True and I agree. I remember when I worked at Blockbuster back then and the store I was in had a Sega Saturn. This was in 2000. Five years after launch. Was brand new, never rented and the ribbon was still on the battery to where it couldn't save data until it was removed. Cost was $50 plus tax. What a fucking steal that was.
When I was a kid I only saw the Saturn on two occasions. Once at a Funcoland (Funcoland >>> Gamestop) with a demo of Congo running, and again in a jewelry display case of all things at liquidation prices. I didn't even know what a Saturn was during this time, I just knew it looked like a "Sega" console but not the one I had (Genesis), so I must've thought it was a new Genesis SKU or something.
The lucky bastards who picked up Radiant Silvergun or PD Saga for $10 back then are probably laughing at many of us today, and for good reason.
I'm going to hard disagree here. Even in the homebrew scene, where people have had years to perfect and optimise for the console, we haven't seen anything really ground breaking for the Saturn. Compare it with the N64, where people have been able to double the framerate on SM64 on OG hardware, and one can tell that the console was simply not too good.
It had trouble with parallelism, data would stall between CPUs, it had lots of issues with transparencies... Let's not forget they added the second VDP in 1994, the same year it released! For context, here's a diagram of the mobo.
I can agree with this to some extent, but one of the things that held back homebrew on Saturn for a long time was that the security hadn't been cracked. In fact, it was only really bypassed just a few years ago. I remember it being a pretty big deal when the guy responsible came out with the video.
Before that making homebrew for Saturn was limited to emulators that were still not where they are today, and it was a lot harder to run homebrew code on actual hardware. There have been some developments since 2016, but this is one of the notable examples that pops up in my head:
This is from the same guy who made the Hellslave Saturn homebrew demo, using a custom engine. I'd say right now this is the peak of technical prowess with Saturn homebrew efforts and they're doing a lot of things generally considered impossible on the Saturn during its commercial tenure. I'm not saying this is looks better than anything on the PS1 or N64, but it's important to remember this demo is just from a single person whereas many of the best showpieces on PS1 & Saturn were made by teams of dozens of people with budgets in the millions, over a period of 2 or so years.
So they obviously have an advantage, but I still think demos like this are pretty impressive and it'll be something to see full games made from efforts like these. If Saturn had more AAA releases made past 1997 (most of the 1998 games finished most of their dev by late 1997 or at most very early 1998), I think we would've gotten more technically impressive stuff than the last batch of releases (some of which like HOTD were outsourced to a rushed 3P dev studio anyway), certainly from a team like Lobotomy Software.
Maybe not stuff to best the likes of FF VIII or IX, Parasite Eve 2 or GT2, but closer to those results than some would maybe expect. I agree though with all of the architecture drawbacks you mention; those existed and compounded on Saturn's problems and lack of a decent SDK for so long just exacerbated the issues (the website with that screencap is a fantastic source on these systems, too).
Was going to mention this. The PS2 was an absolute beast with particles and fillrate. It also had some absolute wonder games that I doubt the gamecube could replicate 1:1, even if it could probably produce better textures and higher resolution.
Yep, I also think PS2 might have had higher polygon culling or rasterization rate than the GC and Xbox as well, but I'm not sure on that. While it didn't have shader support like the GC and Xbox, it had something with "texture layers" or something like that (again trying to recall from what I've read, it's been a minute) and programmers could use that to effectively simulate something similar to shaders, if a bit less efficient.
One of the things that sucked with PS2 though was its limited video output support. Even if it could have produced higher resolution in certain games over GC & Xbox, it had a video output with more muted colors and softening of the image than GC, Xbox and DC. Would've been nice if Sony went a bit further in that respect but considering all the other tech packed into the system, it wasn't a bad tradeoff.
The games was made exclusive to PS1 and ported a year late to Saturn in Japan only... there is a interview in the past that said they had a lot of issues to convert the code from PS1 to Saturn and that can explain the differences with glaring graphic issues.
The opposite happened too.
Grandia on Saturn has better graphics and framerate than a year late Grandia port on PS1 but it was still a better port than SotN on Saturn.
Working exclusively for a fixed hardware matters a lot in the overall result... ports needs a lot of rework or care from the developer to really shines over the original.
Another thing about Saturn SOTN was that Konami didn't handle the port internally; they outsourced it to another company altogether. That company didn't bother to rework the sprite rendering to suite the Saturn's hardware. Capcom did similar with the Saturn port of RE1, which meant they had very little actual hands-on experience with 3D on Saturn.
Explains a lot why Final Fight Revenge became such a kusoge game. Granted, I don't think Saturn ports of RE1 would have exactly matched up with the PS1's if Capcom handled it in-house, outside of the backgrounds which may've been better (and maybe the FMVs and CG sequences if they programmed support for the MPEG decoder card...though how many Saturn owners would have actually bothered with that?), but I think they'd of been a bit better and closer to matching the PS1 versions than they did.
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