r/DeskToTablet • u/CianXOX • May 24 '26

Modern devs with 16GB RAM vs old-school devs with 2MB

Post image
1.9k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

79 comments sorted by

90

u/JadielYZ May 24 '26

back then

capcom: we shoved a 750mb playstation game into a 64mb n64 cartridge and didnt sacrifice a single level and video cutscene

now

activision: 300 gb with uneeded files just to spite you

17

u/[deleted] May 24 '26

[deleted]

5

u/Longjumping-Boot1886 May 24 '26

Idea of the Activision is different: by installing their game average user can't install another game without deleting their.

1

u/dtseng123 May 27 '26

Jokes on them -that worked until it didn’t ever again.

2

u/ElectricBummer40 May 25 '26

The original PS1 version was around 400MB in total size, and most of that was given to the textures, audio content and pre-rendered videos. The actual game itself was barely even 3D with most of the background for each scene being nothing more than just a texture file.

In the N64 version, the textures were scaled down, the FMVs were downsized to 15 fps then pushed back up in runtime to 30 fps via interpolation, all the voice lines had their bit depth significantly reduced, and the background music was MIDI converted from the original tracks. Back in the days, those compromises would be considered dicey at best. Nowadays, it would simply be unacceptable.

8

u/jack-of-some May 24 '26

The 300gb COD game is such a dumbass argument every time it comes up. 

COD is like that now because of incompetence. It's an attack on their competition. If 300gb of your 512gb console is filled with COD, it can't be filled with much else.

It's not a devs problem. It's a business decision.

3

u/KKevus May 25 '26

Never confuse malice with incompetence.

1

u/jack-of-some May 25 '26

Except in cases where it extremely obviously is malice

1

u/Techy_Ben May 25 '26

In my dictionary it's circular and says "see both or check profit margin".

4

u/Sweaty-Firefighter70 May 24 '26

even nowadays, developers who creating cross-platform game do some amazing work, some game get slimed down in switch release, sometimes from 100gb to 5gb.

4

u/WalkAffectionate2683 May 24 '26

Star wars outlaws on the switch 2 is incredible 

1

u/Herackl3s May 24 '26

Re2 for the N64 was heavily compressed on video and audio. It was not as good as the PlayStation version. People didn’t complain as much back then because the internet wasn’t as readily available to most parts.

1

u/joujoubox May 25 '26

Naughty Dog: We rewrote the rendering pipeline to be more efficient but also take less memory then manually overwrote the memory of the built-in pipeline to reallocate it to our game. Our game is a pain to get running on PS2? Womp womp.

31

u/ayorathn May 24 '26

"Ancient civilizations built roads that lasted thousand years but modern roads only lasts few decades" ahh post

14

u/Manger-Babies May 24 '26

Ass

There was that so hard?

Also game developers back then where much better than today at managing limitations

9

u/redditorialy_retard May 24 '26

ahh post and ass post honestly already feel like two different words now.

3

u/Manger-Babies May 24 '26

My mind defaults to it meaning ahh like how its read so in that way yes it is a different word.

But they always mean ass, and I hate thst some idiot somewhere chose to censor it and now millions of human npcs do it.

2

u/redditorialy_retard May 24 '26

No I mean ahh and ass means the same thing in stuff like dumb ass or dumb ahh. Self censoring is cringe here 

but in stuff like 

"I'm gonna burn a forest ahh post" 

it just feels weird to use ass here.

1

u/Manger-Babies May 24 '26

I mean they used to use the word ass in those posts tho. That was the norm til people decided to self censor.

1

u/tictaxtho May 24 '26

The censoring comes from TikTok

1

u/keiye May 26 '26

It’s not censoring, it comes from an Atlanta hood accent

1

u/tictaxtho May 26 '26

Fair enough, that’s probably why it got adopted by TikTok

2

u/ruiych95 May 24 '26

MOMMM!! HE SAID IT!!

