This proves that when programmed properly the Sega Saturn...

the saturn has NO floating point units
psx has floating point units

the saturn's VDP1 has no hardware support for translucency
psx has hardware translucency

the saturn rendered all 3D using 4 sided polygons dispite the industry using 3 sided polygons
psx uses industry standard 3 sided polygons

the saturn's VDP1 only supporteded 16bit color
psx supports 32bit color

the only REAL hardware advantage (out of the box) the saturn had over the psx was in sound (technicly), amount of memory, faster INT. performance, larger and more colorful sprites, and a more powerful I/O proccessor. i'm a sega fanboy but i can't sugercoat the past.

 

the psx had no floating point units

 

Oh come on, the GTE is so fast we should grant it FP status honoris causa .

 

Nope.. Playstation 1 had no FPU, And the GTE was fixed point only.

Saturn did have hardware support for translucency, but the source-based rasterising system it had meant that you'd often get multiple writes of your blended pixels. So it was next to useless. When no scaling of source->destination was involved, it worked perfectly well.

Well.. it did have quad primitive types too.. Infact, seeing as PS1 didn't have strip support (or index support), using quads saved a reasonable amount of memory..

PS1 was nowhere near as good as Saturn when it came to 2D stuff, but considering Saturn went through most of its initial design as a follow up to the Genesis (with no 3D capabilities), this isn't too surprising..

Cheers,
Arnie

 

well shit, i was under the understanding that while the r3000 had no fpu the gte did

well... i guess i should rephrase that then. VDP1 has no useable hardware translucency support. VDP2, OTOH, had a pretty rediculous feature set for it's time.

 

What were the advantages in the saturn's 3d graphics over psx?
I heard at one point that the saturn could do more polygons, however I heard that was actually counting one of the saturn's rectangles as 2 psx triangles, plus the saturn's polygons were harder to work with.

If you gave the n64 and psx equal ram setups to the saturn how would they compare in 2d?

 

Really enjoyed the video.

I cant believe the Saturn was doing that, i just cant.

So acording to Suzuki Shenmue on DC was using a port of the Saturn engine, if this is the case how much better the DC version could end up looking?

 

No, bith the N64 and Playstation would still do worse at 2d if they had the same amount of memory as the Saturn.

 

Dont remember seeing a 2D game on the N64.
How did the machine compare to the Saturn in 2d?

Im sure hardware support for anti aliasing and filters etc would make even 2D look better on the 64.

 

Yoshi's Story, Mischief Makers(some nice scaling effects in that), and some Goemon game. There were many 2d games in Japan. Bangai-O, Legend of the River King, and more. There was a 2d scrolling shooter in America, but I believe it sucked.

 

Sorry to go a little off topic but I didn't think that it was worthy of its own thread.

Which was more technically powerful Genesis or SNES and how? I have friends that say Genesis and I totally disagree but I have no facts to back my self up.

 

Deadmeat, if the Genesis was far far more powerful than the SNES like the Saturn was far far more powerful than the PS1, then we know the story.

 

3 times faster? hardly. it had way less features, inferior sound, and only supported a limited color pallet. sure it's main processor was faster than the snes, but it couldn't hold a candle graphically to the snes hardware.

 

Err NO.

The Megadrive has a more powerful processors (an 8 MHz 68000 + a Z80 sound chip), but the SNES had massively more powerful graphics processor (more colour on screen, more sprites, more playfields and more effects (translunecy and playfield scaling/rotation (Mode 7)).

So its was basically a draw... Some games worked well on Megadrive others on SNES,

 

You can "twist" quadratic primitives to create real curved surfaces. Technically this is caused by a flaw in Saturn's edge detection, but hey, the flaw ends up looking pretty damn good. For an example, look at the terrain in Shining Force III, especially the corners of mountains.

Not necessarily an advantage, but it can look very cool and give a more 'natural' look to some kinds of surfaces.

Saturn doesn't even have a full usable MB more than PS1 does, and they both have exactly the same WRAM - 2MB. IIRC Saturn has 4.5MB whereas PS1 has 3.5MB; it's been a while, so I can't remember the exact counts offhand anymore, but those numbers should be right (Sat - 2MB WRAM, 512KB each for the VDP's, 512KB for the SH-1, and 1MB for sound - PS1 - 2MB WRAM, 512KB graphics, 1MB sound).

N64 has stock 4MB unified, and can be expanded to 8MB. Saturn can be expanded to 8.5MB with a 4MB RAM card.

