View Full Version : N64, fillrate monster of the previous generation?
I was recently reading over the N64's specs again, and as I understand it the RCP (or the RDP block portion) could theoretically draw 62.5 mpix/s with bilinear filtering, and half that with mip-mapping. Even with the poor memory performance, wouldn't 30-40 mpix/s (~1/2 theoretical, and presuming the RDP section was basically 'hard' ASIC so no microcode improvements) have made the N64 the real standout in terms of fillrate in the previous generation? I can't help but think it was perhaps one of the more underutilized consoles, though I never saw Indiana Jones, which was apparently quite impressive.
Also, does anyone have any detail on the bilinear filtering hack that someone mentioned in a previous thread? I thought I vaguely remember an SGI guy on IGN mentioning something about this. Seems like it would have been a useful feature to have a few years back if it saved performance or real estate, though I thought the N64's filtering looked basically identical to that of the Verite, so maybe it was true bilinear just with an economical implementation.
Any thoughts on the N64's hardware, particularly in terms of fillrate, texturing etc. I would be really interested in, though obviously it's not terribly practical information anymore.
Cheers,
roly
Although I never programmed the N64, and I haven't read any of the open source N64 emulators that are floating around the net, here's what I've gathered from reading various articles:
Good features:
A much faster CPU than the competition
More RAM
A programmable vector unit somewhat similar to the VUs on the PS2.
A nice clean OpenGL-like API
A high quality rasterizer, with a Z buffer, bi-linear filtering, alpha, mip-mapping, and accurate sub-pixel-positioning of triangle endpoints
But it had several big flaws:
- Relatively slow T & L, so few polygons per second
- A pathetically small texture memory. 1 KB if I recall correctly. And this wasn't a cache, the programmer had to manage it themselves.
- The lack of a CD drive meant games were data starved and cross platform ports were difficult.
- Sound was done in software, on the same DSP that did graphics.
As a result, the N64 games tended to have very few, but very high quality, polygons with lots of Gouroud shading and low-rez textures.
Tagrineth
16-Oct-2002, 17:12
You forgot the somewhat fickle but high-quality nonetheless multisampling :)
N64 was also the first console to support a full 640x480 output IIRC. :)
How about anti-aliasing performance? Obviously, it's one of N64's feature yet I've never seen any game using that. Some programmers are saying it was impossible to implement it in the first place.
Ozymandis
16-Oct-2002, 17:57
I thought a lot of n64 games used the edge AA?
A lot of N64 games used antialiasing, it supported two modes the faster of which incurred about a 10-20% penalty.
Both methods were very dependant on draw order, and used a single coverage value to weight the final color.
The bilinear filtering used 3 samples instead of four, you can see this if you look at a bilinear filtered circle texture it there it appears as if there are small tris making up the image and protruding beyond the edge.
Unfortunately Nintendo never widely released documentation on the vector unit.
The unit as a whole was crippled by the small texture "cache", and it's memory system.
About the only thing that didn't starve for memory access was the RSP and that's only because it would DMA data in large enough chunks that it could actually offset the hideous latency.
I've never tested actual fillrate, but with Z enabled it was probably <30 mega pixels, it was certainly nowhere near the peak.
Tagrineth
16-Oct-2002, 19:49
How about anti-aliasing performance? Obviously, it's one of N64's feature yet I've never seen any game using that. Some programmers are saying it was impossible to implement it in the first place.
Impossible to get it to work reliably on everything, maybe, but definitely there.
Go play MARIO 64 for crying out loud, and look at some of the edges... o.O
The AA is just VERY VERY fickle about whether or not it'll work, which makes for some really odd contrasts - a beautifully AA'ed edge right next to a hard, 320x240 edge x_x
Texture mem. was 4kb, which meant 64x64 with 4bpp, or more commonly higher color with lower res.
ERP, thanks for the detail on the bilinear shortcut, and your estimation of the real world fillrate, which still seems pretty good for c. 1996.
Couldn't they use some of the n64's ram for texture memory? As Banjo-Kazooie proved you can get some beatiful textures out of the system
Texture mem. was 4kb, which meant 64x64 with 4bpp, or more commonly higher color with lower res.
Wouldn't 64 x 64 x 4bpp be 2 KB? Maybe it was 64 x 64 x 8 bpp?
