Jealousy was prob the wrong word as I had several friends who owned PlayStations so didn’t actually miss out on anything, (also ended up owning one of anyway) plus I was a big fan of sega’s arcade games, Along with nights, burning rangers? Panzer dragoon, guardian heroes, xmen vs sf etc I loved my Saturn days
Agree with this or face his might
Did you inform Copilot about the megatexture technique used on the N64? This technique leverages the fast cartridge speed to stream textures on the fly, supporting sizes up to 1024x1024 pixels. The demo implementation streams 40MB of textures—something not feasible with the double-speed CD drive of the PSX.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.
My experience was getting caught up in the Saturn early release as the timing made for a lucky birthday present. Enjoying it quite a bit, then getting PlayStation that Christmas with the likes of Destruction Derby, Warhawk and Twisted Metal (praise Jaffe!) and thinking wow this is just better. I still got a couple of Saturn games after that like Panzer Dragoon II and Virtua On but they got relatively little play time.
I didn’t get my Saturn until a year after launch so I had a relatively good time catching up on the games that had already been released. I loved virtual on I even imported the twin sticks from Japan. When I saw it’s denise coming I got mine chipped so it could play imports and at 60htz, went on a mad importing spree getting all the cap on fighters etc.
Accessories were another issue. I lived a solid 60+ miles away from the nearest video game stores (and was too young to drive). I never got the original DualShock. Didn't get Nights + that analog controller because... well at that age Nights looked lame as hell. Somehow they did have the Japanese style controller for sale for the Saturn though so I grabbed that at launch (always made sure to have two OEM controllers, would never subject my friends to the horror of MadCatz or whatever). That controller was so much better than the US controller I really have no clue what they were thinking. It was so bulky and the shoulder buttons were so bad. And the original Japanese controller is sitll probably my favorite 2D controller design of all time.
8MB carts were the first batch.
This is what we now call clickbait. Core’s own work says the opposite. There is absolutely no evidence that they would have been able to make future TR games massively better on Saturn,as virtually every 3D game that ran on both was much better on PSX and the PSX had multiple years of further development.No, Try CORE Design too
In the end, power means nothing, its all about market share
Other than replacing the flat floors with VDP2 planes I don’t know what they could have done to improve it.
I mean, Idk why we're constantly circle jerking. It has higher draw distance than PS so throws more stuff per frame. Reducing that seems like something that would increase performance, unless there's a bottleneck elsewhere (at which point it's not an issue of Saturn's 3D graphics rendering that's being harshly judged around here). And hey, even if it's weaker, they could always reduce it even more than PS version already did if they wanted to prioritize performance. It wouldn't be a problem most of the time (as folks don't see a problem with the reduced draw distance - or missing water distortions - on the PS), the original game has few open spaces like the colosseum. So there you go, just one thing you could do to improve performance. It's common so I don't see how you couldn't think of it as a theoretical possibility and have to come up with VDP2 stuff unfit for much of it (sidenote, love how folks praise this or that Saturn game but then someone has to go all "BUT IT USED VDP2 FOR DA FLOOR THAT'S NOT REAL 3D!!!!" or whatever, like it fucking matters, all 3D is equally faked, whether polygons or otherwise manipulated vertices, sprites, whatever, it's ridiculous to praise Tekken 3 for having 2D backgrounds that apparently have to be mapped to a given amount of polygons because of the system architecture rather than render it in any other different way Saturn fighters do and even try to call that a 3D background of all things when it's still a flat 2D picture, or call it out in the case of flat floors or skies or whatever you can view in Saturn games like Gungriffon or Bulk Slush where it's still just as 3D as any other flat floor rendered with polygons or any method and shit looks even better with how it can have way better texture, as in Grandia Saturn vs PS).
Yeah i watched the end of the video, and like he said 64MB does seem to be the limit - also going by CoPilot say Mario 64 was 8MB, Zelda 32MB and Conker's Bad Fur Day was 64MB.
Yeah, posting an actual interview CORE is clickbait and I don't think anyway is saying any Tomb Raider would have looked better on the Saturn. Saying a system is more powerful is vague when people can always highlight examples of when this wasn't the case in the days of custom silcon for each console
Apparently it also cut fillrate in half if used so again… choices choices
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I mean, Idk why we're constantly circle jerking. It has higher draw distance than PS so throws more polygons per frame. Reducing that seems like something that would increase performance, unless there's a bottleneck elsewhere (at which point it's not an issue of Saturn's 3D graphics rendering that's being harshly judged around here). And hey, even if it's weaker, they could always reduce it even more than PS version already did if they wanted to prioritize performance. It wouldn't be a problem most of the time (as folks don't see a problem with the reduced draw distance - or missing water distortions - on the PS), the original game has few open spaces like the colosseum. So there you go, just one thing you could do to improve performance. It's common so I don't see how you couldn't think of it as a theoretical possibility and have to come up with VDP2 solutions or whatever (sidenote, love how folks praise this or that Saturn game but then someone has to go all "BUT IT USED VDP2 FOR DA FLOOR THAT'S NOT REAL 3D!!!!" or whatever, like it fucking matters, all 3D is equally faked, whether polygons or otherwise manipulated vertices, sprites, whatever, it's ridiculous to praise Tekken 3 but having 2D backgrounds that apparently have to be mapped to a given amount of polygons because of the system architecture rather than render it in any other different way Saturn may do and even try to call that a 3D background of all things, it's still a flat 2D picture or in the case of actual 3D floors or skies or whatever you can view in Saturn games like Gungriffon or Bulk Slush, it's still just as 3D as any other flat floor rendered with polygons or whatever other method and shit looks even better with how it can have way better texture, as in Grandia Saturn vs PS).
