Mark Tyson Social Links Navigation News Editor Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
Findecanor Hardware has come a long way. Tomb Raider is from 1996 and ran on an intel 486. In 1996, a 400 MHz RISC chip was considered a workstation-class CPU. Reply
TerryLaze Findecanor said: Hardware has come a long way. Tomb Raider is from 1996 and ran on an intel 486. In 1996, a 400 MHz RISC chip was considered a workstation-class CPU. Tomb raider was a PS1 game and ran on a 33Mhz 32bit risc CPU, now you need 400Mhz because of emulation. Also total power draw of the PS1 was 6-12W including the cd rom spinning. Reply
salgado18 TerryLaze said: Tomb raider was a PS1 game and ran on a 33Mhz 32bit risc CPU, now you need 400Mhz because of emulation. Also total power draw of the PS1 was 6-12W including the cd rom spinning. There's no emulation if you run the PC version, so 66 MHz would be all it takes (probably). That said, pair it with a cell phone battery and a case, and you have an old school gaming device that lasts days with one charge. Reply
usertests TerryLaze said: Tomb raider was a PS1 game and ran on a 33Mhz 32bit risc CPU, now you need 400Mhz because of emulation. Also total power draw of the PS1 was 6-12W including the cd rom spinning. It's running a port of OpenLara, so not emulation. It's using software rendering. The 1996 game required a graphics card. So I think that is making a difference. The ESP32-P4 has some kind of 2D graphics accelerator, as well as JPEG/H.264 support, but gaming is obviously an afterthought for it and most microcontrollers. The 2D accelerator is used for a simple upscale from the 320×240 resolution it's being rendered at to 1024×600 for the panel being used. It may not need the full 400 MHz clock speed. It's capped at 30 FPS. Reply
rluker5 So has this processor surpassed the 22nm, 12 year old Bay trail in perf/watt yet? qA_stIUkzzA View: https://youtu.be/qA_stIUkzzA Reply
usertests rluker5 said: So has this processor surpassed the 22nm, 12 year old Bay trail in perf/watt yet? Lack of a 3D GPU should make that impossible from a gaming standpoint. It may be using an older node too. I couldn't find the node for ESP32-P4. As is typical, the power consumption of the Intel chip is probably more than stated. 2.2W SDP is for fanless, it's probably closer to 4-6W if given more thermal headroom. Which is a good thing, really. Didn't watch the video yet. I hope we see more interesting stuff in the low-end. Wildcat Lake is a good start, but I want to see the AMD response now (e.g. Zen 6 Bumblebee or whatever). Reply
Mindstab Thrull Something I don't get: It runs OpenLara at 320 x 240 pixels, which is PPA hardware scaled to 1,024 x 600 pixels. The math feels weird to me. 1024÷320 is 3.2 whereas 600÷240 is 2.5. Scaling by 2.5 would be 800×600 and by 3.2 would be 1024×768. How do they scale it to make it look "sensible"? 800×600 feels more logical to me with black bars along the edges. Either that or the image is stretched in one direction or another. Am I missing something? Mindstab Thrull Reply
Findecanor TerryLaze said: Tomb raider was a PS1 game and ran on a 33Mhz 32bit risc CPU usertests said: The 1996 game required a graphics card. It had been developed for MS-DOS, Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn simultaneously. The original MS-DOS version used a software renderer — doing it all on the CPU. Playstation and Saturn had crude texture mapping hardware. There have been newer editions for PC and those have had higher system requirements. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/programming/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/programming/playable-tomb-raider-runs-on-a-humble-1-watt-chip-usd25-board-with-dual-core-400-mhz-esp32-p4-mcu-scales-openlara-up-to-1-024-x-600-playable-pixels#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
- NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face
- Lucky PC scavenger discovers 12 RTX 3070 GPUs from the crypto mining era — cards survived years of basement storage with only minor signs of wear
- d-Matrix Adopts NVIDIA NVLink Fusion for Rack-Scale XPU Deployment
- IKEA releases new Skyrim mod that adds gloriously mundane Kallax shelving unit as your newest companion — free collab provides a drab flatpack answer to your lo
- This $399 Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 Combo with $1 filament is the perfect 3D printer deal for beginners — flash sale discount nets you a Core XY printer with fou
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.