Couldn't they use some of the n64's ram for texture memory?
Sure, but each texture was limited in size to just 4 KB, so you ended up with scenes with pretty bland, repetative textures.
I liked "Conker's Bad Fur Day", where they combined Gouraud shading with various repteating texture maps to produce a world that looked quite nice, without taking much texture ram.
Mr. Angry Pants
17-Oct-2002, 07:23
All at a blazing 12 frames per second, no less!
Megadrive1988
17-Oct-2002, 07:31
a few points -
-texture cache was only 4kb, I think. and only 4.5 MB memory (unified) - both much less than what was needed.
-lack of CD-ROM pretty much crippled it.
-although the triangle/polygon count was never officially listed, it was quite low with all or most features enabled. conciderably less than PSX's simple textured and gouraud shaded count.
-fillrate was decent. more or less in the same ballpark as 3dfx Voodoo1, but don't know what it was exactly. Voodoo1 was like 45M pixels/sec I believe.
-N64 had good image quality, the best actually, compared to Saturn or PSX, which were not true 3D machines (the Saturn even less so than the PSX)
-N64/RCP was ment to be based on SGI's Reality Engine or RE2 - though the $200 N64 (was originally going to be $250) was VASTLY watered down/cut down compared to an SGI Reality Engine visualization supercomputer.
I personally wanted to see the 3D0/Matsushita M2 released. IMHO, it would have been much better than the N64 if it had been supported. (the original D2 and Power Crystal looked amazing) M2 had twin PPC 602s each at 66 Mhz, (72-80 MIPs, 133 MFLOPS each) a more powerful triangle/T&L engine (one of the PPCs did that) 4x the N64's texture cache (16k) - 8 MB SDRAM - and a 4x CD-ROM. Overall, M2 was about 1/3rd or 1/4th of Dreamcast's processing power, or about 2-3 times that of N64.
Isn't it weird how SNES and N64 both had excellent image quality but a lack of "grunt" underneath to drive the graphics? Such a shame really.
If someone can find that quote about the bilinear hack, I'd love to see it again. I was the one who brought it up in that other thread - I read it in an interview somewhere, and I'd love to read that interview again.
Tagrineth
17-Oct-2002, 15:58
Isn't it weird how SNES and N64 both had excellent image quality but a lack of "grunt" underneath to drive the graphics? Such a shame really.
If someone can find that quote about the bilinear hack, I'd love to see it again. I was the one who brought it up in that other thread - I read it in an interview somewhere, and I'd love to read that interview again.
It's probably due to a higher resolution (SNES - 256x224 standard, max 512x448; N64 - 320x240/AA standard, max 640x480/AA)... makes for a cleaner image, and on SNES makes for more space to fit fun stuff :)
Also both ended up having a lot of FPS slowdown. :)
In the end it's probably due to both consoles needing a lot of optimisation to run well, therefore devs really went the extra mile to get it running great...
SNES had some amazing looking games (Yoshi's Island, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana 2, and a lot of other Japan-only games took full advantage) but required the Super-FX chip for some of the more intensive ones. (Star Fox, Yoshi's Island)
Tagrineth
17-Oct-2002, 16:18
SNES had some amazing looking games (Yoshi's Island, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana 2, and a lot of other Japan-only games took full advantage) but required the Super-FX chip for some of the more intensive ones. (Star Fox, Yoshi's Island)
...which is mostly because SNES has a severely underpowered CPU. 3.2MHz 16-bit which can only address 64kb chunks of data... that also restricted the poor SPC700 (WAY ahead of its time) which would have been even MORE impressive without the 65816 only being able to feed it 64kb at a time (all ripped SNES sound files are EXACTLY 65536 bytes).
Megadrive1988
17-Oct-2002, 16:37
IIRC, the Super Famicom/SNES was ment to get a 10 Mhz 68000 CPU - that was the original intention of NoJ - however costs became a huge factor and the CPU was cut down, while an extra math co-processor was designed into the graphics architecture - meanwhile magazines didn't get it, they thought that SFC/SNES CPU was getting FASTER. One of them even had the balls to say that Nintendo's CPU would be slightly faster than the NeoGeo's at 14 Mhz! (NeoGeo's CPU was 12.5 Mhz) - So it came as quite a shock for many when they learned the SFC/SNES CPU was only in the 3+ something Mhz range - that was lSega Master System-like speeds--Although the SNES CPU was 16-bit and could naturally do much more work per cycle than SMS's Z80. still, SNES's CPU was SLOW, that could be seen and felt in early games like Gradius III and Super R-Type.
