people talking about innovative N64 games during the same time period you were playing Quake on the PC full lighting 3D 30fps 1024x768 resolution.
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@sun consoles were cheaper though. i don't think you could have a capable pc for the price of e.g. a n64.

@bonifartius I just mean that the games weren't pushing the envelope for 3d, they were pushing the envelope for underpowered hardware
@sun @bonifartius It gets more interesting with handhelds because there isn't the "pull 500W from the wall" cheat code
@birdulon @bonifartius I am merely suggesting that "cool guy pushes boundaries of hardware" is not the same as "PC game pushes boundaries of entire industry in absolute terms"
@sun @bonifartius Correct, the latter is stolen valor from hardware engineers.
@sun @bonifartius A successful guy that people lavish praise on and mistakenly attribute other people's work like the inverse square root trick to. Interesting name to bring up in the context of stolen valor since he doesn't seem to encourage it himself, people just want to consolidate teams into composite mythological figures.
@birdulon @bonifartius it really doesn't matter if it was him alone or a team for the argument I'm making
@sun @bonifartius And the argument I'm making is that hardware guys are always treated as second class and the glory goes to the first software figurehead to make a splash with the gear.
@sun @bonifartius Rockstars aside, it seems like a serious industry problem with trying to bring back fabrication et al from east asia. All the really capable guys who could do hardware could just as easily be making and maintaining websites for double or more pay, or doing other software work for potentially higher multiples. I don't even know where to begin to tackle such a problem short of going full command economy, nobody is going to decide to start offering 3-4x the current pay before the titanic hits the iceberg, and the lead times on this stuff are so very very long.

@sun @birdulon iirc arcade machines still were much more powerful than both pc and consoles. what's cool about pc games is that they were using pretty clever hacks on a machine not really made for games. e.g. quake is software rendering first, not using some special hardware.

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