Those old games could be so consistent because the software and hardware were both so incredibly simple compared to today.
Today, a PC game has to work on a large range of hardware that has come out over the past 5+ years. And there are GPU features that are only available on certain cards, like hardware ray tracing and things like DLSS and FSR for upscaling.
And the game engines are incredibly more complex today to handle modern expectations, with dynamic lighting and shadows, huge maps, etc.
It doesn’t matter what your standards are. Hard realtime just isn’t realistic or even possible any more, except maybe in a game that would be considered truly primitive by today’s standards.
I am sure I have memories of how hard it was to support a range of hardware when I had to write specifically for each piece. When I had to write separately for a Soundblaster card and an Adlib and a Disney SoundSource and a Roland and a Gravis.
And that was just the sound cards. Writing for different hardware became so much easier when OpenGl and DirectX came into being. Suddenly I just had to write to these APIs.
I think I'm disagreeing with you. Supporting multiple hardware configuration way back when was so much harder than doing it today.
Yeah, and Tandy graphics were different from EGA or VGA, just enough that you needed to write different display code for them. And you had to get the user to tell you which ports/IRQ numbers half of their hardware was configured at.
We have way better hardware abstractions in the OS today, which I would agree makes modern development easier overall.
Oh yes, that brings it all back. Having the user tell me the IRQ and also DMAs and... I'm sure there was more. Sometimes the user would end up having to open up the PC and reseat physical jumpers on hardware cards to have the cards use values that were both offered by the software and not clashing with anything else.
Today, a PC game has to work on a large range of hardware that has come out over the past 5+ years. And there are GPU features that are only available on certain cards, like hardware ray tracing and things like DLSS and FSR for upscaling.
And the game engines are incredibly more complex today to handle modern expectations, with dynamic lighting and shadows, huge maps, etc.
It doesn’t matter what your standards are. Hard realtime just isn’t realistic or even possible any more, except maybe in a game that would be considered truly primitive by today’s standards.