Back when splitscreen multiplayer console were a thing, how did they deal with the hardware limitations of the console?

Back when splitscreen multiplayer console were a thing, how did they deal with the hardware limitations of the console?

Aren't you essentially running 4 instances of the same game at once?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtu.be/C6NSm54ImcA?t=19m46s
twitter.com/AnonBabble

At one quarter of the resolution.

Yes. Zombie mode in the CoD games ran like shit on consoles if you had 4 players

4 cameras doesn't necessarily mean four instances. They are rendering more graphics at once sure, but it's at 1/4 the resolution.

No, you're running the same common instance of the game.
What you're doing is rendering 3 additional viewports. They're all a quarter of the original resolution, but that still takes its toll on performance.

Maybe on your poorfag xbox, PS3 had no issue with 4 player splitscreen at 1080p.

>PS3
>1080p

PS3 lagged like shit on 2 player splitscreen for me

>ps3
>poorfag
Are you a brazilian who has to pay day one prices for sony products 10 years after they come out? Ps3s and 360s were competitively priced against each other for years.

That being said, ps3 did handle local multiplayer better than xbox did in my experience. Kino der Toten and Ascension with my brother was fucking great during summers between high school.

Framerates did suffer quite a bit

youtu.be/C6NSm54ImcA?t=19m46s

The game logic and physics stay about the same. Rendering splitscreen would be "free" if your renderer was so efficient that it was limited by fill rate, but games generally are limited on other factors. So, the performance effect of splitscreen was either designed into the whole game's graphics, or certain games would apply lower textures and disable effects for 4 player mode.

agreed difference was definitely noticeable on the ps3

no, it's rendering a single scene from 4 angles, each at 1/4th the res.

anyway most of the limitations are in physics/logic (single scene) or in after effects/shaders (same total res), rendering the world is fucking nothing compared to them.

you're running one instance of the game. But 4 camera viewpoints are being used. This only meant you had to render more objects on the screen which is why only games with worse graphics had multiplayer like this. Sometimes they reduced the screen size, view distance or model quality to compensate.

>ps
>Brazilian
A world exists outside Americas. And face the fact, nobody outside US gives a shit about Xbox and less than 1% people have it.

Consoles used to have more horsepower compared to the average PC back then.

i miss playing Goldeneye and looking at friend's screen constantly and then denying it, also accusing them of looking at my screen when I lost

good times

Did this with my younger brother, but I played it so much to the point where I had memorised the spawn locations and the order they came in and just followed a predetermined route when the looking at the screen became kind of redundant.

Splitscreen on the Genesis (think Sonic) used double resolution interlace mode. So while it was literally rendering at twice the vertical resolution (480i instead of 240p), it was only rendering at 30fps instead of 60fps.

Once you get into 3D stuff where framebuffers were actually a thing, it just rendered two viewports at lower resolution. Technically there's a little more overhead doing 4 views at 1/4th resolution compared to 1 view at 100% resolution, but that overhead's taken into account during development.

silky smooth lowest setting at butt baby butter 15 fps

I know firsthand that on older consoles, some games use simplified maps and textures. I'll play a map splitscreen and go, "Wasn't there supposed to be a small hill here?"

Only logical strategy is to just permit screenwatching. Forces you to be more sneaky and creative.

Lower framerates and one quarter of the resolution. Mario Kart Wii usually runs at 60FPS but doesn't in split screen multiplayer.

>tfw SimulView never caught on

The new deferred rendering technique requires geometry to be recalculated per camera, so different cameras in split screen can't share calculations. The old forward rendering technique allows different cameras to share geometry + lighting calculations. It's making a comeback in VR because VR is basically split screen.

There's still overhead, but most of those old split screen games were actually designed with split screen in mind because there was no online play.

Almost all those split screen multiplayer games had framerate issues with 4 players.

I remember Goldeneye dropping to 4fps with explosions and running at no more than 15fps normally. Diddy Kong racing running at like 12fps, and all sorts of shit just chugging at a motion sickness pace with 4 players like gauntlet legends.

Everyone just kind of tolerated it because it was leading edge then but that's shit today.

any modern 3D engine renders shit selectively. pointless to draw things that are out of view anyway. with 3 additional view points that means a lot more of the map is being rendered at once, since all players will be in different locations looking at different things.

overall this means higher CPU and GPU load due to the additional draw calls.

but in essence you're not running "four instances" of the game. all assets only need to be loaded once. VRAM usage shouldn't be much higher. the game still only needs to calculate AI, world mechanics, etc once.

the overhead should be higher but not by a factor of 4. also, multiplayer modes are certainly made less interactive and cinematic than, say, single player campaigns. no scripted events, few condition checks, etc. this should attenuate the framerate dip somewhat.

>ps3
>1080p
>console user calling other people poorfags
fucking kek