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[Shodai]

The only way we can solve this argument on neogaf is to compare tflops.

 

[deriks]

PS3 > X360, but how many games were better on the Xbox?

 

[s_mirage]

I don't see the problem on Saturn.

Take a look at that Sky Target video I posted. In the canyon section at 15 minutes the warping is so bad that it looks like the quads closest to the viewport are folding in on themselves.

I get the impression that you think warping is just the wobbly Polygon effect that the Playstation suffered particularly badly from. It's not. It's any case where textures/quads/whatever are distorted due to a lack of perspective correction, and it's much easier to see in motion.

Plus, there's a famous example on the Saturn: Doom. Doom doesn't have texture warping but runs like ass, and that's because John Carmack rejected Jim Bagley's initial, smoother, version of Saturn Doom because he hated texture warping and it had it.

 

[Parazels]

Because you're a fanboy. 1/3rd of the road is literally deforming in that pic, stop the cap

Show me the deforming road.

 

[Parazels]

Take a look at that Sky Target video I posted. In the canyon section at 15 minutes the warping is so bad that it looks like the quads closest to the viewport are folding in on themselves.

I get the impression that you think warping is just the wobbly Polygon effect that the Playstation suffered particularly badly from. It's not. It's any case where textures/quads/whatever are distorted due to a lack of perspective correction, and it's much easier to see in motion.

Plus, there's a famous example on the Saturn: Doom. Doom doesn't have texture warping but runs like ass, and that's because John Carmack rejected Jim Bagley's initial, smoother, version of Saturn Doom because he hated texture warping and it had it.

Doom is a 2d game.

What the hell are you talking about?!

 

[RetroGamingUK]

albeit one of the worst examples the Saturn did have a lot more stable textures than the PlayStation but the nature of how they worked did get warpy close to the camera when going out of view in some games.

I remember the UK Saturn magazine bugging this up as the next Sega Rally

Ended up being a dreadful port of what was already an average arcade game.



Sega Rally, Daytona CCE and Manx TT showed that Saturn could run 3D racing games smoothly, there was no excuse for this

 

[SkylineRKR]

SSM magazine did slam it when they reviewed it though.

 

[s_mirage]

Doom is a 2d game.

What the hell are you talking about?!

 

[Alexios]

No it wasn't, this is just comedy now. Even stuff like the 3D stage in Sonic Jam or titles like Bulk Slash show otherwise.

Bulk Slash engine is so good to largely keep 60fps with all that crazy action. Yeah there is extreme pop in but that comes with the territory, look at G Police 2 on PS, it's basically even shorter draw distance at 30 fps (if that) but hey, it has robocop aesthetics instead of anime style, so edgy it wins, lol.

So many promising efforts on Saturn only got one entry and the devs didn't get to flex improvement and refinement with a sequel with longer dev time. A Bulk Slash engine game aiming for a 30fps experience could expand on everything and probably increase the draw distance by a decent chunk.

I remember the UK Saturn magazine bugging this up as the next Sega Rally

Sega Touring Car Championship is great, in arcades and at home. Not becoming as popular doesn't make it a bad game. It did have the worst polygon warping the Saturn has ever seen and very inconsistent framerate but still it's a fun game with tons to do (for arcade racing before GT).

People overstate how tough it is because of tech (less than Daytona imo) or gameplay issues, I wasn't even good at racing games as a kid and still completed everything even with AT which some have claimed isn't even possible because of the lower grip/speed/acceleration or whatever.

It has a great sense of speed despite the visuals and ace music and even presentation with the safety car or whatever you call that and coming out of the pit at race start, the different time of day for expert mode, etc., it's an exciting race atmosphere, with the relentless opponents on top.

I even liked those endurance 20 lap (with tire wear, I recall the pit stops being useful) races. It looks better when you aren't watching bad quality footage of folks bouncing from wall to wall & blaming the game for not handing them wins on a silver platter (Idk why they don't have music):

​

 

[Parazels]

And? That guy suggested to make a 3d version of Doom for Sega Saturn,
but Carmack John rejected this idea.

 

[s_mirage]

And? That guy suggested to make a 3d version of Doom for Sega Saturn,
but Carmack John rejected this idea.

And why did he do that? "Affine texture swim" = warping.

 

[simpatico]

Saturn is the GOAT. When I strike it big I want the entire shmup and fighting game library. WITH expansion card of course. Probably the utmost peak of video gaming as an artform.

 

[Parazels]

And why did he do that? "Affine texture swim" = warping.

Where?

 

[Wolzard]

On paper, the Saturn was superior to the PS1, the "GPU" had more computational power and generated pixels faster, it had some extra features, on the Saturn you don't see the typical shaking of the PS1.

