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[Alexios]

It wasn't more powerful but did have certain strengths allowing uniquely awesome games (and of course it was a 2D powerhouse which meant you got tons of both SNK & Capcom among other devs' 2D games without going for the more expensive SNK only Neo Geo and its way more expensive games but hey, Sony touted 2D is dead and folks ate it even though 3 decades later 2D still offers great fun now, never mind back then with 3D in its infancy). Regardless, loads of games used Saturn with great results, whether from small studios within Sega with little time to turn over the next game like Panzer Dragoon to Zwei, the Sega Rally, Virtua Fighters, Virtua Cops port teams, etc., small studios outside Sega like Lobotomy with Quake, Powerslave, Duke Nukem 3D, etc. and random devs with stuff like AMOK, Drift King 97, GunGriffon 1 & 2, Grandia, Soviet Strike, Bulk Slash, Resident Evil...

Also, nothing was set in stone in that stage of 3D, the successful system that was the PS due to marketing, the turned upside town press relations & 3rd party relations cemented the way it did things was the way to go, not vice versa. Saturn wasn't alien but similar to arcades many were familiar with.​

Even early on, titles like Tomb Raider (a less performant but earlier version than what PS got with missing water effects and vastly lowered draw distance enabling better performance and other graphical features), NFS, ThunderStrike 2 and others from third parties showed more than promise vs the competition. It also got a lot of crap (or simply great but not exactly technically ambitious) games of course, just like any other platform before and since then. The rest just didn't have the means, whether time, money, skill or more importantly any care to seriously support the way less performant in sales platform. But to say you needed more budget or whatever to utilize it well when random, small, no name devs made miracles on it is misguided. Just like saying Sega only had arcade games when they had loads of longform games themselves like 2x Dragon Force, 3x Shining Force III, Shining the Holy Ark, Deep Fear, Panzer Dragoon Saga and others (hell, Shenmue would have been on it had it lived on), as well as many more 3rd party games (as for racing, Saturn was dead and buried long before Gran Turismo changed trends and that's why many of these didn't even get translated). Either way, Saturn in any region had more than enough games for any type of gamer considering attach rates of 10 to 15 games per system back in the day, even if you throw in rentals you'd still be spoiled for choice with its many gems, if only you gave it a chance/the media mentioned they exist.​

Love this guy's anniversary & tribute videos, glad he did another for this year. Pretty much all you need to post when clowns talk about how this or that system had no games/bad 3D graphics/etc., even if it doesn't only show the best - or all of those - as plenty less than stellar games were cool.

Some less known yet grand games shown in the most recent video are GunGriffon II, Bulk Slash and Shinrei Jusatsushi Taromaru, but there are loads more where these came from, Stellar Assault SS, the Gundam Blue Destiny trilogy, Soukyugurentai, Groove on Fight, the Digital Pinball games, etc.

Sega's amazing & varied catalogue is at the forefront no matter what some clowns claim online but third parties offered a ton of awesome stuff, often exclusive or way better on the (more affordable than a Neo Geo) Saturn than the PS, like SNK & Capcom's games, Grandia or Silhouette Mirage.

Reminder that for the last decade or so the bad emulation reputation of the Saturn doesn't apply. Emulators like SSF and Mednafen (RA Beetle core) are as accurate as any system's for the vast majority of its great library (just don't expect the enhancements other emulators like Yaba & Kronos do).​

Some visualization for some of the mentioned (and some not mentioned) games, without citing the god tier Sega stuff like Panzer Dragoon Saga only (which is all you need to look at alongside BR or Lobotomy's stuff to know talk about it lacking lighting or whatever is also pure bs, lol).
​

 

[S0ULZB0URNE]

Much better in 2D, was like Neo-Geo on steroids.

 

[squidilix]

On 2D and Audio hardware (like MIDI), yes the Saturn was better.
Otherwise, lightning, texturing, shadow, alpha texture, polygonal 3D (Saturn can't do polygonal) PS1 was better and more efficient.

