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

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

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.

Oh okay, it was 3M not Iomega. Thanks for the clarification. I think Iomega ZIP drives were more reliable than others when it came to avoiding the CoD, but some alternatives that tried coming to market in the early/mid '90s suffered from it a lot.

I'm mainly going by documentaries though; didn't have a home PC in the '90s b/c my gaming was on consoles & arcades, but we did use (regular) floppies in school for the library & computer room stuff, and AFAIK a lot of ZIP disk types used floppy disk tech as their basis to evolve from (but some also based their tech around HDD designs).

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.

If push comes to shove I'm gonna be moving my OS setup to some type of Linux in the future, if it means squeezing out more performance. I could probably run debloaters for W10/W11 but some of them cause stability issues.

Sometimes I think MS wanting to push ads on W11 is a way of them hoping to screw up debloater scripts or anything modifying registry and utility files in Windows, especially if those ads require an online connection and an online connection is required in the future to install programs or make certain types of system settings modifications (so that the changes can be "verified" on MS's end).

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.

Good point, that's been something happening a decent big with multiplats between both systems. PS5 pulling ahead in RT is surprising for me but perhaps not so if shader core saturation on the game's engine side isn't enough to saturate Series X's GPU, but saturates PS5's. Because even with RT, Series X's advantage only shows up if more than 44 CUs are saturated (assuming 4 TMUs per CU which I think is the case with RDNA2 GPUs).

And just 44 CUs saturated only gives them equal RT advantage to PS5 with its 36 CUs, thanks to PS5's higher GPU clock.

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.

I wonder if any Xbox devs are leveraging swapping of data from the 6 GB pool to the 10 GB pool if needed, for GPU-bound tasks. It will constrain the bandwidth some and lower effective bandwidth for sure, but that has to be better than just going to storage for that data?

Unless the API tools for doing it are so bad they make storing the extra graphics data in the 6 GB pool untenable.

 

[KiryuRealty]

Oh okay, it was 3M not Iomega. Thanks for the clarification. I think Iomega ZIP drives were more reliable than others when it came to avoiding the CoD, but some alternatives that tried coming to market in the early/mid '90s suffered from it a lot.

I'm mainly going by documentaries though; didn't have a home PC in the '90s b/c my gaming was on consoles & arcades, but we did use (regular) floppies in school for the library & computer room stuff, and AFAIK a lot of ZIP disk types used floppy disk tech as their basis to evolve from (but some also based their tech around HDD designs).



If push comes to shove I'm gonna be moving my OS setup to some type of Linux in the future, if it means squeezing out more performance. I could probably run debloaters for W10/W11 but some of them cause stability issues.

Sometimes I think MS wanting to push ads on W11 is a way of them hoping to screw up debloater scripts or anything modifying registry and utility files in Windows, especially if those ads require an online connection and an online connection is required in the future to install programs or make certain types of system settings modifications (so that the changes can be "verified" on MS's end).



Good point, that's been something happening a decent big with multiplats between both systems. PS5 pulling ahead in RT is surprising for me but perhaps not so if shader core saturation on the game's engine side isn't enough to saturate Series X's GPU, but saturates PS5's. Because even with RT, Series X's advantage only shows up if more than 44 CUs are saturated (assuming 4 TMUs per CU which I think is the case with RDNA2 GPUs).

And just 44 CUs saturated only gives them equal RT advantage to PS5 with its 36 CUs, thanks to PS5's higher GPU clock.



I wonder if any Xbox devs are leveraging swapping of data from the 6 GB pool to the 10 GB pool if needed, for GPU-bound tasks. It will constrain the bandwidth some and lower effective bandwidth for sure, but that has to be better than just going to storage for that data?

Unless the API tools for doing it are so bad they make storing the extra graphics data in the 6 GB pool untenable.

Zip disks were basically just super-capacity magnetic discs, an evolution of the floppy. Only Iomega made them, and the click of death was never solved, it’s just that writable CDs became affordable quickly enough that the whole market for high-capacity magnetic storage died almost overnight before it became that widely known.

