Worst system design flaws in consoles?

[Roly]

I was reading over an old post on Slashdot from John Carmack where he details problems doing the Atari Jaguar DOOM port. Anyways, apparently the Jaguar's textured fill-rate could have been tripled by the addition of 2 x 8-byte (64-bit) on-chip buffers... [edit]

"The blitter could do basic texture mapping of horizontal and vertical spans, but because there wasn't any caching involved, every pixel caused two ram page misses and only used 1/4 of the 64 bit bus. Two 64 bit buffers would have easily trippled texture mapping performance. Unfortunate." [JC]


Does anyone else have any candidates for bad architectural decisions (major or minor) that hamstrung a console disproportionately? Given the recent discussions I was thinking something like 4k tmem on the N64 perhaps, but examples from older consoles would be interesting too.

 

[zurich]

I'd probably say the 1.2gb GS<>EE bus would be #1. I'm no engineer, but I guess asking for double the clock rate or bus width would be out of the question...? IMO, the PS2 would be a beast if it had one of the above.

 

[zidane1strife]

ps2's underfeatured gpu combined with small amounts of vram(without this prob, the gap between ps2/cube/xbox would be even smaller.).... thankfully that won't happen again.... next time it'll be performance v.s. performance... and an even bigger leap than ever before.

 

[Zeross]

I would say that SFC's CPU (65C816 @ 3.58MHz) wasn't adequate even with the help of co processors. Graphical and sound abilities of Nintendo's 16 bits system were really astonishing but it lacked some horsepower I think.

 

[Guest]

Dont you think Xbox is one of the best designed consoles ever?

 

[MfA]

It would have been nice if the SH4 had had specific support for the perspective divide in its matrix unit ... even without it the Dreamcast was the most well balanced design of this generation though, every console graphics chip in this generation should have been a tiler (so I guess you can count that as a design flaw for PS2/Xbox/GC .

 

[Zeross]

Totally agreed : Dreamcast was a beautiful piece of hardware maybe a little on the low side in polygon performance (well at least compared to the rest of the system).

Going from N64 (released in 1996 in Japan) to DC (released in 98 in Japan) was a huge leap technically speaking. Since then we've only seen minor additions but nothing breathtaking : higher polycounts here, a little bump mapping there.

 

[Guest]

pfft, Dreamcast is over rated imo.
It is a great system but over rated.

Of course DC was a great leap, it was Sega next console after the Saturn. They need not be constraint by years of last generation research.

PS3 or Xbox2 or GC2(who ever comes first) will have that level of jaw dropping leap over the current consoles.

 

[duffer]

I think the N64 using ROM instead of CD-ROM has been the worst architectural decision so far. It cost them that whole console generation.

In this generation I think the possible candidates are:

+ GameCube's lack of DVD support.
+ Xbox's lack of in-the-box DVD support.
+ Xbox's hard disk. (Except you can't really do online games without it, so if console online games take off the hard disk is going to be seen as a really smart move.)
+ Xbox's original controllers. (But they fixed that.)
+ PS2's difficult-to-program architecture and lack of pixel shaders.

None of these are complete killers though.

 

[DeathKnight]

Xbox's hard disk.

You may want to rethink that

 

[archie4oz]

I was reading over an old post on Slashdot from John Carmack where he details problems doing the Atari Jaguar DOOM port. Anyways, apparently the Jaguar's textured fill-rate could have been tripled by the addition of 3 x 8-byte (64-bit) on-chip buffers...

Well that all depends on many factors. On-chip buffers by themselves may not necessarily help a whole lot, if there aren't any changes further down (and up) the pipe. How fast to execution resources consume the buffer? Can the memory controller fill the buffer fast enough to relinquish it's data tenure? If not, what changes to the memory controller, data lines, and/or any other buffers would need to be made as to prevent stalls elsewhere in the system...

I'd probably say the 1.2gb GS<>EE bus would be #1. I'm no engineer, but I guess asking for double the clock rate or bus width would be out of the question...? IMO, the PS2 would be a beast if it had one of the above.

Screw that! That would be waaaay down the bottom of the list...

#1 one thing would be *LARGER* D-CACHE! 16KB, would be ok, but I'd like both caches to be around 32KB, or even better Athlon sized L1s (64KB each)... Next would be micromem and VUmem on VU0 being upped to 16KB. Ideally SPRAM up to 32-64KB would be nice, and perhaps the VUmem on both VPUs a little higher (32KB, 64KB would be the bomb though)...