 

[Warnen]

It is arcade perfect(as good as). What type of gaf level gamer thinks an iconic arcade game doesn't still look great? What next? SF2 turbo on SNEs looks rubbish?

“Arcade perfect” back then. Doesn’t hold up today. While the 2d gems on the Saturn still hold up to the best 2d stuff 30 years later. 3d graphic age like eggs, 2d is like fine whine.

 

[Muddy]

2D Graphics Yes.

3D Graphics No.

What next? The Dreamcast was more powerful than the PS2?

 

[Azelover]

It was more powerful overall. It had more RAM and the system was handling more data at any given time. Tricky thing is you had to make games a very specific way to use all of the power in a eficient way... so it got a bad reputation due to the results..

 

[Badlucktroll]

If microsoft also made a console during this gen instead of the next the controller would look like this

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

Another myth is that Saturn is better in 2D

Playstation has incredible 2D games without having to use a memory expansion.This is called efficiency.
I've never seen anything on Sega Saturn like Legend of Mana, Valkyrie Profile, Guilty Gear and Saga Frontier 2

Capcom vs Snk Pro even Street Fighter Alpha 3 doesn't owe much to the Saturn version, no matter how excited fans say it does.
the Sega Saturn's 2D advantages are insufficient.

 

[Soltype]

Okay I'm confused, are people arguing whether or not the Saturn was more powerful than the PlayStation or whether or not the PlayStation had better looking 3D games?

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

Okay I'm confused, are people arguing whether or not the Saturn was more powerful than the PlayStation or whether or not the PlayStation had better looking 3D games?

power

 

[Buggy Loop]

Croc Saturn even as a benchmark against Croc PSX doesn't even win that one out.

 

[Futaleufu]

Saturn was the first console that required people to handle two processors at once. It was very powerful if you knew how to get the performance out of it. However in most cases outside of sega games. Everything was a port from PlayStation. Sega did add the second processor after seeing PlayStation 3D capabilities.

Atari Jaguar

Another myth is that Saturn is better in 2D

Playstation has incredible 2D games without having to use a memory expansion.This is called efficiency.
I've never seen anything on Sega Saturn like Legend of Mana, Valkyrie Profile, Guilty Gear and Saga Frontier 2

Capcom vs Snk Pro even Street Fighter Alpha 3 doesn't owe much to the Saturn version, no matter how excited fans say it does.
the Sega Saturn's 2D advantages are insufficient.

The KOF97 ports in PS1 and Saturn shows how much better the Saturn was for Neo Geo ports.
Samurai Shodown 3 is another good example.

 

[RoboFu]

Another myth is that Saturn is better in 2D

Playstation has incredible 2D games without having to use a memory expansion.This is called efficiency.
I've never seen anything on Sega Saturn like Legend of Mana, Valkyrie Profile, Guilty Gear and Saga Frontier 2

Capcom vs Snk Pro even Street Fighter Alpha 3 doesn't owe much to the Saturn version, no matter how excited fans say it does.
the Sega Saturn's 2D advantages are insufficient.

Nick Rox is that you?

 

[Warnen]

Another myth is that Saturn is better in 2D

Playstation has incredible 2D games without having to use a memory expansion.This is called efficiency.
I've never seen anything on Sega Saturn like Legend of Mana, Valkyrie Profile, Guilty Gear and Saga Frontier 2

Capcom vs Snk Pro even Street Fighter Alpha 3 doesn't owe much to the Saturn version, no matter how excited fans say it does.
the Sega Saturn's 2D advantages are insufficient.

Blue shadows….

 

[s_mirage]

It had more RAM and the system was handling more data at any given time.

It had 0.5MB of extra VRAM by virtue of VDP2 having its own RAM, but that was all the stock Saturn had extra (other than the CD drive's dedicated RAM), and it wasn't like that extra RAM could be used for just anything. Also, one half of the Saturn's main RAM was slower than the other, and that's before we get to contention issues due to both CPUs sharing the bus.

The KOF97 ports in PS1 and Saturn shows how much better the Saturn was for Neo Geo ports.
Samurai Shodown 3 is another good example.

