| alabtrosMyster said: the PS1 could also push more raw polygons, had more RAM left to store textures (ie. the textures were bigger than what the N64 could handle, but the machine did not filter them). |
Er... The PS1 had 3.5MB of total Ram across it's entire platform.
The Nintendo 64 had 4.5MB total which is an increase of 28.5% in favour of the Nintendo 64.
But the Nintendo 64 could also expand that to a total of 9MB. (0.5-1MB was reserved for AA.)
The cart was also another benefit to DRAM utilization... Especially considering that the carts had 2,112,000 KB/s of bandwidth verses the CD of the PS1's 150-300 KB/s.
That meant that unlike the PS1... The Nintendo 64 could stream assets (Like textures!) on-demand where-as the PS1 needed to preload allot of that data.
To put that into perspective... The Nintendo 64's carts have more bandwidth than the mechanical hard drives of the 8th gen consoles which tend to stream textures and meshes on demand to Ram!
But the caveat was the carts storage capacity, which meant that allot of texture data was heavily compressed/low resolution which compounded the blurry-texture look.
...But you can bet it was a big advantage to DRAM utilization... Which meant there was more capacity to technically store more/higher resolution textures into the DRAM.
But then you have that pesky 4kb of texture cache... To get around that though you could take a tiled based approach and Garaud shading where it makes sense... And games that pushed their own microcode took full advantage of that... Which meant relative to the PS1, the Nintendo 64 was a texturing monster.
Many of RARE and Factor 9's titles fully showcased this.
And Polygons... Well. Again, when building Microcode for the Nintendo 64, it's polygon capabilities far outstrip the Playstation 1, but games that used the default Microcode tended to have lower poly counts less than the average PS1 game.
In saying that... The Nintendo 64 wasn't really Poly limited, but fillrate limited, the Playstation 1 tended to spend more polygons on models/objects so as to reduce the amount of warping... Meaning it was all a moot anyway when a flat surface on a PS1 game would have more poly's than the N64 derivative to reduce warping.
| alabtrosMyster said: - No, or limited Z buffer |
The Z-Buffer wasn't always used on the N64 either... For example Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine actually forgoed the Z-Buffer entirely so they could push the games resolution up to 640x480 when most games at the time were 320x240... Otherwise the Z-Buffer would have actually needed to use all of the systems Ram.
| curl-6 said: Yeah pretty much how I feel too. The likes of Conker, DK64, Banjo Kazooie, and Starfox 64 were, to me, the best looking 3D games of that era. On the other hand though, PS1 and Saturn were no slouch as stuff like the original Crash Bandicoot and Spyro trilogies and Panzer Dragoon 1 and Zwei also looked great at the time. I have a lot of nostalgia for both looks as I owned an N64 growing up, but also spent a lot of time at my best mate's house playing on his PS1. |
Conker is a massive technical showpiece that showed us many things that the Nintendo 64 was capable of.
Games like StarFox 64? Whilst having a ton of artistic charm, not so much.
Banjo/DK64 were marred by pretty average texturing.
Ironically my favorite games of that generation are Final Fantasy 8 (PS1) and Perfect Dark (N64) so owned both devices, so it's always been a difficult prospect deciding which console I liked more... They both have a ton of Pro's and Con's.
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