If the N64 had a CD-ROM Drive, would've Nintendo won the generation in sales?

[bdbdbd]

Slownenberg said:

bdbdbd said:

It did not have higher polygon count - of course depends on the game, but N64 was roughly twice as powerful when it comes to polycount, and also the hardware effects were much better. PS could stream textures from CD (N64 could do this too, but there wasn't space on cartridge to do that) and N64 had incredibly small texture cache, which is why N64 graphics were blurry.

PS1 could technically do more polygons. I don't know the specifics of it but at the time and ever since every report I've ever read about the two systems says PS1 could do more polygons. That may just refer to a technical ability though, as in when you add in textures and effects and everything it may not have mattered because PS1 was so much less capable than N64. But technically PS1 had higher polygon count, but overall far inferior graphics.

The bit of blurriness N64 games had was just from the use (some say overuse) of Anti-Aliasing. PS1 had super pixelated textures and super jagged polygons (along with very glitchy graphics), N64 was obviously better in all regards because it was more powerful, but devs also used Anti-Aliasing to smooth out the image to further decrease pixelated textures and jaggies. This made N64 graphics smoother looking than they otherwise would have been, but also made them look slightly blurry.

The blurriness was because of the 4kilobyte texture cache. There's really no way around it (technically you could read the cache twice for one screen by halving the frame rate).

The original spec for N64 was 100 000 polygons per second, opposed to 300 000 for PSX, whereas the "new" microcode that took better advantage of the memory made it possible for N64 to churn 500 000 polygons per second. Even as N64 had modern unified memory architecture, it had it's memory divided between the different processors - if you did not need the whole memory reserved for audio, it was unused. The "new" microcode Nintendo provided made the memory dynamic, so you could use the non-used memory for other purposes, like graphics.