It's a very tricky question to answer.

The N64 had more RAM, more raw processing power, and generally a much more 3D-suited architecture. It did texture filtering and texture crossfading, and it didn't do all the miscalculations of 3D geometry the PS1 was infamous for, which lead to the charming "popping" you'd see in many of the games.

It just didn't push as many polygons on screen as the PS1, though, and didn't allow for any single texture file to be any larger than 4 kilobyte. This meant a lot of low-color low-res textures in N64 games, and a lot of games hitting draw call limits early, leading to stuttering frame rates.

The whole thing meant that games on PS1 often had smoother framerates and bigger, prettier textures than the N64 counterparts, despite them jittering a bit and not being filtered.

The N64 -could- run textures unfiltered, which could mean better frame rates for the titles that did exactly need it. But Nintendo weren't at all keen with allowing it. Games on the system had to flaunt the feature.

Lastly is Cartridges vs. CDs. Obviously Nintendo's choice meant voice acting for the most part was axed, music was usually MIDI (towards the end they did get MP3s running on the thing) and FMV was an incredibly rare thing to see. This did mean very short load times for everyone, however, but it wasn't a trade-off many developers appreciated, what with having to amputate their games AND their budgets, do to the relatively sky-high price of production for cartridges compared with CDs.

I guess in the end they were quite different systems. From a purely processing numbers perspective, the N64 is strongest, but quite many hardware design choices cause bottlenecks that held it back gravely.

Nintendo 64 had the better renderer but it didn't have the bigger count of polygons or media storage space. Polygons sure looked nicer, but how about textures? textures looked pretty much the same as a PSone game, and not many games had them, it was mainly plain polys. Most "cinematic experiences" that PSone gave birth like FF 7-9, Vagrant Story, Xenogears, Resident Evil 1-3, Parasite Eve, Chrono Cross, etc, etc, were impossible to do on a N64, it lacked the ability to stream in real time FMV in the background, a pretty cool technique many games made popular at the time. N64 was seriously limited in sound, so no voice-overs, CD quality sound effects and music were just vastly superior on PSone.

The way I see it it comes down to this :

PSone could do about 90% of what N64 could do, except nicer polygons and some effects not looking as neat.

N64 was incapable of doing pretty much any game from PSone, because of cartridges.

N64 loses every single time.

More powerful, but not enough games to take advantage of it.

In terms of pure power, the N64 was easily the more powerful console. It could output 3D graphics that the PS1 devs could only dream of. That's why so many PS1 devs relied on using 3D character models on pre-rendered 2D backgrounds and FMV. This technique was started out of necessity, not because it looked good. For one thing it makes the environment incredibly static limiting what limiting the level of interactivity.

If the PS1 could output N64 quality 3D graphics, I doubt many devs would have bothered with it (and that 2D/3D technique died a death in the following gen).

This is no real contest.

The N64 is obviously the more powerful console. Not only on paper in most aspects, but also in the real world. The only real thing the PS1 had on the N64 that truly hindered the latter on the technical side was of course the capacity of discs versus that of cartridges. Which meant some things would be cut or quality compromised. However, a technically good game for N64 easily looked a good step above one for the PS1. Always, it's undebatable. Sadly there were however too few developers that actually wanted to use the N64's power, which is why you have utter graphical crap like Superman 64 on a console that also had Conker's Bad Fur Day.

I'm not hating the console though, in fact, the PS1 is still my #2 favorite console of all time.

As a side-note, I'm glad Nintendo choose cartridges instead of discs. CD's still weren't really 'there yet' back then and even if it's my second favorite console, it was also the one that gave me the most problems with my games. Durability of the discs was bad and those load-times...

If we're talking about power, then no, it doesn't have better graphics.

I think you started well ethomaz, the n64 really had more processing power... However the CD media for the PS1 allowed it to compensate for some of the shortcomings, even if it did in totally different aspects.

The n64 could apply filtering on the textures, that was pretty impressive for an home machine back in those days, while the PS1 could not even render perspective correct textures on the polygons... however either because of the cartridges or other memory constraints most games on the n64 are disgusting to watch because the textures are extremely blury, so I would say that this benefit kind of played against it in a way because it was not ready to do much with it.

Because of this, if you emulate PS1 games on modern hardware they tend to look much better, they have more data to work with.

When cart prices came down, Resi 2 fit on a 512 mb cart with all the voice overs and all the FMV plus both characters playthrough.

Contrastly There was alot of games the PSX couldnt do at all. It was simply not possible to do Perfect Dark, Banjo Kazooie, Rogue Squadron etc. RS actually had more voice over stuff than most PSX games. And also had loaads of realtime film clips from the movies on the cart to.

Wrong.

In fact. PSX couldnt do ANY N64 game, simply for the fact that it couldnt pull Z-buffering, realtime HW lighting, texture AA...etc.

if the PSX had to do all those effects the performance would be much worst than N64s

on the other hand, N64 could achieve 99% PSX visuals just not doing those effects as was shown by Wipeout 64.

TOP N64 games VS TOP PSx games

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