I know people say this, and of course the art style is stylised. But playing it last night and watching the day-night cycle, the grass moving around on the first sky island, the physics simulation as I dropped my clumsily-made creations and I thought it was pretty impressive. I do think it's a wonder this runs on a low power tablet computer from 2017 but if I open up Teams on a brand new machine it can be a laggy mess. I do think we have lost track of how much computing power we have and how poorly it is used.
> I do think we have lost track of how much computing power we have and how poorly it is used.
I think this is the real lesson to take away from the Switch. The device is woefully underpowered, but developers know there's a huge market out there so they just have to Make It Work. The end result is that many games, especially first party ones, are super well optimized for their hardware. You could see this with the 3DS too, the things those 285MHz could pull off were definitely very impressive.
On PC and other amd64 platforms there's so much raw CPU and GPU compute available that it's possible to get away with performance impacts. Doom Eternal is one of the few well-optimized big games that just seems to play well on any device with a GPU you throw at it. Compare that to some recent releases and you really wonder how bad things must've gotten.
Of course, highly optimized game development takes time, effort, and skill, and that doesn't come cheap. As long as gamers accept the inefficiencies on other platforms, games will continue to be released in a subpar state. Nintendo cares more about the quality and reputation of their brand (in some areas) than it does about making money so it goes the extra mile; I doubt EA or Bethesda care as much as long as they keep making money.
See, pretty visuals / moods don't need high performance hardware, it's what you do with the tools given to you. I'm sure plenty of kids have just sat in Minecraft for a while watching their world go by, and it's using 1x1m blocks and 16x16 textures.
I wish there were better crossplatform native desktop development environments. Teams made / is making the switch to React at the moment, but it's still a web application.
I've recently gotten into the early access program for Beeper, which promises to be a native cross-channel chat app connecting things like Slack, Teams, Whatsapp etc into a native app. I like the native app part, but the downside of one-app-for-all is that it's lowest common denominator in terms of features and visually it looks like none of the other apps. Still uses 130-140 MB of memory at the moment though.
