Sega Saturn Vs Nintendo 64 vs Playstation 1 - Which is the most powerful?

[Darth Vader]

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).

I can concede on all you just said, but I'll still maintain that it's by far the weakest platform

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.

Not really less efficient. You could draw six layers, maybe even more, at minimal to no cost due to the absurd bandwidth (If I'm not mistaken). It was not as "good" in most cases, but it allowed for some pretty groundbreaking effects that even the PS3 had difficulty pulling off (mostly due to higher target resolution though, but still very impressive).

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.

Yeah... Games looked a bit muddy overall. Shit, I just realised we're moving to the 6th gen already hahaha.

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.

One of the things you can really notice is how jagged the models look on the Saturn version due to the use of quadrilaterals.

 

[peter42O]

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.

You seeing the Saturn twice was more than me which was none until I bought it where I worked. lol. Those games for $10 was a steal.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

I can concede on all you just said, but I'll still maintain that it's by far the weakest platform

For 3D I'd agree with that. 2D? It has an edge over PS1 even though that system was pretty good for 2D in its own right. Both of them outdo N64 for 2D games though.

Not really less efficient. You could draw six layers, maybe even more, at minimal to no cost due to the absurd bandwidth (If I'm not mistaken). It was not as "good" in most cases, but it allowed for some pretty groundbreaking effects that even the PS3 had difficulty pulling off (mostly due to higher target resolution though, but still very impressive).

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Maybe it lacked the granularity of the shaders GC & Xbox had, but it was very efficient considering the lack of a penalty to the hardware as you said.

I think there are some things misunderstood about PS3 especially in terms of the GPU's access to memory (since it could use both the GDDR3 and XDR RAM, technically speaking), but while the PS2's benefits of texture layers could probably have been replicated with the Cell (I'm just guessing here), it took a very long time for games to do it, and the GPU was rushed.

If Sony had more time to plan out customizations for PS3's RSX, I think they would have carried over some of those particular PS2 benefits to it, or at least simulated them more directly. Though Nvidia I think were pretty uptight with doing big customizations with their GPUs or providing certain source access to partners (Intel were especially stingy on that front).

You seeing the Saturn twice was more than me which was none until I bought it where I worked. lol. Those games for $10 was a steal.

At least you knew what you were looking at! I honestly thought it was just another Genesis bundle or package at the time. I don't remember reading game magazines regularly until maybe later 1997, but at that time I was infatuated with PS1 & N64.

 

[peter42O]

At least you knew what you were looking at! I honestly thought it was just another Genesis bundle or package at the time. I don't remember reading game magazines regularly until maybe later 1997, but at that time I was infatuated with PS1 & N64.

Okay, that would explain it. I started gaming in 1989 with Nintendo and had started buying gaming magazines - EGM, GamePro, GameFan (my favorite) and a bunch of others. Haven't bothered with magazines though in over a decade. With internet, no real need for it. Anyway, I knew all the consoles and stuff due to getting the magazines every month. PlayStation was excellent as was N64 and Saturn. I also had a 3DO back then which I really enjoyed. Road Rash and Need For Speed in particular.

 

[Darth Vader]

@thicc_girls_are_teh_best this whole conversation made me dig through some hardware info for past generations. It's actually funny how the only gen where one can clearly say "yeah, this console is more powerful no doubt" is the 8th gen, where you have the PS4 being the clear leader, and then the Xbox One X for the mid gen refreshes.

Most if not all generations before and the current one have either more exotic hardware where one console may lead at some things (mode 7 on the SNES was super cool) but be pathetic at others (looking at the texture cache for the N64 for example).

I still think the PS5 has the architecture advantage this gen, but so far they traded blows.

 

[thelastword]

N64 was fog heaven and low fps city, PS1 I think had better architecture overall......I mean, I mainly look at the games....FF7, Chrono Cross, GT1/GT2, Tekken 1-3, Soul Blade, Gran Turismo, Tobal, Castlevania were really impressive games. Also I tend to look at how games emulate today, do N64 games look better uprezzed over ps1 games?

