[Retro] Playstation pushed to the limit

[swaaye]

You sure that's not March 1996? AMD didn't start shipping Am5x86's until November 1995...

No, Dark Forces definitely came out 3/95. If what you say is true, then I was either running the machine's original Intel DX2 50 or a Cyrix DX2/66->80. Had to change the clock crystal to do that! It was enough for the games at the time though, for sure. ISA Diamond Speedstar Pro. I was actually impressed with that Cirrus Logic-based board because it was WAY faster than my original Trident 8900 ISA.

I did pick up a VLB mobo and AMD 5x86 133 then in 1996 probably. The CPU was only $40 or so. Promptly clocked it to the much-renowned 160 MHz. I was excessively poor at the time. Ran that until 1997, when I got a P2-233, Voodoo1 and Matrox Mystique.

I need to get my hands on a Tandy 1000TX. That would be fun to mess with again. Play some Sierra games in Tandy 16-color. Sweet.

The reason consoles weren't my thing back then (and still really aren't) is that I am a player of RTS, TBS, simulations, and FPS. C&C, Theme Hospital, Lightspeed, Master of Orion, X-Com, the Dooms, Descent 1 & 2, Dark Forces, TIE Fighter, Wing Commander series, MechWarrior 2, Betrayal at Krondor, Diablo. Most of those genres were totally absent from consoles, or really badly done in comparison. I am not into fighting games, platformers, or console RPGs. And that was mostly what consoles did. Consoles had crappy MP compared to PCs too, at the time. I used to play Descent and Doom 2 over Kali, along with Battle.Net on my 14.4 modem.

PS1 didn't have anything whatsoever on those experiences, IMO.

I love console racing sims though. Top Gear Rally, World Driver Championship, Gran Turismo, Forza, Rallisport Challenge, etc. I'm picking up a 360 and a wheel once some more decent racers hit. PC did some racers decent, but I don't get into it on PC as much. Need For Speed used to be a classy racer, and I like FlatOut. I liked NFS 1-4.

 

[cullenskink]

T-Rex demo

I didn't write the T-Rex demo itself, but at Sony I wrote the demo disc that the T-Rex demo is running inside in this movie. I had the source for the T-Rex demo and the assets... (and the manta ray, and various other Sony tech demos). That set of demos were around in 94 pre-Japanese launch and were used to persuade developers that the machine was worth developing for.

I demoed the T-Rex thing to developers at ECTS in 94 (well Sony's offsite thing) and many of the developers insisted on pulling the composite cables out of the console to check it was not coming out of some PC behind the scenes ;-)

I gotta say I can't remember what resolution it was, its so long ago! It was one of the higher ones which used too much VRAM to be commonly used in games, anyway - 512x480 maybe, but thats a guess.

Someone mentioned the MIMe technique, this was a bit spin based really, it was just that the GTE could do fast interpolation between vertices and so morph target animation was a reasonably quick thing to do.

Someone said the GTE was a floating point coprocessor - not true, PS1 had no FPU and the GTE was fixed point. The R3000A was severely cut down.

And yes, you couldn't see the texture distortion as it had a pile of tris so the linear interpolation wasn't so visible, and especially not on a stretching skin. You really did tend to see it in things like roads or buildings made out of very few polys.

Al

 

[swaaye]

So basically it was Sony's version of NV's Dawn. It was super impressive and used the hardware under ideal conditions, but was very, very unlikely in any game. Still cool to see this maximum potential; that's some slick rendering for the PS1 hardware.

 

[Nesh]

One game I d want to see how it run on the PS1 was Messiah. That game took development for some time on the PS1, Shiny even released screenshots but they canceled it.

 

[Phil]

So basically it was Sony's version of NV's Dawn. It was super impressive and used the hardware under ideal conditions, but was very, very unlikely in any game. Still cool to see this maximum potential; that's some slick rendering for the PS1 hardware.

