Have a look at the Shenmue prototype for Sega Saturn, that looks like something PS1 doesn't do, even though framerate is unstable and it's a non interactive demo.
I like the Sega Saturn mainly for games from SNK, Capcom and other devs, really Sega as a producer was uninspired in the 5th and 6th gen, that's why the company almost went bankrupt, believe me if the games were good people would buy the sega's consoles, like me and many others did with the N64, we bought it just to play Zelda Ocarina of Time, a game better than anything Sega made between 94-2001. If you disagree with this, I'm sorry you're a fanboy. When I say I'd swap the Sega Saturn's 3D fighting games for MK4 I'm being honest, MK4 is much more fun.
Er, then why ever ask (well, demand, like they care you exist, lol) for a Saturn mini, just ask those companies to bring the games back (which they largely have on all sorts of platforms, especially SNK and Capcom, shit you were happy with PS1 ports right in this thread). Always tellin the truth I guess:
And if you aren't gonna leave (don't care), don't cut & stitch a "quote" (this was in the post, lol). Reply to that post's core point or not at all. At least it's linked for folks to see even if you clipped it just to repeat bs. You'd deserve to get a clown tag every other post, if you didn't already have that
That Shenmue reminds me a lot version of D2 warp for M2, an fmv rendered at a low frame rate using graphics from the game engine insted cgi. Just a concept, the Sega Saturn doesn't have the power to make a working version of that demo. That's the impression I have.
That's far from the only downside.
This is true of most older machines. Ie. how we get 8bit computers do things that looked impossible in the 80ies as well.
SH2 divider unit ran at 39clocks - so assuming other operations can run in that block of time (pipeline allowed it - and transform is like 16MADD operations - so it's plausible, but I haven't checked exact math) that gives us theoretical peak of 1.43M vertex transforms per second (but that's fully loading both CPUs).
I think outside of really naive ports - noone would ever do that though.
www.segasaturnshiro.com
With modelling tools of the time it would have been different like you say, but today with today's tools optimally constructed models with optimally wound polygon meshes sections, you would only pay for the first triangle per mesh section with 2 verts of 3, and then you get 1 polygon extra per extra vertex.
I do not recall, Rambus did not perfect their design until PS2 and PS3, the contended serial bus in the N64 had drawbacks but I am not sure it was a latency more than a bandwidth problem.
How many people / how usable was the Matrix DSP in the Saturn for this?
According to this site,
Saturn Shenmue: The Search Continues…
By now, it’s more than likely that most gamers have glimpsed this old test-build demo footage of Shenmue (originally Virtua Fighter RPG) running on the Sega Saturn and featured in both SEGA&#…
Meaning the video capture was of the game not running on stock hardware and even the devkit had an acceleration board, similar to Ico's video, it doesn't look like much of it was ever on even a PSX devkit, and was mostly just in Lightwave.
Here's the image that has the quote
Thanks for clearing the discussion in a very precise manner. I always appreciate your posts, plenty of deep technical knowledge and objective assements.
But the other information came from the game director and the team in Japan, not from
From a communication perspective the contention for a serial bus uses a binary back-off algorithm and traditionally - as would have been the case at the time with bus designs - under heavy load throughput drops to 40% or less as I remembered it from Uni slides (or 30-50% as CoPilot now claims). which is a massive drop off in usable bandwidth and adds latency with every collision and back off.
In the case of Playstation and Saturn the most powerful hardware in 3D graphics did win.
It is simple as that, hell - it's not even up for debate, Playstation wiped the floor with competition that generation. While I do like Sega quite a bit and play my Dreamcast and Saturn from time to time, it was 3d what mattered most that generation and Saturn just didn't deliver. Just take a look at something like Wipeout XL/2097, 20fps vs 30fps - playing on Saturn just in this regard is masochistic.
So your sources for claiming higher theoretical throughput in context of respective hardware specifics affording it was actually was the infamous Shenmue concept prototype (!) running on an expanded Saturn hardware?... I leave you to your buble then. Or else, read Fafalada's post if you are truly interested about the realities of geometry capabilities of each system.
I'm just going by what we can see from the makeup and end result of Tomb Raider and its performance, and then comparing against a shot in the Saturn video that we know was actually interactive gameplay and trying to estimate the comparative polygon counts in the models and the environment, and fx and texturing to see if it is plausible the game would have ran at least at 20fps in the least taxing section of a Shenmue game.
For me, everything in the shenmue shot looks like a midgen refresh - expansion board - away from the technically accomplished results in tomb raider game on Saturn
Not sure, Shenmue development was started 3 times: First on Saturn, then on Saturn with acceleration board, then on Dreamcast. We don't know if the video capture is from Saturn or Saturn with some addon.
the difference is that the 2D games on the ps1 are really as good as those on the Sega Saturn, that's true. But the Saturn's 3D is much inferior and unfortunately the difference can be noticed. If a 3D game has shadows, transparency, 3D water, lighting and run at 30fps on the PS1, Sega Saturn version of the same game will have cuts in all these areas and will run at 15fps-20fps. Things like shadows, transparency and 3D water are made with those ugly and primitive dithering, the lighting effects will be turned off and textures inferior too. that's a huge difference that is easily seen on 3d games.
Were you developer in 90?
I'm not being clever with it. The decomposition to wireframe in Esppiral old video actually shows how expertly crafted and efficient the underlying asset topology is and how many textures are used. Even working from the wireframes, there is at least 300 quads used just for the 5 sides you see, so at 30fps that's 9000 quads per second of the allocation without even considering a half or similar amount for Lara or anything else moving on screen.