N64 was more powerful, but it was limited by other aspects, like the cartridges could never produce the large games PS could, the CGI which was big then and of course the sound quality. N64 games looked better relative to AA, less pixel crawling and shimmering, but lots of it's games had this foggy/Smudgy look. So if you want to talk textures, I think PS could stand out as having better or more realistic textures/detail. This is why Crash was so impressive. Look at Parappa on PS4 this game was emulated to higher rez with the patented replacements of textures etc... and it look so good with minimal effort. I think it would take more work to get rid of n64's smudge in an uprezzed title...

Anyways, just to note N64 did have games that showed it's strength too. Conker, Perfect Dark, Mario, Zelda, Mario Kart, Jet Force Gemini etc....

 

[KiryuRealty]

N64 was fog heaven and low fps city, PS1 I think had better architecture overall......I mean, I mainly look at the games....FF7, Chrono Cross, GT1/GT2, Tekken 1-3, Soul Blade, Gran Turismo, Tobal, Castlevania were really impressive games. Also I tend to look at how games emulate today, do N64 games look better uprezzed over ps1 games?

N64 was more powerful, but it was limited by other aspects, like the cartridges could never produce the large games PS could, the CGI which was big then and of course the sound quality. N64 games looked better relative to AA, less pixel crawling and shimmering, but lots of it's games had this foggy/Smudgy look. So if you want to talk textures, I think PS could stand out as having better or more realistic textures/detail. This is why Crash was so impressive. Look at Parappa on PS4 this game was emulated to higher rez with the patented replacements of textures etc... and it look so good with minimal effort. I think it would take more work to get rid of n64's smudge in an uprezzed title...

Anyways, just to note N64 did have games that showed it's strength too. Conker, Perfect Dark, Mario, Zelda, Mario Kart, Jet Force Gemini etc....

N64 wasn't really more powerful than the PS1, mostly due to its 64-bit CPU being malnourished by being on a 32-bit data bus. Had Nintendo not taken a rusty machete to the architecture SGI had designed for them, it could have actually run games at a playable frame rate instead of gems like Zelda running 12FPS.

I had the opportunity to talk to an SGI hardware designer who was actually on the N64 hardware team on the Silicon Graphics side back in 1996, and he told me that the final N64 was a joke, and SGI wanted their name out of the advertising and off the box, but the contracts were signed long before the system was finalized.

The original spec was for a full 64-bit bus, the magneto-optical drive as standard, the full 8MB RAM built-in and a proper sound chip, but Nintendo wanted it as cheap as possible, so it was hacked back down to the minimum that wouldn't require all software development to be restarted completely. The arcade Cruisin’ USA and Killer Instinct were based on the original spec, which is why the home releases were so shitty in comparison.

 

[Dr Bass]

N64 wasn't really more powerful than the PS1, mostly due to its 64-bit CPU being malnourished by being on a 32-bit data bus. Had Nintendo not taken a rusty machete to the architecture SGI had designed for them, it could have actually run games at a playable frame rate instead of gems like Zelda running 12FPS.

I had the opportunity to talk to an SGI hardware designer who was actually on the N64 hardware team on the Silicon Graphics side back in 1996, and he told me that the final N64 was a joke, and SGI wanted their name out of the advertising and off the box, but the contracts were signed long before the system was finalized.

The original spec was for a full 64-bit bus, the magneto-optical drive as standard, the full 8MB RAM built-in and a proper sound chip, but Nintendo wanted it as cheap as possible, so it was hacked back down to the minimum that wouldn't require all software development to be restarted completely. The arcade Cruising' USA and Killer Instinct were based on the original spec, which is why the home releases were so shitty in comparison.

Did you ever know what the original target price would have been had they kept the original spec?

I do remember them announcing a price cut from 249 to 199 before launch. This would explain a lot too. I feel like they could have launched at 399 if it had been completely mind blowing compared to the PS1 and Saturn.

That is a bummer. What could have been.

 

[KiryuRealty]

Did you ever know what the original target price would have been had they kept the original spec?

I do remember them announcing a price cut from 249 to 199 before launch. This would explain a lot too. I feel like they could have launched at 399 if it had been completely mind blowing compared to the PS1 and Saturn.

That is a bummer. What could have been.

They could have hit $299 while losing $100 or so per unit like Sony, but Yamauchi refused to take a loss.