Amazingly, the SNES had some extremely fast & smooth shooters later on like Axeley and Space Mega Force aka Super Aleste.
EGM even reported on an upgrade CPU device that was in the works, a 33 Mhz accelerator that would boost SNES speed to great heights. that never happened of course. Even the final SNES CD-ROM (there were 3 different CD-ROMs in dev) called the ND or Nintendo Disc, featureed a very fast 21 Mhz CPU to speed SNES up, but this too was canned in favor of the N64.
SNES's archilles hill was it's CPU. It wasn't even true 16bit because the register was still 8bit. It would have been great if they had at least retained the backward compatibility feature also intended as well.
I personally wanted to see the 3D0/Matsushita M2 released. IMHO, it would have been much better than the N64
M2 was really imoressive for the time even the single processor version was much faster than anything else at the time. It was a great example of unified memory done right, vs the N64 which was a great example of unified memory done wrong.
To be fair even if they had shipped it, it would have been at least 12 months later to market than the N64 and I can't see the box being particularly cheap.
Megadrive1988
17-Oct-2002, 18:24
M2 was really imoressive for the time even the single processor version was much faster than anything else at the time. It was a great example of unified memory done right, vs the N64 which was a great example of unified memory done wrong.
To be fair even if they had shipped it, it would have been at least 12 months later to market than the N64 and I can't see the box being particularly cheap.
Agreed. the single CPU version of M2 blew PSX away, even beating N64. I think most of the games were coded using the single CPU ver, but maybe that's not the case, I can't remember. Matsushita wanted to hype the M2 as being as powerful as the then new Sega Model-3 arcade board, but that was a bit too much to beleive. On the other end, some critics said the M2 was no better, in practice, than the N64. The truth is probably more like M2 being 2-3x the performance of N64 overall. I really wanted the M2 version of Warp's D2, rather than the totally different version that was released on Dreamcast. There were also rumblings of Namco converting some of its System22/SuperSys22 arcade games to M2, but that too, never happened since M2 was canned.
The CG car demo was probably beyond what M2 could actually do in real-time. maybe even beyond Dreamcast, which was 3-4 times M2's performance. The car demo, and other prerendered M2 demos shown, couldn't have been done until GeForce256 or GF2 GTS on the PC side, or Gamecube & XBox on the console side.
To be exact the Snes had a 3.58mhz processor
I actually saw the M2 system in action but it wasn't running any games. My step father worked for a building company and they bought M2 based systems to display 3d mock ups of projects.
Very impressive from what I remember seeing.
Pity MX never came to fruition. The use of embedded RAM was probably just too much for the kind of process availible back then.
Megadrive1988
18-Oct-2002, 00:14
It's cool that you remember that MX was going to use embedded ram - I first read that in Intelligent Gamer magazine, lol. I'd never heard of such a thing... putting RAM on a graphics processor. They said it might allow upto 20 million polygons to be pushed. I think the final MX was capable of around 4 million small triangles though. that was at the time that Nintendo was looking into acquiring it along with the hardware team, CagEnt, for use in its sucessor to the N64. That was just before Nintendo settled on ArtX instead.
The SuperFX and FX2 chips really seemed to give the SNES some much needed assistance. The Doom port was pretty remarkable given how poorly suited the SNES CPU was for 3d. I suspect it was left with housekeeping duties while the FX2 did all the heavy-lifting. The 'Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy' effects in Yoshi's Island were also pretty neat. Pity there was no similar co-processor the N64, but I suspect such a thing wasn't feasible.
Thowllly
18-Oct-2002, 09:53
The SuperFX and FX2 chips really seemed to give the SNES some much needed assistance. The Doom port was pretty remarkable given how poorly suited the SNES CPU was for 3d. I suspect it was left with housekeeping duties while the FX2 did all the heavy-lifting. The 'Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy' effects in Yoshi's Island were also pretty neat.
