And to kill arguments of Saturn 2d vs. Dreamcast 2d. the DC had far better 2d than the Saturn. This was confirmed by Yu Suzuki on many occasions. There should be little doubt that the SH4 and PVR2DC could outperform the 2d on the Saturn with enough competence. Hell, there was an internal emulator that would have been released to the public if the DC hadn't been killed off that would confirm the Dreamcast could handle the Saturn hardware with no problem. Well, there were problems but they were taken care of.
Saturn the last of the 2D powerhouse?
- Thread starter notAFanB
- Start date
This is interesting, if we imagine DC to realistically be able to sustain 5mio. polys, it means it could theoretically do at least 41500 opaque background planes at 60Hz, more if it can render quads rather than a pair of facing triangles...
Pretty insane.
Then again, to expect the console to actually be able to DO anything with all those backgrounds is likely to be way too much to ask as there probably would be zero processor time left after the CPU's done transforming all the vertices, building display list and all that. But, it's interesting, in a nerdy fanboyish sort of way.
Pretty insane.
Then again, to expect the console to actually be able to DO anything with all those backgrounds is likely to be way too much to ask as there probably would be zero processor time left after the CPU's done transforming all the vertices, building display list and all that. But, it's interesting, in a nerdy fanboyish sort of way.
Tagrineth said:
What about the lighting effects?
Another question , are you sure that there won't be bounds such as bandwidth?
And I don't remember any High-res sprites on the Saturn ( GGX runs @640x480 with high res sprites (i 'll look for the exact res of the sprites later))
Personally i think Guilty Gear X is out of the reach for the Saturn's power processing.
Talking of Guilty gear, a lot of people think the First one (Guilty gear psone Official site) was the better looking 2D games of the 32bits era (nothing less
).Sure he used flat poly therefore the 3D acceleration of the Psone, so it's irrelevant to the debate about pure 2D power processing.
Edit: I almost forgot to talk about the fact that GGX is actually a game that use 3D acceleration, wich slims the chance of a saturn being powerfull enough to handle the processing power required by GGX.
Edit 2: I found the specs required by Guilty gear X PC (From the japanese web site Here)
above PIII@700mhz ,128 mo of ram and a 3D accelerated video card with 16mo of Vram.
It looks like saturn would not have the power to run this one.
on a (sad) side note the PC version of the game seems to be incompatible with PowerVR KYRO, sad if you think about the fact that the original Arcade version runs on Naomi (powered by the PVR2DC)
if it really requires 3D Math then I'd imagine (come on go along with me here) that they could hack it. after all they came up with some noval solutions such as the 'floating arena' backdrop scaling for VF2 which worked well.
good question, what where the sprite/blit limits ont he actual proceessing units? although I'm pretty sure 704*400+ was supported without too much trouble (non 3D work here).
I'm not sure how to take those numbers really.
I'd suggest Radient silvergun (or anything from Treasure) as an better example than SFA2. from memory all it offered was more animation and (much) better load times.
no worries, this topic is strictly technical and should focus on the 'whys' and not 'ps1 couldn't do this even if brought it's granny along'...
notAFanB said:... this topic is strictly technical and should focus on the 'whys' and not 'ps1 couldn't do this even if brought it's granny along'...
I thought the topic was about the power of the saturn in "PURE" 2D, 'cause if the Psone's granny's name is 3D or flat poly...Psone could do it
notAFanB said:
Take them as they are : hints of the processing power required by GGX.
Even if this is a "Crappy port" an "above PIII 700 MHz" is MUCH more than what the Two SH2 could deliver...In fact it's much more than what the whole saturn could deliver, leave alone the soundcard and the 3D card part.
alright maybe I wasn;t being too clear on this but, how much more/less is that than what an DC could deliver? what aspect is this 'port' an indicator of what the games really requires and the challenges required for an saturn 'port'.
yuo can see where I'm going with this, but I trust PC 'requiresments' as far as I can hurl My lounge. I actually have the above game on my overclocked P3-800 / 512MB RAM + my (old) TNT2 Ultra (64MB OC).
it ran 'alright' in an non-playable kinda way.
Crazyace said:
I thought PVRDC's TBDR architecture makes overdraw a non-issue? The higher the overdraw the higher the effective fillrate??? I though fillrate only takes a hit if there are transparencies involved? This isn't multitexturing. For example 50 640x480 opaque quads one on top of one another wouldn't take up more fillrate than 2 640x480 opaque quads. Or am I missing something? Maybe Simon or Kristof can chime in.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
that's absolutely true, Vysez
while there are better examples of Saturn's 2D power, I like Rayforce aka Layer Section aka Galactic Attack. Even though it is not a game specifically made for Saturn, it was a port of the Taito F3 arcade game. Taito F3 was probably quite a bit more powerful than NeoGeo or CPS2.
edit: F3 specs from System16.com
Rayforce / Layer Section makes pretty good use of Saturn's power, imho, even though there are much more impressive 2D games, Rayforce is one of the few that I am familar with.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
alwaysgame? no, I don't think I have, Sonic.