The impression I got from the SGI dude was that Nintendo was the kind of partner you don’t work with twice. Talking to one of the dev team for Tetrisphere confirmed that.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

Okay, that would explain it. I started gaming in 1989 with Nintendo and had started buying gaming magazines - EGM, GamePro, GameFan (my favorite) and a bunch of others. Haven't bothered with magazines though in over a decade. With internet, no real need for it. Anyway, I knew all the consoles and stuff due to getting the magazines every month. PlayStation was excellent as was N64 and Saturn. I also had a 3DO back then which I really enjoyed. Road Rash and Need For Speed in particular.

I still read the magazine archives somewhat regularly, because I like the look & feel of them. There's lots of great info in the Next Generation ones, been reading the GameFan ones too but aught to check out the EGM ones again (maybe haven't done so because that was the one mag I read the most of back in the day and I have a pretty good memory of it from that time).

Speaking of missed opportunities, I think 3DO might've been good hardware but the business model was too ambitious and unrealistic for its day. No way for companies to agree to standardized spec when tech was still evolving so rapidly and 3D hadn't even been figured out yet by the late '90s (let alone 1993). I don't think the 3DO model could really work until maybe another 15-20 years from now.

By that point I think console tech will be "good enough" in terms of the horsepower they can provide and dev suites/tools/technologies/engines will be more or less compatible with each other. We'll have a reasonable spec for what a general (by then) modern game console needs to have to run AAA games. I don't think companies are going to be licensing a standard spec from one platform holder, obviously, but I think enough big platform holders (including Sony and yes even Nintendo) will probably change their business model to having a lot more or all software on multiple platforms and getting direct profit off hardware sales.

It's just that I expect Microsoft to change to that model much sooner than the others

@thicc_girls_are_teh_best this whole conversation made me dig through some hardware info for past generations. It's actually funny how the only gen where one can clearly say "yeah, this console is more powerful no doubt" is the 8th gen, where you have the PS4 being the clear leader, and then the Xbox One X for the mid gen refreshes.

Most if not all generations before and the current one have either more exotic hardware where one console may lead at some things (mode 7 on the SNES was super cool) but be pathetic at others (looking at the texture cache for the N64 for example).

I still think the PS5 has the architecture advantage this gen, but so far they traded blows.

Yep, every gen outside of last gen the different systems had tradeoffs in some areas making them better or worst than competitors. But in terms of being the best overall "balanced package" even with those constraints considered, there are some clear winners. With 16-bit it was the SNES/Super Famicom, for 5th gen it was the PS1, for 6th gen it was the PS2.

7th gen is maybe a bit trickier. 360 had some obvious advantages like the better GPU and fully unified memory, but PS3 had a progenitor to modern-day multi-core processor systems in a sense, and it's not like the RSX couldn't use the XDR RAM, it just had to access memory from two different physical memory pools (don't know if the system presented that as one contingeous virtual memory pool or two separate virtual memory pools though). And the Cell CPU dogwalked 360's.

This gen I honestly think PS5 takes it from the overall "balanced performance" POV. They made smart customizations like the cache scrubbers and dedicated cache coherency engines, Tempest audio, and the right balance of GPU clock speed with size. Series X may have some advantages at times with resolution and RT but they're often well short of the theoretical peak of the paper specs. It's going on three years and at some point "the toolz" can't be blamed anymore.

Speaking of, Sony seem to also have the better package of developer tools so that is probably helping devs to target the hardware extract more from it than those on the Xbox systems. Maybe some of Xbox's issues on that note are due to having replaced XDK with the GDK but it could also be that the GDK is simply bloated with redundancies that impact overall efficiency.

N64 wasn't really more powerful than the PS1, mostly due to its 64-bit CPU being malnourished by being on a 32-bit data bus. Had Nintendo not taken a rusty machete to the architecture SGI had designed for them, it could have actually run games at a playable frame rate instead of gems like Zelda running 12FPS.

I had the opportunity to talk to an SGI hardware designer who was actually on the N64 hardware team on the Silicon Graphics side back in 1996, and he told me that the final N64 was a joke, and SGI wanted their name out of the advertising and off the box, but the contracts were signed long before the system was finalized.

The original spec was for a full 64-bit bus, the magneto-optical drive as standard, the full 8MB RAM built-in and a proper sound chip, but Nintendo wanted it as cheap as possible, so it was hacked back down to the minimum that wouldn't require all software development to be restarted completely. The arcade Cruisin’ USA and Killer Instinct were based on the original spec, which is why the home releases were so shitty in comparison.

