Console Graphical Power Ranking

[Pemalite]

bdbdbd said:

Then also some systems, like Saturn vs. PSX vs. N64 vs. NDS are quite interesting because of their completely different philosophy with their design. Saturn looks a bit different from the other systems because of it's square-shaped polygons - which is also why it has so low polycount relative to other system that are using triangles; Saturn needs to calculate 33% more lines than the other systems for the same polycount. PSX and N64 had similar architecture that both had a non-GPU geometry engine to free GPU resources to other tasks. PSX had some goodlooking games that were made by streaming textures from disc, but the games did not have much graphical effects. N64 had way too small texture memory, but every game had incredible effects for their time. NDS on the other had two screens so it had to output 30% more pixels than the other systems, and it was very much like PSX when it comes to effects, even as otherwise NDS blows the 5th gen systems out of the water. But the differences with the systems makes the hardware interesting.

Saturn used Quadratics, ironically nVidia's first graphics processor (NV1) also used Quadratics.

Quadratics isn't "square shaped polygons" - They are Squares, not triangles... That would be like asserting that squares are the same as a triangle, they aren't, they are different shapes.

Quadratics isn't always planar/plat like a triangle either, which meant games could potentially have more curvature and complexity than they would otherwise seem to have.
The issue stems when you want to shade those areas, which meant you needed to split the quads into triangles anyway.

However... Quadratics ironically shine when it comes to ray intersections and surface normals which could be computed extremely efficiently. (Think: Ray Tracing.)

bdbdbd said:

PSX and N64 had similar architecture that both had a non-GPU geometry engine to free GPU resources to other tasks. PSX had some goodlooking games that were made by streaming textures from disc, but the games did not have much graphical effects. N64 had way too small texture memory, but every game had incredible effects for their time. NDS on the other had two screens so it had to output 30% more pixels than the other systems, and it was very much like PSX when it comes to effects, even as otherwise NDS blows the 5th gen systems out of the water. But the differences with the systems makes the hardware interesting.

The Nintendo 64 was able to more efficiently stream data from carts due to the solid state storage that carts used.. Compared to the PS1.
The issue was the 4kb texture cache... Smart developers eventually work ways around that limitation with layering and clamping of textures, especially RARE with Conker and Factor 5 with indiana jones.

The Nintendo 64 -did- have a geometry engine.
Reality Display processor did per pixel operations and the Reality Signal Processor did vertex and geometry calculations and was capable of doing Geforce/Radeon DX7 levels of Transform and Lighting.