Even with 4gb ram My desktop is still lagging with just windows 10 did not install any games just word and excel. While old game are surprisingly just 10 mb some even 6mb and pack a lot of content and run smoothly…..
In: 0
Because video (and audio) now has a much higher quality. Which takes a lot of disk space and (when you launch the game) memory.
Well first and foremost. Games nowadays have much bigger scenes that are loaded at once and many many more objects in them. Also all those objects has much higher resolution textures and are more complex than before and that uses lots of memory. Then modern games tend to rely on generic engines that focus more on ease of development instead of performance. In the old days devs used to work much more closely with the actual hardware meaning they could optimize at lot more and also had to due to the limits of hardware, where nowadays things are very abstracted from the developer and due to the capabilities of the hardware optimization is not profitable as it takes a lot of time it’s easier to just tell the users to upgrade their hardware. As for windows it’s Microsoft and is probably spending more resources on running spyware and the useless features like Cortana than it does running the user programs.
Game designers work within the constraints of what’s available at the time. Games from the past were designed for systems from the past, which had slower processors, smaller hard drives, less RAM, etc. So even games built for max specifications then are below max requirements now.
A number of possible answers here. There are still very small games. However in most cases people expect a lot more from a game/PC. Years ago a PC would boot into an OS that would then load a single game. The system would be doing one thing at a time, all the resources of the machine would be dedicated to doing that one thing. Switching between tasks could take minutes. In most cases today the systems are doing multiple things at the same time. You can alt tab from a game that is doing on the fly video mapping to a web browser and back for example.
The original doom was a 2d map with pseudo 3d and sprite based graphics. Compare with the current doom games that render the 3d environment real time with entirely dynamic lighting.
Graphics, mostly. The size of them is absolutely enormous.
In the times of [Doom](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/de/Doom_ingame_1.png), a screen was 320×200 in 256 colors. That takes 64000 bytes.
Today, I play the [modern Doom](https://parzibyte.me/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Puerta-amarilla-de-Doom-2016-Santuario-de-Kadingir.jpg) at 4K. That’s 24883200 bytes in 24 bit color, or 33177600 in 32 bits. So representing a single screen worth of graphics takes 518 times more space.
That’s before you consider that today we like photorealism and use far more textures than the first doom did, do them in much higher quality, overlap several of them, have various special effects. The original DOOM looks very blocky if you come right up to a wall. The modern one still looks crisp.
In modern times, 4GB RAM is actually a very low amount to have. I’d put the modern absolute minimum at 8GB, comfortable at 16GB, and you can easily use a lot more than that. I’m finding 64GB somewhat restrictive when doing some specialized tasks.
Part of that is modern games trying to do more especially graphics wise than older games.
Another part is that games today are developed for systems around today.
It might be possible to optimize games to do more with less, but that would take time and money and effort. And companies are reluctant to do so when their customers mostly are going to upgrade their hardware anyway.
For comparison you can look at some older system that were around for long enough hat developers had to work hard to get the most of the system they had.
The C64 was around for a real long time with fixed hardware and many games that came out for it had a chance to to have several sequels where the games had better graphics and sound and bigger maps and enemies.
To a lesser degree you also see that with older consoles like the NES and SNES. If you look at an NES launch game like Wrecking Crew with a late game like Super Mario Bros. 3 or compare games from the start of the SNEs era like super Mario World to something that came out later like one of the later entries into the Donkey Kong franchise, it is hard to believe they are for the same hardware.
The consoles cheated a bit by often adding hardware expansion into cartridges, but even disk based gaming consoles that lasted long enough saw some noticeable improvement throughout their life.
My point is that with PCs you don’t have to work hard to cram more game into the same limited amount of resources. You can just expect everyone to buy new and better hardware.
Because high resolution graphics and high quality audio make for huge files. They’re more pixel dense. Old games didn’t need a lot of ram because they were running low density low resolution graphics and 16-bit sound that didn’t take up the space. For the game o be played all of those resources need to be loaded into ram and there’s a lot of them and they’re huge.
Latest Answers