Saturn the last of the 2D powerhouse?
- Thread starter notAFanB
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Given that competing console designs face similar restrictions on R&D budget, die space, and manufacturing processes, the potential for performance they allow tends to be roughly similar. However, as a result of the spectrum for implementation, the practical performance they give is not always so similar (like in Saturn 3D vs PS 3D, or Saturn 2D vs PS 2D).
VNZ said: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).
I truely believe you, that's why i said "a lot of people"
I have Guilty Gear on psone (Jap version) and it doesn't look any better than anything else (maybe not awful...but definitely not the best 2D game of the 32bits era)
But a lot of people truely think this game push a lot the Psone on the 2D side.
PC-Engine said:
The 7 layers comes from max theoretical figures - and assumes worst case ( Every tile containing a mixture of opaque and punch thru transparencies.. )
In practice 7 layers would be easier, as an actual game would be very likely to have many empty tiles in each layer.
( I cant see people working on many 2D tiled games for PS1 at this stage though... PS2 however ... )
Vysez said:
It uses a special compression algo to fit a HELL of a lot of frames.
If you turn frame skipping off in the options menu, you should notice quite a bit of slowdown in-game.
Anyway, I still doubt that Saturn couldn't do Guilty Gear.
Those PC port specs are a load of crap. Dreamcast has a 200MHz CPU that isn't as efficient as a P3... so obviously whoever coded the PC port needs some good old-fashioned firing.
I stand by what I said earlier - even if the sprites aren't large, consider that Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter uses sprites optimised for 320x240, and if both players do assists or team supers at the same time, there is no slowdown - and four 320x240 sprites roughly equals one 640x480, right? I mean, in a logical sense. Plus the added burden of tracking and animating four sprites rather than two.
Tagrineth said:
A PC isn't dedicated to gameplay (and PC port are 99% never über-optimized), it needs more raw power to achieve the same stuff that a dedicated console cpu like the SH4 can do, wich is actually a 64bits processor (FP only) wich deliver 1.4 GFlops.
IIRC GGX rely heavily on 3D acceleration and therefore on FP units of the SH4 ....
OK the port isn't brilliant that's for sure, but a PIII 700MHz is around 3 Gflops , wich is "only" 2 time the SH4 perf.
There's others DC to PC (SegaGT ,Crazy taxi..) port and they all needed this kind of specs...
Anyways all those specs are millions miles away from saturn's ones.
Edit:
are you talking about Guilty Gear (Psone) to be port to Saturn or Guilty Gear X (DC/PS2).Tagrineth said:
Because if it's the first , it will be highly feasible, but if it's the latter , i really doubt that could be possible (even if we put aside the ram size)
this is simple, the saturn had 2 display proc's, one for backgrounds and one for sprites (or poly's, as the case may be). pretty much every 2d game used the vdp's as they were intended (not counting the odd psx port here and there), so pretty much every 2d saturn title took advantage of SMP. also, this gave the saturn the ability to effectivly use 2 different resolutions. in some 2d saturn games, you would have fantastic high res backgrounds and pixelated sprites.
also, the psx has some strange limitations for 2d. if memory serves (and it sometimes does not) the psx could only use sprites up to 16*16 pixels in size (but they could be scaled up to 256*256) and could only have 16 colors per sprite, while the saturn could do larger (32*32 or maybe 64*64) sized sprites and 64 colors/sprite. i'm not 100% on the sprite size, but i'm quite sure of the color limitation. to put that into comparison, the psx had basicly the 2d capabilities of a snes per sprite but could display virtualy limitless sprites.
as for a good 2d comparison, quality wise (not game quality, graphics quality) primal rage was much better looking on the saturn than psx. sfa3 was rediculously better than it's psx counterpart (i even prefer it to the dc version, but i think alot of that is controller preferance), and vampire saviour, astal, and MKR a fantastic example of what can be done with the saturn 2d power.
clockwork night and bug used 3d backgrounds and 2d characters, nights was almost all 3d. mr. bones OTOH, is damn impressive, though. especialy the huge t-rex, tons of animation on that thing. but mr. bones was a bit on the jaggy side. demonstrating the high detail background, low detail sprite syndrom mentioned abobe.
