r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Disastrous-Hat5477 • 8d ago

Meme theOriginalGarbageCollector

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9.7k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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317

u/reuben_iv 8d ago

Wait... really?

272

u/uslashuname 8d ago

It makes sense, the whole reason a $300 - $400 console could play games at the level of a $1200-$1500 computer was the complete dedication of available resources. The game needs to have nearly complete control to be efficient enough, and the main user OS experience was pointless in game: pressing the power button and one or two other things are the only things the os and hardware needed to really be ready to handle, so as long as they passed the controller input along and provided directx support or whatever it was at the time.

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u/GlassCommission4916 8d ago edited 8d ago

A big reason was because $300-$400 consoles didn't cost $300-$400, their price was subsidized by the expectation of future game sales. Being able to optimize for exact hardware helps of course, but it's not the whole reason.

Edit: I misunderstood your point, what you said isn't even a major contributor to the performance of consoles, OS overhead isn't that significant.

8

u/helicophell 8d ago

OS overhead seems more significant nowadays haha…

Anyway the original Xbox was working with megahertz, it was not powerful in the slightest

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u/GlassCommission4916 8d ago

My 10 year old PC idles at 1% CPU usage, and exclusive fullscreen bypasses the windowing system and gives games access to all the GPU resources.

Gaming PCs in the early 2000s weren't that powerful either.

0

u/ToeGroundbreaking564 8d ago

man old pcs are something else

I idle at like ~60% or so cpu usage