Amiga & Consoles - frame rates, game quality and hardware specs

many Amiga games in my opinion were often better than their Snes/Megadrive counterparts in my eyes.

Lotus 2+3
Syndicate
Mega lo Mania
Gods
Chaos Engine


have you seen Lotus 2 on the MD ?, pretty poor tbh, same goes for Syndicate/Populous on the Snes
A lot of Amiga games had better sound.
not to mention the games that that were simply never released on the consoles....

UFO Enemy Unknown
Banshee
Sabre Team
Stunt Car Racer
F1GP
Lionheart

Just to name a few, and yes obviously the consoles did win in many games, but its not as 1 sided as some people like to think.
to say the Amiga was behind technology wise when the MD/Snes were out , it did damn well and held its own for a good while i feel.
I simply could not see either console running Crammonds F1GP,admittedly on an A500 it wasn't smooth but it was perfectly playable,
and improved on the A1200 , shame it never did get that release on the CD32.

Couldn't care less about ~FPS on an Amiga ,that wasn't what it was about.
the only ones that fps mattered for was the later 3d shooters, AB3D,Gloom etc.

[jayminer]

The Amiga for sure had the upper hand when it came to strategy and those kind of games, and I agree that FPS aren't exactly important in those games.

However when it comes to things like Shoot'em Ups the consoles usually always have way better performance than the Amiga, many Shoot'em Ups on the Amiga ran at 25FPS (or in some cases even less) while I can't think of many on the consoles that did that. And in those cases I think it makes a huge difference.

However, I don't think it's because the hardware couldn't do better, just look at Mega Typhoon on the Amiga. It throws objects around like crazy and maintains 50FPS. The Mega Drive and SNES were easier to work because of their sprite hardware, so more games on those consoles kept a better framerate, on the Amiga you would have to design the game around the hardware better to get a similiar result.

However I think it's silly that some people seem to defend the Amiga versions of some games when the console version is clearly better. Things are what they are, the Amiga shined in many areas and was a computer with a lot more possabilities than a console, but the hardware wasn't perfect.

[005AGIMA]

I jumped on with consoles at the SNES, then ATARI Jaguar (stop laughing), then N64, PS2 and so on.

So my most "comparable" would be the SNES.

for me, even when SNES started adding the 3DFX chipped cartridges, the Amiga still held out better imho at my main area of interest....which was "simulation".

Consoles never did that well back then.

Only a jump to PC could match what the Amiga churned out.

That's not so say consoles hardware wasn't capable. I think it was more a publishing choice. Consoles were about "fun".

The only limiting factor for consoles in this area hardware wise, was a lack of a keyboard.

Anyone who was seriously into sims on the Amiga knows that you "needed" a keyboard for all the controls. And most of the time, you "needed" the keyboard overlay that came with the game too.

thinking back, maybe that's why I lost interest in Amiga when they started leaning toward CD-TV and CD32.

I think then that the 16bit era was more closely matched.

But when you jump to the 32 Bit era, including the offerings on A1200, up to CD32, and pit them up against the likes of Atari Jaguar and PSOne, that the gap widened in favour of the consoles? And as a tangent, put the A1200 up against a 386DX of the time?

I'd be guessing (having never owned anything other than an A500) that the quest for backward compatibility held the Amiga line back, and also allowed lazy devs/publishers to keep producing for the wider Amiga range, rather than taking advantage of the new hardware capabilities? "Lazy" perhaps isnt the term. "Safe"? "Business minded"?

[touko]

for me, even when SNES started adding the 3DFX chipped cartridges

It's super fx, not 3dfx (it's a 3d GPu for PCs) .

Are you sure the amiga can compete ??
See yoshi island on snes with superfx :
[ Show youtube player ]

[roondar]

Originally Posted by jayminer

However I think it's silly that some people seem to defend the Amiga versions of some games when the console version is clearly better. Things are what they are, the Amiga shined in many areas and was a computer with a lot more possabilities than a console, but the hardware wasn't perfect.

I'd agree mostly here. If someone is going to argue that an Amiga version is better than/equal to the console version when this is clearly not true then that's not a clever thing to do.

However, IMHO it's still possible to appreciate an Amiga game as an Amiga game. What I mean here is that if it's a good game given the systems limits you can still see it as a good version and defend it as such even when better hardware gets a better version.

I hope that makes sense.

