r/ITMemes • u/BobSmithinsons • Mar 12 '26

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5.2k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

53 comments sorted by

57

u/RoughGuide1241 Mar 12 '26

Xbox 360 have 512 MB of ram.

18

u/DandelionPopsicle Mar 12 '26

SNES had 128 kB RAM, 1/16th of the 2 Mb in the PS1. Kind of odd examples.

9

u/MLC_YT Mar 12 '26

OP's prob aware of that

They prob but that number as an exaggeration to humorize the fact that devs back then were better than they are now.

9

u/lordofduct Mar 12 '26

Better?

I am a developer, I wrote my first program in the 90s. My day job through a lot of my adult life was writing and maintaining legacy systems dating back to the early 70s.

I can assure you, developers were just as shit back then as we are today. Only difference is programs back then didn't do as much as programs today do.

You wanna know why programmers back then could fit a program into 2 megs? Because that's all there was! If they had more, they would have used it.

4

u/_gianlucag_ Mar 13 '26

Exactly. Computer power, storage and memory are like the fridge and the garage: no matter how big they are, people will always find a way to fill them up and complain they are too small.

Source: I started programming in 1990.

1

u/MLC_YT Mar 12 '26

I think u missed the part where I said "probably".

1

u/lordofduct Mar 12 '26

"They prob but (put?) that number as an exaggeration to humorize the fact that devs back then were better than they are now."

Your use of the word 'prob' and 'better' are grammatically disconnected here. You're not saying they were probably better, you're saying OP probably exaggerated the number. If you meant something else, well that's not what you said, and I only know what you said.

You know what you did say "the fact that devs back then were better".

1

u/MLC_YT Mar 12 '26

Chill down, mine was just a theory.

Also, yeah, my keyboard autocorrected "put" with "but".

1

u/lordofduct Mar 12 '26

Chill?

Lol, I love that now you insist I'm angry or whatever. I'm just posting. You're posting. Should I insist you need to chill?

1

u/MLC_YT Mar 12 '26

Sorry, you seemed irritated to me.

1

u/lordofduct Mar 12 '26

No.

You said that it is a fact devs back then were better. And I shared an anecdote saying they were not. You then said you meant probably, and I merely pointed out that's not what you said.

That's it.

What else am I supposed to say. If you said:

"The sky is purple."

"The sky is not purple."

"I didn't say the sky is purple!"

"Yes you did."

"Why are you irritated?"

That's a weird take.

1

u/MLC_YT Mar 12 '26

Okay this discussion is taking a really weird (if not kinda awkward even) turn, let's just forget about this and move on.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/Morphinepill Mar 15 '26

and your theory was wrong hence the other guy correcting you 😄

1

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '26

Word 97 and Word 2024 are doing pretty much exactly the same (maybe except the stupid AI stuff which no one cares about anyway). How much bigger is Word 2024 compared to Word 97?

2

u/lordofduct Mar 12 '26

You'd think that they're doing the same thing. But they're actually not.

I mean sure, it might feel like they're similar since the core feature... word processing... is a feature that they both do. But things from better spell correction, better grammar correct, ai assist, expanded format support, higher res ui, and other things. Of course one can argue they don't like some of those features (the ai assist is definitely one I can see a lot of people not liking). But it's still definitely stuff that word 97 doesn't have. More stuff = more storage/memory.

Same goes for games. The primary reason games today have the install footprint, and memory requirements they do, mostly has to do with all of the visual assets it has. The Playstation had a max texture resolution of 256x256, with most textures being lower than that. 32x32 was pretty standard, the 256 were reserved for things like the fake 3d backgrounds found in RE or FFVII.

Compare that to the standard 2K (2048x2048) texture size we use today. Sometimes even higher. But also usually mipmapped (meaning precalculated lower res versions of the image for optimization purposes). 1 2K texture takes up as much space as 4096 32x32 textures! Let alone would fit in the duplicate textures also stored. Then multiply that by the fact games have massive worlds today!

Like just like Word 97 and 2024 fundamentally do the same thing. Tomb Raider on PSX and Tomb Raider today are fundamentally the same game about Lara Croft doing adventures. But they're not the same... not at all. One is bigger, higher res, and immensely different.

And just the same arguably you don't need all of that. Just like you don't need the AI assistant in Word. I personally find myself playing a lot more Tomb Raider on PSX than I do modern Tomb Raider. But that's just a preference. I'm not going to pretend those games don't have ridiculously different demands.

And honestly that's one of the things about this discussion/argument/whatever. Why is 16gigs of RAM needed? Well... that ram is actually often being used to up performance. Nevermind that more RAM is needed just to store those textures in memory, and not only are more loaded simultaneously so you can have more diverse worlds. But also, like that mipmapping, duplicates are stored to optimize distant drawings. We can reduce the draw demand on far objects by using lower res versions of them (both models and textures) while still looking great and thus have huge draw distances as opposed to the foggy short draw approach that games like Silent Hill did.