However, the PS1 was much simpler to work with and was one of the first consoles to work with the C language, which was much simpler than the Assembly used before. The Saturn never supported it, there was still an attempt to use BASIC, but it didn't have the same potential.



Typically, this is what defines the success of a console for me, the ease with which developers have to extract the power of the machine. This facility even allowed the PS1 to have many companies debuting on the console, which is why the console has so many games.

The Saturn was complicated to develop further due to the fact that it did not have adequate development tools. In 1995, everything was very raw, even Sega games were a little poorly finished. And there was also the fact that the Japanese Sega did not share this knowledge with anyone, not even Sega of America or third parties. Lobotomy Software, from PowerSlave, created a development environment to meet its needs and this was used in several other games such as Witchcraft, Shadow Warrior, etc.

Sony made it too easy on the PS1, you have no idea how advanced it is to go from developing in Assembly to developing in C, it's much easier and faster. That's why I said that the PS1 was a console where you spent little to make a game, either because of lower royalties or because a development kit was much simpler to obtain and work on.

Sony was also different by being more open, it shared knowledge with third parties, helped with development (in exchange for exclusivity).

Notice how on the PS1, you don't see a graphical discrepancy between a first and a third game. On the 64 and the Saturn, the difference is abismal. No third party has done anything like Virtua Fighter 2 or the Rare/Nintendo games on the N64.

The PS2 was really complicated, but it also left the factory with good kits, so much so that in the first year of the console, we already had very graphically advanced games, such as Tekken Tag Tournament, Metal Gear Solid 2, Final Fantasy X, Gran Turismo 3, etc. The PS2 was very well documented at the time.



Sony failed with the PS3, because everything was delayed, the console was launched in 2006 while still incomplete, they only managed to achieve something in 2008, when Mark Cerny formed a team to develop better tools for the console, the famous ICE Team. So much so that the leap in quality is huge from 2007 to 2008.

 

[s_mirage]

Where?

Are you blind or just trolling? Did you watch the Sky Target video? Can you not see what looks like a dip in the road near the viewport in the Touring Car screenshot? Hint = that's a warped texture, not a dip. Warping /= only wobbly polygons, as has already been explained. I'm not wasting any more time on you.

 

[Spiral1407]

Show me the deforming road.

Use your eyes for once and look at the bottom portion of that pic. You've been shown it multiple times and you are literally the only one here who can't see it...

 

[Parazels]

Are you blind or just trolling? Did you watch the Sky Target video? Can you not see what looks like a dip in the road near the viewport in the Touring Car screenshot? Hint = that's a warped texture, not a dip. Warping /= only wobbly polygons, as has already been explained. I'm not wasting any more time on you.

Why is all of this shit absent in Tomb Raider or Powerslave?
You see a couple of poor games, but ignore the other 1000 games, which have no issues with textures!

 

[Parazels]

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

The PS1 is better at 2D than people give it credit for, agreed.

Yes, that's true, the PlayStation has an excellent design for 3D graphics but it is a very efficient system in 2D. The Sega Saturn's fortunes could have been better if it had Dreamcast quality in 2D games, being just a hair better than the PS1 wasn't enough to receive the public's due attention.
If we show casual people Legend of Mana and any 2D Sega Saturn game, someone might say hey this ps1 game is prettier than that one.

 

[s_mirage]

Why is all of this shit absent in Tomb Raider or Powerslave?

It isn't! Look at the bottom left corner. That's not a curved wall. It's also very present on Duke Nukem 3D, which uses the same engine as Powerslave.

Tomb Raider likely subdivides quads into smaller ones as they get close to the viewport, which is a technique to reduce warping and is why it's not visible most of the time. However, that causes the wall textures to "pop" and change as they get close to the viewport. I believe both the Saturn and Playstation versions do this trick, but I think the popping looks worse on the Saturn.

You see a couple of poor games, but ignore the other 1000 games, which have no issues with textures!

You said that there's no texture warping on the Saturn. There is. It doesn't matter if most games cover it up well, it's a feature of the hardware and it's still there. No-one denied that the Saturn suffered less from it than the Playstation, but you've been denying that it happened at all.

As for your Toshinden example: that's likely a VDP2 plane. Unlike VDP1's polygons, those are perspective correct so don't warp and were very useful in situations calling for a completely flat floor or ceiling. On the whole though, Toshinden didn't fair too well on its translation to the Saturn.

 

[Togh]

Very powerful but too baroque and unpopular to have it shown off enough.

Outside of the Panzer Dragooon and VF games it rarely got pushed.

