how bad a limitation was the 4k texture cache in N64 ?

I really have to wonder why that cache was designed so foolishly. Was it because SGI's engineers were too used to thinking in terms of offline rendering rather than real-time?
 
I'm not so sure "foolishly" is quite the right adjective to use. Also I wouldn't say offline mentality had anything to do with it (after all their workstation hardware was all about real-time visualization).

I'd say it was mainly about cost and manufacturing capability...
 
I'm not so sure "foolishly" is quite the right adjective to use. Also I wouldn't say offline mentality had anything to do with it (after all their workstation hardware was all about real-time visualization).

I'd say it was mainly about cost and manufacturing capability...

I agree, it wasn't all that unusual as a paradigm back then. The 3DO M2 used the same mechanism allbeit with a considerably larger "cache".
 
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