to walk it back once it lured everybody else to a profit dark hole. I'm not gonna change how my social relationships work for the sake of them having a neat revenue stream with no gray areas.

So no, PW sharing is fine, period, that's what concurrent screen limits are for. What constitutes a "household" is not for Netflix to define, and I have a social group where some expenses just float around in limbo without a clear attribution or distinction between payers and users. Welcome to existing in real life and having zero time to worry about enshittified late captialist terminally online bullshit, honestly.

The stuff my dad made. My mom worked past our lunchtime, my dad did not.

https://media.tenor.com/WUwtwTKCvicAAAAC/reexamine-personal-biases.gif

Oh, that's a whole other subject. "Old games were so polished and fully finished". Meanwhile, half of the planet was either playing games squished down, in slow motion or both. And most of them didn't even know.

It's not as simple as that, either. May people think all games ran 15% slower. Many games did have some retiming somewhere, but it was definitely not great and people didn't complain because with no internet, they often didn't realize what was going on.

This is one of those things where I'm not sure what people mean when they say it.

There are bugs that affect performance, and yeah, we're generally more likely to see bugs fro several reasons now. But there's also games just being heavy. We're not in a cycle where the top of the line hardware just maxes out many games, because... well, we're doing real time path-tracing, we have monitors that go up to 400 Hz and resolutions up to 4K. The times of "set it to Ultra and forget about it" with a 1080 are gone and not coming back for a really long time. Plus everything has to scale wider now, because on the other end we have actual handhelds now, which is nuts.

So yeah, I'm not sure which one people are complaining about these days. I'll say that if you can play a game in a handheld PC and then crank it up to look like an offline rendered path traced movie that's way more thought to scalability than older games ever had, but maybe that's a slightly different conversation.

No, I'm... correcting myself. That's how correcting a statement works, you make a new statement. Read my previous comment carefully.

You are half right. I am misremembering 63min being the original standard of the red book audio CD, that was 650 already, although apparently 63 min CDs were used for audio mastering at some point? Info about that is sparse. As a side note, man, modern search engines suuuck.

Anyway, 63min/550MB was the low capacity standard of the CD-R instead.

People are aware of them, but man, it took me a while to find a contemporary technical reference to it being available. I ended up having to pull it from the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070110232445/http://www.mscience.com/faq55.html

And also this, from a eBay auction selling a box and labelling them "incredibly rare", which apparently is accurate. I came just shy of digging through my pile of old CDs to see if I have any left. I may still do that next time I have them on hand.

It did exist, I promise. But again, I just default to 500 because it was such common shorthand to think about it in terms of needing two discs to store a gig. And to this day I still have 650 CDs laying around, even when 700MB ones were available they were both around at once.

I think some of the mismatch may also be that you're thinking about it in terms of storage only (i.e. CD-Rs) because of your age and I'm probably a bit older and was mostly talking about them as read-only media. It was years between the first CDs in the late 80s and writers being widespread at all, assuming whatever game or application that came in a single CD was going to take 500 meg-ish to duplicate or install was, again, pretty useful.

In any case, this is obsolete trivia. The point is we went from games being tens of megs to hundreds of megs overnight, and we were all extremely pleased about it.

I have the opposite problem, where I have to remind myself that a lot of people making these memes just don't have a frame of reference for any of this. I'm used to having been there for the vast majority of home computing, it's so hard for me to parse having been born with computers just mostly working the way they do now.

Oh, and while I'm at it, it also looked completely different:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo2_ksqxbiQ

Changing GPUs these days mostly just changes your framerate. That wasn't always the case.

Hah. Yeah, I meant 20 megs. My muscle memory just doesn't want to type a number that low, it seems.

The hard drive I had to wipe from the OS, as I mentioned above was a whole 20 gig. 386-ish era. It seemed so huge when I got it (and so expensive) and by the time that PC was done it was... well, a "wipe to OS to fit stuff in" drive.

But that's not necessarily the point, the more relevant thing is how big things are relative to storage and how cheap it is to upgrade storage. It's true that storage sizes and prices plateaued for a while, so a bunch of people are still running on 1-2 TB while the games got into the hundreds of GB. But still, storage had gotten so proportionately cheap before then, and very fast storage is so overkill now. A 1TB Gen 3 NVMe is 75 bucks, and most games will run fine on it, Sony propaganda notwithstanding.