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[SweetTooth]

49:35 is for our friend Parazels
"Distortion doest exist on Saturn"

You could have picked that skateboarding game! It was disaster on Saturn with the closeup textures, looking really bad and warping like hell.

 

[SweetTooth]

Looks like the title of this thread is aging like milk, and I am sure that PlayStation would prove even better on the next videos. All the extra hardware on Saturn doesn't mean s**** In the end, it was an unbalanced system, just like the N64! Both were one of the worst designed and unbalanced consoles ever.

 

[simpatico]

Anytime you see a post counter signaling the greatness of the Saturn, you can be sure it was typed by hands that have never played DoDonPachi or Radiant Silvergun. Don't be too hard on them, they're suffering through a sad and deprived existence.

 

[Fafalada]

PS1 had an MJPEG decoder, MDEC, right? I wonder if it was crazy to use for texturing or if it was almost as approachable as the IPU in PS2 for texturing…

Documentation indicates it might have been more programmable than the IPU (not that we'd necessarily want that, I preferred to just fire&forget on decoders not micro-manage the operations). But I don't know what the throughput was like - the obvious uses happened in a bunch of games (decoding animated content at runtime).
To use it on static texture content - you'd need to implement virtual texturing of sorts (as you'll want to predict at least the next frame textures to decode). On PS2 that was entirely a non-issue since the decoder was fast enough to saturate half of the main-bus with its output alone, and it's been practically demonstrated one generation later with somewhat lower throughput (Rage after all - decoded JPeg macroblocks at runtime too).
So the question is how fast MDEC really was (and how much handholding it needed from the CPU). The tradeoff on the other hand - was that you'd get uncompressed textures as output - so it's a bit more to juggle memory wise when it comes to cache management.

Ok some docs out there state 9000 macroblocks/s - which is about 0.6Mpix/s. Not exactly rocket-fast - but then again it was built for CDs that could barely do 300KB/sec if you were lucky. For reference IPU ran at 150Mpix/s.

 

[cireza]

All the extra hardware on Saturn doesn't mean s**** In the end

What extra hardware ? What does this even mean ? There is nothing "extra" in the Saturn, everything was there day-one and meant to be used in a certain way.

 

[SweetTooth]

What extra hardware ? What does this even mean ? There is nothing "extra" in the Saturn, everything was there day-one and meant to be used in a certain way.

2 bogus CPUs instead of 1, the weird inefficient quad polys, the system was complicated for nothing.

 

[cireza]

2 bogus CPUs instead of 1, the weird inefficient quad polys, the system was complicated for nothing.

What is extra in this already ? Nothing.

Both CPUs were there day-one and documented. You didn't have to use both. Bogus ? Lol, these were very capable CPUs individually. Quad polys made as much sense as triangles in a day when 3D was still a novelty on home consoles. It also made sense for a company pursuing both proper 3D AND 2D through hardware, unlike PS/N64 that were natively incapable consoles in terms of 2D, where everything had to be done through software.

But SEGA had not planned to invest a ton of money in marketing to discredit 2D, unlike Sony and Nintendo, who did not have the choice anyway. Quads made sense for SEGA's hardware, as they also wanted those proper 2D layers and sprites functionalities.

Your post is overall the usual ignorant bullshit being spread indefinitely over the internet, do you really want to be a part of this ?

 

[synchronicity]

I've never understood the obsession with hardware power measurement. (or console warring or the like)

All I've ever cared about is whether or not the games I play are fun for me. Was the Saturn or PS1 more powerful?

I guess it can be fun in retrospect to look at these sort of things. They both had some amazing libraries that were very different from each other, and that's the real measurement that's relevant to me.

 

[SirTerry-T]

Now when the Saturn launched in the west the design was altered. Comparing it to the newer pad it feels more ergonomic and fits the hands better, the rear is curved on either side and I feel no cramp after prolonged use.

Big improvement then, right? Well no, the Dpad is complete redesigned and while it’s OK for moving left to right in 2D platformers and driving games it just chafes your thumb when carrying out Dpad rotation moves in fighting games. As for the triggers, unless you press them at the rear there’s literally zero tactile feedback. Very much a case of 1 step forward 2 steps back. Sega discontinued it under a year after release, I can see why.