By magneto-optical drive you mean the 64DD right? They showed that thing off at the '95 event (Sho-something) but I'm still amazed it took them like four years to actually release it and by then in Japan only. What a waste of technology. They somehow managed to get those games squeezed onto N64 carts but it would've been nice to have a home console back then with rewritable media as standard.

But skimping on all of that just to profit directly off the hardware from Day 1 sounds like typical Nintendo. I mean they skimped on some things with the SNES I guess and held off on releasing it until the costs were low enough, but at least they provided a means for the carts to add in co-processor chips. If Nintendo were so half-in on 64DD I wonder if they could have at least added a 2nd cartridge slot but reserve it for co-processor carts, kind of like what the Saturn did. How much would that have costed, would it have been feasible at the time?

 

[peter42O]

I still read the magazine archives somewhat regularly, because I like the look & feel of them. There's lots of great info in the Next Generation ones, been reading the GameFan ones too but aught to check out the EGM ones again (maybe haven't done so because that was the one mag I read the most of back in the day and I have a pretty good memory of it from that time).

Speaking of missed opportunities, I think 3DO might've been good hardware but the business model was too ambitious and unrealistic for its day. No way for companies to agree to standardized spec when tech was still evolving so rapidly and 3D hadn't even been figured out yet by the late '90s (let alone 1993). I don't think the 3DO model could really work until maybe another 15-20 years from now.

By that point I think console tech will be "good enough" in terms of the horsepower they can provide and dev suites/tools/technologies/engines will be more or less compatible with each other. We'll have a reasonable spec for what a general (by then) modern game console needs to have to run AAA games. I don't think companies are going to be licensing a standard spec from one platform holder, obviously, but I think enough big platform holders (including Sony and yes even Nintendo) will probably change their business model to having a lot more or all software on multiple platforms and getting direct profit off hardware sales.

It's just that I expect Microsoft to change to that model much sooner than the others

I had a massive collection of GameFan, Next Generation, PSM, PS Extreme and others but sold them off a long time ago. I haven't read a gaming magazine or online archive in a very long time. 3DO was a great console and I don't think the hardware or what they wanted to do was really the problem. The $700 launch price tag was the main issue. If it was $300, they could have been very successful and would have had more third party support because the install base would have been bigger.

Hahaha. I don't believe that Microsoft is going in that direction at all but it all remains to be seen. I believe all three will evolve but not by much or in a drastic way. I think they all stay close to what they are now.

 

[KiryuRealty]

I still read the magazine archives somewhat regularly, because I like the look & feel of them. There's lots of great info in the Next Generation ones, been reading the GameFan ones too but aught to check out the EGM ones again (maybe haven't done so because that was the one mag I read the most of back in the day and I have a pretty good memory of it from that time).

Speaking of missed opportunities, I think 3DO might've been good hardware but the business model was too ambitious and unrealistic for its day. No way for companies to agree to standardized spec when tech was still evolving so rapidly and 3D hadn't even been figured out yet by the late '90s (let alone 1993). I don't think the 3DO model could really work until maybe another 15-20 years from now.

By that point I think console tech will be "good enough" in terms of the horsepower they can provide and dev suites/tools/technologies/engines will be more or less compatible with each other. We'll have a reasonable spec for what a general (by then) modern game console needs to have to run AAA games. I don't think companies are going to be licensing a standard spec from one platform holder, obviously, but I think enough big platform holders (including Sony and yes even Nintendo) will probably change their business model to having a lot more or all software on multiple platforms and getting direct profit off hardware sales.

It's just that I expect Microsoft to change to that model much sooner than the others



Yep, every gen outside of last gen the different systems had tradeoffs in some areas making them better or worst than competitors. But in terms of being the best overall "balanced package" even with those constraints considered, there are some clear winners. With 16-bit it was the SNES/Super Famicom, for 5th gen it was the PS1, for 6th gen it was the PS2.

7th gen is maybe a bit trickier. 360 had some obvious advantages like the better GPU and fully unified memory, but PS3 had a progenitor to modern-day multi-core processor systems in a sense, and it's not like the RSX couldn't use the XDR RAM, it just had to access memory from two different physical memory pools (don't know if the system presented that as one contingeous virtual memory pool or two separate virtual memory pools though). And the Cell CPU dogwalked 360's.