I assume you are referring to 3D games, yeah? So do yourself a favor and search on YouTube for these games:

The "Lobotomy Software Trilogy": Exhumed/PowerSlave (1996), Duke Nukem 3D (1997) and Quake (1997, had better lightning effects than the PC version);
The other 3D fighting games all of which runs at 60 fps and at a higher resolution than any 3D fighting games on PSX: Dead or Alive, Last Bronx, Anarchy in Nippon, Zero Divide and D-Xhird, all of them released in 1997;
Touryuu Densetsu Elan Doree (1999);
Mobile Suit Gundam Side Story I, II and III (1996);
Gungriffon 1 (1996) and 2 (was released in 1998 but was kinda of a budget release with the same engine as the first one with no apparent improvements);
Bulkslash (1997);
F-1 Live Information (1995);
Thunderstrike 2 (1995);
Die Hard Arcade (1997);
3D Baseball (1997);
NBA Action 98 (1997);
DecAthlete (1996) and Winter Heat (1998);
Dark Savior (1996);
Dungeon Master Nexus (1998);
Grandia (1997 - If you care to read here are two good explanations of why the Saturn version was way superior o the PSX version: 1 and 2);
Shining Force III (1997);
Wachenröder (1998);
Crimewave (1996);
Radiant Silvergun (1998);
J.League Pro Soccer Club o Tsukurou! 1 (1996) and 2 (1997);
Deep Fear (1998);
Digital Dance Mix Vol. 1 - Namie Amuro (1997);
Touge King the Spirits 2 (1997);

Honorable mentions: Virtua Cop 2 (1996), Virtual On (1996), Burning Rangers (1998), Sonic R (1997), Ninpen Manmaru (1997), Sonic 3D Blast (1996, the Special Stages), Sonic Jam (1997, the Sonic World mode), and Daytona Usa Circuit Edition (1997, Japanese version with better draw distance).

I only mentioned the exclusive games with the exception of the Lobotomy Software trilogy, Dead or Alive and Grandia which are so different than the PSX that I thought it was worth mentioning them. Then there are the rare cases of games which came from both consoles but ended looking and running better on Saturn like Thunder Force V, Mass Destruction, Independence Day, Tomb Raider and others.

I put the release year next to the game names, so that if you want to compare with PSX games you don't make the mistake of comparing it with late releases from the PSX and instead compare it with games released in the same year, preferably with games of the same genre. You may notice that most of the games are from 1996 ~1997 which are when the Saturn Peaked (before Final Fantasy VII fucking killed it ) and the few games listed that were released in 1998 and 1999 are either budget titles that use the same engine from 1996~1997 with no improvements or late ports from 1997 Sega Titan Video arcade board.

I think all these games I mentioned hold their own or look even better than what was been releasing on the PSX on the same year.

 

[Alexios]

I'd delete Tomb Raider there (though it's not as clear cut inferior on Saturn as often claimed) but dang, I had no idea about Independence Day. Just looked at footage and it actually seems half decent when "smooth", hah (it does miss some small things but the performance is worth it).

It didn't even use VDP2 for the flat ground (with the mountains and buildings etc. made of actual polygons as in games like GunGriffon and Bulk Slash), I guess it could have improved even further but they kept that just like it is on PlayStation. Never realized it's so Rogue Squadron-like.

 

[Lysandros]

On paper, the Saturn was superior to the PS1, the "GPU" had more computational power and generated pixels faster, it had some extra features, on the Saturn you don't see the typical shaking of the PS1.

However, the PS1 was much simpler to work with and was one of the first consoles to work with the C language, which was much simpler than the Assembly used before. The Saturn never supported it, there was still an attempt to use BASIC, but it didn't have the same potential.



Typically, this is what defines the success of a console for me, the ease with which developers have to extract the power of the machine. This facility even allowed the PS1 to have many companies debuting on the console, which is why the console has so many games.

The Saturn was complicated to develop further due to the fact that it did not have adequate development tools. In 1995, everything was very raw, even Sega games were a little poorly finished. And there was also the fact that the Japanese Sega did not share this knowledge with anyone, not even Sega of America or third parties. Lobotomy Software, from PowerSlave, created a development environment to meet its needs and this was used in several other games such as Witchcraft, Shadow Warrior, etc.

Sony made it too easy on the PS1, you have no idea how advanced it is to go from developing in Assembly to developing in C, it's much easier and faster. That's why I said that the PS1 was a console where you spent little to make a game, either because of lower royalties or because a development kit was much simpler to obtain and work on.

Sony was also different by being more open, it shared knowledge with third parties, helped with development (in exchange for exclusivity).