While I do think the Saturn has advantages over the Playstation for 2D games, those examples don't really say anything about the Playstation's inherent ability to push 2D graphics. The Saturn versions were better because they used RAM expansion carts. RAM was the main limiting factor for a lot of 2D games. The Neo Geo CD had more RAM than the stock Playstation and Saturn combined.

 

[Alexios]

It had near/90% arcade perfect CPS2 ports before the 4MB/1MB carts like SFA2 Gold and Vampire Savior (and many that aren't arcade ports like Silhouette Mirage, Street Racer or games cited for great use of VDP2 alongside sprites and polygons like Radiant Silvergun or the also better on Saturn Thunder Force V). Since it got the carts there was 0 reason to not go for it & do even better (at least once Capcom figured out how to properly use them). Of course the differences don't show well in screenshots so if you're blind to attack animation frames like some folks you claim such bs

So efficient, to make the 2D intro a FMV instead of moving sprites/bgs etc. and suddenly graphics/backgrounds/animation frames, essentially 2D graphics eye candy, is cut because it's also efficient, it's only a problem if cuts are in Saturn versions of games or 3D games, also one shit 2D game having a shittier port on Saturn means Saturn wasn't better or had any advantage in 2D so I guess we can cite one or more 3D games Saturn did better to also equally prove PS wasn't better in that 3D stuff either, am I right? I'll start with Need for Speed & Mass Destruction I guess, solid games even

Primitive Bonus:
​

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

The KOF97 ports in PS1 and Saturn shows how much better the Saturn was for Neo Geo ports.

I don't think so. the only difference is when the characters stand you can see more frames of animation in the Saturn characters, but this doesn't interfere in any way with the gameplay. the ps1 version is a good port, this is called efficiency.

but as I said the Sega Saturn can use expansion cartridges to have a small subjective advantage.
Mortal Kombat Trilogy is better on PS1, 2D always better on Saturn is a myth.

 

[MrCunningham]

I still remember reading about the original Playstation Japanese release in magazines like GameFan magazine. I didn't get my hands on a PS1 until I was able to rent a unit like November 1995. The first games I ever played for the the machine were Wipeout and Rayman. I also had a Saturn too.

On paper, the Saturn probably had a lot more horse power under the hood, but it is entirely a 2D based machine. The Playstation is an efficient piece of hardware and specialized in rendering triangles on the screen. It seemed like devs had to work less to get it to do more.

 

[bundylove]

As someone who owned both , i am laughing

 

[RoboFu]

I still remember reading about the original Playstation Japanese release in magazines like GameFan magazine. I didn't get my hands on a PS1 until I was able to rent a unit like November 1995. The first games I ever played for the the machine were Wipeout and Rayman. I also had a Saturn too.

On paper, the Saturn probably had a lot more horse power under the hood, but it is entirely a 2D based machine. The Playstation is an efficient piece of hardware and specialized in rendering triangles on the screen. It seemed like devs had to work less to get it to do more.

I still cannot believe the pc fx. The pc engine has one of the most advanced graphics processors of its time. They went all in on cd rom fmv being the next big thing.

 

[MrCunningham]

I think Dragon Force is a really good example of what the Saturn could do with sprites:



The system could throw around 100's 2D scaling sprites on a 3D background pretty effortlessly. Which is something that the Playstation would probably struggle doing.

 

[cartman414]

It had 0.5MB of extra VRAM by virtue of VDP2 having its own RAM, but that was all the stock Saturn had extra (other than the CD drive's dedicated RAM), and it wasn't like that extra RAM could be used for just anything. Also, one half of the Saturn's main RAM was slower than the other, and that's before we get to contention issues due to both CPUs sharing the bus.



While I do think the Saturn has advantages over the Playstation for 2D games, those examples don't really say anything about the Playstation's inherent ability to push 2D graphics. The Saturn versions were better because they used RAM expansion carts. RAM was the main limiting factor for a lot of 2D games. The Neo Geo CD had more RAM than the stock Playstation and Saturn combined.

