Recent content by atomic837

A neat concept, but hard to gauge what later, more complex/expansive areas would look like in terms of performance. I believe it was discussed earlier, but can anyone confirm that the Saturn's textures are generally at a lower color depth than the Playstation? It seems to me that this is a...

Great example - I forgot about that one. I suppose that probably answers the question. I also recall now that Digital Foundry's analysis on Resident Evil 2 described how background image data is streamed directly from disc to the Playstation's VRAM as you change camera angles, but that does...

That video is actually what sparked my question. The "disc streaming" theory seems plausible as this technique began to see widespread use for 32-bit systems in the late 90s, at least as it pertained to 3D titles. Many high profile Playstation games were known to stream game/texture data and...

Question on the 4MB RAM cartridge and games like X-Men vs. Street Fighter. After the initial load, there is virtually no loading during gameplay/different rounds, which was a major Achilles heel of memory-strapped consoles like the Playstation. I remember being hugely disappointed by the...

If I recall, the CPUs had to share the same memory bus, so they were considerably bottlenecked. Yu Suzuki was quoted in Next Generation issue 1 that at best they might be able to get 1.5x the performance of a single CPU, and that's only in certain situations. He remarked that a single fast CPU...

I think you hit the nail on the head for the low-resolution of the textures being a primary culprit. In the case of Crypt Killer above, the Saturn textures are quarter-resolution compared to the Playstation - take a close look at the "Now Loading" door texture at 3:28. No matter if the screen...

Thanks - and yes, the different 3D meshes (triangles vs. quads), as well as the UV mapping surely all play a role. Looking at it very closely, I think the biggest piece of the puzzle is the lower color depth of the textures on Saturn. Comparing the arms and pants of Chris in the last picture...

It probably has something to do with that. I read somewhere that the Saturn uses "forward texture mapping" versus the Playstation's simple affine texture mapping.... but then, it is my understanding that the former is actually a superior method, so it still wouldn't answer the quality...

Thinking about it further, it almost feels like the Playstation hardware better approximates sub-pixel texture map values better than the Saturn. Which is odd to me since the lack of sub-pixel precision on polygon models is what gives Playstation graphics that jittery/wobbly appearance. Curious.

So I've recently been dabbling with my new Steam Deck and getting some of my Saturn stuff on there. Something that I can't quite put my finger on is the texture clarity/pixelation of Saturn stuff that differs from comparable Playstation games. For whatever reason, Saturn games in their native...

Deep Fear is a Saturn exclusive RE clone that was actually competent for what it was. It probably didn't leverage the system's resources in the way you mention though.

That's a great observation. I've always been a bit perplexed at the rather large 512KB CD-Rom buffer in the Saturn (versus the Playstation's 32KB). That buffer might be the key in economically streaming in art/program data from the disc while the SCU frantically shuffles data into and out of...

Thanks for the replies above. Does anyone have a good answer for my other question, "... do all textures/sprites have to be redundantly loaded/sitting in main DRAM or can some of those assets load directly from the disc into VRAM and sit there exclusively? In other words, do all...

I think your assessments are correct. From the smattering of developer comments that I've seen over the years, one of them made a comment about the mistake of going with that insanely high resolution (for the time), leaving very little rendering budget for any detail. I can only imagine that...

I recently came across this article, "Could Bubsy 3D on Sony Playstation been a better looking game?" (http://mgarcia.org/2018/06/05/could-bubsy-3d-on-sony-playstation-been-a-better-looking-game/) from the website blog by Mike MGarcia (http://mgarcia.org/?blog=1). It's an interesting analysis...