Modern consoles do not have "infinite" power for 2D graphics, but they are extraordinarily capable of handling 2D rendering tasks with ease due to their immense processing power compared to the demands of 2D graphics.
Why 2D Graphics Are Easier for Modern Consoles:
1. Efficient Rendering: Rendering 2D graphics, even with advanced effects like parallax scrolling, particle effects, and high-resolution textures, is far less demanding than rendering complex 3D models with physics, lighting, and shaders.
2. Optimized Hardware: Consoles like the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and even the Nintendo Switch are designed to handle highly demanding 3D games, so they can easily process 2D games at high resolutions (e.g., 4K) and smooth frame rates (e.g., 60fps or 120fps).
3. GPU Power: Modern GPUs can perform billions of calculations per second. Drawing sprites, tiles, and effects in 2D games doesn't come close to pushing their limits.
Are There Limits?
While consoles have vast resources for 2D, they aren't "infinite," and constraints still exist:
High Complexity Effects: If a 2D game adds heavy post-processing effects (e.g., dynamic lighting, shaders, or massive particle systems), it can still tax the system, especially at high resolutions.
CPU Usage: A poorly optimized game with heavy AI, physics, or systems running in the background can bottleneck the performance, even in 2D games.
Developer Optimization: No matter how powerful the console is, poor optimization in game design or programming can lead to performance issues.
Practical Reality
For all practical purposes, though, modern consoles can render even the most visually intense 2D games without breaking a sweat. Developers are generally more limited by artistic design choices or budget than by the hardware's ability to handle 2D graphics.
Yes I ask it to Gpt chatChatGPT?
You can tell by it unrolling words for maximum word count like a middle schoolers essay lol
Maybe. But I meant rather quality of 2d animation, than 10000 moving objects.Nothing is free. You are still limited by sheer CPU calculations. Put 10,000 moving interactive sprites on the screen and see most modern CPUs struggle. You could probably get Doon to run at 3 fps if you put enough on the screen.
Well, technically it's not quite like that, game looks 2D, but in fact it is 2.5D. It uses a huge number of 3D renders, converted into 2D graphics (including the characters and their animations). If you're interested, you can watch it here, they told how the game was made. Nowadays, quite a lot of 2D games are made this way, it’s easier than drawing animations frame by frame, and it significantly reduces development time.Now the question is what is the best looking 2d game, ori and the will of the wisps?
What do you mean by "way inefficient"? could you please tell us more. I can ensure you that today gpus are much more capable. Back then, ram memory was too expensive and too slow to implement a framebuffer for 60 fps. To overcome that, video game consoles invented tiles, sprites, and color palettes to generate a scan-line on the fly when requested by the monitor. But those have their own limitations: the tilemaps (background) and the sprites have to use the same tiles. a tile has a fixed size and you had a small amount of memory to store those... which is why the graphics of old 2d games are pattern based (same tiles being repeated again and again). Today gpu aren't using these anymore, they are bliting machines with enough memory to hold multiple framebuffers for very high resolutions. Today gpu are able to blit thousands of bitmaps at hundred of fps (You don't need to use polygons btw, both OpenGL and Vulkan have blit procedures but using polygons give you usefull 3d transformations).No, In fact in a lot of ways modern graphics is way inefficient at 2d games.
I miss the days where animations where drawn frame by frame (Symphony of the night, Street fighter 3rd strike etc.)Well, technically it's not quite like that, game looks 2D, but in fact it is 2.5D. It uses a huge number of 3D renders, converted into 2D graphics (including the characters and their animations). If you're interested, you can watch it here, they told how the game was made. Nowadays, quite a lot of 2D games are made this way, it’s easier than drawing animations frame by frame, and it significantly reduces development time.
Isn't impossible to create a program (or AI), that could generate those frames?I miss the days where animations where drawn frame by frame (Symphony of the night, Street fighter 3rd strike etc.)
Nowadays, it's rare for anyone to do this, it's too long and expensive. Usually, they use 3D to 2D conversion, or there's a more complicated method - creating skeletal animation, when the character is drawn in separate parts and animated using a skeleton like a puppet (Vanillaware - they really like this technique). Now there are very few studios, to the old school of 2D games, well, perhaps the most famous is again Vanillaware, they use 3D objects to create backgrounds and fill locations, but all the main art of the game plus characters is handmade by artists. But because of this, their games are released very infrequently, usually every 3-5 years.I miss the days where animations where drawn frame by frame (Symphony of the night, Street fighter 3rd strike etc.)
What do you mean by "way inefficient"? could you please tell us more. I can ensure you that today gpus are much more capable. Back then, ram memory was too expensive and too slow to implement a framebuffer for 60 fps. To overcome that, video game consoles invented tiles, sprites, and color palettes to generate a scan-line on the fly when requested by the monitor. But those have their own limitations: the tilemaps (background) and the sprites have to use the same tiles. a tile has a fixed size and you had a small amount of memory to store those... which is why the graphics of old 2d games are pattern based (same tiles being repeated again and again). Today gpu aren't using these anymore, they are bliting machines with enough memory to hold multiple framebuffers for very high resolutions. Today gpu are able to blit thousands of bitmaps at hundred of fps (You don't need to use polygons btw, both OpenGL and Vulkan have blit procedures but using polygons give you usefull 3d transformations).
Why would you want to mimic palletized graphics when today gpu are able to do more and do it faster? color palette graphics is an inferior technique. But if you want that, you can implement it with a ten lines shader. Shaders are the best and most efficient thing that happened to computer graphics. You neither need polygons nor power-of-two textures to do 2d graphics; you can blit a bitmap to a framebuffer with both Vulkan or Opengl. The super nes has great limitations: a tile size is 8x8, a tilemap (background) 32x32 tiles, 128 sprites at most, 32 sprites on the same scanline, 60 fps at most, one video resolution (the others are buggy), ... An apple mac mini with the cpu at %100 is consuming ~20 watts at the plug (entire system), you could probably emulate a super nes while staying under ... ten watts!You basically just argued why old consoles were way more efficient. lol Those tiles sprite and palettes were very efficient.
To even mimic palletized graphics on a modern gpu you have to use shaders that check and change each pixel and at least two triangle polygons and one texture with a resolution in the power of 2 for each sprite. You need an entire graphics / input api loaded into an os.
So it takes way more resources today to display one sprite than it did to run an entire nes game. A nes / snes run at 17 watts.
Try to run even a nes emulator on a system with the wattage lowered to 17 watts.![]()