I’ve been wondering this recently. I grew up on atari/nes/snes and so of course almost all of those games (pretty sure all) are written in assembly and are rock solid smooth and responsive for the most part. I wonder if this has affected how I cannot stand to play badly optimized games eith even a hint of a laggy feel to it. I’ve always been drawn to quake and cs for that reason: damn smooth. And no, it doesn’t just need to be FPS games either. I cant play beat saber with a modicum of lag or i suck massively, but others can play just fine and not even notice the lag.
Its odd. I feel like a complainer but maybe I just notice it more easily than others?
Oh absolutely
I say that less as a knock on the game and more that there were technical compromises made back in the day as well. Nostalgia sometime last hits and people assume everything ran blazing fast.
The Nintendo64 did run blazingly fast. Comparatively, even modern consoles are a step down in terms of power compared to Nintendo64 hardware for its time.
Had the draw distance been lowered in Ocarina of Time, its performance would have been at minimum a steady 30fps, as Ocarina of Time runs in a more optimized Mario 64 engine. Which, naturally, is less optimized than what Kaze has done to Mario 64’s engine, but Kaze also has like 20 years worth of more coding and computer knowledge learned, making comparison pretty unfair.
Framerate is also not the only metric in determining if a game’s performance is bad. Ocarina of Time runs at 20fps (unless you are in PAL region, then it runs at 17fps because of PAL standards, oof), but it never misses a frame. It is extremely consistent at 20fps. The frametime is perfect even on original hardware. The same cannot be said about most modern AAA games, even Nintendo games. Modern games might mostly run at 60 or 30 fps, but they very often dip below that and even more often have hitching and stuttering due to inconsistent frametime. Even though the fps may be high, the playability of the game is worse than Ocarina of Time.