Notice how on the PS1, you don't see a graphical discrepancy between a first and a third game. On the 64 and the Saturn, the difference is abismal. No third party has done anything like Virtua Fighter 2 or the Rare/Nintendo games on the N64.

The PS2 was really complicated, but it also left the factory with good kits, so much so that in the first year of the console, we already had very graphically advanced games, such as Tekken Tag Tournament, Metal Gear Solid 2, Final Fantasy X, Gran Turismo 3, etc. The PS2 was very well documented at the time.



Sony failed with the PS3, because everything was delayed, the console was launched in 2006 while still incomplete, they only managed to achieve something in 2008, when Mark Cerny formed a team to develop better tools for the console, the famous ICE Team. So much so that the leap in quality is huge from 2007 to 2008.

Complete nonsense.

 

[cartman414]

Indeed. PS1 was no slouch in the matter of 2D, in fact it could draw sprites faster than Saturn. Saturn's main advantage over PS1 in this area was the RAM pack like you mentioned which was required for closer to original NeoGeo conversions like King of Fighters which enabled mores animations to be stocked for smoother gameplay. PS1 has its own share of beautiful 2D games like Saga Frontier 2 and Legend of Mana.

Even without the RAM cart the Saturn eclipsed the PS1 in 2d (see: the cutbacks between versions of Grandia and Thunder Force V).

 

[cireza]

Typically, this is what defines the success of a console for me, the ease with which developers have to extract the power of the machine.

How come the PS2 and PS3 were successful then ? Mikami himself said that Saturn was much easier than PS2.

 

[Team Andromeda]

There was a written interview with one of the guys that designed the Saturn? He mentioned Ken telling him you will lose. Something to the effect that Sony had access to in house parts that help them cut costs. SEGA had to buy everything and put it together.

If I find the interview I'll link it. Hideki Sato

SONY spent $500 million developing the PS which was a figure SEGA couldn't match and SEGA always used outside tech for its systems even in the Arcades.
Though it's a little-known fact that Toshiba helped design the PS1 GPU and also manufactured it in the early days of the PS1

SEGA was never going to beat the PS1 well maybe in Japan but it was the 32X that was cost SEGA not the Saturn being slightly underpowered to the PS1.

Saturn was really designed with the expectations of 2D games in mind, as Sega thought that capable 3D hardware was way out of reach for the average consumer, and arcade would be home for 3D games for the generation. I believe the positive reception of 3D games for the 32X and 3DO caused Sega to panic and to start throwing more chips at the design, some of which were redundant in most of the game. Do you really need a dedicated SH1 CPU for controlling the CD drive when a normal dedicated controller would have been enough? Then you had the 68000 that functioned as the sound CPU (Same as the CPU used in the Mega-Drive, but the Saturn wasn't compatible with mega-Drive games for some reason) The dual SH2's were mostly because the yield's maxed out at 28Mhz, less than the PlayStation's 33.8Mhz MIPS CPU.

Shortly after release there were rumors of the 64X addon which would have incorporated the Lockheed Real3D rendering technology that was used in the Model 3 arcade board, but this thankfully never came to fruition.

Just because a system was designed to be 2D doesn't mean it couldn't do 3D even at its early stage before SEGA learnt of the PS1 specs it was going to be able to handle 4000 Hardware Sprites with a RISC SH2 that was a massive jump over the Mega Drive which could handle decent 3D polygons graphics with just 80 hardware sprites and a 16 bit CPU We have no idea was SEGA was paying for the SH-1 but long loading times were a concern with the upcoming 32-bit systems and no doubt the SH1 was brought to mitigate that. Also, SEGA's engineers always seemed to like having a sup CPU set-up for its sound system be it their consoles or their Arcade boards and SEGA's Saturn soundboard was amazing, it's just a shame SEGA didn't double its Ram and that ADX came a little late in the Saturn life to help with sound compression



It was the 32X that cost SEGA really but it was one thing that hurt Saturn it lack of 3D polygon Alpha effects and that always made it games look so much worse than the PS1 version, even if most of the 3D polygons were there. The likes of Tunnel B1 show this the game is nearly all there in the Saturn version but you get those horrible mesh effects and it makes it look worse right away That seemed like a SEGA thing too, since Model 1 or Model 2 didn't support 3D polygon alpha effects and you got mesh effects in their games (please no YouTube Emu videos )

 

[Team Andromeda]

How come the PS2 and PS3 were successful then ? Mikami himself said that Saturn was much easier than PS2.

