It has been discussed on these boards before but, I think never satisfactorily explained I think.
That is: Why the Playstation had much higher resolution textures in general in its games than N64.
To the best of my knowledge (obtained via what I deem to be reliable sources) the N64 had a 4 Kb texture buffer, while the Playstation had a 2 Kb one.
The N64 buffer was halved when doing trilinear, which means they are essentially the same size.
According to ERP though, in an answer from one of the few threads that discussed, among other things, the subject at hand, the N64 cache is explicitly loaded.
Which in turn should mean that the Playstation cache is a true associative cache, while the N64 has either what could also be described as a scratchpad or a simple directly mapped cache.
The strange thing is though, that the disadvantages of the scratchpad or simple buffer should be quite easily overcome with well crafted code and models.
Especially when you consider that the N64 is a fixed platform with many exclusive games, and the task at hand, rasterizing polygons, is quite predicable and linear.
For example you could split textures into multiple smaller pieces to fit exactly to polygons. This would be especially effective and easy over ground and wall textures.
The N64 could have high texel destiny, as evidenced by some games, it was just the same small 32x32 or 64x64 that was tiled extensively.
There is very little evidence of things improving a lot over the lifetime of the console though (apart from very early rush-ware), even from first party efforts.
That is: Why the Playstation had much higher resolution textures in general in its games than N64.
To the best of my knowledge (obtained via what I deem to be reliable sources) the N64 had a 4 Kb texture buffer, while the Playstation had a 2 Kb one.
The N64 buffer was halved when doing trilinear, which means they are essentially the same size.
According to ERP though, in an answer from one of the few threads that discussed, among other things, the subject at hand, the N64 cache is explicitly loaded.
Which in turn should mean that the Playstation cache is a true associative cache, while the N64 has either what could also be described as a scratchpad or a simple directly mapped cache.
The strange thing is though, that the disadvantages of the scratchpad or simple buffer should be quite easily overcome with well crafted code and models.
Especially when you consider that the N64 is a fixed platform with many exclusive games, and the task at hand, rasterizing polygons, is quite predicable and linear.
For example you could split textures into multiple smaller pieces to fit exactly to polygons. This would be especially effective and easy over ground and wall textures.
The N64 could have high texel destiny, as evidenced by some games, it was just the same small 32x32 or 64x64 that was tiled extensively.
There is very little evidence of things improving a lot over the lifetime of the console though (apart from very early rush-ware), even from first party efforts.
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