Originally Posted by touko

It's super fx, not 3dfx (it's a 3d GPu for PCs) .

Are you sure the amiga can compete ??
See yoshi island on snes with superfx :
[ Show youtube player ]

He was referring to simulation style games though, which may have been technically possible on the SNES but weren't really a 'thing'.

For standard 'arcade 2D stuff', the SNES hardware is already better at throwing stuff about on screen than the Amiga without the SuperFX chip

[touko]

He was referring to simulation style games though, which may have been technically possible on the SNES but weren't really a 'thing'.

Ah ok, but this kind of games was really not much popular,there is may be 2/3 games, that's all .
And frankly the 3D on those machines (aka 16 bits) was really poor, and you did not buy a 16 bits machine for 3D games .

BTW starfox is way better than any computer games of that area IMO .

For standard 'arcade 2D stuff', the SNES hardware is already better at throwing stuff about on screen than the Amiga without the SuperFX chip

i agree, but the Amiga also has its gems.

[005AGIMA]

yeah my bad on 3dfx. Of course I know that was PC GPU as my first proper PC GPU was Banshee card.

And yes I was referring to the style of game as mentioned by saying "simulation".

So that's where we disagree. I did buy MOSTLY "3D games" on my A500, as I was heavily into flight and driving simulations which were great on the Amiga, and only better on a PC.

And that was my point. The SNES "could have" done better. But it didn't as that was their choice.

Star Fox "looked" great, but it was on rails, with no free roaming unlike most flight sims of the time.

[jayminer]

Originally Posted by roondar

I'd agree mostly here. If someone is going to argue that an Amiga version is better than/equal to the console version when this is clearly not true then that's not a clever thing to do.

However, IMHO it's still possible to appreciate an Amiga game as an Amiga game. What I mean here is that if it's a good game given the systems limits you can still see it as a good version and defend it as such even when better hardware gets a better version.

I hope that makes sense.

I totally agree and there are games where I prefer the "lesser" version, often due to nostalgia though.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by touko

Ah ok, but this kind of games was really not much popular,there is may be 2/3 games, that's all .
And frankly the 3D on those machines (aka 16 bits) was really poor, and you did not buy a 16 bits machine for 3D games .

BTW starfox is way better than any computer games of that area IMO .

I can't say I agree. Starfox is great as an action game, but I must have poured several hundred hours in Frontier (and it's predecessor Elite). I also played FA-18 interceptor for ages. There were more of those games, but those in particular I personally remember very fondly.

In fact, I'm still somewhat sorry I missed out on Midwinter at the time, as it's indeed hard to get into these 3D type of games years after the fact and it was apparently rather special.

I would agree the 3D was poor in terms of frame rate etc, but it was still very immersive at the time and I'm sure lots of people bought those earlier 3D games & simulations and got great enjoyment out of them.

i agree, but the Amiga also has its gems.

Oh absolutely, that's one of the points I was making in this thread

[touko]

but I must have poured several hundred hours in Frontier (and it's predecessor Elite). I also played FA-18 interceptor for ages. There were more of those games, but those in particular I personally remember very fondly.

I forgot those games..

[Tigerskunk]

A few points from my side here (and I am talking about OCS here):

1) obviously the Amiga has problems to get the typical late 80ies arcade game going, which usually has a parallax background and at least 16 colours in the foreground. Which is the fault of that stupid 3-3 layer bitplane split in dual playfield resulting in 8 background and 7 foreground colours. With a 4-2 split the Amiga would have been able to compete there a lot better.

2) I think 25hz are okay for these old games, but these days, with all the knowledge and tools we have now, should aim for 50hz on a vanilla A500 1mb machine under most circumstances.

3) It's well known that a lot of Amiga games were simply not using the chipset. But what irks me almost a bit more is, that there were also a lot of shitty graphics around.
I don't understand why there were so many ugly ports from the 8-bit machines. Exolon, which is a beautiful game on the C64 and Spectrum looks like horrible shit on the Amiga (and ST). Same with Cybernoid and lots of other games from the era.
For every Jim Sachs, Henk Nieborg and Pete Lyon there were a dozens of bad graphics guys around who were obviously not capable to properly utilize those free 16 colour palettes.

[MickGyver]

Not that this thread is about modern games but a lot (probably majority) of triple A games on the PS4 and XBone are running at 30fps only. On those systems there is also a lot of input lag, often like 100ms or more (TV adds even more).

