Final Fantasy XII / FF12 revealed [!=56K]

So the amount of memory it relates to is main RAM where you have 32 MB... I find incredible that Square doens't have enough room for textures due to high polygonal models.
First, above said is just an assumption - I already explained memory use is Not the Only possible difference in my previous post.
Second, it's actually not difficult at all to waste most of that 32MB on everything else but graphics content memory - and some PS2 games have been quite "successfull" at doing that too.

Consider Splinter Cell used 4MB on PS2 and 8MB on XBox for textures Per Level. Which makes it only ~10-12% of available memory in both cases. And rest assured they didn't just leave the remaining 90% free :p ...
 
london-boy said:
Storage space could be a problem for a full-blown FF game on PSP....
Again, the main issue PS2 has with textures is the amount of memory available. And PSP wont have more memory than PS2, so i guess that means, even less space for textures, as well as smaller UMD format to put those textures on compared to DVD...

I guess it's time to whip out the old "but how come Gamecube and Dreamcast that has even less RAM has better textures than PS2 if memory is such an issue?" argument.
 
Grall said:
Tag, the PS has swimming textures NOT because it doesn't have Z-buffer, but because it lacks the per-pixel divide for perspective-correct texture mapping.

And if you want to see Painter's Algorithm, go fire up a PS1 game. Notice the utter lack of perspective correct texturing? Also the incredibly amusing texture alignment, warping, and swimming problems? (play Tony Hawk 2 for one of the most extreme examples)

Re-read what I said. I said lack of perspective correction was, ALONG WITH TEXTURE SWIMMING, a result of the system's reliance on PA.

Look at Saturn games, I haven't seen any saturn game with texture warping like in PS games.

As I said, it's because Saturn doesn't use Painter's Algorithm.

Oh, and some Saturn games have texture warping of a different nature. Fire up Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Powerslave, or Panzer Dragoon Saga, and get near a surface. Watch the quads as they start to leave the viewport.

Also, some old DX demos I got on my harddrive (DX5 era) have separate toggles for Z-buffering and perspective correct TM, and they do work. You can enable perspective correction without having to enable Z-buffer.

That's odd, I thought perspective correction was achieved using 1/Z? How can you have that Z value with no Z-buffer? Someone more knowledgeable care to explain?
 
Re-read what I said. I said lack of perspective correction was, ALONG WITH TEXTURE SWIMMING, a result of the system's reliance on PA.

Painter's algorithm alone isn't reason. The PlayStation relied on simple affine texturing.

Z-buffer is required for perspective correction. The algo requires correct Z values.

Actually this isn't quite true... I *does* make it a lot more straight forward on most hardware. There are image/mesh based warping methods to achieving perspective without any depth information..
 
As I said, it's because Saturn doesn't use Painter's Algorithm.

Saturn did use PA for 3D work - It's pretty much the only way to render without a Z buffer when using real time graphics hw.. ( Coverage based methods such as A buffer and span algorithms tend to operate at the pixel level, so require SW rasterisation, these were used in some of the doom style
engines on both Saturn and PS )

Oh, and some Saturn games have texture warping of a different nature

PS texturing mapped horizontal screen lines to arbitary texture lines.
Saturn took horizontal texture lines and mapped them to arbitary screen lines.

PS could handle triangles, but suffered from texture shearing along poly seams. Saturn handled quads well, but triangles required preprocessed textures. Both gaves perspective errors - just different ones...


That's odd, I thought perspective correction was achieved using 1/Z? How can you have that Z value with no Z-buffer? Someone more knowledgeable care to explain?

Perspective correction requires a Z value for each vertex of the triangle - this is then used to calculate the z value at each pixel fragment ( often by linear interpolation of 1/z ).
A Z buffer is used to give perpixel Z sorting.
 
Crazyace said:
Saturn did use PA for 3D work - It's pretty much the only way to render without a Z buffer when using real time graphics hw.. ( Coverage based methods such as A buffer and span algorithms tend to operate at the pixel level, so require SW rasterisation, these were used in some of the doom style engines on both Saturn and PS )

I dunno, last I checked Saturn used a different method, but I'll ask a Saturn homebrew dev later about it.

(-- turned out someone knowledgeable about it happened to be on IRC. He said yes, it does use PA - heh, oh well.)

PS texturing mapped horizontal screen lines to arbitary texture lines.
Saturn took horizontal texture lines and mapped them to arbitary screen lines.

PS could handle triangles, but suffered from texture shearing along poly seams. Saturn handled quads well, but triangles required preprocessed textures. Both gaves perspective errors - just different ones...

Quads and triangles are processed the same on Saturn - just triangles have two vertices in the same place. Textures look weird when warped like that. ^^;

Perspective correction requires a Z value for each vertex of the triangle - this is then used to calculate the z value at each pixel fragment ( often by linear interpolation of 1/z ).
A Z buffer is used to give perpixel Z sorting.

OK, fun stuff.
 
Now we're talking about Saturn hardware? Give me a day and I'll dig up as much info I can on the polygon side of the Saturn. I'm pretty sure that the Saturn only natively supported quads. Triangles were initially a beast to get running on the system, as Core complained about it before.
 
Yes, Saturn only supported quads.
The Saturn had a very powerful Sprite engine in the VDP1, so then the only way to work with was the use of distorted sprites as polygons. Many interesting things could be done on VDP1...

There are rumours that many games passed triangles as quads (by just using the same coordinates in two vertex) with the consequent low performance that this implies.
 
Trying really hard not to come up with something silly to post, just to fill in time...

Untile we get any news on this one, i guess this thread is gonna go down to then get bumped up again as soon as details get released...
 
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