Why was the Saturn more expensive than the Playstation despite being inferior hardware?
Because $299 PlayStation was a last minute marketing decision at E3
>>12014507It actually has superior hardware in many ways, it was just significantly harder to make use of that power.
>>12014507Soul tax
>>12014524>It actually has superior hardware in many waysNo
>>12014507>inferior to playstation.My sides!!! Ps1 was inferior to saturn and n64 in either 2d or 3d.
>>12014540Then why the fuck do Playstation games look better than both Saturn and N64 games?
>>12014507Better hardware>b-but my revisionism!!!I literally don’t care. Saturn was more powerful.
>>12014507>inferior hardwarelel
>>12014639It's not
>>12014647You are immensely wrong, embarrassingly wrongFor an anonymous comment to have such biting, identifiable stupidity and ignorance is incredible
>>12014564From my understanding, it seems like both consoles can go head-to-head with each other if devs tried hard enough. However, the only thing I'm aware of that the Saturn doesn't have much going for it is transparency.
>>12014507I have an old laptop that struggles with saturn but emulates ps1 just fine. The saturn must have better hardware.
>>12014507More complicated hardware. Sony being rich enough to undercut Sega. Sony inventing cds
>>12014507These machines are so fundamentally different that one cannot simply compare them. When you have machines so architecturally different, you can't really compare price to performance, because one cannot even define what performance is, they don't work the same way, and have different feature sets.
>>12014507Because Sony undercut them
>>12014507The PS1 had the same design objectives from the start to the end of the console's development, making it a lot more focused and simplerThe Saturn had more hardware thrown in it at the last moment when they realized 3D was going to be important, jacking up the priceDon't take my word for it, the Saturn's lead engineer said it himself
>>12014507Saturn needed help from Hitachi, Victor, Toshiba, and other vendors to manufacture it while Sony was able to build every piece of hardware in-house.
>>12014507the actual cost of making a saturn was only slightly higher than the ps1. the higher msrp was because sony was a gigantic company capable of taking a big loss on every console sold
The U.S. price during those first months was premium early-access taxSega dropped the price to the same as PlayStation when the PlayStation came out
>>12014524>It actually has superior hardware in many ways,It has built-in hardware for 2d backgrounds, the CD drive has more cache so games need to load less often, and, uh... the sound chip can do frequency modulation (but can't do hardware compression, so it ends up sounding inferior in practice). And it had built-in save memory. That's about it.Everything else, PSX was superior. ESPECIALLY at drawing polygons where it was several times faster and could do higher color count and working transparency effects.
>>12015291The Saturn can do real transparency, it's just that it's limited when it comes to what it can do transparency between.VDP2 does transparency between layers for free but it receives everything drawn by VDP1 (sprites and polygons) as a single layer, so any part of a sprite/polygon that should be behind another sprite/polygon simply doesn't exist (left)VDP1 can do transparency between sprites, but transparent pixels take 6 times longer to draw and transparency can't also be done with other VDP2 layers (right)
>>12015291Saturn has more ram
>>12015382an extra .5mb of vram is nothing compared to everything else it sucks at
The Saturn is stronger than the Playstation the same way the Atari Jaguar is stronger than the Genesis and Snes. In the wrong places and with no games to show off such superiority.
>>12015453I'd say the Saturn's unique strength is the VDP2 effects it can do like the water here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_z5PSsc_BI&t=993s
More like inferior software
>>12014639Proof?
>>12014507
Sega didn't have the luxury of a nest egg from manufacturing consumer goods during the 80s
>>12015291The two CPUs and VDP1/VDP2 have a higher combined clockrate than the single CPU and GPU in the PS1, though VDP1/VDP2 barely add up to have a higher clockrate. It's absurdly difficult to make two 28 mhz GPUs outrun one 53 mhz GPU, but it is possible. Which is why people say the Saturn is hard to code for.And that's only GPU. The two CPU on the Saturn are also clocked at 28 mhz, only 5 mhz shy of the PS1s 33 mhz. So if you can split tasks between the two CPU even a little bit, it has more processing power for CPU tasks than the PS1 by a large margin.>>12014564N64 games SHOULD look much better than PS1/Saturn games, as it runs at 4 times the clockrate of Saturn and PS1. In effect though games are uglier because of bafflingly stupid decisions regarding memory and cache that lead to all the textures being the size of SNES tiles that are blown up to like 10x their resolution with shitty early anti-aliasing tech. You CAN turn off texture filtering, but very very very few retail games do, so almost all N64 game are ugly.
>>12018196You can't fully optimize the 2 CPU there are hardware flaws on the Saturn that prevents it+The PS1 CPU comes with the GTE which helps in performing fast mathematical calculations etc.
>>12018271>You can't fully optimize the 2 CPU there are hardware flaws on the SaturnDetails on this?VDP1 and VDP2 have well known limitations, but I've never heard anything about the CPUs being gimped.