URL needed to be certain, but that name doesn't ring a bell.
edit: nevermind, i just googled it. no I have not posted there. interesting forum, perhaps i will soon i did however, post at the segatech.com / dreamcast technical pages forum way back.
URL needed to be certain, but that name doesn't ring a bell.
edit: nevermind, i just googled it. no I have not posted there. interesting forum, perhaps i will soon
i did however, post at the segatech.com / dreamcast technical pages forum way back.While PS1 used triangles, they were just as 2d as Saturns quads. Neither machine had any actual 3d rasterizing features.Vysez said:
And they would look like 1 opaque quad.PCEngine said:
If we're doing paralax (hence screen sized quads), the whole point is to do lots of transparent layers.
PC-Engine said:
You are right, the internal Z testing of polys occurs at a far higher rate ( I think it may be 32/clock - couldn't say from memory at the moment ) and that would define the limit in this case.
At 32 pixels/clock, 100MHz you'd get ( 3.2e9/(640x480x16) = 173.6x overdraw with fully opaque in theory - which is way more than a Saturn ( esp. as all of these layers can be rotated/scaled.
Even with complete transparency you'd still get 5 640x480 screens - ( To compare with Saturn you'd get 20 320x240 screens, or 10 640x480i screens... )
Heh that quad example probably wasn't ideal. However a better example would be to use more small polys or quads for each layer. A simple example would be a 2D circle made up of flat polys over a screen sized quad. In that scenario you wouldn't be using up any fillrate due to transparencies. Similarly for parallax scrolling you would build the layers using small flat polys or quads. This would cut down the transparency by a whole lot. Of course it would use up more polys but at the same time save fillrate.
One can also argue that the only thing "truly" 2D about the two machines is the Saturn VDP2 backgrounds, since neither use hardware sprites. Therefore, fill-rate and effects "win" and the PlayStation is quite clearly the victor in those areas. Not that the background features are insignificant, but not too many 2D games put them to good use (a lot of 3D games did, though).Fafalada said:
Anyway, a head to head "real life" comparison is quite hard to do.. The best Saturn games, ie. fighters, impresses mainly with the amount of graphics data they hold in memory (Marvel vs Capcom on PlayStation is no mean feat, though). Games with insane amounts of sprites and transparency/particle effects tend to be more impressive on PlayStation, though. The DonPachi series of shoot'em ups are in fact running better on the PSOne. Also, Symphony of the Night is nothing but a travesty on the Saturn. Perhaps not a good example though, since much of the slowdown and other shortcomings are due to bad coding..
Believe me, it looks absolutely awful.Vysez said:Talking of Guilty gear, a lot of people think the First one (Guilty gear psone Official site) was the better looking 2D games of the 32bits era (nothing less
notAFanB said:
As a more relevant comparision the PS1 pixel fill rate ( for punch through transparency - not alphablending ) was effectively 33Mpixels/second.
At 320x240/60Hz that would give 7 layers ( with rotation/scaling )
In practise though - running backgrounds on PS1 or DC/Xbox/Ps2 wouldn't
be handled by a single sprite/poly, but instead a series of individual 16x16 sprites ( or some other size ) for each area in the background with graphics present ( A good deal of 5 backgrounds might actually be empty in a 2D game - especially if 1 'background' is actually a score/info plane.. )
So for a 'real' game situation - giving 5 effective backgrounds might take 50% of the frame time, and the remaining time available for 'sprites' would be comparable with the Saturn...
At the end of the day there wasn't any real 'technical' advantage in 2D terms - apart from the amount of memory available ( even without the cartridge, the extra 512k CDram, and extra 512k physical VRAM could be used by a dedicated programmer to good effect.. )
( As an aside - given the way the Saturn worked, it was easier to fix the frame rate at 60Hz and 'lose' any excess sprites - On the PS the general technique was to paint the screen, then wait for the next Vblank if possible before switching. Nearly all programmers operated on a pure painters algorithm drawing back to front compared to a priority approach where 2D sprites could be interleaved with the backgrounds. There was actually a priority mode that could be used to draw important front details first on the PS which wasn't really explained or used much.. )