The PS1 lacked a lot of Saturn's dedicated 2d functions. Even non-RAM expanded Saturn to PS1 ports (i. e. Grandia, Thunderforce V) needed cutbacks. The RAM expansion games threw the gap into sharp relief. AD&D Collection couldn't even be ported.

PS1 used polygons to fake sprites, which cost a ton of RAM.

 

[onQ123]

I'll be better on Saturn
None of this matters
Dreaming of Saturn, oh

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Could Saturn even do transparencies whether it used 1 or both cpus?

PS1 games had tons of that shit, which cool at the time and gouroud shading (sp). Saturn transparencies were more like micro checkerboard pixels.

 

[Spiral1407]

Except it didn't have a late gen redemption and overtake it's main rival globally.

I'm talking about the hardware lol

 

[nkarafo]

Doesn't matter if it was much harder to develop for though, does it?

 

[RoboFu]

Could Saturn even do transparencies whether it used 1 or both cpus?

PS1 games had tons of that shit, which cool at the time and gouroud shading (sp). Saturn transparencies were more like micro checkerboard pixels.

That's another thing. Yes it could but again not easily. You had to juggle the vdps. Also some devs just imported triangles and add one extra vertices to make them quads. This worked but made the texture draw on itself if using transparencies. The guy who programmed sonic r talks about this on his you tube channel. He came up with a neat way to do transparent fade ins though. The game plays like shit but has some cool technical things going on for the time.
That guy how ever was the go to assembly guy which brings us back to the Saturns poor sdk.

 

[Crayon]

What next? The Dreamcast was more powerful than the PS2?

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

Doesn't matter if it was much harder to develop for though, does it?

No, the Saturn just has less juice, it was a very primitive product.
most fmv runs in windowed mode, the transparencies are dots, no shadows, no light effect, limited textures, 15~20fps.
Sega made a mistake by changing its design to match the PS1, they should have kept the original design and sold it for $199

 

[s_mirage]

I still cannot believe the pc fx. The pc engine has one of the most advanced graphics processors of its time. They went all in on cd rom fmv being the next big thing.

The PC-FX GA PC card did have some 3D acceleration, though it looks quite poor. I half wonder if they intended for that to be part of the console, but it turned out to be so weak that they attempted to pivot.

Could Saturn even do transparencies whether it used 1 or both cpus?

Can of worms. There's more than one way to do transparency. VDP1 can do it, but it's limited, slow, and it's glitchy if the transparent quads are distorted. That's why meshes were used most of the time. VDP2's 2D background planes can be blended/made translucent, and VDP2 can treat pixels from VDP1 as transparent over VDP2 layers, but that can cause VDP1 objects to seemingly disappear if one passes behind another. See, the objects themselves aren't actually made transparent, pixels from VDP1's framebuffer are. It's like printing a photo onto a transparency and placing it over a background.

A few other games, notably Burning Rangers, did some more complicated trickery, but that had its own issues.

 

[Soltype]

power

I thought the consensus was that it was more powerful on paper.

 

[Trogdor1123]

I thought this was well known? But the Saturn was just impossible to work with at the time? I always wonder what they could do now after learning all the tricks on the old systems. Really max them out.

 

[RoboFu]

I thought this was well known? But the Saturn was just impossible to work with at the time? I always wonder what they could do now after learning all the tricks on the old systems. Really max them out.

Home brew is really just starting on the Saturn and advent of the saroo has jump started that interest even more. People are already starting to do things like fix the crappy SOTN port.

 

[ManaByte]

Another myth is that Saturn is better in 2D

Playstation has incredible 2D games without having to use a memory expansion.This is called efficiency.
I've never seen anything on Sega Saturn like Legend of Mana, Valkyrie Profile, Guilty Gear and Saga Frontier 2

Capcom vs Snk Pro even Street Fighter Alpha 3 doesn't owe much to the Saturn version, no matter how excited fans say it does.
the Sega Saturn's 2D advantages are insufficient.

