Biggest leap forward from a system to its successor

[Pemalite]

haxxiy said:

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.

If you watch the video it goes in-depth on the CPU/GPU contention issues when accessing Ram.

And yes, the expansion pack was used by a plethora of games... To various degrees. I.E. Donkey Kong used it to get around a memory leak bug.
But I wouldn't consider additional Ram beyond that to be a "memory starved" ecosystem, it was limited in other ways before that became a big issue.

They didn't even need to skip the 4kb of texture memory or replace it, they just needed to let developers bypass it entirely and access straight from cart or system memory.