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Something thats always intrigued me, as a kid who loved video games growing up in the '80s, was the technical superiority usually enjoyed by arcade games over their console counterparts, both in terms of graphics/animation and framerates, but particularly framerates-- even when looking at the pre-polygonal video game generation. Being that DF is all about technical achievement and frame rates in contemporary video games, I've decided this forum would be a great place to post a topic on this. The following are my observations and thoughts regarding this subject. Ancient History When the venerable Atari 2600 (the first console to really matter) hit the scene in 1977, it could more or less do a perfect game of Pong, but thats not saying much. Video game CPU/video hardware at that time was not at all standardized and most early arcade games were either in black and white or some monochrome color. While its difficult to compare speed and power of the of the 2600 to these early arcade systems, at least it could render color graphics, so with that I guess it could be considered at least as "on par" with many arcade hardware used back in '77. Space Invaders was released a year later, but was still monochrome. Later arcade games such as Pac Man and Donkey Kong in 1980-81 had already surpassed the capabilities of the 2600, and we had to settle for inferior (but still fun) ports of those games. This is understandable , as these games were released 3-4 years after the 2600 console. The performance gap, however, only grew-- and at the time of the great video game crash of '83-'84 the 2600s graphics really paled in comparison to what was available in the arcades We would have to wait another couple years for the chance to finally play some of these great arcade games in all their glory.... Enter the NES. At the time of its release in 1984-85, the NES was advanced enough to accurately replicate earlier arcade games such as Pac man, Galaga, and Donkey Kong and was even able to pretty faithfully replicate a few arcade games released around the same time as the NES such as 10 Yard Fight, 1942, etc. While the NES was capable of matching graphics and sound of these games, speed was sometimes another issue. At only 1.79MHz, the NES CPU was 2-3 times slower than the Z80 CPU used in many of its contemporary arcade counterparts, so even in Arcade to NES ports that looked more or less pixel perfect, framerate slowdown occured when a scene contained a large number of moving objects or sprites. In addition to framerate slowdown, the NES was also subject to "sprite flicker", because its video hardware was only capable of a limited amount of sprites per scanline. When too many moving objects (sprites) ended up on the same horizontal lines on the screen, parts of them would disappear momentarily or flicker. The NES was plagued by both flicker and slowdown throughout its reign as king of the 1980s videogame console. Its interesting to note that slowdown and flicker were almost non-existant arcade systems of the same time period. Enter the 16Bit systems. Back in the late '80s and early '90s, the dawn of the "16-Bit" generation of consoles gave new hope to gamers that they would FINALLY be able to play games at home with "arcade quality" graphics and sounds. The Sega Genesis and NEC Turbografx-16 hit the scene in 1989 and wowed gamers with their colorful graphics, large and numerous sprites, and enhanced sound systems, followed by Nintendos own Super NES in 1991. Despite their more advanced processing power though, even moreso than the NES, all three systems by and large lacked the capabilities of their arcade contemporaries by an even larger margin than the NES did when it was released, in my opinion. While GOOD home translations of games such as Altered Beast, Ghouls N Ghosts, R-Type, and Street Fighter 2 were released on the Genesis, TG-16, and SNES respectively, ALL of these titles were inferior graphically in some ways to the arcade versions, be it lack of colors, animations, or sprite size/number. Also, all of these systems still suffered with some slowdown and flicker in certain titles, while once again the arcades seemed immune from these problems. Even on titles that were originally created on their respective consoles, these problems occured every now and then. History Enter the 32 and 64 Bit systems. The Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation entered the market as a new trend in video gaming began to emerge-- real time generated, 3D polygonal graphics. 2D hand drawn, sprite based games had pretty much reached their peaks in the arcades during this time, with brilliantly animated, screen filling games like Dark Stalkers, X-Men: Children of the Atom, Killer Instinct and tons of other fighting and shooting games dominating the arcade scene. The Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation, with their highly upgraded processing power, were able to reproduce these games and all other 2D games that came before them more or less without a problem, despite a few issues due to RAM limitations. And while they were finally were more or less on equal ground to the arcades for 2D, they were WAY behind the best of what the arcades had to offer in terms of 3D. Segas Saturn failed to accurately reproduce even older, flat shaded polygonal Model 1 games such as Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, and came nowhere near what Sega was doing with its Model 2 arcade games like Daytona and VF2, at least at its release. Programmers were later better able to utilize the Saturns power to do closer translations of Model 2 games, but they were still far from exact. The Playstation on the other hand, did have perfect translations of Tekken and Tekken 2, which were impressive-- but even those titles lacked the punch of Segas Model 2 games. The N64, while technically more powerful than the Saturn, PS, or even Segas Model 2 arcade, seemingly used up all its additional processing power on advancing the quality of 3d graphics rather than the speed. Its filtering, antialiasing, and z-buffer