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

I thought the consensus was that it was more powerful on paper.

consensus among laypeople, numbers released by Sega Saturn marketing come with a bunch of asterisks.
I will deconstruct some. Saturn has 2MB of ram, yes the ps1 also has 2mb of ram but the ps1 uses a single pool, the Saturn has 1MB of fast memory and 1MB of slow memory, this is a serious obstacle for some types of games.

Saturn has 1.5mb Vram while the ps1 has 1MB, again the ps1 uses a single pool while the saturn's vram is destined for the vdp1 and vdp2 chips, leaving only 0.5mb for textures and effects. Less than the 1MB of the ps1.

To make it easier for friends to understand, everything, everything that makes a 3D game beautiful is inferior on the Sega Saturn compared to the PlayStation (Transparency, shadows, light effects, particles, models and textures, even fmv most are windowed mode, and low fps 15~20fps.

 

[kevboard]

yeah, as far as I know he is correct.

the Saturn can calculate more polygons, has a higher fillrate, better texture mapping... and generally is more flexible thanks to the VDP2.

I think the only area where the PS1 beats the Saturn is in shading polygons.
so if a game relies a lot on just flat or smooth shaded polygons, the PS1 will have an advantage.

but, I am pretty sure the Saturn beats the PS1 in literally everything else.

the big issue really came down to the oddities like using quads instead of triangles, and the challenges programming for it.

 

[Impotaku]

I'm sure this info will become useful when sega makes a time machine to go back to stop themselves becoming a 3rd party.

 

[nkarafo]

There is Hellslave and Irreel, which is both a Quake Arena clone and a Unreal clone that look pretty snazzy.

Eh, i still think the released Quake game is more impressive than those.

These demos are interesting but also very boxy and empty in comparison.

And also, Quake 2 on PS1 beats all the above.

 

[SirTerry-T]

Proving once again, power isn't worth a shit if accessing that power is more labour intensive and time consuming,.

Also worth considering, Argonaut were pretty bad at picking platforms, they chose ST over Amiga for example!

That's because the ST was better for those sort of 3d games. Sort of like the Speccy was better than the C64 in the same way....faster processor bruv.

Also I'd hazard a guess that Jez San knows far more about this sort of thing than the majority of Neo Gaf.

 

[nkarafo]

Much better in 2D, was like Neo-Geo on steroids.

Not even close. The Metal Slug 1 Saturn port was barely arcade perfect, even with the 1MB RAM expansion.

And that's just the first game. Metal Slug 3 is even more advanced with tons more animations. No way the Saturn would handle that.

There is no way a slow ass CD based console with only 2MB RAM would handle the best looking Neo-Geo games. Neo-Geo's biggest strength was it's massive cartridges that were so fast, they could stream sprites and animation frames in real time, not much RAM required.

The Neo-Geo CD needed a whooping 7MB of RAM to compensate for the change from carts to CDs. Even with the RAM carts the Saturn didn't have that much RAM.

 

[Alexios]

^ true, but conversely it does 2D things Neo Geo doesn't like display more sprites (and not waste sprites to draw the backgrounds like Neo Geo), in higher resolution, hw scale and rotate them, and enhance further with a faster CPU & 3D. Of course Neo Geo games were made with Neo Geo's specs in mind hence wouldn't benefit from any of that unless they were fully remade to make up for cut down frames or whatever else with enhancements elsewhere utilizing the Saturn's strengths, which would also be impossible to 1:1 port back to Neo Geo (even without 3D effects added) but nobody would attempt to. So, nah, it wasn't inferior just because it couldn't do everything the same for the practical reasons stated like not making Saturn a cartridge game console (plus you could get great ports for way less than buying essentially arcade games for home as with Neo Geo before CD).

 

[BlackTron]

He said Saturn was more powerful AND it should have been easier to work on (ya know, for normal people). He backed it up by making the same 3D game on both and the Saturn version does not look inferior.

I'm not much of a Saturn fan but I'm getting a kick out of the people who think they are smarter than this guy. Because *checks credentials* they like Playstation.

 

[Trogdor1123]

Home brew is really just starting on the Saturn and advent of the saroo has jump started that interest even more. People are already starting to do things like fix the crappy SOTN port.