WTF are you smoking? The Japan style Saturn pad is probably the greatest 2D pad ever designed. Fuck knows why the European territories and the USA were given that horrible monstrosity.

Owning a Pal Saturn back then involved three very important things....
1. Get a region select switch fitted.
2,Get a 50/60hz mod switch
And
3.Get hold of a Japanese Saturn pad.

 

[SweetTooth]

What is extra in this already ? Nothing.

Both CPUs were there day-one and documented. You didn't have to use both. Quad polys made as much sense as triangles in a day when 3D was still a novelty on home consoles. It also made sense for a company pursuing both proper 3D AND 2D through hardware, unlike PS/N64 that were natively incapable consoles in terms of 2D, where everything had to be done through software.

But SEGA had not planned to invest a ton of money in marketing to discredit 2D, unlike Sony and Nintendo, who did not have the choice anyway. Quads made sense for SEGA's hardware, as they also wanted those proper 2D layers and sprites functionalities.

Being an extra in the sense that they're not needed at all. And they are simply a bad hardware design! being there day one or day 1000 doesn't change this fact, they simply made the life devs really hard for little to no gains.


Quad polys doesn't make any sense at all. If they were making any sense, they would have been used to this day. Also, your last paragraph means Sega has has a lack of foresight, thats all.

the market was transitioning to 3D. Making a console that create good 2D in really complicated methods doesn't make you smart at all. PlayStation has managed to do 2D just fine in easier way and it was really great in the 3D. That's what made it really successful!
Its getting tiring and sad to see Sega fans trying to paint the Saturn as this untamed monster with untapped potential which it never was. It was a mediocre console that met it deserved fate.

 

[PaintTinJr]

Nothing to respond to my post overall, and cherry-picked one example (a joke, by the way, so obviously not objective), which doesn't goes against anything I said, and admits the SNES is still absolutely mandatory to run the game. Amazing rebuttal.

It was the source of why I said they were effectively just a box.

That's the original source, but I was paraphrasing the wiki version for Argonaut Software which makes no mention to the power supply, and even if it is a joke, the maximum of "many a true word said in jest" fits as that particular console wasn't critical to the solution in the way the superFX chip was, as demonstrated by the other companies they did similar solutions for - ironically this thread started for a tweet from a former Argonaut dev.

But if you can't appreciate the abstract joke or my equally abstract use of that joke to say the 32x was effectively the critical console hardware, then sure, the Genesis + 32x or SNES + SuperFX had equal importance in their components, even though it would be more like adding a RTX 2060 to an Intel Pentium Gold PC.

 

[Parazels]

Can someone invite this Argonaut founder here to let him explain his statement?

 

[cireza]

Being an extra in the sense that they're not needed at all. And they are simply a bad hardware design!

Wrong. A hardware is a toolbox. You don't have to use every single aspect of it to make your games.

Quad polys doesn't make any sense at all. If they were making any sense, they would have been used to this day.

They made sense during the 1990s when SEGA were building their hardware. They made sense for a 2D + 3D hardware as I already explained. This solution provided perfectly satisfactory 3D for the time. Maybe try to think with some context ? Nobody uses VHS anymore, does it mean it didn't make any sense back then ?

Making a console that create good 2D in really complicated methods

Wrong. Nothing was complicated about 2D on Saturn, it was straight-forward.

PlayStation has managed to do 2D just fine in easier

Wrong. Just because developers invested the time to make 2D on the console doesn't mean it was easy nor straight-forward : it wasn't. They had to implement through software many aspects that came natively through hardware on Saturn. This is the same as PS2 being complicated to develop for but developers still basically forced to make it work because the console was going to sell a shit-ton anyway.

Its getting tiring and sad to see Sega fans trying to paint the Saturn as this untamed monster with untapped potential which it never was. It was a mediocre console that met it deserved fate.

Where am I painting the Saturn as a monster ? Nowhere. What is tiring though, are people spreading ignorant bullshit like you are. Pretty much everything you say is wrong or incorrect.