functions ate up most of the machines fill rate and basically rendered it unable to reproduce games like Daytona USA. Nintendo did not allow its developers to use the N64s graphics mode that forsook these techniques in favor of incredible speed and would have allowed perfect translations of games like Tekken 3, etc (which is extremely ironic). Post-Modern History Starting with the release of the Dreamcast in 1999, for the first time in history, consoles finally equaled or surpassed the best the arcades had to offer for the first time. Segas Dreamcast was roughly as powerful as their mighty Model 3 arcade board (more powerful in some areas, less in others), and could basically faithfully reproduce ANY arcade game available at the time of its release. This was a very big deal back in the day, and gamers were floored by the quality of graphics it could bring with games like Soul Calibur and Sonic Adventure. The Dreamcast was so close in power and so inexpensive in comparison to the Model 3 arcade hardware that it became the successor to the Model 3 to power Segas newest arcade games under the NAOMI name, and was even licensed to third parties such as Capcom to use to creat their own arcade games. Later consoles in this generation (PS2, GC, Xbox) only increased the gap in performance consoles now held over arcades. Current Generation Of the newest consoles, the Xbox 360 and the PS3 far outpaced arcade hardware at the time of their release, and even the underpowered-in-comparison Wii is still more powerful than most arcade hardware in use today, save for the new PC CPU/GPU based ones. Not much more to say here, other than its interesting to see the graphical gap that once existed between consoles and arcade come completely full circle..... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Enough history that everyone is already aware of, my question is- why do even console exclusive games of todays generation usually struggle to hold a consistent framerate?? If Sega could do it with their old System 16 and 32 boards, their Model 1, 2, and 3 arcade boards, and Capcom did the same with its CPS-1, 2, and 3 hardware, why have developers on consoles by and large been unable to keep the same level of frame rate consistency that arcades usually had? I mean, I've seen slowdown in arcade games from time to time, but its usually extremely rare-- even in older games. Final Fight 1 back in the day slowed down just ever so briefly in the most hectic scenes, so why do we have to endure inconsistent framerates in Xbox 360 or PS3 games? Its not like its only because they're 3d games-- has anyone ever seen Virtua Racing or Daytona USA drop even a frame in the arcades? It just perplexes me. Is there some other, underlying reason for it? Was staying within the boundaries required to maintain a consistent framerate a requirement for arcade programmers by their management or something? What are the chances that just about EVERY arcade development house had this same directive? I'd say its pretty slim. Who knows, but this has always interested me.. |
Consoles vs. Arcades Regarding Steady Frame Rates....
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Josh128 13 posts
Seen 6 months ago
Registered 12 years ago -
Veracity 352 posts
Seen 8 years ago
Registered 15 years agoNitpick: wasn't the NAOMI marginally more capable than the Dreamcast? I might be misremembering and certainly don't recall how, even if I'm not.
Shiny graphics sell games. It's still (and arguably always will be) more profitable to keep adding shinies until the hardware starts to creak than to spend more money on better optimization to produce something that never drops a frame but gives less attention-grabbing still shots. Maybe the odd exception if you're confident you're selling something for which shouting about 60fps will matter to enough of your target audience to be helpful. Seems a bit dismissive for such a wall of text, but I don't really think there's much more to it. Throw in the fact people will buy and adore Shadow of the Colossus and you're there.
Arcade hardware has often been riddled with slowdown, too. Can you clarify where you're getting the claim it's always consistent, if that is what you're saying? -
Cappy 14,393 posts
Seen 29 minutes ago
Registered 16 years agoVeracity wrote:
Nitpick: wasn't the NAOMI marginally more capable than the Dreamcast? I might be misremembering and certainly don't recall how, even if I'm not.
Yes, in basic terms Naomi is Dreamcast X2. Similar sort of situation to the systems based on the PS1 hardware ZN1 and ZN2 had various additions such as extra RAM. -
Josh128 13 posts
Seen 6 months ago
Registered 12 years ago@Veracity -- the NAOMI differed from the Dreamcast in that it had more RAM and loaded entire games into RAM banks upon bootup, but had identical CPU and graphics hardware. I think it ( or maybe it was NAOMI 2) was "stackable" in that 2 boards could be connected together for an SLI-like or dual GPU performance if needed.
As for arcade framerate consistency, Im basing it largely on Segas System 16, 32, Model 1,2,3 systems games, Capcoms CPS 1,2,3 games, Konami games like X:Men and TMNT, and Namcos games. Games on these systems almost never suffered from slowdown. The only arcade system I can remember that had more than a few games w/ some fair slowdown was Neo Geo, but even that was not bad at all.
Can you elaborate on what games you remember that were "riddled with slowdown" ?
Sorry for the wall of text, I was really bored at the office that day. ;0) -
Obiwanshinobi 870 posts
Seen 5 years ago
Registered 13 years agoFirst they release wishful screenshots, then try to make the actual game resemble those screenshots closely enough to prevent people from bitching. The performance suffers in the process.
To be fair, though, it's not like arcade games always had more consistent/steady framerate. It was usually much higher than the standard 30 fps of today, therefore framerate drops weren't that apparent. When framerate falls from the epic 30 fps down to the cinematic 24 fps in blaze of motion blur glory, it's much more disgusting than 60-to-48 fps drop.
