Was the Sega Saturn really more powerful than the PlayStation?
No
>>12510324No.
This is an old hardware board, why do you care?
Yes.
>>12510324Maybe
>>12510324You're not the boss of me now
>>12510324Its neither more, or less powerful, because "power" does not exist. There is no abstract unit of measure "power" for machines of this kind.
>>12510324It can do more calculations per second, so yes. It uses quadrilateral polygons which are more computationally expensive and it uses floating point numbers to calculate their vertices so no vertex wobbling.
>>12510420No
>>12510324Yeah it had a faster cpu. Not to mention a second one.
>>12510324Idk
>>12510662No
>>12510324Saturn was an 2D system with the second CPU tacked on at the last minute. PSX had an additional 66MHz geometry chip for 3D math.>Just as Virtua Fighter singlehandedly sold the Saturn when it was released in Japan (98% of all owners bought the game), it was Daytona USA that sowed the first seeds of doubt in the minds of gamers eyeing Sega's 32bit machine. With its clumsy visuals falling well short of Namco's PlayStation conversion of Ridge Racer, the Saturn has recently been the subject of much skepticism in the game development community. After all, if Sega's own programmers can't get the machine to perform well, what chance has the average third party developer?>Unlike PlayStation, the Saturn does not contain a dedicated geometry engine for calculating polygons - instead, the twin CPUs handle all the calculation, and the VDP1 chip, in conjunction with the frame buffer, draws 3D objects to the screen as distorted sprites. The decision to design the Saturn in this way was an attempt to cater for all needs: the two SH-2s were included to give the machine some serious computational power, with the VDP1 processor providing 2D performance that would outclass anything its rivals could offer.>Kazuhiro Hamada: "The chip has got calculation system similar to DSP but we realized that a single CPU would not be enough to calculate 3D world.">[...] it's possible to have the CPUs calculating the maximum number of polygons, for example, while the VDP2 draws parallax backgrounds or even Mode-7 style distorted ones. This is a combination that PS would find tough to follow.>K. H.: "it takes plenty of time to find an effective use for it. There are so many different ways in which it can be employed.">Scrolling and sprite handling is the area in which Sega is confident its machine will outshine the PS. "To be honest, VDP1 is not powerful enough to replicate the latest polygon arcade games," concedes Hamada, "but for sprite and scrolling games it's fine."
>>12510932>With its clumsy visuals falling well short of Namco's PlayStation conversion of Ridge RacerNobody actually believed thisRidge Racer looked like garbage
>>12510948>Despite the Saturn's ability to produce sophisticated 2D, what most developers are striving to achieve is smooth, fast 3D, and so far many have been unimpressed with the results they've managed to obtain.>Keiji Okayasu, software development chief at Sega of Japan, acknowledges that there is mounting dissatisfaction among certain developers - and, more importantly, among Saturn owners - about the quality of the machine's 3D features. "A lot of people complained about the glitchy polygons in Virtua Fighter during the replays, so for the sequel we're using different techniques," he explains.>The Saturn's complex design has done it very few favors. With seven independent processors, getting the whole architecture to operate efficiently is not easy. SN Systems' Andy Beveridge, designer of the PSYQ development system admits: "It's a real coder's machine. For those who love to get their teeth into assembly and really hack into the hardware, the Saturn will probably pack a few surprises. It's going to take some time before we'll see what it can really do.">LA based developer Scavenger (Subterrania, Vertigo, X-Men) recognizes the Saturn's strengths, although it had to develop its own set of libraries to exploit the hardware efficiently.>"The Saturn is very fast at drawing single pixels using its processor, while the PS has to go through its polygon engine," explains the company's lead Saturn programmer. "That gives the Saturn programmer more flexibility. However, the Saturn does have the tendency to write polygons that are not seen. Overall, though, the Saturn has more calculating power than the PlayStation.">The Saturn can boast superiority over the PS in CPU throughput. Granted, Sony's machine is able to calculate more geometry and display more polygons, but in terms of computational power the Saturn definitely has the edge.
Regarding Tomb Raider 2 cancellation:>The original Tomb Raider had been designed with the Saturn in mind, debuting before the PlayStation release in many territories and being adopted by Sega as a key selling point for the system, however Core Design claimed that upgrades to the game engine reportedly led to a Saturn port becoming unfeasible in Eidos Interactive’s given time frame.>The second, perhaps more sinister, reason concerns the Saturn’s suitability for the game. The original game ran at a slower frame rate than the PlayStation version and Core are pushing that game's engine to the limit for the new sequel. In the original, around 150 polygons were used on-screen to show off the backgrounds - this is thought to be far higher on Tomb Raider 2, which is set in Venice. This would explain the rumours regarding Core looking into using the fourth-coming 3D enhancement cartridge widely tipped to be packaged with Saturn Virtua Fighter 3. Considering the lack of details to emerge on the upgrade perhaps this isn't so surprising. Whatever the reason, the sad fact is that at the time of writing, Tomb Raider 2 is not in development for the Sega Saturn.Regarding Virtua Fighter 3 cancellation:>[...] given the complexities involved in converting Sega Model 2 games to the system, it was widely expected that converting a Model 3 game would bring significant challenges.>It was therefore decided that supporting hardware would be produced - an “accelerator cartridge” (of unknown specifications) would be used to give developers access to Model 3-like graphics. This peripheral could then theoretically be used for other conversions, such as Scud Race. Sega Europe’s Andy Mee suggested the price would be pegged at around the price of a third-party Nintendo 64 game in the UK - £80, but hopefully lower.>By mid-1997, all plans for an accelerator cartridge were scrapped, likely due to costs and the simultaneous development of a console successor to the Saturn.