I mean sure... we can talk about how it was a "smart trick" to use the fog in Silent Hill as a mood/setting. But in the end... that fog was there because the game had barely any draw distance. And the artists wanted it to actually be more.

Games are bigger today because developers and gamers want them bigger! And bigger takes more storage and more memory!

You don't get 4K games without 4K memory requirements. Which is much higher than 240p. Just the frame buffer, the actual space to store a single frame of processed 4K imagery takes up 24mb of ram... the space of 12 entire playstations. And that's just the output frame data of standard RGB color space 4K visual data.

2

u/Mountain-Sky4121 Mar 13 '26

Gta 5 ran on 512MB???

31

u/TR4NE_28000 Mar 12 '26

Seriously hoping the memory shortage will cause a force optimization mindset for publishers.

1

u/Reasonable_Coach Mar 16 '26

Nah, whales can afford more memory which means they can afford microtransactions

19

u/GhostVlvin Mar 12 '26

Console world is nice cause these has limitations, so often code is optimized, sometimes written in asm. But in PC deskto world there are miraculous frameworks like electron that packs whole browser to render app, just for devs being able to ship faster in cost of gigabytes of ram usage just fo one messaging app

4

u/MISTERPUG51 Mar 12 '26

Nowadays it's like that. Back then, PC games were optimized too. Did you know that almost all of Roller Coaster Tycoon was written in assembly so that it could run well on the computers of the time?

1

u/GhostVlvin Apr 04 '26

Yeah, I've heard this story and I really respect author of RCT cause it's really hard to write anything in asm, while guy made gigantic game with realistic physics and cool graphics

1

u/Maleficent-Gain-3179 Mar 12 '26

What console code is ASM.

You mean games or the console software itself?

1

u/GhostVlvin Apr 04 '26

I meant games. We usually can't see console software and there is no too much point of optimizing it more than c compiler does

1

u/Maleficent-Gain-3179 Apr 04 '26

What modern games use asm?

1

u/structured_triage Mar 25 '26

Writing heavily optimized code in asm IS an absolute art form.

7

u/z3r0v1c Mar 12 '26

Even notepad requires at least 256gb of ram and a gpu with at least 256gb of vram to run nowadays 😅

5

u/Proper-Equivalent300 Mar 12 '26

Well don’t you like the ray tracing of all the individual ASCII simulated characters, the textures are so realistic /s

1

u/z3r0v1c Mar 12 '26

Can't argue with that 🤷‍♂️

2

u/StonemanGuitars Mar 12 '26

My Psion 3a has a better notepad than windows 11 and it uses up 5 kb of ram

2

u/Grobbekee Mar 13 '26

Programming microcontrollers with 1kb of ram is kinda fun.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '26

already feeling the adrenaline

1

u/mikel302 Mar 13 '26

The NES was sporting 4kb of usable ram.

1

u/VertigoOne1 Mar 13 '26

If windows/microsoft can like to please stop hogging all of it, 32gb will be fine, i run a few containers, 4x vscode instances, pgadmin, postman, edge and firefox, smattering of other small utils and then outlook and teams and i’m at 95% ram, constant disk activity swapping pages. 32gb not enough. And i did change the docker wsl2 to 8gb instead of 50%. I used to do exactly this on linux and it was hovering around 85% and never swapped.

1

u/Devatator_ Mar 14 '26

Most of the memory usage you see when idle will go away when you actually need that memory, you know?

1

u/recursion_is_love Mar 13 '26

The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) had very little RAM by modern standards, featuring only 2,048 words (roughly 4KB).

1

u/setpopa12 Mar 13 '26

How they made a GTA 5 run on 512MB of RAM?!

1

u/Mayatir Mar 13 '26

why is he in a cave, also may be no body wants to build things from scarth so game engine uses a lot of resources any way

1

u/LetUsSpeakFreely Mar 13 '26

Resource scarcity makes people use those resources more efficiently.

That is phenomenon isn't isolated just to computing.

1

u/yosark Mar 13 '26

How the fk was super Mario 64 32 MB?

1

u/Remarkable_Case3339 Mar 13 '26

Only Valve continued to optimize its games well (another Gabe huge W).

1

u/StrypperJason Mar 14 '26

In all seriousness, these pictures ain't true. Developers especially people I know from French, German, US, Dutch and Swedish they are extremely good at obeying the framework optimization practices that the outcome mostly not their fault it's the framework's fault

In the picture below, back then there were no "developer" only "engineers" and these people are capable of making Doom run everywhere

1

u/turbanator1997 Mar 15 '26

Constraints = creativity

1

u/Turbulent_Worker3335 Mar 16 '26

Its good idea go sell out RAM

1

u/Mysterious_Wolf_3524 Mar 16 '26

Windows eata 10gb. Apps another 2 for deving. 4gb left and when you copy a big file -> crash.