Recent content by TapamN

Not every triangle drawn can be part of a substrip of 6 triangles. You're going to have strips that can't be 6 triangles long, like having to draw quads for UI elements, which will bring down the average. If you have a strip of 7 triangles, it would have to be broken up into a 6 triangle...

The video output chip of the Dreamcast runs at a mostly fixed pixel clock. It outputs pixels at a fixed rate for either NTSC/PAL 480i or VGA 640x480 60hz. The only other standard resolution that the DC's pixel clock matches is 640x400 at 70hz. To run at a higher resolution, the hardware has to...

It didn't make the image brighter. Whether or not the image is interlaced, a CRT TV would output the same number of photons per square inch. Brightness is perceived as by many photons hit a rod/cone in a given time. Non-interlaced vs interlaced brightness is like comparing an unmoving light bulb...

The driver collection at VOGONS includes Rendition Vérité and its SDK, so if you want to look at it's instruction set and hardware, it's right there. It's been a while since I looked at it, but IIRC, the original V1000 basically just has the custom CPU do everything. It's not like the N64, where...

The vector FPU instructions in the SH4 has some oddities compared to the regular FPU instruction. If you preform a register-to-register move, generally on the SH4, the result is ready instantly, on the same cycle the move is issued. You can copy one register to another and preform, say, an...

You mean the code in the spreadsheet? It normalizes 3D vectors, which is important when doing certain lighting calculations, so there's not much to see. It's software pipelined, which makes it faster than a straight forward implementation. What is does it this: void Normalize(vec3f *src, vec3f...

There was an official pipeline simulator as part of Hitachi/Renesas's HEW (high-performance embedded workshop) SDK, but I don't know when it was created. I've thought about making a pipeline simulator, but I was too lazy and just stuck with spreadsheets for the hard stuff, or doing it in my...

Looking up some tech docs, the GS seems to support a maximum rendering resolution of 2048x2048? It doesn't have the EDRAM to do that, but it should be possible to do render-to-texture for a 128x2048 texture if you wanted to, for some strange reason. I see no reason a game couldn't render to a...

I've talked about that previously. Relevant bit: Tiles are 32x32 pixels, so 640x480 would be 300 tiles. Horizontal antialiasing compresses each tile down to 16x32, and doubles the tile count. The number of polygons per tile is limited by available RAM, there's no hard limit otherwise.

Not a total gimmick, but still not that useful. Stuff like the 800x600x60hz isn't actually displaying a 800x600 framebuffer, but a 540x600 frame buffer. The rate at which the DC's RAMDAC outputs pixels has exactly two speeds, one for interlaced NTSC/PAL/RGB, and one for 640x480x60hz VGA. So you...

You technically can do vertical AA (I've done full 2x2 SSAA), but it's not really worth it. You have have to render the top and bottom halves of the screen separately, resubmitting geometry for each half. Another way to render above 1280x480, that I haven't tried, would be to generate the...

There's no reason someone couldn't modify KallistiOS's CD driver to add artificial delays to mimic the speed/seek times of a GD or CD. The KallistiOS CD driver is a bit weak and is might contribute somewhat to the framerate problems of the GTA3 port. It works, but it reads data off the disk...

That video seems to be encoded at 25 FPS, so there's going to be judder playing it back on a 60/120 FPS display. So it's still not the representation of how smooth it really is.

I wasn't trying to say the PS3 had less memory, I'm aware of the PS3's video RAM. I was comparing exclusively main RAM between the PS3 and 360 (and deliberately ignoring other RAM pools) to mirror the way davis.anthony was with the PSP and DC. Maybe I should have rephrased, "despite the 360...

I suppose this depends on what your definition of a large advantage is. I would consider stuff like the PS2 port of Deus Ex, where you have to go, break up, and redesign levels to make the game work, to be something that indicates a major advantage, whereas 360 vs PS3 seems like a minor...