 

[Darth Vader]

This is a very interesting comparison between the same game on two platforms showing the different strengths of each quite clearly. Nintendo can obviously render smoother graphics and lacks the Z jank the PS1 had, as well as much better lighting and even ground textures. The PS version however has actual crowd and not just a running sprite, more environmental density and even better draw distance!

Edit: Also found this one, where it compares Nascar 98 PS1 vs Saturn. The PS1 takes the edge pretty much everywhere.

 

[Kokoloko]

Interestingly, while the Saturn was considered a "2D beast" (and I said as much), some games had the edge on the PS1.

Yeah PS1 had loads of games with better 2D. Just depends who was making it etc. But Id still say Saturn version of SOTN is the most complete because of the extra character lol.
I prefer the PS1 controller for SOTN too

 

[KiryuRealty]

This is a very interesting comparison between the same game on two platforms showing the different strengths of each quite clearly. Nintendo can obviously render smoother graphics and lacks the Z jank the PS1 had, as well as much better lighting and even ground textures. The PS version however has actual crowd and not just a running sprite, more environmental density and even better draw distance!

Edit: Also found this one, where it compares Nascar 98 PS1 vs Saturn. The PS1 takes the edge pretty much everywhere.

That PS1 Vs N64 comparison really shows where Nintendo fucked up by cutting the data bus width in half. Having half of your CPU idling on every cycle really hampers performance.

 

[Darth Vader]

That PS1 Vs N64 comparison really shows where Nintendo fucked up by cutting the data bus width in half. Having half of your CPU idling on every cycle really hampers performance.

Texture cache as well.

 

[Deleted member 223]

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[Darth Vader]

N64, the nintendo trash that made me ditch their hardware as my main and jump into PlayStation for good. God was that controller awful. Sega was Sega, non-starter as always, no matter how much marketing dollars they allocated to their sales push.

PS1 was King.

Hey, don't you dare shit on Sega (pre-32x / CD)

 

[Deleted member 223]

The Genesis was indeed a worthy check on Nintendo and provided growth and much needed competition to the industry but after the NES, you would have been cray to not go Super Nintendo as your main, and the software exclusives justified it. Kinda funny after all these years, that's what it's still all about for old chaps like us - the great quality exclusives.

From the Super Nintendo to this:

Never forgive, never forget.

 

[Darth Vader]

The Genesis was indeed a worthy check on Nintendo and provided growth and much needed competition to the industry but after the NES, you would have been cray to not go Super Nintendo as your main, and the software exclusives justified it. Kinda funny after all these years, that's what it's still all about for old chaps like us - the great quality exclusives.

From the Super Nintendo to this:

Never forgive, never forget.

I had both the Genesis (Mega Drive in Europe) and the SNES. Both amazing consoles in their own right.

 

[KiryuRealty]

I had both the Genesis (Mega Drive in Europe) and the SNES. Both amazing consoles in their own right.

If Nintendo hadn’t fucked up by halving the clock speed of the SNES, it would have been amazing.

 

[Darth Vader]

Another fun comparison that shows the power of the Saturn in 2D games vs PS1

 

[KiryuRealty]

Another fun comparison that shows the power of the Saturn in 2D games vs PS1

Saturn was designed to be the ultimate 2-D machine, mainly thanks to SEGA suicidally deciding to keep 3-D in the arcades.

 

[Alabtrosmyster]

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.

Especially when the hardware is so extremely different in the way it handles graphics.

For the 2D graphics crown, I would say that the PSX could handle quite a lot but was limited by the amount of memory it had to store the sprites. Games with giant animated sprites and extremely detailed backgrounds were severely affected by the limited memory (frames had to be cut).

But the PSX had clear benefits in how it handled 3D that could be used for 2D games as well, transparencies, and low precision pixel 3d lent themselves well to 2d pixel art based games.

Still, the Saturn had the extra ram or VRAM, it had that "infinite plane", single layer transparency and proper native sprites and layers support for 2D. So games built around that would be a challenge to port over to the ps1, same for games built around the PSX being ported to the Saturn.

