N64's bilinear filter and AA method were mandatory functions of the hardware, right?

[Exophase]

Not really a case most of the time probably, due to the horrifically low efficiency of said RDRAM interface... I believe ERP said they did some measurements of RAM latency on the N64 and concluded it was around 250ns or something ludicrous like that, I can't quite recall the exact numbers stated so I may be off.

Actually quite a bit worse:

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=394753&postcount=17

Uncertain what the costs are like for a cache miss, or if this is what he was referring to. I've seen some CPUs were uncached reads actually performed more poorly than cache misses.

However, much of this is likely due to the interface between the CPU and the chip that has the RSP and RDP (RCP), the latter of which has the memory controller. Hopefully the RDP and DMA controller didn't have as severe problems due to memory latency problems..

9th bit was hardware parity used by the RDRAM interface I believe. It would probably lead to some very odd alignment issues if it accessed the DRAM array directly...

9th bit was directly accessible to at least the RDP. I don't think there was a way for the CPU to see it (maybe it used it for parity itself or maybe the memory controller handled that optionally), but the RDP could read and write it, and therefore there were effectively 18bpp framebuffer formats. You could get 3-bits of coverage in addition to 15-bits of color, for instance.

IIRC it's worse than that, bilinear filter ran at half-rate and trilinear at quarter rate I believe.

Yeah so with filtering off, which it almost never was in games (but neither was depth buffering). I wonder if it ran at lower rate with depth buffering too. Bandwidth was cited as the culprit but if it needed more clocks for it..

 

[ERP]

That was a cache miss if I remember correctly.
Yes depth buffering was a big penalty, as I said above the RDRAM was split into two banks, and you were supposed to put the Frame Buffer in one and the ZBuffer in the other, in practice the difference was only about 5 or 10%.
We didn't use the ZBuffer for World Driver Championship or Stunt Racer 2K, that coupled with faster uCode let us do a lot more visually, there was always a concern during development that Nintendo would bounce the title if they saw playstation like visual artifacts.

 

[swaaye]

I don't remember any depth fighting in WDC so it turned out well. That game is quite the looker and I'm pretty sure that it's the best driving sim on N64.

I picked up Turok 3 the other day and have it almost beat. The game slipped entirely under my radar back in the day. I think it's probably the best of the series. Nice visuals, usable 640x480 mode, interesting maps, good saving, facial animation on N64, good fun, etc. At one point you return to the Turok 1 jungle and they've made it look vastly better and with little fog.

 

[Grall]

I really enjoyed the N64 Turoks, the original in particular. The fog never bothered me, I saw it as atmosphere. If there was something I'd wanted fixed, it was the blasted platform jumping rather than the fog... First-person with a console controller isn't good for supermario stuff. I'm sure I could never get through the entire game today, but I did back in the day. It's one of the highlights of my youth, lol. (Shit, I was like 25 when the game came out...)

I still remember the original turok with a lot of fondness. T2 was decent enough, but the framerate suffered a lot from having the fog pushed back. Soft-skinned characters also seemed to take a lot breath out of the N64, it was a much more juddering experience than the first game, even with high-res turned off.

 

[swaaye]

Turok 1 has all that bullshit platform jumping combined with a ridiculous save system that can cause you to need to play for an hour to find a save point. It kills it for me. You are right that it has fantastic atmosphere. It was one of those early 3D games that blew my mind and will never be forgotten.

Turok 2 is interesting but man was it over hyped. And it runs at around 15fps. It's like Crysis but you're stuck with a Geforce 7 lol. But it was ported to PC so you can solve the speed issue. It runs wonderfully on proper hardware like a Voodoo2

Another neat, overlooked shooter for N64 is Quake 2. It's not a port. It has an original campaign. I appreciate that sort of port.

 

[Grall]

I think a lot of the platform jumping stuff simply came from the mask ROMs the N64 used being unbelievably expensive so there simply wasn't enough storage space for anything else. Remember, they cut the treetop village with the Brachiosaur boss from the game entirely, it probably exists now only as faded screenshots on old gaming websites after Acclaim died a fiery death years ago...

The lack of save points was bothersome at points. It happened that I backtracked a kilometer to save at a previous save point rather than push ahead if I felt it was tactically advantageous. If they'd had a bit more time, and more storage then they could surely have fixed a lot of those things, of that I'm sure. There were tons of bugs in Turok, places you could get stuck, where the game glitched and so on. I can't remember any of it off the top of my head this long afterwards, but it was absolutely a rushed title that could have used a bunch more polishing. Still, it had such atmosphere, it's incredible.

By the way, the original Turok had fantastic texturing work for being a N64 game. There were tons of variety on all of the old ruins, weapons, enemies and so on. Great stuff really. There was quite a few different enemies squeezed into that game, and the T-Rex boss was so so so awesome. I loved fighting him, blowing chunks of meat off his body with the quad-rocket launcher and so on!

The endboss was a bit bland in comparison. Just a dude... A badass dude for sure, but not a 3-story-tall-T-rex-with-hydraulic-augmentations-plus-lazors-attached-to-its-head-and-armor-plating-badass-awesome kind of dude.

Damn, they don't make games like that anymore do they? I guess I better never boot that game up again ever, because the it could never match up to my fond memories of it!

 

[swaaye]

Yup the olden times were experimental and we had nothing to judge the games against so it was all fresh and new. And the old fuzzy graphics do add to the atmoshpere by powering up the imagination.