This gen I honestly think PS5 takes it from the overall "balanced performance" POV. They made smart customizations like the cache scrubbers and dedicated cache coherency engines, Tempest audio, and the right balance of GPU clock speed with size. Series X may have some advantages at times with resolution and RT but they're often well short of the theoretical peak of the paper specs. It's going on three years and at some point "the toolz" can't be blamed anymore.

Speaking of, Sony seem to also have the better package of developer tools so that is probably helping devs to target the hardware extract more from it than those on the Xbox systems. Maybe some of Xbox's issues on that note are due to having replaced XDK with the GDK but it could also be that the GDK is simply bloated with redundancies that impact overall efficiency.



By magneto-optical drive you mean the 64DD right? They showed that thing off at the '95 event (Sho-something) but I'm still amazed it took them like four years to actually release it and by then in Japan only. What a waste of technology. They somehow managed to get those games squeezed onto N64 carts but it would've been nice to have a home console back then with rewritable media as standard.

But skimping on all of that just to profit directly off the hardware from Day 1 sounds like typical Nintendo. I mean they skimped on some things with the SNES I guess and held off on releasing it until the costs were low enough, but at least they provided a means for the carts to add in co-processor chips. If Nintendo were so half-in on 64DD I wonder if they could have at least added a 2nd cartridge slot but reserve it for co-processor carts, kind of like what the Saturn did. How much would that have costed, would it have been feasible at the time?

On the dev tools question, the bigger issue than tools that impacts Xbox performance is that it runs on Windows, which is full of bloated, inefficient code, even in the stripped-down Xbox form. PS5 runs on an OS based on BSD UNIX, and is custom-built for what Sony wants it to do. No excess code, no old programming cruft from the 1980s killing efficiency. The estimated OS overhead for the systems is a huge gap, Xbox at 30% of CPU cycles being OS function calls that have nothing to do with gaming, while the PS5 OS is in the neighborhood of 5% of CPU cycles being tied up in system calls.

As for the MO drive for the N64, one of the possibilities was Nintendo didn't fully own the tech, and with Yamauchi being the way he was, he didn't want to share any tech royalties. That's why PlayStation became what it is, Nintendo wanting the whole pie. It was also late to market due to reliability and performance problems, which is why it never left Japan.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

I had a massive collection of GameFan, Next Generation, PSM, PS Extreme and others but sold them off a long time ago. I haven't read a gaming magazine or online archive in a very long time. 3DO was a great console and I don't think the hardware or what they wanted to do was really the problem. The $700 launch price tag was the main issue. If it was $300, they could have been very successful and would have had more third party support because the install base would have been bigger.

It's interesting with 3DO because sales DID pick up when they slashed the price to around $300, although that wasn't a sustainable price for them for the long term and they never moved the volumes needed to offset the bleed on costs (since 3DO didn't get any percentage cut from 3P software sales with their business model).

Honestly if they had a more traditional business model from Day 1 I think they would have done a lot better out of the gate because they'd of priced the console more competitively (maybe $399 instead of $699; even $499 maybe wouldn't have been so big a deal at that time given the tech). They had some great early games like Need for Speed and Road Rash, and had a better lineup overall than Atari Jaguar.

$399 3DO with that lineup would have obliterated the Jaguar even if Jaguar were cheaper IMHO. The gulf in software quality was just too much and 3DO actually had some real 3D games whereas it took Jaguar until arguably Alien vs Predator to get such games (and even then, they were extremely sparse).

Hahaha. I don't believe that Microsoft is going in that direction at all but it all remains to be seen. I believe all three will evolve but not by much or in a drastic way. I think they all stay close to what they are now.

You keep believing that bud

On the dev tools question, the bigger issue than tools that impacts Xbox performance is that it runs on Windows, which is full of bloated, inefficient code, even in the stripped-down Xbox form. PS5 runs on an OS based on BSD UNIX, and is custom-built for what Sony wants it to do. No excess code, no old programming cruft from the 1980s killing efficiency. The estimated OS overhead for the systems is a huge gap, Xbox at 30% of CPU cycles being OS function calls that have nothing to do with gaming, while the PS5 OS is in the neighborhood of 5% of CPU cycles being tied up in system calls.