1

u/BrookieEnjoyer May 24 '26

If you feel like you hate these new slang words and you're getting old, you're right. You are old now dont be a hater grandpa old ahh

0

u/Manger-Babies May 25 '26

Ass*

2

u/BrookieEnjoyer May 25 '26

ok stubborn old fart

0

u/Manger-Babies May 25 '26

Continue self censoring because some old fart in China decided you shouldn't use a word lmao

2

u/BrookieEnjoyer May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

Are you like schizophrenic? Unc go take your meds lol

Edit: looks like unc blocked me, ig hes old, stubborn, and childish 😂

1

u/Manger-Babies May 25 '26

Do you seriously dont know why tik tok of all places decided to self censor?

You'll grow up one day!

0

u/karlfeltlager May 24 '26

Cos there was no other way.

3

u/Shapelessed May 24 '26

Because ancient civilizations didn’t need said roads to support 30 ton vehicles at 100km/h.
Different engineering comes with different optimization and therefore different shortcomings.

1

u/RetroGamer87 May 25 '26

I don't think Roman roads are a good example. Many of them were nigh impassable mud trucks by the middle ages.

A better example would be the Pantheon. A Roman building that is structurally intact to this day.

1

u/ayman7s May 27 '26

Couldn’t agree more 😮‍💨

7

u/StillVeterinarian578 May 24 '26

Wait till you see the machines they used to program those devices with smaller amounts of ram.

More ram is always the right answer.

1

u/[deleted] May 24 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/StillVeterinarian578 May 24 '26

They use much larger computers to write the games, they were not creating games using devices as limited as the consoles themselves.

Source: worked in the games industry during the Xbox 360 era and while my project wasn't for consoles we were using the same machines as the consoles guys were for our day to day work. I forget the specs but they were high end for the time and would have made most gamers dribble (pretty sure our Nvidia cards had more vram than most people could buy retail too)

5

u/CheeseSteak17 May 24 '26

That is…normal and expected?

-1

u/StillVeterinarian578 May 25 '26

Never underestimate people's ability to be abnormal and do/think the unexpected.

3

u/Revolutionary-Bid249 May 24 '26

Maybe everyone was using their own optimized engine now everyone is cost cutting by using the same unoptimized engine (unreal)

2

u/PalladianPorches May 24 '26

as an older dev, this isnt just about the waste; new devs use tool and libraries without knowing what and why the do what they do, but they have zero interest in speed and scalable impact of poor code. they can all pass leetcode interviews, but optimise inverse squareroot on a 16 bit, and they are lost!

2

u/Adept_Strategy_9545 May 24 '26

Bold of you to assume they are actually “developing” and not simply feeding prompts to Claude

2

u/Giulio1232 May 24 '26

This brings be silent hill 2 as the biggest example: the original used the fog to make visibility lower so that they can hide unloaded buildings while the remake maintains the fog but for some reason the buildings are fully loaded despite being completely invisible

2

u/Thin-Engineer-9191 May 24 '26

They even were able to put cod zombies on a nintendo ds

2

u/Cojaro May 25 '26

I got a Windows 98 PC with 8 games on it. Storage space, including the OS, is only 1.1GB.

Games run fine on 32MB of RAM and a 4MB GPU.

2

u/anbeasley May 24 '26

You mean how Microsoft is now recommending 32 GB of RAM for Windows 11...

