Insomniac's Brian Hastings speaks out on the PS3

[sieanr]

HappySqurriel said: robjoh said: @happysqurriel damn I didn't know that it was such a large difference...actuly thought that ps1 and N64 had the same power more or less. albionus said: Wikipedia's entries have a good rundown of the technical differences between the two. There's lots of MHz's, MB's, MB/s', MPixels, etc. but I guess the most notable number is that the PS1 could output 180,000 polygons per second while the N64 could do 500-600,000 at the same quality level. Nintendo apparently required a higher quality 100,000 poly/s mode to be used however. Someone mentioned it earlier but despite being more powerful the N64 was also more difficult to program for (which system does that sound like today). Again, wikipedia has a section on it but a major problem was the N64's graphics processor only had a 4 kB texture buffer. That limited the size of a texture that developers could use which caused the muddy stretched textures many games had. Developers found work arounds of course but it took time and effort. There is actually a lot of problems with each of the components in the N64; the system needed 8 or 12 MB of memory rather than the 4 that came with it by default and the memory's latency was too high; the CPU could have used a L2 cache and a 64 bit bus; and the GPU could have used a much larger texture buffer. Had it not been as rushed of a project, and had Nintendo been willing to budge on the initial manufacturing cost of the system, the actual performance from the system would have (probably) doubled and developers would have had a far easier time obtaining decent performance.

A short addendum: Ninty had a very backwards stance with the microcode on the 64 and it was only when they started relenting with Rare that some truely impressive titles hit. Conker is an excellent example of what good microcode on the 64 can do, as is indiana jones. Of course microcode wouldn't prevent the TMEM from sucking, but it would help.