The same Mikami who said he would never work on the PS2 because it was so hard, only to do so in the end. Let's also remember how Tomoyuki Takechi said no more than 5 software companies in the world would be able to use the PS2 to its fullest, but so many like to use a Yu Suzuki quote instead

Market share wins over a system being easier to work on.

 

[v1oz]

I think this is pretty much the only developer that has publicly said the Saturn was more powerful. Back in the day most developers at least in interviews said the Playstation was more powerful.

 

[Parazels]

I think this is pretty much the only developer that has publicly said the Saturn was more powerful. Most developers at least in interviews have said the Playstation was more powerful.

Maybe, that's because the modern developers know, how to deal with several processors. And they would have extracted better graphics today.

 

[Pegasus Actual]

Why does every thread about vintage Sega turn into a bunch of dorks trying to claim their failed system was actually better than the one that succeeded.

Like bro get over it. Just enjoy the Saturn on its own terms. Nobody actually cares about these comparisons except you "people".

Yeah yeah but but but.... if you tickle the Sega Genesis FM Synth chip just right and run it on a console built before 1991 before they used even shittier hardware Sega will give you a throbbing eargasm. Way better than Super Nintendo that uses fake samples it's so fake what a bunch of fake bad music!. Trust bro trust!

(meanwhile 95% of Genesis games are filled with hideous screeching noises that make your parents think you blew the speaker on their TV).

My fondest gaming memories are my Saturn (closely followed by Dreamcast) days

There were only a handful of games on PlayStation I was jealous didn’t come to Saturn

(MGS, Ridge racer type 4, Rage racer, re 2/3, silent hill)

Yeah but just imagine if you'd gotten PlayStation instead. You'd have better memories and even less jealousy!

 

[s_mirage]

On paper, the Saturn was superior to the PS1, the "GPU" had more computational power and generated pixels faster

Where is this coming from because AFAIK it's untrue? The highly questionable figures on Segaretro?

 

[Team Andromeda]

I think this is pretty much the only developer that has publicly said the Saturn was more powerful. Back in the day most developers at least in interviews said the Playstation was more powerful.

No, Try CORE Design too

In the end, power means nothing, its all about market share

 

[Team Andromeda]

Where is this coming from because AFAIK it's untrue? The highly questionable figures on Segaretro?

I don't for once second think the VDP1 had the raw speed over the PS1 GTE but I believe the Scanger team did say the Saturn drew pixels faster.

For polygons it was clear the PS was better, but when a developer looked to use the sprite and polygons pushing power along with the VDP2 was when the Saturn could go toe to toe with the PS1 and in some rare cases beat it

 

[Horseganador]

It's weird that Core says that Saturn is more powerful than PSX when then Tomb Raider can perform twice as well on PSX (30fps vs 15-20fps), looks better and sounds better on Sony's console.

 

[PaintTinJr]

Sure, Saturn has more raw power than the PS1. But that doesn't mean very much in the end.

Saturn's problem was that not only was the power very hard to extract from the system, but major parts of the architecture inhibited that potential to varying degrees. The system bus wasn't widened to accommodate for a dual-CPU setup, so one CPU would always lag behind waiting to transfer or access data. The DSP was very powerful, but could only work with data in its internal cache and results still had to be passed back to the CPUs for anything meaningful to be performed, so that required more cycles overall.

The Saturn could do MPEG decompression in software, but that relied on developer solutions that could vary wildly in efficiency. You could extract tons of performance if you hard-coded things to assembly, but Sony provided many libraries for PS1 that were basically pre-programmed solutions developers could take and then modify as needed, while still having the option for hand-written assembly when needed.

Power is only as good as it is efficient and accessible. Saturn had a lot of capability for 3D games, but a lot was obfuscated behind constraining architecture choices/compromises and lack of foresight in providing easy-to-use 3D tools & libraries for a new age of game programming. Sony struck the perfect balance of power & ease of use, and the market rewarded them for it. As well, for as much untapped potential the Saturn had, and while I do think it's the 32-bit system with the most untapped potential (at least tied with 3DO in that respect, and arguably the Jaguar tho I doubt Jaguar had much in the way for 3D regardless), the PS1 and even N64 weren't necessarily fully tapped, themselves.

I'd say of the Big 3, the N64 probably had 15% untapped potential and the PS1 closer to 10% untapped, while the Saturn probably has something closer to 30%. But, even if you threw the best skill & resources at a 3D game for Saturn, it'd probably still come up a bit short to the best 3D game you could throw on a PlayStation. There are just differences between the two at the root level where PS1 has a natural advantage for 3D.

It'd probably be more interesting pushing the best respective 3D/2D game at both however; that could be an area (in theory) where the Saturn would come out on top, if you threw the best at it and the best at PlayStation. VDP2 was a monster for sprites in its time.

