Best 8/16 bit console hardware

[Tagrineth]

It's because console hardware has much MUCH more powerful dedicated 2D capabilities... VGA didn't have scrolling planes and such. It all had to be hacked in by the programmers.

 

[Fox5]

Really? Wow, I was always under the impression that pc hardware was so much more powerful than console hardware. Well, now I can understand why many old console to pc ports always required a pc like 5x as fast as the console, and still didn't run as well.

 

[Tagrineth]

Really? Wow, I was always under the impression that pc hardware was so much more powerful than console hardware. Well, now I can understand why many old console to pc ports always required a pc like 5x as fast as the console, and still didn't run as well.

Consoles have always been more efficient than PC... consoles are a fixed architecture, with lots of room for tremendous optimisation, whereas a little time spent on optimising a PC game would generally be better spend improving compatibility across the giant range of PC hardware.

PC hardware is more 'General-Purpose' than console.

And besides all that, PC has never had great native 2D capability, until pretty recently when Windows pushed heavy DirectDraw and extended GDI.