I saw something about that the other day. Pretty neat. I’d love to see how far they can push this stuff now.

 

[Saber]

Didn't Saturn has alot of inferior quality games? Something like mesh-transparency, double-pixels, etc?

 

[PaintTinJr]

Proving once again, power isn't worth a shit if accessing that power is more labour intensive and time consuming,.

And yet I'd argue it even goes beyond that good point you've made because power, like with the PS5 IO and other features yields more of what a developer needs, and in this case texturing is a form of power metric in GPU hardware and at that time PlayStation supporting higher texture sizes (64x64,128x128, 256x256) with 128x128 being commonly used with performance in mind, versus Saturn (32x32,64x64,128x128) with 64x64 being chosen with performance in mind was the bigger power.

Far superior texturing completely negated the x4 throughput of polygons as facetted quads meshes but limited to 32x32 pixel textures on Saturn vs PlayStation using polygon meshes and x4 or x8 the texture quality.

At a consumer level at the time poor texturing was more of a limiting factor than approximated geometry with less polygons. Despite the N64 being a next-gen hardware, Nintendo - like Sega because of their own game design - fell into the same hole as the Saturn of not seeing that higher quality texturing added more signal quality to noisy low polygon meshes for non-kiddy games far more than higher polygon counts with lower quality texturing. The N64 being the only device I've ever read off using colour index mode texturing, and it wasn't even powerful enough for Mario 64's Terminator 2 inspired metal Mario texturing to look good.

Looking at the final renditions of PlayStation 1 games it seemed like everyone had learned to bake fx into textures by then, and were using higher throughput flat shaded polygons with higher quality texturing to get 3 tiers better visuals than PS1 launch games and better performance too.

By contrast Saturn would have had to sacrifice quad throughput to split geometry into 4 mesh parts to provide texture parity, and by which stage the problem of using quads on low polygon models with small parts would have likely been impossible to maintain even with the facetted geometry as it was - like the Croc faceoff shows of duck on Saturn - without a performance hit.

What was nice in the Saturn version of the Croc faceoff is the mathematically correct perspective projection of the textures compared to the PS1 version, which IIRC was a PS1 library fix late in the gen I remember from an old Kings Field to Souls retro video.

 

[nkarafo]

^ true, but conversely it does 2D things Neo Geo doesn't like display more sprites (and not waste sprites to draw the backgrounds like Neo Geo), in higher resolution, hw scale and rotate them, and enhance further with a faster CPU & 3D. Of course Neo Geo games were made with Neo Geo's specs in mind hence wouldn't benefit from any of that unless they were fully remade to make up for cut down frames or whatever else with enhancements elsewhere utilizing the Saturn's strengths, which would be impossible to 1:1 port to Neo Geo just the same (even without 3D effects added) but nobody would attempt to. So, nah, it wasn't inferior just because it couldn't do everything the same for the practical reasons stated like not making Saturn games on cartridges (plus you could get great ports for way less than buying essentially arcade games for home as with Neo Geo before CD).

The poster wrote "Neo-Geo in steroids" so i responded to that.

You are also right though. The Saturn is a more capable console, when it comes to the actual raw power. It's just that it's gimped by the CD and small amount of RAM. The Neo-Geo had access to much more data at any time and that helped with all the animation frames. So you get games like the state-of-the-art Metal Slug 3 with all the elaborate animations and high budget anime-level explosions while on Saturn you get games like Astal, which has higher resolution assets and more fancy effects but lacks the animation frames.

Still, thanks to the RAM carts, the Saturn could at least reach about the same level as the Neo-Geo did in 1995-96, with just the loading times being the issue. Same with all the great CPS2 ports. But the later Neo-Geo stuff was just too much.

I wonder if the N64 would fare better with those, provided you used the biggest carts available (64MB). The N64 carts were also very fast and could stream data the same way. But it also had more RAM (which i assume was used mostly for decompressing stuff from the smaller carts). It also had a very fast CPU that could surely handle as many sprites as you throw at it (there's Bangai-Oh). So i'm willing to bet a Metal Slug 3 port, compressed into a 64MB cart (the arcade game is 88MB) could be arcade perfect on a N64 with the expansion pack (8MB RAM).