Great post.

The part that fascinated me most in your post was the part about how underutilised each console was, and it triggered me to have a few separate chats with copilot

The chat was about running various scenarios by which the Saturn or n64 could have done far more than they did to overcome their texturing weaknesses, and in the Saturn's case its ability to do a software zbuffer on the coprocessor and use pre-zbuffering to catch the n64 on that capability.

I was also led to look at n64's potential to use deferred rendering via the 1MB/s 75ms access 64DD to do higher quality texturing or higher quality fx and stream textures, even discussing why the per pixel lighting cel-shaded of Windwaker wasn't possible on the n64, even checking if it had an accumulation buffer or fixed path texture shadow mapping which it didn't.

Effectively when all was said and done, the 256x256 RGB/A texturing capability on the PS1 is too tough to bridge on the other systems, and that combined with really good polygon throughput, transparency and graphics flexibility kept bringing CoPilot back to the view it would have been tough to bridge the texturing issue no matter what strategy was used with either the Saturn or the n64.

Now I'm more convinced that either the Saturn or PS1 would have benefitted more from modern techniques than the n64, and that's despite its raw processing advantages of a hardware accelerated z buffer that neither those systems had, the tiny 32x32 RGB/A texturing on the n64 just seems too hard to bridge the gap of doing a stage like king's level in Tekken 2
which used a lot of quality texturing all in one level for the time - on console.

 

[Neff]

More power doesn't mean shit if your console is bottlenecked to oblvivion with slapdash architecture which insists on arguing with itself. Just ask PS3.

You can count the number of multiplat games which looked better on Saturn than PlayStation on one hand after a wood chipper accident.

 

[nkarafo]

No, Try CORE Design too

The same people who made Tomb Raider on Saturn, which looks and runs worse than the PS1 port?

 

[Team Andromeda]

The same people who made Tomb Raider on Saturn, which looks and runs worse than the PS1 port?

The same people with 6 weeks of heavy optimising left to go were told they had to get the game out there and then , since CORE did a deal with SEGA Europe.

So try again.

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

I put the release year next to the game names, so that if you want to compare with PSX games you don't make the mistake of comparing it with late releases from the PSX and instead compare it with games released in the same year, preferably with games of the same genre. You may notice that most of the games are from 1996 ~1997 which are when the Saturn Peaked (before Final Fantasy VII fucking killed it ) and the few games listed that were released in 1998 and 1999 are either budget titles that use the same engine from 1996~1997 with no improvements or late ports from 1997 Sega Titan Video arcade board.

I think all these games I mentioned hold their own or look even better than what was been releasing on the PSX on the same year.

let's take it easy with this nostalgia, man.
Sega pioneered the arcade with Virtua Fighter 1 in 1993, despite 30fps it moves more polygons per frame and polygons per second than any other 5th gen fighting game but dispute here is Saturn vs Playstation.

November 22, 1994 VF1 was launched on the Saturn
Tekken 1 was released in December on the System 11 arcade which is a PS1 running at 60fps but VF2 Model 2 arrived first in November 1994.

But on console Tekken 1 was the first fighting game at 60fps March 31, 1995.

Toshinden January 1, 1995 still release window destroyed Virtua Fighter, the game had textures, transparency effects and was fully 3D. Sega was so desperate that they made VF1 Remix and gave it away for free July 14, 1995 because they were afraid that people would discover that the Sega Saturn was weaker hardware.

The rest of the story you know, Ridge Racer running at 30fps, Daytona usa running at 20fps , Destruction Derby, Jumping Flash, Twisted Metal, wipeout, ace combat, warhawk etc had no rivals in 1995 at us launch it was already clear that the Playstation was better hardware.

1996 Crash, Tobal N1 and Tomb raider destroyed the Sega Saturn
1997 Gran Turismo, megaman legend, Einhander, Klonoa, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Backand Final Fantasy 7. It's unnecessary to mention the games from 1998, the Sega Saturn was no longer alive and its games stagnated.

The other 3D fighting games all of which runs at 60 fps and at a higher resolution than any 3D fighting games on PSX: Dead or Alive, Last Bronx

These Sega Saturn games made in high resolution mode would be more impressive if they were in true 3D like Tobal and Blood Roar games
hi res 2 layer bitmap was a nice tradeoff.

Grandia (1997 - If you care to read here are two good explanations of why the Saturn version was way superior o the PSX version: 1 and 2);

A very small difference, I think the biggest difference is that the characters in the PlayStation version have shadows.