Yeah, that effect was pretty neat, but it was probably no coincidence that the game also went into slow motion during that effect... :)
Pity there was no similar co-processor the N64, but I suspect such a thing wasn't feasible.
Maybe they could have done something with the memory expansion slot? Should be possible to communicate with an external processor through that bus. The GC 'parallel-port' is just an external connection to the sd-ram memory bus, but isn't meant to be used for memory expansions anyway... and wasn’t the N64 supposed to have some sort of disk drive add-on? Where was that supposed to be connected?
Tagrineth
18-Oct-2002, 14:47
Maybe they could have done something with the memory expansion slot? Should be possible to communicate with an external processor through that bus. The GC 'parallel-port' is just an external connection to the sd-ram memory bus, but isn't meant to be used for memory expansions anyway... and wasn’t the N64 supposed to have some sort of disk drive add-on? Where was that supposed to be connected?
Got an N64? Turn it upside down, and look at the bottom of the N64 where it's lined up perfectly with the cartridge slot on top :)
The 64DD was actually released in Japan IIRC, but like all console add-ons, it failed miserably...
archie4oz
18-Oct-2002, 17:20
The 64DD was actually released in Japan IIRC, but like all console add-ons, it failed miserably...
All? :-? I seemed to remember the memory expansion module selling quite well, along with the PC-Engine's SuperCD-Rom2 add-on (enough so that it became built-in on the Duos). You can probably also through in the PS2's network adaptor as well, along with perhaps the headset in due time. Speaking of headsets, one might also consider the Xbox Live headsets when the time comes. If you want to throw in non-standard controllers (i.e. GunCon, DDR mats), then Konami has made a killing with DDR and Beamani add-ons...
Megadrive1988
18-Oct-2002, 18:58
I seem to remember there was a series of DSPs for SNES games - some where from Nintendo, others from Seta - the earlier DSPs might have been 10 Mhz, the later ones around 20 Mhz -
F1-ROCII was one such game that got a boost from a DSP.
I'd really have liked to have seen SNES games with the mythical
33 Mhz co-processor, or at least the 32-bit CD-ROM (the ND)
with its 21 Mhz co-processor.
Might have seen games close to what Saturn typically did (games that didnt take full advantage of Saturn's processing power)
Tagrineth
18-Oct-2002, 19:58
The 64DD was actually released in Japan IIRC, but like all console add-ons, it failed miserably...
All? :-? I seemed to remember the memory expansion module selling quite well, along with the PC-Engine's SuperCD-Rom2 add-on (enough so that it became built-in on the Duos). You can probably also through in the PS2's network adaptor as well, along with perhaps the headset in due time. Speaking of headsets, one might also consider the Xbox Live headsets when the time comes. If you want to throw in non-standard controllers (i.e. GunCon, DDR mats), then Konami has made a killing with DDR and Beamani add-ons...
Well the majority then :\ Controllers don't count. Also the expansion pack is an iffy case because it only cost $30, not even as much as a game.
At what point in the PC-Engine's life cycle was that addon released? It seems like the earlier they're released AND the more tangible their improvements are, the more relatively successful they'll be. Meh.
PC-Engine doesn't sell that well to begin with.
Tagrineth
19-Oct-2002, 00:59
PC-Engine doesn't sell that well to begin with.
Heh, actually I'd almost call PC-Engine a market failure (in fact it was)... so how could its add-on be 'successful' when the console itself wasn't?
megadrive0088
19-Oct-2002, 02:55
From what I remember, the PC-Engine was quite successful, in Japan. It was the American version, the TurboGrafx-16 that wasn't so successful. In Japan, the PC-Engine beat the MegaDrive during their years. In fact, the PC-Engine was second only to the Super Famicom. What kept NEC from being successful long term was the lack of strength overseas (in the U.S. and Europe) - Even the PCE CD attachments, the CD-ROM2 and Super CD-ROM2, had quite a following in Japan. (the Arcade Card ver CD-ROM games weren't too big though)
The TG16 CD-ROM bombed in the U.S. and TG16 only had a cult following a few years after its 1989 introduction (PCE was out in 1987 in Japan!) and it had NO market presence in Europe at all, AFAIK. Though in the U.S., owning a Turbo Express (PCE GT in Japan) was concidered pretty cool, even though it didnt sell enough to even start to compete with the Gameboy.