As for the GS, the first thing I'd want would be for it to draw 16 pixels instead of 8 when TME is enabled. Next would be no speed penalty for linear interpolation of m+1 filtering. Some fast, basic DOT3 support would nice. Support for non-power of 2 textures would be next. Finally if we were getting really greedy, an I-32 GS would the killer (even half would be nice), and not so much for texture caching (as one might think, although that would be nice too) but more off-screen draw space...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

+ Xbox's hard disk.

Let's see what could make it a design flaw...
- Power and heat issues - that's not much of a problem IMHO, the volume is usually set high enough so that the cooling's noise does not disturb you.
- The danger of wrecking within 5 years, stripping you of your saved games - it would be embarassing, but has no effect on the console's working otherwise.

I can't see those making the hard drive a design flaw in any way, especially not when compared to the other examples here...

On the other hand, there are the benefits:
- No need for a memory card, and also savegame files can get a lot bigger, making more complex game types possible (Project Ego and online stuff comes to mind).
- Temp space for games decreasing load times.
- Grab custom music.

And I'm sure some developers could come up with a few more things...

 

[Ante P]

+ Xbox's hard disk.

Let's see what could make it a design flaw...
- Power and heat issues - that's not much of a problem IMHO, the volume is usually set high enough so that the cooling's noise does not disturb you.
- The danger of wrecking within 5 years, stripping you of your saved games - it would be embarassing, but has no effect on the console's working otherwise.

I can't see those making the hard drive a design flaw in any way, especially not when compared to the other examples here...

On the other hand, there are the benefits:
- No need for a memory card, and also savegame files can get a lot bigger, making more complex game types possible (Project Ego and online stuff comes to mind).
- Temp space for games decreasing load times.
- Grab custom music.

And I'm sure some developers could come up with a few more things...

it added to the price of an allready expensive console...

 

[Glonk]

Which is not passed on to the consumer, which would hurt MS' bottomline more, but could also mean that's why it sold more.

HD + ethernet out of the box means a lot to what you can do with games.

Personally I would never consider it a design flaw, and would go as far as saying the lack of a HD on the other consoles is a design flaw.

You have no idea how much I hate memory cards.

 

[JF_Aidan_Pryde]

Half of the HDDs I've purchased within the last 5 years have died.
Other people have experienced worse. I just don't see how it can be viewed as "reliable" anymore. Only time will tell how bad this gets for the Xbox.

 

[PC-Engine]

I wouldn't consider GCN's mini DVD format a design flaw. It was an intentional design choice to keep the size of the console to a minimum and also kept the price down.

 

[mkillio]

I wouldn't consider GCN's mini DVD format a design flaw. It was an intentional design choice to keep the size of the console to a minimum and also kept the price down.

Don't forget Piracy.

I think the N64 using ROM instead of CD-ROM has been the worst architectural decision so far. It cost them that whole console generation.

I would put the texture cache over that any day. Also the console generation was just them and PSX. Plus they got a two disc PSX game on 64, Resident Evil 2.

 

[duffer]

think the N64 using ROM instead of CD-ROM has been the worst architectural decision so far. It cost them that whole console generation.

I would put the texture cache over that any day.

You'd be wrong. The tiny texture cache caused N64 games to have bland textures, but the lack of CD ROM was a much bigger problem, because it strangled games both for lack of data and much more importantly for lack of a cheap, quickly reproduced game media.

Check out the book "Revolutionaries at Sony: The Making of the Sony Playstation and The Visionaries Who Conquered The World of Video Games". (Admittedly a biased source, but not entirely incorrect.)

With the N64 game publishers had to order ROMs three months in advance, $50 per cart, minimum order 10,000 carts. While with the PSX the CD-ROMS cost under $10 and (in Japan) you could order your CD-ROMs a week in advance.

This made it much cheaper to develop a PSX game, because you didn't have to gamble nearly as much money when deciding how many copies to produce. And if you had a surprise hit (and most first time hits are surprise hits), you could make much more money on the PSX because you could quickly make more copies of the game to meet the demand.

 

[Ozymandis]

Also the console generation was just them and PSX.

*cough*Sega Saturn*cough*

Actually from the numbers that I've seen, Sega Saturn outsold n64 in Japan at the end of last generation 8)

 

[archie4oz]

It actutally ran neck & neck with the PSX in it's first 2 years in Japan as well...