Should Sony Abandon the PSP?, or You Can't Spell Ignorant without...

[dharh]

jarrod said:

I just brought up Saturn and N64 for relative figures of same class hardware.  BTW, what game did you find 150k textured, shaded polys in, and what was the framerate?  My understanding was that PS1 games tended to peak around 90k pps @ 30 fps. I thought Tekken 3 was good example of a high end title @ 60 fps though (ranging 60-80k pps), you actually found something better?

The DS locked ceiling is in place to ensure stable framerates (like previous Sega arcade hardware), I'd view it less as a disadvantage and more as a guide. Plus DS throws tons of 3D effects at you "for free" (cellshading, gouraud shading, environment mapping, shadow volumes, specular lighting, alpha blending, fog, etc) and even had a crude T&L engine with 4 "free" directional lights and even ST3C texture compression.  DS' 3D spec was basically designed to be the anti-N64 (which took major performance hits the more effects you piled on), it really is the all around most capable system for 3D when compared to similar class consoles (N64, PS1, Saturn) and DS would rank only behind Saturn in 2D capability.  I'd say the proof is in the pudding though, looking at high end 3D DS RPGs like FF Gaiden or DQIX or SaGa2 or Ninokuni, and they pretty much blow away anything comparable on PS1 or Saturn technically.

I also found the peak transform figures for each by googling, PS1 is 1.5m verticies/sec while DS is 4m verticies/sec.

The real downfall for DS 3D imo isn't the above-PS1-in-game polygon ceiling.  It's in it method for texture filtering, which is fixed point (resulting in those "blocky" looking textures) and lacks any bi-linear filtering (which N64 at least supported).  Considering the screen size, Nintendo likely figured the performance hit wasn't worth the trade off, but it'd have been nice to have the option imo.

You're gonna want to throttle me, but now I can't find my citation for the polygon count of chrono cross, which beats tekken 3.