| 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'm not arguing that the Saturn was more powerful than the PSone (it clearly wasn't in the 3D department) but it's unfair of you to bring up ports of PSOne games as a measuring stick. And FYI VF didn't have texture mapping in the arcades hence nor did the Saturn version since it was a port. Later on it was released with texture maps and renamed VF Remix. And the highest res games released in that era were both on the Saturn. Texture mapped VF2 and Saturn Bomberman.