The amazing thing when you think about it is that, technically, Sony also use hypervisor and abstraction layers. Since the PS3 even (I just found this out reading through the PS3 article on that...Italian(?) website. Need to finish the 360 one sometime). But I guess it really all comes down to the kernel and as you said, Sony cuts all the unnecessary stuff out. They also don't have to account for being BC with code dating back to the early '80s, like you also mentioned.

If the gap is that huge between the two system's OSes, no wonder we're seeing the results in multiplats we've been regularly getting. That 100 MHz advantage for Series X's CPU literally doesn't matter if the CPU's spending so much more time on redundant and unnecessary OS functions, utilities or suchlike. None of the "tools" are going to clear that up unless they completely rewrite the OS and that could outright break lots of software compatibility.

As for the MO drive for the N64, one of the possibilities was Nintendo didn't fully own the tech, and with Yamauchi being the way he was, he didn't want to share any tech royalties. That's why PlayStation became what it is, Nintendo wanting the whole pie. It was also late to market due to reliability and performance problems, which is why it never left Japan.

A lot of ZIP drive tech from that era ended up being pretty sketchy in reliability. Iomega got that part right which is why their standard became #1 in the market. But there's like dozens of failed ones from various companies, it's pretty interesting having learned more about it.

Actually wasn't the 64DD's drive built by Iomega? I'm just curious if so, or if Nintendo tried developing their own custom variant only buying a license to some type of ZIP tech that was already on the market like say Iomega's?

Guess Nintendo have a history with disk media and reliability/performance issues, same thing happened with Famicom seemingly.

 

[KiryuRealty]

It's interesting with 3DO because sales DID pick up when they slashed the price to around $300, although that wasn't a sustainable price for them for the long term and they never moved the volumes needed to offset the bleed on costs (since 3DO didn't get any percentage cut from 3P software sales with their business model).

Honestly if they had a more traditional business model from Day 1 I think they would have done a lot better out of the gate because they'd of priced the console more competitively (maybe $399 instead of $699; even $499 maybe wouldn't have been so big a deal at that time given the tech). They had some great early games like Need for Speed and Road Rash, and had a better lineup overall than Atari Jaguar.

$399 3DO with that lineup would have obliterated the Jaguar even if Jaguar were cheaper IMHO. The gulf in software quality was just too much and 3DO actually had some real 3D games whereas it took Jaguar until arguably Alien vs Predator to get such games (and even then, they were extremely sparse).



You keep believing that bud



The amazing thing when you think about it is that, technically, Sony also use hypervisor and abstraction layers. Since the PS3 even (I just found this out reading through the PS3 article on that...Italian(?) website. Need to finish the 360 one sometime). But I guess it really all comes down to the kernel and as you said, Sony cuts all the unnecessary stuff out. They also don't have to account for being BC with code dating back to the early '80s, like you also mentioned.

If the gap is that huge between the two system's OSes, no wonder we're seeing the results in multiplats we've been regularly getting. That 100 MHz advantage for Series X's CPU literally doesn't matter if the CPU's spending so much more time on redundant and unnecessary OS functions, utilities or suchlike. None of the "tools" are going to clear that up unless they completely rewrite the OS and that could outright break lots of software compatibility.



A lot of ZIP drive tech from that era ended up being pretty sketchy in reliability. Iomega got that part right which is why their standard became #1 in the market. But there's like dozens of failed ones from various companies, it's pretty interesting having learned more about it.

Actually wasn't the 64DD's drive built by Iomega? I'm just curious if so, or if Nintendo tried developing their own custom variant only buying a license to some type of ZIP tech that was already on the market like say Iomega's?

Guess Nintendo have a history with disk media and reliability/performance issues, same thing happened with Famicom seemingly.

The Nintendo M/O format was based on 3M tech, not the Zip drive. And Zip drives had worse issues than most people know. The Click of Death was a fatal failure Zip drives could suffer, and the worst part was that a disc that was in a drive that suffered the CoD would pass that failure on to whatever drives it was put in after that.

The Famicom Disk System media failures mostly came due to the discs not having any kind of shutter over the media inside the casing, due to Nintendo’s cheapness. As with any floppy drive, put a dirty disk in it, the heads get dirty too, and they wreck more discs in turn.