IIRC, while N64 does have a functional 2D ucode available, not one single game actually used it, favouring 'faked' 2D using textures on screen-aligned polygons.

 

The same argument is brought up all the time - and I always wonder what 3d capabilities are people talking about?
PS1 rasterizer is just a simple 2d accelerator, quite similar to Saturns "sprite renderer" (although with slightly different interpolation approach).
IIRC it was faster then Saturns renderer (higher fillrate and polygon setup), but it wasn't 3d in any real sense.
The only really "3d" advantage PS1 has, is the fast vector math capabilities that GTE provided.

And on that note I dunno why PS1 is dubbed to be weak in 2d either, absurdly enough, sometimes even compared to older machines.
I don't know what fillrate equivalent both VDPS combined amounted to, but I doubt it was that big of a difference either, even if they were faster then using PS1 GPU strictly for 2d fill.

 

Well if you use fullscreen flat background planes, VDP2 effectively does 4-5 full screen layers, even transparent, at 60FPS... and if you use "Mode 7" effects you can still do 1 3D and 2 2D layers, or even 2 3D (bandwidth, more than computation, prevents 5 full planes from being used in most cases, especially when 3D planes are concerned).

VDP1 has enough sprite-generation power to fake full, damn good looking 3D worlds on its own (Shining Force III, Burning Rangers, Panzer Dragoon II and Saga, QUAKE/Duke3D/PowerSlave(Exhumed in Europe), and of course the unreleased Shenmue appears to be doing next to nothing on VDP2 as usual). Lobotomy's three FPS games for Saturn really show off how much VDP1 can render - look at Quake, it's more or less an exact conversion of the PC game.

Basically, the whole reason Saturn is so much "better" for 2D is that it has two pools of memory for frame buffer (more bandwidth), can fill its frame buffers to the maximum while only sacrificing colour depth, which isn't that severe in 2D if you use pallettes well (results in very high-res output), and the load balancing allows it to manage much more "stuff" in real-time compared to PS1.

PS1 can do niftier tricks, though - for example, look at Castlevania:SOTN (Nocturne in the Moonlight in Japan)... while KCEN did indeed do a horrific job of porting it (tons of extra load times despite Saturn having more RAM and a far and away better disc loading mechanism), there are scenes were NitM does legitimately over-tax the Saturn with its mixed-mode 2D and 3D, forcing the VDP1 to work "too hard" within the scope of a 2D game.

Basically, in my opinion, "which is the more powerful system" is a toss-up... both can generate, at their maximums, about equal graphics quality, with each having advantages in different areas. I feel that Saturn is a "superior" architecture because of the extreme versatility inherent in its design, however that of course hinders it in the real world due to the difficulty in coding. PS1 can push out the same graphics with half the effort... which is why PS1 obtained much more mind-share from developers, which resulted in Saturn's premature demise.

--

By the way, I hear that an updated SDK was released by Sega within a month of Saturn getting the axe, officially - which was capable of more than doubling Saturn's max poly count - but it was never used by any games because devs weren't interested anymore, and Sega's plans to nix the hardware were already final... (IIRC, Virtua Fighter 3 was being developed using the techniques included in the SDK) Not sure on this info, of course. Sonic?

 

the saturn can display sprites with up to 64 colors while the psx can handle a mere 16 colors/sprite (just like the snes). this, combined with the saturns dual VDP solution (one for backgrounds and one for sprites) and extra overal memory gave the saturn a nice advantage in 2d.

arg, don't get me started on the shoddy quality of this port, though. seriously, there are so many effects missing from the saturn version, even some simple 2d effects, that it almost feels like playing the atari vcs version of mario brothers (the game is a generation higher than the system). to me, and it's been a while since i've fired up either the psx or saturn version, it looked like they faked several effects using screen facing poly's and never re-worked them into sprites when the ported it to the saturn.

i think the saturns maximum poly count (listed at 500,000) was largely inflated by sega to combat marketing form sony. seriously, i think they added the polygon throughput they each sh-2 could transform and added them together to come up with the number. the reason the number was unatainable, besides the normal limitations of SMP, was that the saturns 2 sh-2's shared a single memory bus.

 

even if it was ever released. the effort can easily be trashed by bastard reviewers. i can still remember how gamespot thrash soukaigi ps(by yuke for square) in their review back then. it was a great game with a very good soundtrack and nice graphics/art. how they came out with poor tex and control etc blah.. beats me. and if i'm not wrong, the game is even badly previewed during tokyo game show. just some of my thoughts..