I only mentioned the exclusive games with the exception of the Lobotomy Software trilogy, Dead or Alive and Grandia which are so different than the PSX that I thought it was worth mentioning them. Then there are the rare cases of games which came from both consoles but ended looking and running better on Saturn like Thunder Force V, Mass Destruction, Independence Day, Tomb Raider and others.

Thunder Force V doesn't run better despite looking better
Tomb Raider doesn't run better, on the contrary, just an enemy appears and the fps drops to ~15, it doesn't look better either.

I think all these games I mentioned hold their own or look even better than what was been releasing on the PSX on the same year.

It's a controversial opinion not supported by consumers at the time.

 

[Team Andromeda]

It's weird that Core says that Saturn is more powerful than PSX when then Tomb Raider can perform twice as well on PSX (30fps vs 15-20fps), looks better and sounds better on Sony's console.

Do people even read the making of Tomb Raider?. SEGA Europe made a lost minute deal with CORE to make the Saturn version the launch exclusive right at the time the team was set to do the heavy optimising for the final code which so hurt the Saturn version
Not that I think the Saturn version would have looked better or better than the PS1 version, but for sure the frame rate would be improved over the launch Saturn version

Sadly, the 2 games that lead on the Saturn and were designed to it's strengths were canned for the PS1 versions by EDIOS

 

[nkarafo]

I'd say of the Big 3, the N64 probably had 15% untapped potential and the PS1 closer to 10% untapped, while the Saturn probably has something closer to 30%.

I rate these percentages according to recent, modern developments.

- The PS1 doesn't really have any homebrew or modern release that looks as good as it's best official games. For this reason i would say the PS1 was 100% tapped. It makes sense since it lasted longer in the market, had more developers working for it and was the easiest to develop for.

- The Saturn has some pretty impressive homebrew/modern stuff but i still don't think they are as good as the best looking official games. Some canceled games indicate there might have been some lost potential. And that it didn't last as long as the PS1 on the market so this would make sense. I would say a 10-15% lost potential here.

- I would save the 30% for the N64. Looking at recent developments this might be the case, or maybe even more than that. The latest version of the Mario 64 engine runs the same game at 60fps and handles 10x as many polygons, including effects such as normal mapping (!). And there was also Portal 64, which is a fairly complex game for 5th gen standards (which also runs beautifully). There's a lot of random homebrew/modern stuff that do things you wouldn't even imagine the N64 would do. Plus, the N64 was always notorious for being just as hard to get advantage of it's hardware as the Saturn or even more.

 

[nkarafo]

The same people with 6 weeks of heavy optimising left to go were told they had to get the game out there and then , since CORE did a deal with SEGA Europe.

So try again.

Ah yes, always the same excuse. Every time something looks worse on the Saturn, it has to be something unrelated to the console itself or it's design.

Even with the heavy optimizing you are referring to, the game would still look worse on the Saturn, it would just not run as badly, maybe.

 

[PaintTinJr]

I rate these percentages according to recent, modern developments.

- The PS1 doesn't really have any homebrew or modern release that looks as good as it's best official games. For this reason i would say the PS1 was 100% tapped. It makes sense since it lasted longer in the market, had more developers working for it and was the easiest to develop for.

- The Saturn has some pretty impressive homebrew/modern stuff but i still don't think they are as good as the best looking official games. Some canceled games indicate that there might have been some lost potential. And that it didn't last as long as the PS1 on the market. I would say a 10% potential here.

- I would save the 30% for the N64. Looking at recent developments this might be the case, or maybe even more than that. The latest version of the Mario 64 engine runs the same game 60fps and handles 10x as many polygons, including effects such as normal mapping (!). And there was also Portal 64, which is a fairly complex game for 5th gen standards (which also runs beautifully). There's a lot of random homebrew/modern stuff that do things you wouldn't even imagine the N64 would do.

This is what I wrestled with given the hardware zbuffer puts it in a different class for polygon handling than the other two, and yet the texturing issues on the n64 and the saturn are their weakest capability and despite me going all out to find an angle where even using AI to generate amazing code from any potential strategy, even using the 64DD, CoPilot couldn't convince itself there was a strategy to overcome the 4KB texture cache problem on the system to manage PS1 level texturing.

 

[Team Andromeda]

I remember the UK Saturn magazine bugging this up as the next Sega Rally

Ended up being a dreadful port of what was already an average arcade game.