 

[Lysandros]

Looks like the title of this thread is aging like milk, and I am sure that PlayStation would prove even better on the next videos. All the extra hardware on Saturn doesn't mean s**** In the end, it was an unbalanced system, just like the N64! Both were one of the worst designed and unbalanced consoles ever.

Each system featured hardware with no equivalent in the other, like GTE or MDEC on PS1. Those were vastly different systems.

 

[SweetTooth]

Each system featured hardware with no equivalent in the other, like GTE or MDEC on PS1. Those were vastly different systems.

I know, it was really interesting up to 7th gen. Now all consoles are really similar for the best or worst.

My point in this thread that PS1 was balanced to achieve fantastic 3D for the time vs Saturn with its quirky and alien ways to get similar effects.

Sony took opposite approach with PS2/PS3 and paid for it especially in PS3 era. But they managed to show the strengths of each console with their 1st party. PS2 with the crazy VUs and the ultra fast bandwidth and PS3 with its unconventional (at the time) SPEs which laid the ground work for current parallelism in graphics rendering.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

I thought maybe the wheel because I tried the 3d pad and it was just awful. I don't have a wheel though!!

I'm sure someone trie playing it with the wheel. It might've been Pandamonium Games, IIRC they have a video of Touring Car on their Youtube channel and they talked about the controls (and some methods they used to fine-tune them).

One should've included a racing wheel, IIRC.

I read the Saturn userbase advantage, before the FF7 demo was released on the PS1 was over 1.5 million to 2 million units in Japan. Had FF7 come out on the Saturn in Japan I think we could safely say that would have been it for the PS1 in Japan.

For a long time I thought that too but I've come across Japanese sales for both PS1 and Saturn and the truth is, PS1 was quickly gaining ground on Saturn there since even early 1995.

Source: VG Sales

1994:

Saturn: 800K

PlayStation: 300K

1995:

Saturn: 2500K (2.5 million)

PlayStation: 2000K (2 million)

1996:

Saturn: 4800K (4.8 million)

PlayStation: 4200K (4.2 million)

So you can see here, yes, Saturn did maintain a lead in Japan over PlayStation from 1994 to 1996, but it was never anything where I'd say they were "dominating" PlayStation at all. It was fairly close and, if you look, it's the early launch shipments that gave SEGA that early lead. Retailers just trusted their name as a console maker more than Sony's at the time, which was understandable, and Virtua Fighter was a phenomenon in Japan during the era.

For both '95 and '96 though, Sony's PlayStation shipments were statistically tied with SEGA's to Japan; it's also worth considering that since PlayStation was performing so much better outside of Japan than Saturn, Sony likely had to curb some stock for Japan to prioritize other markets, something SEGA has less need to do. So it's very possible had Sony prioritized Japan with more shipments in '95 and '96, they probably could have exceeded SEGA's and PlayStation could've outsold Saturn there earlier than '97.

For 1997, Saturn moved another 800K units in Japan but PlayStation sold a massive 4400K (4.4 million) there the same year. That's more than 7x what Saturn did. I'd agree that FFVII was a major factor in helping PS1 see such massive sales. I'd even say SEGA cut short Saturn's sales in Japan that year both due to Dreamcast development (and its planned release a year later) and also something Jenovi mentioned in one of their videos where SOJ deliberately scaled back production of hardware to not report losses in fiscal reports due to unmoved hardware sitting in the channels.

That said, I think PS1's huge sales boon in '97 for Japan was more than just FFVII...it was also just a swell of other great games hitting the system at the time like GT, continued sales for games like RE etc. that helped PS1 see a surge. But even without FFVII, I think eventually PS1 was going to overtake Saturn in Japan, it might've just been 1998 instead of 1997. Having exclusives like RE2 and MGS were going to put it over the edge of Saturn eventually, but it's possible SEGA could've still kept competitive in that scenario between what games they DID release in '98, that 3P were releasing, and if they pushed back Dreamcast while moving some of those Dreamcast titles to Saturn instead.