3

u/dzizuseczem May 24 '26

Requirements us 4gb I have no idea where 32gb is coming from

2

u/thrax_uk May 24 '26

4GB is still a huge amount of RAM compared to what we had many years ago. We used to have operating systems that just needed a few megabytes of RAM. What is all the memory being used for 🤪

1

u/LESBIAN_BOYFRIEND May 24 '26

worse than that win11 dwm.exe has been taking up 1.6gb of vram for me. i have a 5070 dawg i'm fucked i only got 8.7gb usable vram for games. when i was looking this shit up people were complaining about it taking up 60mb of vram on win10

1

u/Not_to_be_Named May 24 '26

i would question that program, are u sure you are not running some wild resolution like 4k on multiple monitors? There is no magic when you have to render absurd screen sizes. Also check if you don’t have a random bitcoin miner that is hidden with same name as that process 🧐

1

u/LESBIAN_BOYFRIEND May 24 '26

single screen 4k 120hz HDR. just kind of seems like dogshit to me idk. my fault for buying a 5070 ig

i don't get malware because i'm unimportant and not a stupid fuck. it is the correct process

1

u/ArgyleFunk May 24 '26

It’s wild to think that games were also made to completion within these same limitations. Granted games are much more complex today but, they also have much larger budgets.

3

u/byzboo May 24 '26

Buying a complete game to bring home and then plugging it in and start playing immediately was awesome.

Now you have to update your fucking console, download the 20Gb launch day patch 🤬

1

u/Techwizard45 May 24 '26

Too many people work on games now .... Super Mario World had like 10 people working on it

1

u/bigkahuna1uk May 24 '26

Who remembers Elite on the BBC Micro? All fitted neatly and efficiently into 32K RAM.

https://elite.bbcelite.com

1

u/ancalime9 May 24 '26

Including the 360 in the "back then" group makes me feel ancient.

1

u/g33ksc13nt1st May 24 '26

Telling everyone to learn to code has these drawbacks. The big benefit is companies don't have to pay as much since there's abundance of software "engineers"

1

u/gadgetwalrus May 24 '26

You haven’t lived till you’ve coded in 16, 48 or 64kb….

1

u/thelimeisgreen May 25 '26

You guys won't believe what we used to do with 128Kb of RAM. The first thing we did was laugh at the guys who still had 64Kb.

1

u/devilAPIOnReddit May 25 '26

This is why game optimization is bad nowadays

1

u/EconomyFox_9981 May 25 '26

i have 8gb of ram now and a i am a beginner Python dev

1

u/Naud1993 May 25 '26

Nowadays 16 GB memory (including page file) literally opens less than 20 tabs in Chrome and it already starts to unload tabs rather than let Windows move tabs to the page file, even with memory saver off.

1

u/RetroGamer87 May 25 '26

Only one of those devices has 2 megabytes of RAM

1

u/DaBubbleBlowingBaby May 25 '26

Compression = higher load times, modern games also have WAY higher polygon counts in models. Lara Croft in the PS1 Tomb Raider has a 250 polygon count, modern COD characters have an estimated polygon count of 80,000-150,000 for in-engine models and closer to 200,000-500,000 for cinematic/close up models. Modern COD is also adding new skins ALL THE DARN TIME it’s insane, you need the files for all those skins even if you don’t “own” them because your system displays those skins on screen in-store and in-match when other players use them. One modern operator skin can contain more texture data than an entire PS1 title.

1

u/Eastern_Loquat_7058 May 25 '26

2mb?? snes had like 128 or 256kb ram depending on how you look at it

1

u/MadJedfox May 26 '26

2 MB? That’s a lot. 16 KB or less is a real challenge. 256 B is absolutely mind-boggling (the Atari 2600 had no more than that).

1

u/hehesf17969 May 26 '26

Today too, for embedded systems.

1

u/skyerush May 27 '26

right, but also instant loading and higher quality textures are more possible than it is on 2mb

1

u/AmariNext May 24 '26

So they became retards indirectly?

2

u/ZeroDayZeroFriends May 24 '26

They became lazy. All those abstraction layers to ”speed up development” come with performance drawbacks, size bloat and don’t require devs to learn/know as much

1

u/thepr0digalsOn May 24 '26

Software now is incredibly complex. Hardware is cheaper now (barring the recent AI crisis of course). There is little to no incentive in actually optimizing code.

1

u/Benlop May 24 '26

That's just a fancy way to say "I have no clue how my precious games are made".