[Retro] Playstation pushed to the limit

[Simon82]

You have to remember how Playstation made the other vendors nervous about the 3D capabilities of the system, only Nintendo was saved but I ever believed that SGI pact was a consequence of the 3D Playstation.

Atari (sadly for them without no money) started Jaguar 2 with 3D acceleration and a powerful CPU, Sega started to find a good 3D chip and 3DO was working on M2, all them as a result of Playstation existance.

And 3D general industry that understood what 2d to 3d transition would give them in terms of money.
We will not see a so powerful event like this transition in game industry. Maybe if someone will give us some kind of virtual reality that will shut off the "3D image on 2D monitor" era.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Was the Playstation really that powerful? We got a 100 MHz Pentium-powered PC right around the time the Playstation came out, and I seem to recall it doing a pretty good job with Quake 2 and Tomb Raider.

 

[Simon82]

Was the Playstation really that powerful? We got a 100 MHz Pentium-powered PC right around the time the Playstation came out, and I seem to recall it doing a pretty good job with Quake 2 and Tomb Raider.

Well.. we got a 100Mhz Pentium without 3D hardware acceleration and few tridimensional games. PSX has got a computational unit that rendered 3D geometric and texture mapping. Also with its R3000 33Mhz it was really powerful I think. I think that SDK was at low level programmability too, wasn't it?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Was the Playstation really that powerful? We got a 100 MHz Pentium-powered PC right around the time the Playstation came out.

And what did that cost? My bro' bought a Pentium pretty new for £1000+. No computer at $300 could compete, which has been unsual for consoles. Sure, you can get more powerful hardware, but at higher prices and less effective use.

 

[Polygon Crusher]

Hi,
I would share a thing discovered today trying one of the best PSX emulator around the web. I'm talking about "psX" a really good "all in one" emulator that make use of dynamic recompiler to achieve an average CPU occupation of 30% on most games on my Athlon 64 3500+.
Well.. today I've run the tech demo disc 1 of original 1994 release where you could try the famous Dinosaur real time rendered model showed at the original presentation conference (I'd love to see this on video but it was lot of time ago) and I've found that with this tech demo my CPU is working at 65%!!
Now I understand why editors told that it seems it was impossible that dinosaur was running in real time on the final production plactform.. just more one polygon and this console would probably explode.

Did you remember this? And what about the sprite tech demo I don't find.. ?

LOOOOL!?
Ok I used to test some PS1 games on my P166mmx (166Mhz) and a voodoo2 card. I used a demo of the BLEEM! emulator which did not allow 3D acceleration to be enabled for the Voodoo2 card so all was done on the CPU.
All tested games ran fluid including the Dino from the original demo disc, with higher resolution and better graphics precision (30-60fps and better filtering of the textures). MGS ran like a dream and I can only imagine how it would have run with the Voodoo2 card helping it out (BLEEM! demo didn't allow one to turn 3D acceleration)!

 

[Nesh]

This was indeed one of the greatest achievements ever on Sony's old console.

I remember when I first popped in the disk and tried this tech demo. I was blown away! I really wished it was an actual game.

The animation is top notch. You can see the vains, muscles and skin stretch and move like the real thing

 

[Polygon Crusher]

LOOOOL!?
Ok I used to test some PS1 games on my P166mmx (166Mhz) and a voodoo2 card. I used a demo of the BLEEM! emulator which did not allow 3D acceleration to be enabled for the Voodoo2 card so all was done on the CPU.
All tested games ran fluid including the Dino from the original demo disc, with higher resolution and better graphics precision (30-60fps and better filtering of the textures). MGS ran like a dream and I can only imagine how it would have run with the Voodoo2 card helping it out (BLEEM! demo didn't allow one to turn 3D acceleration)!

I forgot to add that the sound was good to but dont remember if the 3D sound effects where on (I had a SB live installed in the comp)!

 

[Lazy8s]

The Saturn handled the scale of Hong Kong and the other complex environments of Shenmue in its build of the game, and the system was even slightly ahead of the PlayStation in release.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=UE2smkBf5kg

 

[fearsomepirate]

And what did that cost? My bro' bought a Pentium pretty new for £1000+. No computer at $300 could compete, which has been unsual for consoles. Sure, you can get more powerful hardware, but at higher prices and less effective use.

I was just responding to claims like "It threw around polys like no other home hardware at the time." No one was talking about price/performance, so I wasn't, either.

 

[Fox5]

Surely we have to think that all the polygon capabilities of this console has been used to move a single, on black flat background, model that used also that kind of modelling named before.
Impressive indeed... while Manta demo has not got this kind of complexity but lot of sprite moving around the fish model with cool effect.

Was the T-rex demo really done on a psx though? It doesn't seem to have any of the texturing problems that every psx game suffered from. The nasty crawling textures that liked to bend and deform almost at random. Not to mention polygon clipping.

Oh, and on a note of what was more powerful, PSX or Pentium...well, I had a 133mhz Pentium, and it couldn't come close to running the PC port of FF7 acceptably. For that, it took a 200mhz Pentium PRO.

 

[Nesh]

Was the T-rex demo really done on a psx though? It doesn't seem to have any of the texturing problems that every psx game suffered from. The nasty crawling textures that liked to bend and deform almost at random. Not to mention polygon clipping.

Oh, and on a note of what was more powerful, PSX or Pentium...well, I had a 133mhz Pentium, and it couldn't come close to running the PC port of FF7 acceptably. For that, it took a 200mhz Pentium PRO.

