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fillet on 06 June 2012
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lilbroex said:
fillet said:
 


I will take you up on that challenge tomorrow on your wall if that's ok. It's a bit late now. But I will shoot you down, well i'll try lol, but as a quick aside there were virtually no games that looked better on the Saturn, most had a lower resoltion (Wipeout), worse lighting and crap shading (Resident Evil), lower frame rate (Doom), lower poly count, (VF vs Tekken), remember the first Virtua Fighter? It didn't even have textures at the same time Tekken was being released. :p

I know the saturn had 2 cpus, I remember reading some rubbish that 1 "processed" the foreground and 1 the "background" in the marketing spiel. Point is it's very hard to utilize 2 cpus at the same time efficiently for jobs that both are suitable for, especially in those days where programmers never had to thread things like engines and graphics over 1 cpu. Normally it was just 1 cpu for game and 1 for sound. (sorry if patronising).

I didn't know about the rendering method using quads to be honest. End of the day though, the lack of transparency effects is what truely showed up the Saturn and made it clearly look inferior, games like Crash Bandicoot with it's texture smoothing wouldn't even be possible on the Saturn.

I can tell you now that Sonic Racing youtube video is a fraud, the Saturn didn't support bilinear filtering so there's no way those graphics would be possible and that is clearly being run on an emulator. I played that game and it wasn't terrible looking but it didn't look that good. The only other reason I can think of for the smooth textures in it is down to the bad compression on youtube. I doubt that though as the edges still look crisp.

Saddly I was a die hard Sega fan and couldn't stand the idea of owning a games console from a company that isn't in the gaming business (Sony) and purchased a Saturn only to be treated to sub par ports with a few classics from Sega.

Sorry, said I wouldn't say anything now, but well anyway :)

 

Edit - Actually, just done a google to prove how bad the graphics were and turns out this was released on the PC, so that must be from the PC. The Saturn simply wasn't capable of graphics that good.

I was sure that was the Saturn version but I wll go with another then. Same attributes apply. This is a 100% Saturn game.

And Duke Nukem 3D for good measure. Do I need to pull out Christmas Nights, the Shenmue beta or Sonix Xtreme better? Most of the games that showed what the Saturn could really do never saw the light of day cause SEGA killed the system so early.


I agree, those late games you mention were the shizzle and true classics in every sense but they were the exception talking in terms of graphic quality. Sega's AM studios could create stuff that PS1 couldn't do, at the time at least. But they till had limitations, water always looked rubbish on the Saturn, as did any window, and it's lack of bilinear filtering made it so it's best games couldn't match that of a PS1's best game. Those games you list don't have bilinier filtering which is the whole problem. Bilinier filtering was the main reason to own a 3d card for pc back in the day, beautiful smoothed textures with no pixelation, this simply wasn't possible on the Saturn due to a completely lacking set of hardware 3d features and badly thought out future by Sega.