nesdev.org

How that video by the 8bit guy explained they work is my guess

tokumaru wrote:The general population also appears to think that only newer/more powerful systems are capable of running games at 60fps, while every (NTSC) system ever built outputs video at that rate, and anything with hardware scrolling and hardware sprites can animate objects and the camera that fast. It's true that every generation has its share of laggy games, but most games are supposed to play smoothly.

This, also, many people will believe that the older a system is, the biggest its pixels are. Whathever that means. They don't understand low resolution is not the only limit of older system and there's all the things with colours, palettes, amount of sprites, etc... going on.

Except smaller pixels is one of the most easily quantifiable trends from one console generation to the next.

Second-generation (early 8-bit) consoles tended to have a 3.58 MHz dot clock: one pixel per period of the color subcarrier. Some of them, such as the Atari 2600 and Odyssey2, also used pairs of identical scanlines. Not all 2600 games had this, but a lot of especially earlier games had a so-called "2-line kernel". This produces a 160x96-pixel plane. The unofficial 16-color graphics mode of the CGA also used scanline doubling. Later 8-bit consoles (ColecoVision, Master System, NES, Super NES) have a 5.37 MHz horizontal (narrower pixels) and no scanline doubling. The Genesis and PlayStation further increased the pixel clock by 20% to 6.71 MHz. The sixth gen (PS2, GameCube, Xbox) further doubled the pixel clock to 13.5 MHz and added interlace as a standard feature, halving pixel size. From there, high-definition frame buffer size increased from one console to the next: 576p to 720p on PS3/360, 900p to 1080p on PS4 and Xbox One, and larger for PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.

Oziphantom wrote:How that video by the 8bit guy explained they work is my guess

Is the way he explained it wrong? I’m not super familiar with C64 architecture, but his explanation for nes graphics at the end seemed short sweet and to the point.

No he is correct. I wasn't having a stab at his explanation, just pointing out that most people interested have probably watched his video.

Bregalad wrote:

dougeff wrote:The general population thinks Sonic runs fast because of "blast processing".

This. Also I doubt many people have any idea what a PPU is. If anything, they just have an idea what a CPU is and think it's clock rate is a good measure for how fast games will be (*) or how "powerful" the console is (whathever that means).

It seems most people here really overestimate how educated the "general population" is.

(*) PS: How fast in terms of actual scrolling speed, not processing power.

When I see people talking on other forums, they seem to know what a PPU/VDP is, but the same people also think that for some reason the CPU has to do the dirty work.