Whereas in Street Fighter even minuscular framerate drop would be game-breaking (in racers it's not welcome either), in some other genres, like shoot 'em ups, it can be helpful. Some developers (most notably Cave) deliberately push the hardware with myriads of sprites to the point of slowing down. The PS2 port of Ibara was criticised not only for the uglyfied graphics, but also for the LACK of slowdown (compared to the arcade original).
Many bullet hell shmups slown down on a regular basis, which works a bit like bullet time in Max Payne. Check out Progear no Arashi (the Japanese version, as they hacked out the voices from the US one) on MAME. It's a Cave shooter running on CPS-2, and it slows down a lot (by pressing F11 you can tell whether the emulation runs at 100% speed or not; slowdown will be there even at 100%).
I wholeheartedly recommend this MAME hack, as the input lag in certain CPS games (including Progear) is pretty rampant without it. -
Josh128 13 posts
Seen 6 months ago
Registered 12 years agoObiwanshinobi wrote:
First they release wishful screenshots, then try to make the actual game resemble those screenshots closely enough to prevent people from bitching. The performance suffers in the process.
To be fair, though, it's not like arcade games always had more consistent/steady framerate. It was usually much higher than the standard 30 fps of today, therefore framerate drops weren't that apparent. When framerate falls from the epic 30 fps down to the cinematic 24 fps in blaze of motion blur glory, it's much more disgusting than 60-to-48 fps drop.
Whereas in Street Fighter even minuscular framerate drop would be game-breaking (in racers it's not welcome either), in some other genres, like shoot 'em ups, it can be helpful. Some developers (most notably Cave) deliberately push the hardware with myriads of sprites to the point of slowing down. The PS2 port of Ibara was criticised not only for the uglyfied graphics, but also for the LACK of slowdown (compared to the arcade original).
Many bullet hell shmups slown down on a regular basis, which works a bit like bullet time in Max Payne. Check out Progear no Arashi (the Japanese version, as they hacked out the voices from the US one) on MAME. It's a Cave shooter running on CPS-2, and it slows down a lot (by pressing F11 you can tell whether the emulation runs at 100% speed or not; slowdown will be there even at 100%).
I wholeheartedly recommend this MAME hack, as the input lag in certain CPS games (including Progear) is pretty rampant without it.
I'll have to check out that Progear game (never heard of it), but CPS-2 games I'm familiar with like Giga Wing threw a huge amount of sprites on the screen with only a few hints of slowdown. I wonder if the game youre speaking of has intentional slowdown ala SF2 or Samurai Shodown when you throw some special attacks or defeat someone. Maybe not, but I'll check it out, sounds curious. Of course slowdown is POSSIBLE if ANY platform is pushed too hard. Point is, the developers back in the day like Capcom and Sega must have been pretty keen on the limitations of their systems and avoided slowdown pretty brilliantly, in my opinion. Been playing a bunch of Model 2 games on the M2 emulator as of late, and framerates on those games are FLAWLESS. I havent seen a hitch in any one of them yet. -
Veracity 352 posts
Seen 8 years ago
Registered 15 years agoJosh128 wrote:
Yep, Blazing Star on Neo Geo was certainly one. It went sluggish if you got a lot of...things to come out of other things...at once. As Obiwanshinobi said, almost every Cave shooter has significant slowdown (possibly not Dangun Feveron, not sure). In them, though, it does seem to be a semi-feature, somewhere between stop-start awfulness and the SF2 effect you mention (see also any Treasure game where something explodes). G-Darius (ZN1, I think) had some. If I want to justify the "riddled", I think I'd go with Hellfire - it's ancient, but I'm sure I remember that really chugging in busy spots if you were using a powered-up 4-way shot. If you want a CPS one, I think Giga Wing does it a bit.
Can you elaborate on what games you remember that were "riddled with slowdown" ?
I would agree with the generalization that arcade games prioritize performance more. Isn't that mostly just that they have to be instantly accessible and are usually twitchy, though? -
Ryze 3,767 posts
Seen 1 hour ago
Registered 15 years ago*bump*
Daytona USA would slow down when CPU cars crashed ahead of you.
It's still marvellous. -
Dirtbox 92,595 posts
Seen 18 hours ago
Registered 19 years ago -
photoboy wrote:
It doesn't sound like a universal solution, though. (Unlike, say, hardware antialiasing which works well even with the earliest 3D accelerated PC games). Rather the game design must be compromised for the sake of making a good use of it. Besides, you sure we won't get 15 fps looking like 30 fps instead? Nintendo 128, anyone?
Hopefully LucasArts motion interpolation technique will be implemented in hardware on the next generation of consoles so that even very complex scenes will be able to maintain an illusion of 60fps...
I believe that coding teams are bigger these days and high end development is more expensive, but some old arcade systems used to be rather complex for their time. For example, Galaxy Force II had three CPUs, no less, but blimey, what a game it is. The Saturn port's performance was nowhere near the original (reportedly the PS2 port fares way better).
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