 

[ManaByte]

Astal

Loved that game.

 

[s_mirage]

yeah, as far as I know he is correct.

the Saturn can calculate more polygons, has a higher fillrate, better texture mapping... and generally is more flexible thanks to the VDP2.

??? How can it have better texture mapping when it's not even capable of UV mapping? The hardware is literally incapable of mapping a texture onto a model. It's stitching distorted sprites together. Also, as far as I can see, some of the fillrate numbers claimed use highly questionable methodology regarding VDP2. Bear in mind, VDP2 is a 2D plane processor. If a 3D game has no perfectly flat 2D planes, its use is limited to stuff like skybox and UI rendering.

I would avoid using Segaretro as a source, by the way; I've seen their comparison table rubbished years ago.

Here's what Ezra Dreisbach of Lobotomy software said about the relative speed of the hardware:

Ezra: I did do some work on the PSX later. After Saturn Quake was done I did a quick port of it to the PSX. Lobotomy was really hurting for cash at that point, and I hoped that we could get some publisher to sign us up to do PSX Quake. But for some reason, we couldn't get anyone to go for it. Lobotomy folded soon after.

Matt: A PSX port of Quake? That's terribly interesting! I've wanted a version of Quake on the PSX so I could compare versions on all three of the consoles from that "generation". If you've the inclination, I'd truly like to hear how the port turned out on the PSX hardware, compared to the Saturn and (if you've seen it) the N64 version.

Ezra: The most striking thing about the PSX port was how much faster the graphics hardware was than the Saturn. The initial scene after you just start the game is pretty complex. I think it ran 20 fps on the Saturn version. On the PSX it ran 30,but the actual rendering part could have been going 60 if the CPU calculations weren't holding it up. I don't know if it would have ever been possible to get it to really run 60, but at least there was the potential.

Other than that, it would have looked identical to the Saturn version. Except for some reason the PSX video output has better color than the Saturn's.

So I know something about the PSX. And really, if you couldn't tell from the games, the PSX is way better than the Saturn. It's way simpler and way faster. There are a lot of things about the Saturn that are totally dumb. Chief among these is that you can't draw triangles, only quadrilaterals.

Interview: Ezra Dreisbach. saturn + ps1 and stuff

Back when the Saturn had reached its apex in the US market, I had just obtained a used one and several games and had done some research on USENET for which games I should investigate. Among the games that seemed to be highly acclaimed were three by the company Lobotomy Software. Those titles...

forum.beyond3d.com

Now, I'm more likely to trust Ezra Dreisbach, who was writing closer to the actual time and coded the Saturn versions of PowerSlave (Exhumed), Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake, than Jez San, who as far as I know coded nothing on the Saturn.

 

[S0ULZB0URNE]

Not even close. The Metal Slug 1 Saturn port was barely arcade perfect, even with the 1MB RAM expansion.

And that's just the first game. Metal Slug 3 is even more advanced with tons more animations. No way the Saturn would handle that.

There is no way a slow ass CD based console with only 2MB RAM would handle the best looking Neo-Geo games. Neo-Geo's biggest strength was it's massive cartridges that were so fast, they could stream sprites and animation frames in real time, not much RAM required.

The Neo-Geo CD needed a whooping 7MB of RAM to compensate for the change from carts to CDs. Even with the RAM carts the Saturn didn't have that much RAM.

Port being bad means nothing.
Symphony of the Night was also worse on Saturn this means nothing.

Saturn not only has better looking 2D games but it has 2D games that could never be done on Neo-Geo.

 

[nkarafo]

Saturn not only has better looking 2D games but it has 2D games that could never be done on Neo-Geo.

And the Neo-Geo had games that could never been done on the Saturn.

Depends on the graphical style and the animations. The Saturn can have more impressive stuff as long as they fit into the limited RAM. The Neo-Geo can't do the same high-res assets as the Saturn but with its carts it's not limited by RAM and can have as many animation frames as the developer is willing to draw.