Sega Rally, Daytona CCE and Manx TT showed that Saturn could run 3D racing games smoothly, there was no excuse for this

It wasn't that bad and it was pushing so many polygons and looking to include all the Model 2 detail I think it was more a case of the game being released before it was finished and SEGA Japan just starting to give up on the Saturn after the mega sales of FF7 and PS overtaking Saturn userbase advantage

 

[Crayon]

Bulk Slash engine is so good to largely keep 60fps with all that crazy action. Yeah there is extreme pop in but that comes with the territory, look at G Police 2 on PS, it's basically even shorter draw distance at 30 fps (if that) but hey, it has robocop aesthetics instead of anime style, so edgy it wins, lol.

So many promising efforts on Saturn only got one entry and the devs didn't get to flex improvement and refinement with a sequel with longer dev time. A Bulk Slash engine game aiming for a 30fps experience could expand on everything and probably increase the draw distance by a decent chunk.

Sega Touring Car Championship is great, in arcades and at home. Not becoming as popular doesn't make it a bad game. It did have the worst polygon warping the Saturn has ever seen and very inconsistent framerate but still it's a fun game with tons to do (for arcade racing before GT).

People overstate how tough it is because of tech (less than Daytona imo) or gameplay issues, I wasn't even good at racing games as a kid and still completed everything even with AT which some have claimed isn't even possible because of the lower grip/speed/acceleration or whatever.

It has a great sense of speed despite the visuals and ace music and even presentation with the safety car or whatever you call that and coming out of the pit at race start, the different time of day for expert mode, etc., it's an exciting race atmosphere, with the relentless opponents on top.

I even liked those endurance 20 lap (with tire wear, I recall the pit stops being useful) races. It looks better when you aren't watching bad quality footage of folks bouncing from wall to wall & blaming the game for not handing them wins on a silver platter (Idk why they don't have music):

I only got it more recently and I found the controls with either dpad or analog to be appalling. I don't call many games unplayable but this one i do.

 

[nkarafo]

This is what I wrestled with given the hardware zbuffer puts it in a different class for polygon handling than the other two, and yet the texturing issues on the n64 and the saturn are their weakest capability and despite me going all out to find an angle where even using AI to generate amazing code from any potential strategy, even using the 64DD, CoPilot couldn't convince itself there was a strategy to overcome the 4KB texture cache problem on the system to manage PS1 level texturing.

But the 4KB texture cache was already beaten long ago, when Banjo-Kazooie was released, officially. It's a pretty simple issue to overcome (you simply use multiple small textures to form a big one) but most devs didn't want to bother with such task as it was simpler to just make one low quality texture and be done with it.

 

[cireza]

Even with the heavy optimizing you are referring to, the game would still look worse on the Saturn

I find that it looks better on Saturn though. No wobble, PS1 is too bright, greater view distance, better water. Another case of subjective preference, not some kind of absolute truth.

But I would surely have appreciated the framerate optimization.

 

[PaintTinJr]

But the 4KB texture cache was already beaten long ago, when Banjo-Kazooie was released, officially. It's a pretty simple issue to overcome (you simply use multiple small textures to form a big one) but most devs didn't want to bother with such task as it was simpler to just make one low quality texture and be done with it.

But that quarters your 2-polygon/quad throughput just to do 64x64, which is still x4 less than the commonly used performance 128x128 on ps1. You feasibly can't render 16 2-polygons/quads for every ps1 2-polygons to have texture parity, and with vertex perspective projection that doesn't guarantee polygon alignment by doing that.

Saturn had 5 times the polygon throughput as 2-polygon/quads than ps1, and it still can't use texturing and polygons efficiently to bridge a x4 gap of performance at 64x64 to performance at 128x128

 

[Lysandros]

I must say that i am completely baffled by the point of view which argues that "Saturn had more raw power than PS1" in context of 3D graphics. Besides from being very far from a prevalent assessment, how the heck Sega somehow ended up with the more capable machine in this area despite the system's own creator's admission that the console was architected to be the most powerful 2D system around with 3D being somewhat of an afterthought and they were in complete state of panic after discovering how much more advanced PS1 hardware was in this area, a machine architected for 3D from the onset? Was this black magic? Were the Sega engineers that lucky even by accident and Sony ones that inept? This doesn't make the slightest bit of logical sense, especially in light of actual results. How about all the developers stating that PS1 was convincingly faster then?

 

[Team Andromeda]

Ah yes, always the same excuse. Every time something looks worse on the Saturn, it has to be something unrelated to the console itself or it's design.

Even with the heavy optimizing you are referring to, the game would still look worse on the Saturn, it would just not run as badly, maybe.

It's not an excuse but the truth . SEGA Europe did a last-minute deal that played havoc with TR original release window.
Coming out later sometimes worked out for the Saturn as we saw for Sovert Strike, Fifa 96 and Zero Divide.