How come N64 games generally had poor framerates?
- Thread starter I.S.T.
- Start date
I take it that's why Nintendo turned from Rambus to Mosys to provide memory solutions for their hardware.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
I was going to say that a ~62 MHz pixel pipeline/engine (the Reality Display Processor part of the RCP) should've been able to provide decent framerates at resolutions lower than 640 x 480.
the things to blame have already been mentioned, and seem to be the answer. had those weaknesses not existed, we could've /should've had a 60fps Mario64, a 30fps Pilotwings64, a 30fps Zelda OoT, and so on
the things to blame have already been mentioned, and seem to be the answer. had those weaknesses not existed, we could've /should've had a 60fps Mario64, a 30fps Pilotwings64, a 30fps Zelda OoT, and so on
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So if RAM latency is the main problem in theory with Wii emulation we could have stable (not faster) on the top of what the game could do
Probably more stable, but wouldn't it depend if it was HLE or LLE? LLE emulation usually has perfect emulation, including the faults of the hardware, doesn't it?
pretty much. I've heard of games relying on broken parts of, say, the NES' sprite processer(Just a basic example.) to pull off some trick/bad programming.
edit: that reminds me of something. at a board I go to dedicated to rom hacking(Doesn't host roms.), one guy who was working on a fan translation of one of the SNES FF rereleases on the PS1(he's translating it to polish,I believe) mentioned that the "emulator" that Square used in FF6 was an abomination. according to him, it was a mix of emulation, simulation and the game's original coding, IIRC. he called it one of the worst hackjobs he'd ever seen.
Thanks for the info on the n64. I've never had luck finding too much info on how the consoles from before the DC/PS2/X-Box/GC gen worked that I could understand.
edit: that reminds me of something. at a board I go to dedicated to rom hacking(Doesn't host roms.), one guy who was working on a fan translation of one of the SNES FF rereleases on the PS1(he's translating it to polish,I believe) mentioned that the "emulator" that Square used in FF6 was an abomination. according to him, it was a mix of emulation, simulation and the game's original coding, IIRC. he called it one of the worst hackjobs he'd ever seen.
Thanks for the info on the n64. I've never had luck finding too much info on how the consoles from before the DC/PS2/X-Box/GC gen worked that I could understand.
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Not necessarily.
A LLE can upgrade functions or remove bottlenecks of an emulated componant/system.
megadrive, I believe your knowledge would be helpful on Wikipedia. I have lost myself for weeks at a time working on stuff over there. 
I put a bunch of effort into a Architecture & Development section of the N64 article months back. ERP answered a bunch of questions for me about N64 a couple of years ago and I referenced that info. I'm sure it's in need of tweaks and fixes tho.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64
I put a bunch of effort into a Architecture & Development section of the N64 article months back. ERP answered a bunch of questions for me about N64 a couple of years ago and I referenced that info. I'm sure it's in need of tweaks and fixes tho.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64
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Iron Tiger
Regular
You guys are overanalyzing the problem. The reason why most N64 games had terrible framerates is because the developers were selling games based on screenshots, and not enough people were bothered by the framerate to hurt the sales of choppy games. It's not that the N64 couldn't run games at 60fps (as a few games like F-Zero X and Dark Rift evidenced is totally possible), but detail must be sacrificed. It's very simple and it's the reason why we see 60fps traded off for 30fps even today on the X360 and PS3. I'm happy to report, however, that most of the Wii games I saw at E3 ran at a steady 60fps.
Well, of course. But the detail had to be dropped so low that you basically had no polys and very limited texturing left. Take a closer look at what's left in FZero X. They couldn't do that to Goldeneye and make it look decent IMO. Doom64 and the horrible Hexen port used sprites and still didn't do 60fps.
Plus, Rayman 2, Rogue Squadron, and World Driver Championship ran fine and looked better than most of the 15 fps turkeys.
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i think this thread lacks a bit of perspective. there were quite a few PSX and SAT games that had poor and sometimes downright embarrassing framerates. the N64 was basicly keeping the status quo with those systems. it's not that games couldn't run at 60fps, it's that games couldn't run at 60fps and do what the developers wanted to do with the game (in terms of graphics, interactivity, ect). that generation of consoles was the first real step towards "true" 3d games in the home. think of them like the atari VCS/Intelevision of 3d games.
MK4 was very detailed and that was 60fps
I still have my N64, and my MK4 too. And I have to say that it´s very hard to call it very detailed, even for its time.
You know, there's plenty of reasons why N64 games had bad framerates. These same reasons can be applied to the Playstation and Saturn as well. For most devs it was a new way of making a game and they may have had a difficult time of getting teady framerates. It ushered the 3D era for home consoles and it mus thave been no easy task of switching to that.
I do not know how good or bad Nintendo's documentation, dev kits, and tools were for the N64 but I can imagine they weren't nearly as good as Sony's but far better than SEGA's at the time.
My question to those devs is did the RAM upgrade make getting steady framerates on the N64 much easier, or was it more of an architectual flaw?
I do not know how good or bad Nintendo's documentation, dev kits, and tools were for the N64 but I can imagine they weren't nearly as good as Sony's but far better than SEGA's at the time.
My question to those devs is did the RAM upgrade make getting steady framerates on the N64 much easier, or was it more of an architectual flaw?
Megadrive1988
Veteran
megadrive, I believe your knowledge would be helpful on Wikipedia. I have lost myself for weeks at a time working on stuff over there.
I put a bunch of effort into a Architecture & Development section of the N64 article months back. ERP answered a bunch of questions for me about N64 a couple of years ago and I referenced that info. I'm sure it's in need of tweaks and fixes tho.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64
hehe, thanks. though I'm definitally no expert. i'm no engineer, or hardware guru, I just remember things, relative to other things, and use some "common sense" and "what ifs".
i'm sure you guys know more about the in's and out's of N64 architecture better than I do.
heh, the funny thing is, N64 was actually more powerful than SGI's lowend to midrange workstations of the early 1990s (1990-1994) as far as texture-mapped polygons/sec. by the time N64 came out though (summer 1996) SGI had refreshed its entire lineup of machines, from lowend to highend.
I wonder how different / slower the technology was that SGI offered to SEGA in 1992-1993, before SGI went to Nintendo? Sega complained that what SGI offered them did not provide good enough framerates.
ok, now you all have me thinking (again) of what could've been.
my "ideal" Nintendo 64 would've been a machine that provided Voodoo Graphics level performance which would be somewhat higher than the actual N64, but slightly below 3DO M2 (say oh, ~200k to 250k fully featured polys/sec) 8k or better yet, 16k texture cache, a 150 MHz MIPS CPU, 9 MB of high-bandwidth, fairly low-latency RAM, a cartridge slot for smaller games that required very fast loading and built in 64DD or equivalent drive (no CD-ROM) for larger games that could still have reasonably decent loading times. no need (IMO) for CD-ROM since really, most of the time, the large capacity was really only used for was FMV and CD soundtracks. alternatively, no 64DD, and instead a 4x CD-ROM with a large amount of cache (like Saturn) but that would still be slow.
N64 games would have higher polygon counts than PS1 games, with far more features applied, moving at equal if not better framerates.
easy to use API and tools like 3Dfx had.
price the originally announced $250 or even $300.
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