And yeah, the difference in efficiency between the Xbox Windows build and the PS BSD stack is amazing. It really shows the cost of legacy code and the strengths of tailoring code for specialized devices. Then again, even for general purpose computing, Windows is a massive waster of resources when compared to any flavour of UNIX system.

 

[Darth Vader]

This gen I honestly think PS5 takes it from the overall "balanced performance" POV. They made smart customizations like the cache scrubbers and dedicated cache coherency engines, Tempest audio, and the right balance of GPU clock speed with size. Series X may have some advantages at times with resolution and RT but they're often well short of the theoretical peak of the paper specs. It's going on three years and at some point "the toolz" can't be blamed anymore.

FYI there have been more circumstances where the PS5 shows better Ray Tracing than not. When there are differences, the PS5 pulls ahead on RT, FPS, Alpha effects, and the Xbox pulls away in resolution.

Another thing I thought of the other day was that it's likely some 3rd party developers are not using the full theoretical 13.5GB RAM available to them on the PS5, but rather narrowing it down to 10GB because of the Series X. I doubt developers are bothering with the slower pool of ram on the Series X, especially because it shares the same stupid bus.

 

[KiryuRealty]

FYI there have been more circumstances where the PS5 shows better Ray Tracing than not. When there are differences, the PS5 pulls ahead on RT, FPS, Alpha effects, and the Xbox pulls away in resolution.

Another thing I thought of the other day was that it's likely some 3rd party developers are not using the full theoretical 13.5GB RAM available to them on the PS5, but rather narrowing it down to 10GB because of the Series X. I doubt developers are bothering with the slower pool of ram on the Series X, especially because it shares the same stupid bus.

It’s like the devs who couldn’t be bothered to parallellise their code on PS3 ports just dropping effects, like how Starbreeze left most of the lighting effects out of The Darkness compared to the 360 build.

Give a developer the choice between putting in a bit more work to have two versions be identical on different machines, and they’ll just half-ass or cut out whichever features they need to on the more complex machine to avoid the extra work.

 

[peter42O]

It's interesting with 3DO because sales DID pick up when they slashed the price to around $300, although that wasn't a sustainable price for them for the long term and they never moved the volumes needed to offset the bleed on costs (since 3DO didn't get any percentage cut from 3P software sales with their business model).

Honestly if they had a more traditional business model from Day 1 I think they would have done a lot better out of the gate because they'd of priced the console more competitively (maybe $399 instead of $699; even $499 maybe wouldn't have been so big a deal at that time given the tech). They had some great early games like Need for Speed and Road Rash, and had a better lineup overall than Atari Jaguar.

$399 3DO with that lineup would have obliterated the Jaguar even if Jaguar were cheaper IMHO. The gulf in software quality was just too much and 3DO actually had some real 3D games whereas it took Jaguar until arguably Alien vs Predator to get such games (and even then, they were extremely sparse).

Agreed. 3DO was such a great console.

You keep believing that bud

Haha. I will.

 

[Old Gamer]

FYI there have been more circumstances where the PS5 shows better Ray Tracing than not. When there are differences, the PS5 pulls ahead on RT, FPS, Alpha effects, and the Xbox pulls away in resolution.

Another thing I thought of the other day was that it's likely some 3rd party developers are not using the full theoretical 13.5GB RAM available to them on the PS5, but rather narrowing it down to 10GB because of the Series X. I doubt developers are bothering with the slower pool of ram on the Series X, especially because it shares the same stupid bus.

It's really something, isn't it? Looks like Cernys presentation wasn't the marketing BS a lot of people dismissed it as after all.

 

[Darth Vader]

It's really something, isn't it? Looks like Cernys presentation wasn't the marketing BS a lot of people dismissed it as after all.

Of course it wasn't. The guy is one of the great ones in game and hardware design, but somehow internet armchair specialists think they are somehow more qualified.

 

[KiryuRealty]

Of course it wasn't. The guy is one of the great ones in game and hardware design, but somehow internet armchair specialists think they are somehow more qualified.

Basically, Cerny is on a level where a person can be quite knowledgeable and yet not comprehend what Cerny is saying, because his approach tends to be unconventional.

They mock him because they don’t get how he plays the game, and they can’t accept that they don’t get it, so they try to keep discrediting his words after they’re proven.

Like the over-focus on the PS5’s SSD, when the SSD is just one part of a unique and inventive I/O subsystem that is years ahead of standard PC system design.