@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place
Post #1489177
2026-03-30 22:18 UTC
it's kind of amazing how at every single step of the process, they went "ehhh, we'll just throw more hardware at the problem".
[Ed: to be fair, this was their absolute top-of-the-line option at the time, but still, whoa.]
Replies (2)
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@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-03-30 22:30
In Appendix 2: "Because the 6400 Mbyte/sec framebuffer bandwidth [in 1992!!!!!] is so much larger than the bandwidth required to refresh a monitor (roughly 800 Mbyte/sec at 1280x1024x76Hz) we implement the framebuffer with dynamic RAM rather than video RAM, accepting the 12 percent fill rate degradation in favor of the lower cost of commodity memory." how very cost-conscious of you!
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@FunkyBob@chaos.social 2026-03-30 22:19
@rygorous Reminds me of a story I read about the DEC Alpha engineers, who then turned to making the StrongARM. Essentially "every choice for performance", then "the opposite of everything we just did".