The PCE was really an entire line of different machines and addons/ upgrades.
The one PCE system that REALLY, REALLY did not do well in Japan was the PC Engine SuperGrafx.
Once known as the PC-Engine 2 - most just call it the SuperGrafx or SG for short. unlike all the other versions, addons and enhancments of the base PCE, the SG was actually an upgraded, more powerful machine, with double the sprites (128), 2 background playfields, twice the VRAM and I think more main RAM, as well as a larger color pallete and possibly more colors on screen, all over and above the regular PCE (or CoreGrafx, CGII, Shuttle and CD-ROMs) The SG only had 5 native games released for it (Strider, Galaxy ForceII, Forgotten Worlds and a few others never made it) the SG came out in 1989, two years after the original PCE, it had one game the year it was released, Battle Ace, a cross between AfterBurner and Galaxy Force. Then in 1990 the SG got Grandzort (or Granzort) the sequel to Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. SG's third release was its best, Ghouls N Ghosts--a graphically awesome, but aurally poor version of the game that had just skyrocketed every gamers opinion of the MD/Genesis into the stratosphere. I say the SG was aurally poor because its sound chip was the same lame one used in the PCE/TG16. Though some say SG games feature better music & sound than PCE games, that's probably because SG game cards could have higher "meg" counts. Next for SG came Aldynes, an original shooter (non-arcade) that was never made in any other form on any other machine. Last, came a decent conversion of Capcom's WWII shooter, 1941 Counter Attack, and that was it for the SG. by 1992 it was deader than the Atari 5200 or the Sega Saturn was that soon after their releases, but the SG did become a collectors item. The Japanese were perfectly satisfied with their original hyper 8-bit system, the PCE.
To say the basic PCE wasn't a success is simply not the case :)
Reznor007
19-Oct-2002, 03:35
I seem to remember there was a series of DSPs for SNES games - some where from Nintendo, others from Seta - the earlier DSPs might have been 10 Mhz, the later ones around 20 Mhz -
F1-ROCII was one such game that got a boost from a DSP.
I'd really have liked to have seen SNES games with the mythical
33 Mhz co-processor, or at least the 32-bit CD-ROM (the ND)
with its 21 Mhz co-processor.
Might have seen games close to what Saturn typically did (games that didnt take full advantage of Saturn's processing power)
Mario Kart used a DSP chip as well. Mega Man X2 and X3 used Capcom's C4 graphics chip for wireframe enemies and some 2d stuff, Street Fighter Alpha 2 used the SDD1 graphics compression chip(which still isn't emulated). The ZSNES developers think the Seta DSP may actually be a 68000 CPU though.
Megadrive1988
19-Oct-2002, 04:47
yes I remember that there were alot of specialized chips and DSPs in SNES games. Even PilotWings was said to use a DSP as well. And that was odd to me, because PilotWings being one of the first SFC/SNES games, I thought it was showing off what the SNES could do itself, with its much hyped (years before its release) scaling & rotation abilities. I wondered why a DSP was used so early to boost SNES. I suppose that 3.58 Mhz CPU was really just too slow even from the start. but I thought the machine's standard math co-processors did the scaling & rotation in PilotWings, as in the earliest SFC demos of DragonFly (fore-runner of PW).. It makes sense that SNES got so many special chips much later in its life. It seemed to me it was just a continuation of Nintendo's strategy as with the NES and its MMC series of memory mapper chips, boosting a weak console that was originally going to be much more powerful (famicom/nes designers first concidered a 16bit CPU but cut that down to 8bit)
Its also very interesting about the Seta DSP possibily being a 68000... that was the original CPU choice for the SFC..
Megadrive1988
19-Oct-2002, 04:56
At what point in the PC-Engine's life cycle was that addon released? It seems like the earlier they're released AND the more tangible their improvements are, the more relatively successful they'll be. Meh.
The PC-Engine got its first CD-ROM (CD-ROM1) in 1988 I believe (PCE released in 1987) Then shortly after that, I think in 1989, it got CD-ROM2 which was the main CD-ROM for PCE until the Super-CD format - the American version, the TurboGrafx-CD (CD-ROM2) came out in late 1989 or early 1990, I dont remember which. AFAIK, CD-ROM ver 1 and 2 were basicly the same. it had a 64k buffer. CD-ROM2 quickly superceded CD-ROM1.