I wonder how someone who has worked with both would break this down, I think that games that don't need the extra memory would fare better on the PSX everything else being equal.

 

[KiryuRealty]

Especially when the hardware is so extremely different in the way it handles graphics.

For the 2D graphics crown, I would say that the PSX could handle quite a lot but was limited by the amount of memory it had to store the sprites. Games with giant animated sprites and extremely detailed backgrounds were severely affected by the limited memory (frames had to be cut).

But the PSX had clear benefits in how it handled 3D that could be used for 2D games as well, transparencies, and low precision pixel 3d lent themselves well to 2d pixel art based games.

Still, the Saturn had the extra ram or VRAM, it had that "infinite plane", single layer transparency and proper native sprites and layers support for 2D. So games built around that would be a challenge to port over to the ps1, same for games built around the PSX being ported to the Saturn.

I wonder how someone who has worked with both would break this down, I think that games that don't need the extra memory would fare better on the PSX everything else being equal.

From reading old Next Generation and Edge magazine developer interviews, you are pretty much dead on.

The PS1, while constrained by RAM, allowed for a lot more use of effects and blending of 2D and 3D elements in ways that Saturn couldn’t touch.

For a great example, see CastleVania: Symphony of the Night. It runs nearly flawlessly on PS1 and is full of creative uses of polygons in place of sprites, such as Alucard actually being a marionette made of polygons rather than a sprite.

The Saturn version struggles terribly with even the simpler areas, while the PS1 is smooth and responsive aside from one or two areas where things get extremely intense.

I just had a thought.

It really is crazy how Sony systems hold their own or exceed competitors that should, according to specs, beat them. It really illustrates how there is much more to system performance than just raw chip capabilities. Saturn had the twin CPUs, but they were hard to utilize properly due to the system being retrofitted with the second CPU and not actually designed to be a twin-CPU from the start. N64 had a 64-bit chip that could do incredible things natively, but was on a 32-bit data bus and clocked so low that it couldn't make full use of its capabilities. The PlayStation was designed to allow developers to squeeze every drop of performance out of it, and the results could be stunning at times.

 

[ethomaz]

N64 was similar to Series X case probably… it was designed to work with 64bits including the bus data but to cut costs they choose to use a 32bits bus data that decrease a lot the complexity and cost of PCB (aka the motherboard).

I said like Series X because for me it is clear they made it to work with 20GB memory but have to find a weird way to cut costs and use only 16GB in a 320bits bus… you need a very smart software side to not have issues with data management because if some data you need fast enters in the slow part of the memory you will have a slow pipeline affecting the overall performance to delivery the actual frame… or if the dev made the code to ignore that data to not affect the frame delivery then you will probably have pop-ins or artifacts.

 

[KiryuRealty]

N64 was similar to Series X case probably… it was designed to work with 64bits including the bus data but to cut costs they choose to use a 32bits bus data that decrease a lot the complexity and cost of PCB (aka the motherboard).

I said like Series X because for me it is clear they made it to work with 20GB memory but have to find a weird way to cut costs and use only 16GB in a 320bits bus… you need a very smart software side to not have issues with data management because if some data you need fast enters in the slow part of the memory you will have a slow pipeline affecting the overall performance to delivery the actual frame… or if the dev made the code to ignore that data to not affect the frame delivery then you will probably have pop-ins or artifacts.

It is NEVER worthwhile to cut bus width below the optimum for a processor, but penny-pinching companies keep doing it.

 

[twinspectre]

To me PlayStation 1 was the most powerful, not because "specs" but because games library.

 

[Alabtrosmyster]

It is NEVER worthwhile to cut bus width below the optimum for a processor, but penny-pinching companies keep doing it.

So many gadgets ruined by those slow busses at the wrong place.

 

[KiryuRealty]

So many gadgets ruined by those slow busses at the wrong place.

Adding bottlenecks is never a good move, whether it be in the form of a narrow bus, a pool of slow RAM, or an under locked CPU.