>>12510948Nobody actually believed Daytona USA on the Saturn looked better than the PS port of Ridge Racer until /vr/ died.
>>12511006>It's going to take some time before we'll see what it can really do."Did we really ever see what it could do? I remember games looking shitty the whole way through.
>>12510324more ram and thoroughput but less in practice since coding for two CPUs and maximising performance is impossible. Same deal with the PS2, which requires two different co-processors and a rasteriser to output a single fucking pixel which in theory outspecs the gamecube in every way but in practice causes lower performance.
There were things the PS1 did that the Saturn doesn't fare well with, and stuff that the Saturn can handle easily that the PS1 struggles with. But one thing is for certain, devs were able to extract so much more out of the PS1 it's not even fair to compare.I'd still give a slight nod to the ps1.
>>12510932> Saturn was an 2D system with the second CPU tacked on at the last minute. Stop spreading this horse shit. The Saturn was intended to be a 3d capable machine before the second cpu was added. They were freaking out about how good the PSX allegedly was going to be. You need to understand that the PSX is not the threshold for 3d, the PSX blew through that boundary massively. Also, we know the Saturn was intended for 3d because of the existence of the SCU DSP.
>Matt: A PSX port of Quake? That's terribly interesting! I've wanted a version of Quake on the PSX so I could compare versions on all three of the consoles from that "generation". If you've the inclination, I'd truly like to hear how the port turned out on the PSX hardware, compared to the Saturn and (if you've seen it) the N64 version.>Ezra: The most striking thing about the PSX port was how much faster the graphics hardware was than the Saturn. The initial scene after you just start the game is pretty complex. I think it ran 20 fps on the Saturn version. On the PSX it ran 30,but the actual rendering part could have been going 60 if the CPU calculations weren't holding it up. I don't know if it would have ever been possible to get it to really run 60, but at least there was the potential.>Other than that, it would have looked identical to the Saturn version. Except for some reason the PSX video output has better color than the Saturn's.>So I know something about the PSX. And really, if you couldn't tell from the games, the PSX is way better than the Saturn. It's way simpler and way faster. There are a lot of things about the Saturn that are totally dumb. Chief among these is that you can't draw triangles, only quadrilaterals.Saturn bros...
HOW MANY MORE SATURN THREADS DO WE FUCKING NEED
>>12511432"The Saturn is a 2D machine" is like arguing the PS2 is a 2D machine. Neither machine actually has dedicated 3D hardware because geometry tansformation is done on the CPU.
>"Saturn is a 2D powerhouse" -some white guy living in the West>needs Japanese exclusive RAM carts for every arcade port that is visually more arcade-accurate than a PS1 version>the biggest 2D game of the era, SotN, performs much worse on the Saturn compared to the PS1... and it was Japanese exclusive>almost every 2D game used to showcase the Saturn's "2D power" is some Japan exclusive and looks no better than what PS1 could do considering it has to do transparency slowly via softwareCan this fucking lie please die?Just give it up, the Saturn failed because it couldn't keep up with Sony or Nintendo's hardware and was nearly unsupported in the West.
>>12511519Untrue, the CPU of the Playstation contains its own coprocessor which exclusive handles 3D geometry calculations and transformations. It's hardware 3D.
>>12510324Saturn has 8 processors, PS1 has 1 cpu. You do the math sonyboy.
>>12511537Yeah never really get thatI don't see any 2D games on base Saturn that couldn't be made on PS1On the other hand a game like Gradius gaiden would be really hard to make for the Saturn, the crystal level would probably need to be cut
>>12511550you are asking too much from the snoys
>>12511537I’m not going to argue about the rest, but the middling quality of the Saturn port is because it was rush job done by a smaller team, by Iga’s own admission, and was explicitly not because the hardware was incapable.
>>12511553any game that makes heavy use of VDP2 infinite planes
>>12511558Well actually the Saturn can't handle the resolution of SOTN or almost every PC engine , SNES gamesThat's why almost all ports from previous generation are better on PlayStation (Megaman X3...)
>>12511556>15 FPS on Saturn vs 30 FPS on PS1Do the math Saturd fag
>>12511569>It's flat surface but it can go on forever*!*Note: actually it's limited by the display resolution of the Saturn and most of the time the 'infinite planes' fade out of sight a few feet from your character or devolve into pixelation.
>>12511578yet ps1 can't do it
>>12511578Beside wasn't the infinite plane used just for 3D games?
It's always 'muh graphics' or 'muh 3D' in these discussion, but what about sound? Which one has better music? PS1's SPU? Or the Saturn's Yamaha?
>>12511594It's Sony we're talking about here, the people who made the walkman. The PS1 sound chip is beautiful and it STILL hasn't been properly emulated.If you play on original PS1 hardware, you'll notice just how clear all CD audio is compared to how scratchy it sounds through emulation. That's the benefit of having top of the line hardware audio compression and CD streaming technology.
I hope the Saturn version of TR2 will get finished