The Super CD-ROM2 format (System 3.0 card upgraded the older CD-ROMs) with 4x the memory buffer (256k or 2 megabit) came out in 1991 in Japan, IIRC. In Japan you could buy a Super CD-ROM2 with the memory built in, or the 3.0 card to upgrade your old CD-ROM. Or you get a PCE Duo.
In America, to get to play SuperCDs, you had two options, get the 3.0 System Card to replace the 2.0 Card in your TG16+CD-ROM, or buy a TurboDuo.
The American TG16 CD-ROM2 and
TurboDuo (SuperCD) both bombed, while their Japanese counterparts both did very well, being strongly supported until the 32bit generation.
The Arcade Card was the final CD-ROM format for the PCE and was only released in Japan. It boosted the CD format to 16megabit (2MB) plus the 2megabits already in the Super CD-ROM.
with 18megabit total, developers pushed the 8-bit PC-Engine further than it should have ever been pushed. NeoGeo games were converted to this format but I dont know how they fared (not to well I guess)
by the time the Arcade Card CD games were coming out, NEC and Hudsonsoft had LONG been working on the successor to the PC-Engine. (SuperGrafx couldn't cut it, as SG was based off the PCE too heavily) the 32-bit Hudson/NEC console that would face Saturn and Playstation was first known as Iron Man FX, aka Project Tatsujin, or Hudson HuC62. This 32-bit chipset/prototype board was shown in 1992 in Japan and perhaps also at the summer CES in Chicago... this was the fore-runner of the PC-FX which didnt come out until 1994-- 7 years after the PC-Engine first hit Japan. Yes, the PC-Engine was quite successful. otherwise, NEC wouldn't have put out so many variations and formats, many of which I have not even mentioned! :)
Reznor007
19-Oct-2002, 06:43
yes I remember that there were alot of specialized chips and DSPs in SNES games. Even PilotWings was said to use a DSP as well. And that was odd to me, because PilotWings being one of the first SFC/SNES games, I thought it was showing off what the SNES could do itself, with its much hyped (years before its release) scaling & rotation abilities. I wondered why a DSP was used so early to boost SNES. I suppose that 3.58 Mhz CPU was really just too slow even from the start. but I thought the machine's standard math co-processors did the scaling & rotation in PilotWings, as in the earliest SFC demos of DragonFly (fore-runner of PW).. It makes sense that SNES got so many special chips much later in its life. It seemed to me it was just a continuation of Nintendo's strategy as with the NES and its MMC series of memory mapper chips, boosting a weak console that was originally going to be much more powerful (famicom/nes designers first concidered a 16bit CPU but cut that down to 8bit)
Its also very interesting about the Seta DSP possibily being a 68000... that was the original CPU choice for the SFC..
Yeah, I think that with Pilot Wings it was originally designed to use special functions of the SNES that were removed for some reason, and those functions were put onto a DSP in the PW cart.
Mr. Angry Pants
19-Oct-2002, 08:13
The DSP 'band-aids' were a cheap ploy by Nintendo to reduce the cost of manufacturing the SNES while third-party developers footed the bill.
Gotta love the Big N. Microsoft of the video game industry from 1986-1996
Ahh but Nintendo did not put a gun to any developers head and say 'you must use these cheap band aids!'
However I got to agree the cartridge based model was very bad for 3rd party developers - but Nintendo did not care. It was their console and if they could be successful with being the only ones producing games for it - even better!
Regarding the SFX chip - they were originally developed for the NES by Argonaut (British based company) and shown off by Jez San to Nintendo. At that point (this is BEFORE SFC was released worldwide) Nintendo asked Argonaut to develop something similar for their SNES instead. A couple of years (or more) later you had StarFox which made Argonaut and Jez San VERY rich. Funny how Argonaut went on to develop Croc for the Playstation afterwards though.
Regarding the SETA chip from what I remember (Got A Screw Driver Magazine was great for this) it was touted as a 21MHz RISC Chip but I don't think it saw the light of day (or at least in it's original carnation).
