By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
jarrod on 12 January 2010
Edit Thread
dharh said:
noname2200 said:
dharh said:

I guess it depends on what you call a DS. The original DS (and DS Lite) would probably need quite a bit of re-engineering to run FFVII and more specifically FFVIII.

The thing is, many of us can not figure out why you're saying this.

It's mainly because I know the limitations of the DS. It's quite a interesting bit of engineering, but it was given strict limits on its capabilities (one wonders why though). The polygon count of the DS is not really impressive, also it has to deal with two screens, though you could limit the use of one of the screens and thus focus most of the processing power to only one of the screens.

The polygon capabilities of the PS1 are more powerful than DS, and the PSP is more powerful than the PS1. With the DSi on the other hand this is not necessarily the case. I dunno if the DSi is fundamentally more powerful than the PSP, given the limited info on it still, but it probably is. Fact remains though that we are talking about the DS and not really the DSi. 

Really though my original argument, again, was specifically about the purity of the original games, FMVs and all. Which again, again, would have to removed/changed/etc to work on the DS.

DS manages 100k textured lit polys @ 60 fps on just the ARM10.  This isn't a peak theoretical though, it's actually in game.  We don't have a comparable figure for PS1 (Sony only gave out peak figures, not used in-game environments), but we can look at emulators to find some.  Tekken 3 was just 60-80k pps @ 60 fps on PS1 iirc, so well below what DS is capable of for a well regarded 4th/5th gen PS1 game and possibly the best looking game in it's genre that gen.

Where DS really outclasses PS1 though is in memory.  4MB main ram vs just 2MB on PS1.  On DSi, this balloons to 16MB (though some is reserved for the background OS).  DS actually has a more capable chip for 3D though (it's Z-buffer alone basically ensures that) and even has hardwired support for stuff like cellshading, scanline rendering, etc.  In actual game performance, DS pretty much smokes PS1 from every angle unless you're using only flat, unshaded, unlit polygons.

Also, FFVII/VIII each have less than an hour of FMV, which means that alone could be squeezed on to a 128MB DS card using standard DivX compression with plenty of room to spare.  Again, the games wouldn't need to have anything removed, period.