if the 90’s were defined by classic retro videogames with pixel and “old” graphics, then why was music and images so high quality?? for example, in 1995 radiohead released “the bends”, a cool album!! but it doesn’t sound like it was made in 1995, because in 1995 videogames were pixelated and had blurry graphics, shouldn’t it have been that way too?? if technology was that way in 1995?? why does that album sound so high quality and modern if it was made around the same time old retro games were made?? thank you!?
It’s bitrate and computation based. Playing back a waveform through speakers takes very little computation and doesn’t really have all that much data.
Computing billion of pixels per second by doing exotic math between thousands of entities with millions of individual physics calculations and then ray tracing all that and doing it 100 times per second… dude, that’s many many many orders of magnitude more complicated.
To put it in perspective- a heavily compressed song almost fits on a floppy disc. A heavily compressed movie almost fits on 600 floppy disks. A decent quality movie takes 4000 floppies. An hd movie- 10,0000. A 4K UHD etc etc film? Close to 50,000 floppy disks. That’s just video, there’s no physics, no ray tracing, no rendering, no bump mapping, no animation, no anything, just displaying data. Now imaging doing all that, but 5x more per second and add all the things I said.
Graphics cards of today are more powerful than an Empire State Building sized computer of the 90s, probably more powerful that most of the computers on earth put together in the early 90s.
Why did games look basic? Because we had basic level computational power. But why was sound so good? Because sound is like stacking wooden blocks when modern games are like colonizing mars. Different orders of magnitude in complexity and scale.
A single smartphone image is easily 3x bigger than a high quality song- and that image needs to be rendered hundreds of times a second for a modern game. It’s not even the same sport.