Of course - but that's what technical demos are about: To show what the hardware is capable of demonstrating something specific.

Demonstrating content that factors in overhead for AI, physics, collision, game-mechanics is all good and well, but wouldn't really show what the hardware is capable of and wouldn't counter in that the [performance] needs are very variable and depend on the type of game, type of developers, perhaps even skill.

 

[Urian]

Something that comes to my mind is what is the real performance of Playstation?

I remember that an Intel 860 had similar posibilities and could put up to 30.000 pol/sec that compared to the 500.000 pol/sec of the GTE seems ridiculous. What is the real performance in-game of Playstation?

I know that the question seems very silly, but I want to know how is possible that a difference like this could exist between 2 arquitectures that are very similar (same clock speed, both RISC and scalar, both with a 3D engine).

 

[Nesh]

Something that comes to my mind is what is the real performance of Playstation?

I remember that an Intel 860 had similar posibilities and could put up to 30.000 pol/sec that compared to the 500.000 pol/sec of the GTE seems ridiculous. What is the real performance in-game of Playstation?

I know that the question seems very silly, but I want to know how is possible that a difference like this could exist between 2 arquitectures that are very similar (same clock speed, both RISC and scalar, both with a 3D engine).

From Wikipedia thats what we get

Central processing unit

An early PlayStation motherboard
An early PlayStation motherboard

MIPS R3000A-compatible (R3051) 32bit RISC chip running at 33.8688 MHz

The chip is manufactured by LSI Logic Corp. with technology licensed from SGI. The chip also contains the Geometry Transformation Engine and the Data Decompression Engine.

Features:

* Operating Performance of 30 MIPS
* Bus Bandwidth 132 Mbit/s
* Instruction Cache 4 KB
* Data Cache 1 KB (non associative, just 1024 bytes of mapped fast SRAM)

Geometry transformation engine

This engine is inside the main CPU chip. It gives it additional (vector-)math instructions used for the 3D graphics.

Features:

* Operating performance of 66 MIPS
* 360,000 flat-shaded polygons per second
* 180,000 texture mapped and light-sourced polygons per second

Sony originally gave the polygon count as:

* 1.5 million flat-shaded polygons per second;
* 500,000 texture mapped and light-sourced polygons per second.

These figures were given as a ballpark figure for performance under optimal circumstances, and so are unrealistic under normal usage.

Data decompression engine

This engine is also inside the main CPU. It is responsible for decompressing images and video. Documented device mode is to read three RLE-encoded 16×16 macroblocks, run IDCT and assemble a single 16×16 RGB macroblock. Output data may be transferred directly to GPU via DMA. It is possible to overwrite IDCT matrix and some additional parameters, however MDEC internal instruction set was never documented.

Features:

* Compatible with MJPEG and H.261 files
* Operating Performance of 80 MIPS
* Directly connected to CPU Bus

Graphics processing unit

This chip is separate to the CPU and handles all the 2D graphics processing, which includes the transformed 3D polygons.

Features:

* Maximum of 16.7 million colors
* Resolutions from 256×224 to 640×480
* Adjustable frame buffer
* Unlimited color lookup tables
* Maximum of 24-bit color depth
* Maximum of 4000 8×8 pixel sprites with individual scaling and rotation
* Emulation of simultaneous backgrounds (for parallax scrolling)
* Flat or Gouraud shading, and texture mapping

Sound processing unit

Features:

* Can handle ADPCM sources with up to 24 channels and up to 44.1 kHz sampling rate

Memory

* Main RAM: 2 MB
* Video RAM: 1 MB
* Sound RAM: 512 KB
* CD-ROM Buffer: 32 KB
* Operating System ROM: 512 KB
* PlayStation Memory Cards have 128 KB of space in an EEPROM

CD-ROM drive

Features:

* Double Speed, with a maximum data throughput of 300 kB/s
* XA Mode 2 Compliant
* CD-DA (CD-Digital Audio)