Yes its on the PSX. I have it and it doesnt suffer at all from these issues. The resolution is also very high compared PSX games

btw about FF7, I had a 800MHZ pentium back in teh old days and when I put FF7 through Bleem it playied the game and sound at blazing speeds It was unplayable but the graphics playied better than my PSX. The actual PC port though playied slower and had graphical issues

Makes you wonder why the port was so badly made

 

[Simon82]

LOOOOL!?
Ok I used to test some PS1 games on my P166mmx (166Mhz) and a voodoo2 card. I used a demo of the BLEEM! emulator which did not allow 3D acceleration to be enabled for the Voodoo2 card so all was done on the CPU.
All tested games ran fluid including the Dino from the original demo disc, with higher resolution and better graphics precision (30-60fps and better filtering of the textures). MGS ran like a dream and I can only imagine how it would have run with the Voodoo2 card helping it out (BLEEM! demo didn't allow one to turn 3D acceleration)!

But compare PSX in the 1994 with the 1998 Voodoo2 card don't make sense.

 

[Simon82]

Was the T-rex demo really done on a psx though? It doesn't seem to have any of the texturing problems that every psx game suffered from. The nasty crawling textures that liked to bend and deform almost at random. Not to mention polygon clipping.

Oh, and on a note of what was more powerful, PSX or Pentium...well, I had a 133mhz Pentium, and it couldn't come close to running the PC port of FF7 acceptably. For that, it took a 200mhz Pentium PRO.

Yeah.. they give you the demo on Demo1 disc on every console so you could try yourself it's running in real time.
That screenshots has been taken by me on PSX emulator.

 

[Fox5]

So if the psx could do graphics without all the texture problems, how come no games ever did graphics without texture warping?

 

[fearsomepirate]

Oh, and on a note of what was more powerful, PSX or Pentium...well, I had a 133mhz Pentium, and it couldn't come close to running the PC port of FF7 acceptably. For that, it took a 200mhz Pentium PRO.

And the PC port of Devil May Cry requires a ridiculously powerful PC. Also, I submit the PC port of Halo as Exhibit B.

 

[Nesh]

So if the psx could do graphics without all the texture problems, how come no games ever did graphics without texture warping?

Who knows? But then again all resources were concentrated on one model, and in that tech demo the only thing you could do was twist the view angles, turn its head left and right, open its mouth and make it show off its teeth.

If thats a question because you dont believe this was running on the PSX I d feel offended because I (and others) have no reason to lie about it. We have the demo disc (Atleast I have) and I assure you this is achievable and controlled on my PSX

 

[Jacob]

Who knows? But then again all resources were concentrated on one model, and in that tech demo the only thing you could do was twist the view angles, turn its head left and right, open its mouth and make it show off its teeth.

You could zoom in and out as well.

 

[Fox5]

Who knows? But then again all resources were concentrated on one model, and in that tech demo the only thing you could do was twist the view angles, turn its head left and right, open its mouth and make it show off its teeth.

If thats a question because you dont believe this was running on the PSX I d feel offended because I (and others) have no reason to lie about it. We have the demo disc (Atleast I have) and I assure you this is achievable and controlled on my PSX

I wasn't questioning it's validity, just why the PSX, though capable of avoiding texture warping, had it in virtually every 3d game, if not every 3d game.

And the PC port of Devil May Cry requires a ridiculously powerful PC. Also, I submit the PC port of Halo as Exhibit B.

All ps2 ports to PC seem to require ridiculously powerful pcs, I'd imagine they just straight port the code and use the cpu for a lot of things the graphics card should be doing. PS1 hardware was closer in its design to a PC, additionally, whereas the PS2 ports are likely not using a large part of the power of the PC (by ignoring most of the capabilities of the graphics cards), a software rendered game should be using pretty much 100% of available resources, so I'd imagine it would be relatively more efficient.
I don't think the Halo port was that bad...granted cpu and memory requirements were a bit ridiculous considering the hardware it ran on (to actually get equivalent performance), but it ran surprisingly well on low end geforce 3 and 4 hardware, at least as well as the xbox version. I believe there were quotes from Gearbox that they had to make the shader code a lot more cpu dependent than on the xbox because of directx requirements, so once again an example of offloading things to the cpu when they shouldn't be. FF7 didn't really have that option on something that really only has a cpu, so I propose it's not completely unreasonable to say a 200mhz Pentium Pro matches or exceeds the entire PSX (cpu, audio, and video) in capability.

 

[phat]

So if the psx could do graphics without all the texture problems, how come no games ever did graphics without texture warping?

The T-Rex probably does have texture warping, but since it's composed of so many polygons, you don't see it. Textures warp only inside polygons. At polygon vertices texture coordinates are accurate. Thus, the smaller your polygons (or the more per area of screen space), the less severe the texture warping.

In games, with multiple characters on-screen and non-trivial backgrounds, you don't have the luxury of using so many polygons to avoid texture warping.

 

[see colon]

The T-Rex probably does have texture warping, but since it's composed of so many polygons, you don't see it. Textures warp only inside polygons. At polygon vertices texture coordinates are accurate. Thus, the smaller your polygons (or the more per area of screen space), the less severe the texture warping.

In games, with multiple characters on-screen and non-trivial backgrounds, you don't have the luxury of using so many polygons to avoid texture warping.

QFT. this is why you'll notice warping in FPS and racing games on the floor and walls, because they (walls and floors) are made out of large polygons viewed at pretty consistant angles (so you have a "better" referance for where the texels are supposed to be.).