And loading times. I think people already forgot how long you had to wait on loading screens or how many faked loading (moving through a brush while the next area loads) there was on PS4
PS4 wasnt too terrible but jumping back to PS3... wow I completely forgot how memory starved that machine was. Working on it, we knew at the time but in retro spect it was just horrible.
Small RAM space with the hard CPU/GPU split (so no reallocation) feeding off a slow HDD which is being fed by an even slower Bluray disc, you are sitting around for a while.
If only we could just ship a 256GB NVMe SSD with every game and memory map the entire drive like you could with cartridges back then. Never have loading times again.
Also: I think it got less common on the N64, but games on SNES and NES and other old home consoles routinely accessed static game data, like graphic tiles, directly from the cartridge ROM. Without loading it into system RAM at all.
So there literally were no "loading" times for these assets. This might not even be realistically possible with NAND flash based SSDs, e.g. because of considerations like latency.
Though directly accessing ROM memory would also prevent things like texture block compression I believe.
Seems like an overgeneralization. I get it when FPS players want the best performance: players have FOMO of the best reaction time and the games are more built for fast action than contemplative scenery watching.
I wonder if players of single player action/adventure games make the same choice. Those games are played less (can be finished in 10-30 hours instead of endlessly) so the statistics might be skewed to favor performance mode.
Yeah. Case in point: "Zelda: Ocarina of Time" was at the time and several years afterward often labeled as one of the best games ever made, despite the fact that it ran with 20 FPS on NTSC consoles and with 16.67 FPS on PAL machines.
I'm sure it would have been even more successful with modern 60 FPS, but that difference couldn't have been very large, because other 60 FPS games did exist back then as well, mostly without being nearly as popular.