>>12018279I'm not an expert hardware wise my informations came from a homebrew Saturn developper (knight0dragon) https://www.reddit.com/r/SegaSaturn/s/dyqwiz1O94 he confirm the superiotity of the PS1 and the flaws of the Saturn
>>12014507SEGA started out making a 2D system, because the developers they asked wanted a 2D system, but 3D started heavily taking off so they kludged a second GPU in the system where the GPUs were already not really a 3D GPU but more of a 2D GPU on steroids that can mess with sprites enough to basically treat them as textures of a polygonal model. When you are viewing a 3D model on a Saturn you are essentially viewing not so much textures as sprites that all have been squished and stretched and skewed to act like a textured segment of a 3D model.This mess resulted in a GPU that could not even do transparencies except in very limited circumstances, and even with that, there were additional limits when you could do it.Because of this shifting gears half-way and kludging a 2D system to do 3D the system ended up with multiple CPUs, GPUs, and other chips. That does not come cheap.Also... they worked with Nvidia. Pretty much any console maker who has ever worked with Nvidia did it once and then never again, with the exception of the Switch since there isn't much better options there. Even Microsoft dropped them after the Xbox, as well as EVGA.>>12014524It was only superior in 2D, that's it. And even then, mostly for 2D fighters. It didn't even have hardware video decoding so even FMVs looked like shit compared to the PSX.>>12018196>You CAN turn off texture filtering, but very very very few retail games do, so almost all N64 game are ugly.Tried doing that, and games look horrific, especially on a modern screen. Turning off dithering can help, and LOD models if not running on real hardware, but the games were made with texture filtering and look horrible without it. Try turning it off in the sand level in Mario 64, the sand suddenly turns into a checkerboard Sonic level.
>>12018279>>12018292The two SH2s share the same bus. One can't even access memory without blocking the other. This makes parallel processing almost completely impossible.>>12018295The Saturn had two video chips from the start. It's the second SH2 CPU that was added during development, plus an extra meg of RAM.
Ico and Shenmue prototypes show they are both pretty evenly matched when maxed out as far as dev knowledge could go at the time by in-house teams with sizable budgets late into console life. Saturn was probably harder to get those results from, and had way less return due to the smaller installbase. Sony had stronger assets, strategy and finances which allowed them to overcome the experience barrier.
>>12018295> so they kludged a second GPUStop repeating horse shit you don't understand. Both GPUs are 100% required for 2d. Also, the Saturn might have been originally intended as a 2d machine at the concept stage. But the idea that 3d was kludged on towards the end of development is nonsense. The only thing that was added last minute was the second sh2 cpu.
>>12018778>top repeating horse shit you don't understand.>>12015167That post literally says every point I made, from a Saturn dev and former SEGA president. Funny thing is I didn't even see that post yet when I was writing mine.Also, other 3rd party devs who worked on the Saturn have basically said the same thing:https://youtu.be/FdD0GvVRSMc?t=65
I can never figure out which is technically better. All I can gather is they were pretty much comparable, but it seems the PSX was better where it mattered because every 3D game I've seen on both looks as good or better on PSX. the only game I've played that I like better on Saturn is mega Man 8, only because I like the soundtrack better and the graphics look a little sharper, which probably has more to do with how the game was developed then with hardware limitations
>>12014507>inferior hardwareBecause theoretically is a superior hardware. Come on guys, we have this thread 5 times a week.
>>12014507The $399 Saturn came packaged with Virtua Fighter and had internal memory, vs the $299 PlayStation that required a memory card and came with no game.
>>12014507The PS1 had fewer parts and Sony had deeper vertical integration that allowed them to do their own hardware revisions. By the end, they were able to consolidate the PS1 to basically a single chip.
>>12018917>internal memory >but comes bundle with a games that does not require at all>virtual fighter instead of mainline Sonic They should have dropped both internal memory and virtua fighter. Sony did it better
>>12018438Shenmue Saturn run with a 3D acceleratorIt's not on base Saturn
>>12018990Virtua Fighter was the biggest hit Sega ever had in Japan, and as a japanese company they gave no shits about the other markets.
>>12018917Don't fergot to count the magazine prices in official sega mag wuz 6 bucks and psx with the damw demo 12,50
>>12020504Never fergot
>>12014507No good devs
>>12014507Too many middle menOne of the most expensive parts of a CD-based console back then was the CD drive itself. Sega had to buy theirs from Sanyo and JVC, and both of those companies had to make a profit on every unit sold to Sega. Meanwhile Sony could just manufacture them at-cost to themselves.Sony also designed and manufactured a lot of the microchips inside the PS1, and was able to reap the benefits of continual tech improvements with newer manufacturing nodes and tighter integration. Meanwhile Sega only designed some of their chips, and manufactured none of them.Sure the additional price per-part may not be much, but Sega was paying that for every single part in a highly complex system.
>>12022651Sony cheated