IIRC, scalable sprites on the PSX was limited 8*8 or 16*16, but 1:1 blits could be of an arbitrary size up to 256*256. I'm quite sure all color modes were available (CLUT4, CLUT8, RGBA16). Like on the PS2 you'd better take the texture cache into consideration, so in practice I suppose most engines went with a "tiling" solution (incidentally most arcade boards only use 8*8 and 16*16 anyway).see colon said:
Sega Saturn could blit sprites up to 504*255 in size. Pretty odd, but hey.. it's the Saturn.
As for the theoretical max amount of sprites, both machines supposedly blit undistorted (non-scaled, non-rotated) sprites faster than any other textured primitive -- but I don't have a clue how big the difference is. Anyone?
Well, that's pushing it.. The game doesn't really use 3D acceleration other than for blitting the sprites, and some non-transformed polygons for the effects. It isn't really doing anything differently than most 2D games on Saturn and PlayStation.Vysez said:
Saturn didn't "really" support hardware sprites either.notAFanB said:
What was the real capabilitys of the background VDP?see colon said:
I understand that "all" it could basically do, was to scroll backgrounds, and do two mode7 style planes.
How usefull is that really in 3d games? I mean how many percent of the power in for example a Playstation game is used for drawing 2d backgrounds?
What is SMP? Simple Multi Processing maybe?
Squeak said:
Yeah, it's pretty much a beefed up SNES (sans sprites). It does 4 backgrounds (with scrolling and limited scaling) or 2 planes with full scaling+rotation (three axis, no HBlank fiddling necessary). There's also some classic functions like line scrolling, vertical offset, windowing and mosaic.
It wasn't entirely insignificant in early 3D games. Practically all fighting games and many sports titles used VDP2 for the ground, and its solid perspective rendering made quite a difference over traditional PSX/SS style warped textures. DecAthlete is a good example and, IMO, one of the best looking 32-bit 3D games. Without VDP2 backgrounds, the devs would have to sacrifice either framerate or resolution.. So, I'd say it made an impression.Squeak said:
I'd have to dig out my PS1 manuals (I saw them the other day while 'tidying' at home) but IIRC sprites were simple double pumped textured quads (exactly twice the speed). They had exactly the same limitation of the standard PS1 texture hardware but were restricted to scan-line aligned rendering.VNZ said:
Are you sure about the colour restrictions? IIRC we used them for all our overlays/menus etc and we used 256 colours, it was just expensive so nobody used in it real sprite situations.
Very useful. A lot of developers used this to create floors/roofs on 3D games since the apparence hadn't the lack of perspective correction and it was nearly free. One example of this is Street Racer and I think that Choro Q too.
There is also more on the VDP thing. I think that due to a bug in the way VDP 1 works you could get curved surfaces on screen that they weren't actually curved. That's a limitation in the quad drawing algorythm and was used in games like Grandia ore Nights.
Time ago, I remember reading this on SXT:
http://www.phantasy-star-universe.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=10381&st=0&#entry82293
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Wow that's amazing! But didn't it warp around quite a bit, shattering the illusion somewhat (it's a long time since I played Nights)?ShinHoshi said:
Would something similar be possible on hardware that uses the z-buffer as reference for perspective correction, by manipulating the z image in various ways (for example texturemapping it)?
Vysez said:see colon said:
Fine example , Astal is very representative of the Saturn 2D power.
Thanks see colon , i forgot the name of this one (i remembered it as "astral" and i was sure that the name was slightly different)
Hmm, looks very similar to 32x's 2d games, like that hummingbird game.(and I remember knuckles chaotix to look sharper than that, but I could be mistaken, and knuckles chaotix had rather busy backgrounds, but the artistic style sucked compared to the genesis sonic games)
Squeak said:
According to some article about the history of nvidia, nvidia's president was crazy about how much easier it was to make a perfect sphere out of quads than triangles.(how much easier was it, half the polygons?)
Also, sega's higher ups didn't have things quite in focus. The people who mattered weren't really concerned with consoles, just that the console was weaker than arcade machines but still capable of handling downgraded ports.
