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haxxiy on 07 February 2024
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Pemalite said:

The Nintendo 64 wasn't really Ram limited.
With the expansion pack you could have 8MB... And the system can theoretically support around 12-16MB which is the upper limit from the initialization routines on the system itself... The Nintendo 64 was able to be fairly memory efficient as it can stream data directly from the ROM carts with no load times.

The issue was that stupid 4kb of texture cache... With a unified memory architecture it was a stupid and unnecessary decision.

That Mario 64 demo does use the expansion pack, and a lot of games that did too had access to 2-4 times higher resolution options even if the expansion pack wasn't mandatory. That is kind of huge.

It is my understanding that their esoteric 9-bit Rambus RAM was way faster than the PS1's EDO RAM, but the CPU and GPU would fight over access to it so unified memory wasn't as optimal back then as it would in the X360 days.

Ideally, they probably should have done away with the cache (which is still RAM, mind, SRAM) and included some 4MB of dedicated VRAM. Even without the benefit of hindsight, I don't think developing that kind of solution was out of reach for Silicon Graphics considering the PS1/Saturn opted for this.