Yeah, it says that in the interview I quoted
Commercial success is like an add-on? Let me see if I understand correctly, you are suggesting that if the Sega Saturn were a greater commercial success, this success would increase extra power to the vdp1 (which is objectively weaker than the ps1's gpu by a large margin) and would be able to make the ram 1mb H-ram + 1mb L-Ram work like a fast, unified 2mb ram memory? So, could a commercially successful Saturn overcome the limited vram for textures beyond the 500kb or 750kb to which it is restricted? (the ps1 has 1mb of unified vram) what's more, could a commercially successful Saturn map textures with its quads as well as a console that uses triangles does?
One of the worst post I have read, blatant bad-faith and pretending you don't understand anything.
Yea and every newer PSX is weaker from previous one due to chip reduction
That's a pretty reductive logic but it makes total sense, i agree.
I'm not judging team size, performance or whether it was rushed. The assets are of very good quality vs the Saturn technical specs when decomposed in Esppiral's video.
Why do you want to improve Tomb Raider? Even on PlayStation it has both improvements and reductions to get that final result. Why even assume 30fps? Shenmue clearly runs way, way worse in the tech demos (but it would have been perfectly fine for the things it'd offer instead of framerate had it ever released back then, OoT style) and hell, so does Tomb Raider in many spots. Idk why you're choosing snapshots of the very first area like that's the whole game, in either quality or performance anyway, even the training room shows more complexity (but lol @ using emus to judge anything about real hardware), never mind areas like St. Francis' Folly (this is a rough PAL version video regarding a save bug but it speeds past some nice views, playthroughs I found of the US version are like speedruns and beeline all the jumps etc. without any looking around) that include both way, way more complex geometry and may have several enemies lurking and roaming and other interactive and moving elements on top. In your Shenmue shot there's nothing even impressive there, it's a simple area with like one equally simple extra detail element making it more than a plain square (the corner pillars or whatever, everything else is painted on). You're just assuming Ryo's backside has a crazy amount of polygons but it's not like that model would be as seen in the in-engine cut scenes with detailed hand, facial and eye expressions etc. and I doubt that would be real time lighting from the window to the walls, just textures, I don't think any game that era has that detailed lighting/shadows to actually take the shape of the window with the gaps and everything and if any do they're definitely the exception (Vagrant Story has some such things like railings in front of torches or fireplaces or similar casting a shadow on the floor but that's also obviously a texture and the small cubic areas of the game like FFT on steroids also helped with texture variety potential in this manner), I don't think anyone expected that to be the case. Hand placed varied textures to fake it in otherwise way smaller scope and scale indoor areas like that (hell even nowadays we have games where indoors have better dynamic in this case lighting than outdoor scenarios) certainly seems doable, if painstaking as everything manual is vs modern automated real time lighting systems.
According to this site,
Saturn Shenmue: The Search Continues…
By now, it’s more than likely that most gamers have glimpsed this old test-build demo footage of Shenmue (originally Virtua Fighter RPG) running on the Sega Saturn and featured in both SEGA&#…
Meaning the video capture was of the game not running on stock hardware and even the devkit had an acceleration board, similar to Ico's video, it doesn't look like much of it was ever on even a PSX devkit, and was mostly just in Lightwave.
Here's the image that has the quote
the number you got (289.000 qps) refers to vdp1 isolated from the other chips in a theoretical condition.
That's great and all, but it still doesn't detract from my point where the rushed release, small team and unoptimized argument is used, but that is only valid if it gives you something back that's extra, in this case if it is something that could equal or surpass the PS1 version, which in this case, we take performance out of the equation so Who cares if what I took screenshots from was running at 15fps or 120fps on the emu, the only way to get something extra is to improve the visuals.
I didn't say it was impressive - PS1 could easily have achieved that - but the requirements for Saturn to achieve that with texturing being such a performance hit compared to PS1, the texture quality in that demo are above Tomb Raider, and as I've already set my stall out, it would need 4x the geometry detail non-interpolated to get that increase, despite having more taxing geometry on display, and not because I think there is vastly more geometry in that playable Shenmue screenshot, but because Ryo's on screen size and texturing means there is more overdraw by his larger on screen projection and there is more geometry in his model because of the detailed texturing on this model by comparison to Lara.
You massively underestimate the ingenuity of development at the time (particularly British development where they were ahead of the curve) back then and the push towards more 3D experiences since games like the Skull on 48K Spectrum, Argonaut Software doing Starglider on ST/Amiga(eventually doing the mode 7 SuperFx chip on SNES) or Elite, 4d Sports Series, Hard Drivin,etc and the game on Saturn and PS1 is consistent with what they released on PC as I recall at the time, pretty sure it was prior to console release, so both version IIRC were ports of a finished PC game that ran on PC CPU with 2D accelerators, so hardly the rush job of an unfinished game debuting early on a launch platform.But okay, back to how some early title, a studio's 2nd game on it, one of the very first in this full 3D open roaming style granting it and its series a higher than legendary status (on the platform it reached later, lol) for video games, maxed one of the according to this thread most difficult to develop for systems, because you analysed an emulator shot and spec sheet (yet these geniuses somehow didn't max the easy to develop for PlayStation with their same-era games which are super close on both systems yet still did way more with sequels and other games on that eventually, it's magic)
why?