Saturn up, PlayStation down. Whole training room and the music room past it, visible on Saturn to the left, and to the right again rendered/visible from the floor below through the door above. Clearly overkill for most of the game but also clearly hampering the visuals in open rooms on PS.
Perfect spot for it with the room past the corridor already fully rendered on Saturn from the start of the corridor at the timestamp and on PlayStation the blackness only starts pulling back right before exiting the corridor (and other places in this and other videos but that's a good spot for it there).
Bad quality captures/media/whatever (and PAL versions with even more issues common back then) but the massive draw distance differences are perfectly demonstrated. Games do such things all the time. Reduce visuals, rendering load, in whatever way, to up performance. Just like Tomb Raider and Powerslave did on PlayStation. That's why G-Police 1 & 2 have the short draw distance they have. That's why Tenchu is notorious for its draw distance (and still far from great performance). Etc. All sorts of games demonstrate it. Plenty games on PS have performance issues, even critical darlings like Gran Turismo 2 or Metal Gear Solid are far from flawless on that front so don't act like it's only an issue in Saturn games. It's an issue on all systems of the era (OoT at ~20 fps anyone, but oh no, if a Saturn 3D game does it it's the end of the world, it can't possibly be a great game with great visuals despite issues), whether because they prioritised other things (like Shenmue on Saturn was doing) or didn't know any better (obviously Tenchu didn't max the PlayStation as other games do a lot more without such severe issues). It's commonly done shit and how this shit generally works.
Dang, that Sony, always they get the magical sweetspot, anything less like Saturn vs PS is shit, anything more like PS2 vs GC vs Xbox overkill, they're the gold standard and issues like gaps in geometry and worse polygon/texture shimmering or whatever else are just fine and dandy, they have charm but Saturn's issues like banding or color depth are puke! And when we reach this point then we go back to hey, man, it's like, your opinion! For most people's opinion the PS won fair, square and that's why it sold best! Everyone knows sales = quality! Except when PS loses, like when Wii came along, that was not the same and unfair! Sales are the de facto proof when Sony wins, if somebody else does we gotta come up with excuses like how they still did very good all things considered and some stupid audience bought into what bullshit the others peddled, Sony's God and PlayStation Jesus!
Anyone who has discussed Saturn here has seen all this but nooo we just always gotta start with the premise of how shit it is and reiterate every single point, from games demonstrating it could do way better than hater favorite shitty examples to comparisons like here, every, single, time. And then when you bring receipts like this you're a fanboy who cares too much and should have just spewed vague bullshit like how Powerslave on PlayStation aims for 60fps with no further explanation or anything to back that up with and go on your merry way happy with your continued shitposting. Yay.
Next related thread (and before then next page right here) guaranteed will have the same exact points brought up again and again from the same people who have already been shown up by actual proof against their bs but don't care, lol.
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If you understand the Sega Saturn as the Xbox Series S+ 2D chips trying to be more powerful than the PS5.
The only comparison from the Saturn to the Xbox is both management made all the wrong decisions.
it's not nonsense the analogy is accurate, vdp1 has less than 50% of the ps1's GPU. You have less knowledge than me and cannot participate in a strictly technical conversation, Instead of sitting down and learning, you prefer to harbor false hope of hidden power.
But have you Studied the Blade?
The 64DD was 64MB. And there were 64MB cartridges during the N64's time. Zelda OOT was 32MB and Resident Evil 2 was 64MB.
Is that because of the memory bandwidth requirements resulting from the high latency memory and shared usage between the CPU and graphics pipeline?Apparently it also cut fillrate in half if used so again… choices choices
That's the other way around, when it comes to pushing geometry PS1 has the highest throughput of its era, main reason being GTE's computational abilities.
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.
If you are speaking about real throughtput, it's correct. But the theoretical throughput is higher on Saturn, cache and other limits end up reversing the situation.
Short answer, yes.
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www.youtube.com
What are your sources for higher theoretical throughput on Saturn? There are a lot of speculative/phantasy spec sheets claiming all sorts of inflated figures about it around the net. What specific Saturn hardware would exceed/outperform PS1's GTE geometry capabilities if it 'wasn't limited its by cache' for example?
I think with the CPU setup being master-slave on Saturn based on CoPilot info, the system wasn't so much parallel programming, so much as a halfway house of the master-slave setup of a Maths Coprocessor x87 on PC - where 80286, 80386SX and 80486SX all had sockets for a maths coprocessor(80287, 80387, 80487) to offload floating point maths calculations - and enough second core versatility to do things like offloading hidden surface removal alternatives because the system - like PS1 - had no hardware zbuffer.
the absolute maximum limit is 60,000 quads per second or in the stupid conversion 120,000 triangles per second, numbers above that is Sega projecting how many polygons the vdp2 replaces, the official marketing says 500,000 polygons, a lie or maneuver with the numbers like the ps2 and its 66 million pps.
That's not the case of Saturn though, it's was not more powerful. And the developers tried their best.
is that 120,000 number for flat or lit polygons, because in context of Saturn doing better to match PS1 I would posit that very few games by the end of the generation used lit polygons on PS1 and focused on maximum flat textured throughput, with the lighting baked in, and having lit and unlit versions of textures get mapped in and out on geometry moving in and out of light source placeholder volumes gave optimal visuals and performance on final PS1 games, so the flat textured polygon count for the Saturn would be the best comparative figure.