The SNES CDROM was co-developed with Sony until Nintendo pulled the plug on that and was in fact called the xxxxstation even then. Sony learnt a lot about the games market and capitalised with a firm two fingers up at Nintendo with the amazing Playstation (which in itself was touted as being as powerful as the hardware running Ridge Racer at the time).
Ahh... nostalgia.
Mr. Angry Pants
19-Oct-2002, 13:36
Ahh but Nintendo did not put a gun to any developers head and say 'you must use these cheap band aids!'
Yes, but since Nintendo could afford the luxuries of such chips for their games they could achieve a Wow! factor that the 3rd parties couldn't.
Nintendo basicly waged war on 3rd party developers for over a decade. They are business Nazis and how they have been able to gain the reputation of being the 'good guys' of the industry baffles me.
Magnum PI
19-Oct-2002, 13:59
nazis ?
you mean they build concentration camp, killing civilians on racial criterias, made war to other countries etc.. or just their political doctrina is national-socialism ?
are you of these people who see nazis everywhere ?
Mr. Angry Pants
19-Oct-2002, 14:14
are you of these people who see nazis everywhere ?
:wink:
Rodéric
19-Oct-2002, 14:20
Nintendo is enforcing its rules on its hardware... that can be seen as being a dictator.
Hopefully Nintendo don't own the whole market, neither almost all of it, so if you don't like their rules, you can just work on another system.
BTW, I do beleive that Nintendo blended the rules to get more devs on the NGC and GBA, which is a good thing, as long as quality still preveils.
my 2 € cents.
Megadrive1988
19-Oct-2002, 16:52
"Regarding the SETA chip from what I remember (Got A Screw Driver Magazine was great for this) it was touted as a 21MHz RISC Chip but I don't think it saw the light of day (or at least in it's original carnation)."
that's about what I remember, yeah.
"The SNES CDROM was co-developed with Sony until Nintendo pulled the plug on that and was in fact called the xxxxstation even then. Sony learnt a lot about the games market and capitalised with a firm two fingers up at Nintendo with the amazing Playstation (which in itself was touted as being as powerful as the hardware running Ridge Racer at the time)."
of course, there were three seperate CD-ROMs developed for the SNES, two of them were 16-bit, the final one was the ND (Nintendo Disc) which was 32-bit. Sony worked on at least two of them, in several incarnations. Phillips worked on one of the 16bit CD-ROMs, to be compatable with the CD-I format, IIRC. Nintendo had an agreement with Sony, as far back as 1988, years before the SFC/SNES arrived on store shelves, to build a CD-ROM unit for the SFC/SNES. Nintendo had many on-again/off-again flip flops with Sony and Phillips over the various CD-ROMs - Nintendo screwed Sony at the 1991 CES in Chicago by annoucing they would go with a Phillips CD-ROM, then they went back to Sony. And Phillips, and Sony again. This nonsense lasted until 1993 when Nintendoput the brakes on any CD-ROM for SNES, annoucing they would parnter with SGI for the 64bit "Project Reality" aka Ultra64 aka N64.
"Ahh... nostalgia."
Ahhh yeah :)
Megadrive1988
19-Oct-2002, 17:00
As for Sony claiming that the PSX was as powerful as the hardware that ran the Ridge Racer arcade, that was true. that Sony claimed that. In reality, the PSX was roughly 1/2 as powerful, and no lacked z-buffering and high res display with 60fps and 240,000 texture mapped, gouraud shadded polygons that the System22 Ridge Racer hw could achieve.
Sony's inflated figures of 500,000 textured & lit polygons/sec was utter nonsense. even the 360,000/sec figure for the same kind of polygons was also nonsense (otherwise PSX would have been more powerful than Sega's Model-2 board)
Around 180,000 textured, lit and g.shaded polygons/sec was about the max for PSX. First gen software like Toshinden hovered around 70,000-90,000/sec - RR1 was maybe 100,000/sec - developers got alot more out of PSX, but I doubt any games got much more than 180k/sec.
Magnum PI
19-Oct-2002, 21:06
Nintendo is enforcing its rules on its hardware... that can be seen as being a dictator.
you mean other console manufacturer aren't enforcing their rules on their hardware ?
Hopefully Nintendo don't own the whole market, neither almost all of it, so if you don't like their rules, you can just work on another system.
Hopefully the market isn't owned by a single manufacturer.
whichever it would be: nintendo, sega, sony, microsoft, amstrad.. it wouldn't be a good thing.
