This is very much a "well, yes and no" situation: if you had a genius-level programmer like a John Carmack sitting down, hammering out assembler and having all of the Saturn's various chips working simultaneously, there's no doubt the system can do some crazy things. By contrast, the PlayStation has a full-on triangle-based rasterizer built right into the SoC-- and it's fast! Take a look at even launch titles like "Warhawk" to see what it's capable of.

But while game developers were undoubtedly very talented back then-- much, much moreso than today-- not every development team had someone at a Carmack-like level. Further, games aren't developed in a bubble: they are created under strict budget and timeline constraints. So in real-world terms, the PlayStation's setup is significantly faster than the quad-based myriad chip design of the Saturn-- that's how things manifested in real-life when both platforms were under active commercial development.

While we're on the topic of modern-day game programmers, check out this video. Heck, while we're at it what about this one? I've said many times before, the PlayStation 5 GPU can solve ten trillion floating point math problems per second-- there is no reason why games should be having any kind of even remote performance problems, or have any sort of lack of ambition. Hand this hardware to developers from the 80s and 90s, and they'd made the Holodeck somehow!

I don't think the kids today are dumber, I've met a lot of extremely sharp people in their teens and twenties. But I don't think they are being taught the right things in university: everything today is higher-level languages, middleware, and off-the-shelf engines to the point where a lot of the "art of the hardcore" has faded from the industry. Outside of rare exceptions such as "Penny's Big Breakaway", I can't think of any developers doing "down to the metal"-style programming anymore.

Speaking of video games, I've been on a real resurgence with PC gaming lately. My latest kicks have been "World of Warcraft: Dragonflight", which looks like an up-res'd Dreamcast game and with ray-traced shadows bolted on, plus "Flight Simulator 2024". Specifically in the latter, I've been teaching myself how to fly helicopters. Here I am cruising around my old Twin Cities area, hovering over my old house, near my old city's water tower, checking out the Twins stadium, and weaving around the buildings in downtown Minneapolis.

Click on any of them to see the full-resolution versions:









The only struggle I'm having right now is, it seems like the cyclic-- at least in this particular model of helicopter, which is the only one I've tried so far-- is on a razor's edge: either the machine will hover, or it will drop like a rock; so when I try to land, I can't establish a nice clean two-foot hover, I instead slam down on the ground. I think I just need to continue to practice, it feels very fussy.

Wifey and I are taking this Christmas to do some PC updating a across-the-board.

My daughter is getting bumped from an ancient Ryzen 1600 to a 5700x, and is getting a mini-LED 1440p 180Hz panel, with HDR and VRR. The CPU upgrade will let me get that machine off of Windows 10, plus give her a major performance boost. She's only on an RTX 2060, so maybe next year a GPU upgrade will be in order too. Meanwhile, my son is getting the same monitor. He's already on a Ryzen 5800x3d and Windows 11, along with my old RTX 2080-- pretty decent shape. As for the wife, I just ordered a brand new B550 setup for her: she will get my 7700x, and I will take a brand new 9700x. In January I will order a myself an RTX 5000 series card, and she will get my mighty, 40 teraflops 4070 Ti.

Finally and changing topics, here is a complete list of all of the refereeing mistakes made against Lazio this season. The list is astonishing when you see them all lined up in one spot!