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.
"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.