BTW, I do beleive that Nintendo blended the rules to get more devs on the NGC and GBA, which is a good thing, as long as quality still preveils.
as every console maker, with the pressure of competition nintendo has to be more friendly with the developpers.
Here is the last known specs for the SNES Nintendo Disk
RAM: 8 Mbit
Sub memory: 1 Mbit
Rom Memory: 2 Mbit
Co-CPU: 32-bit RISC
CPU speed: 21.477Mhz
Cache: 8 Kbit
Access time: 0.7 sec
Data transferring speed (between the SNES and the CD-rom): 150 or 300 Kbit/sec
CD-I compatible: Yes
Price: 299 dollar
Colors: 16.7 million
Here is some Super Fx chip info
This invention from the people at Argonaut is a special chip that is implanted in a SNES cart, like the ones above and is called the Super FX chip. It was specialized to help the SNES to create 3D worlds made by shaded polygons and texture mapping and light source shading. The Super FX chip is a RISC type mathprocessor and a supplemental CPU to the real SNES CPU. With the FX chip in a game the SNES´s speed goes up from 3.58 Mhz to 10.5 Mhz. This is a truth with modifications though. The 'real' speed never exceded the SNES CPU's 3.58Mhz, but with the Super-FX certain difficult graphic calculations could be done faster.
The FX-chip can also make ordinary 2D games better. It has been used in StarFox (StarWing) and Vortex (formerly known as Citadel) by Argonaut; a shoot 'em up where you can transform between being a walker, a boggie, a tank or a jetplane and Stunt Race FX (a.k.a. FX Trax and Wild Trax) a nice polygon racer made by Nintendo.
Crazyace
20-Oct-2002, 10:04
The raw 3D transform on the PS is way higher than the base model 2, in theory peaking at over 3 million vert transforms/second.
The pixel fillrate is an order of magnitude higher ( 33Mpixels/66Mpixels flat compared against 1.2Mpixels )
The lack of FP and the perspective correct texturing are the main weaknesses. Even the CPUs are comparable ( 33MHz mips against 25MHz i960 )
The biggest visual improvement is the lighting and semitransparency support. ( The model 2 uses cross hatching and rendered to a palletted frame buffer... )
However the one advantage the Model 2 has ( probally the most important ) is the amount of memory available for textures, ( the texturing in general )
Megadrive1988
20-Oct-2002, 18:33
The main difference that I notice between PSX and Sega Model-2 is that PSX had gouraud shading, Model-2 does not. However, I don't care how many theoretical vertices the PSX GTE can push out. that is peak performance on paper. paper specs don't impress me. Model-2 pushed more polygons on screen in games than any PSX game, and with massively better textures, image quality and FRAMERATES.
The vertice/sec rate for Model-2 was 900,000 anyway, not the 300,000/sec most ppl think for its specs. The 300k figure is for fully textured, perspective correct, z-buffered and bilinear filtered four sided polygons/sec, IIRC. Again, PSX games did not go beyond 180k textured polygons, AFAIK, or much beyond that. The actual displayable flat shaded polygon count for PSX was 360,000/sec, which is like twice as much as Model-1, but again that's untextured, and without anything like z-buffer (PSX didnt have it)
Model-2 was a whole order of magnitude beyond PSX/ Saturn / N64 in power and image quality. Even the best 3D cards for the PC at the time, Voodoo1 & PowerVR PCX1/2, could not match Model-2 overall, even though they had newer features and g.shading. Not until 1998 was the technology good enough at home to surpass Model-2 in performance in the form of Voodoo2, TNT and Dreamcast.
Crazyace
20-Oct-2002, 20:56
PSX like model 2 in a way pushed 360k flat tris max with 3 independant verts/tri, so vert/sec was theoretical max of >1m - but you are right, that is theory not practice...
180K/s was actually comparable ( in the same range ) to Model 2, with the effect that most titles ran at 30Hz, rather than the 60Hz of the arcade.
Another point of comparision - I only compared against the base model 2, the various revisions increased the fpu support by a factor of 5 - something not practical on a console :D
Apart from resolution I think that RR4 compared quite well with the model 2 titles, and DOA on PSX is very comparable to the original arcade version.
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