I don't have a point per se, just wanted to point that out to put things into perspective.

[Retro-Nerd]

But you can't compare 2D scroller with modern 3D games. 30fps is indeed enough for a smooth gameplay in 3D. Unless you play this hectic 3D shooter crap in multi-player online.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

But you can't compare 2D scroller with modern 3D games. 30fps is indeed enough for a smooth gameplay in 3D. Unless you play this hectic 3D shooter crap in multi-player online.

I kinda agree and disagree here.

I've had more than a few friends that really couldn't tell the difference between 17, 25 and 50FPS in games. People who claimed that Blood Money was a 'smooth' game, even though it runs at 17FPS. People who claim that the Atari ST version of Turrican is identical to the Amiga version apart from sound, though the Amiga version runs at 50FPS vs the Atari's 25FPS.

The simple truth is that not everyone can actually tell. I don't know real world percentages, but if I look at the people I've personally known, more of them seemingly couldn't tell the difference than could. For those people, it really doesn't matter. It's only people like you and me who care because we can notice.

------
On a side note: modern 3D online multiplayer games (including hectic shooters) might update the screen at 60FPS (or even more), but don't be fooled. There is almost no netcode out there that updates at rates over 30-40HZ. And yes, that includes the netcode used in these hectic shooters.

[MickGyver]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

But you can't compare 2D scroller with modern 3D games. 30fps is indeed enough for a smooth gameplay in 3D. Unless you play this hectic 3D shooter crap in multi-player online.

When it comes to framerate, it's the same with modern gamers, some (especially PC gamers) would never play a game if it runs at 30fps while others are fine with it.

[Retro-Nerd]

As i said. Idiots that just need the frames to kill themselves in hectic multi-player sessions. Ever decent singleplayer game, which involves more than fast kills, is just fine in 30fps and smooth. While a lot of 25/30fps faster 2D scroller aren't (ghosting, jerky if unstable etc).

[Tigerskunk]

I don't really know why, but what was said above is really true.
In 3D games I usually don#t care much about 30 vs 60 frames.

Vanquish by Platinum is a super frenetic 3D shooter, yet runs in locked 30 fps. And it's amazing.

Yet most games on the Amiga running on 25 frames feel a lot worse than their 50 fps counterparts. At least to me.

I didn't even know about "frame rates" back in the day, but I always felt something was off in these games.

Blood Money and Xenon2 played like crap, yet I couldn't nail it down why, since the games looked so pretty. Turrican on the other hand played amazingly well.

These days I know, that it's really difficult to make a reaction based 2D game that plays well with only 17 fps.

[roondar]

For 17FPS games I would actually agree. That is a very low frame rate for action based games. I find it interesting then that the examples you list as playing poorly (and I'd agree - Blood Money & Xenon 2 are rather overrated IMHO) happen to run at 17FPS and not 25FPS.

As for 25FPS, I'd say it can work - depending on the game. As a couple of examples, I personally find Lotus II and SWIV to be very playable games, even though they run at 25FPS. In general I'd say that 25FPS works much better if the scrolling speed is likewise lowered, or if the player sprite still runs @50Hz.

BTW, I could list more example games here, but I think two will do for now

[Retro-Nerd]

Ruff'n Tumble though is awful in 25fps. I'll get seasick all the time. Now, get this to 50fps. AGA version *hint*.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

Ruff'n Tumble though is awful in 25fps. I'll get seasick all the time. Now, get this to 50fps. AGA version *hint*.

Interesting.

Many people here seem to feel Ruff'n Tumble is just fine. Myself, I do notice the lower frame rate but I don't get seasick nor feel it's 'awful'. I can still have fun with that game.

I'm starting to come to the conclusion that there are some people who are way more sensitive to this than others. For those (and you seem to be one of them), perhaps 25FPS can be a deal breaker. Whereas others, such as me, do notice it but generally don't really mind. And yet others don't notice it at all (and say things like 'I think it runs at 50Hz' when it clearly doesn't).

Strangely enough I have way more problems with the modern lower FPS 3D games. Really low (say <15) doesn't bother me much (apart from playability), but 20-35ish FPS can get me rather nauseous. To me 50/60FPS feels so much nicer for 3D - yet I can play 25FPS 2D games just fine. Though I do note the lower FPS there as well.

Different people react differently it seems