However, the global situation would've likely made that impossible, so still likely SEGA would've pushed '98 for Dreamcast which would negatively impact Saturn in Japan anyway, and ironically probably give the PS1 a major boost over Saturn. That's even supposing the Saturn got FFVII instead of PS1, which if that happened I almost imagine would have been a '97 Saturn release and maybe would've helped Saturn increase its lead over PS1 to 1 million or slightly more. Even then, you'd still get Dreamcast in late '98, which would damage Saturn momentum in Japan, while games like RE2 & MGS releasing exclusively for PS1 helping close up that gap to maybe at most 300K-500K.

Then '99 seeing even more releases, especially from companies like Squaresoft, Enix and Capcom, probably finally closing up that gap and giving PS1 the lead as SEGA has to juggle between Saturn and Dreamcast. Maybe they catch a lucky break, maybe Squaresoft develop Dreamcast versions of Vagrant Story, Parasite Eve, Einhander but those wouldn't be exclusive; they'd have PlayStation versions as well to guarantee enough market share for sales. I'd still see Sony trying to court Squaresoft BTS though for something like FF VIII, maybe aiding for dev on a PS1 version in exchange for timed exclusivity while Squaresoft work on a Dreamcast version. Maybe Sony start talking about the PS2 a bit earlier, maybe they push for a late '99 launch in Japan instead of March 2000.

Basically I don't see a scenario where the Saturn is effectively competitive against PS1 in Japan any much longer than it actually was, if you remove FFVII from PS1 or even give that a Saturn version (I think it's highly likely PS1 would still get a FF game of some type be it a port of VII or an offshoot, or maybe it's the Saturn that gets the offshoot, whatever). But that scenario might give the Dreamcast a somewhat better chance in Japan against PS1 & PS2, at least early on. But, it'd still come at the expense of Saturn within the same market.

Think you're mistaken about Rally too, I think it did better in the UK than anywhere else in the world (talking in account population) and I'm sure I remember reading it broke all UK records for the best selling CD game in the UK at the time

You got a source on that? I'm only recalling from memory the Sega Rally figures from the leaked SEGA fiscal document, so I know in America the game did not perform well overall which really disappointed SEGA of America at the time.

I think with the CPU setup being master-slave on Saturn based on CoPilot info, the system wasn't so much parallel programming, so much as a halfway house of the master-slave setup of a Maths Coprocessor x87 on PC - where 80286, 80386SX and 80486SX all had sockets for a maths coprocessor(80287, 80387, 80487) to offload floating point maths calculations - and enough second core versatility to do things like offloading hidden surface removal alternatives because the system - like PS1 - had no hardware zbuffer.

As for why I think geometry throughput was greater on Saturn (theoretically at least) was because Copilot said this.



So 2743 quads is 2-polygon each quad being flat textured 5486 polys per frame vs PS1 1300 polys per frame.

Well okay in theory maybe geometry throughput was higher on Saturn, but I still think it's something similar to how "on paper" Series X is more powerful than PS5; it's just looking at one metric or a set of metrics in isolation of each other and outside of their relative impacts unto and from other parts of the system design that inform the practical, working total package.

Saturn's higher geometry throughput would still have been limited by bus contention between the two CPUs needing to share data and take turns sending/receiving along the bus, having split caches (I think each SH2 has an L1$, right? But not an L2$), among other things. Yourself and certainly other people have already spoken about those issues in greater detail within the thread.

Also yes, Saturn didn't have "true" parallel processing the way I guess that term usually evokes. It was still a master-slave setup, so one SH2 was always waiting to be initiated by the other. Whereas I think some of SEGA's arcade boards that inspired the Saturn design like...I want to say System Y?...had a more true parallel processing architecture or at least a setup very similar to Saturn's.

This is true of most older machines. Ie. how we get 8bit computers do things that looked impossible in the 80ies as well.
And yea - as I said in the other thread - it'd be interesting if someone did have a commercial playground with restricted hardware like that - a true retro-console for the modern age. It breeds creativity that doesn't really happen on modern hw anymore (or it doesn't really show through because it's drowned in $s spent on inflating the runtime and world size).

A retro console like that would basically need a Neo Geo type of business model to be financially viable, but physical collectors in the retro scene tend to spend a lot of money anyway, so it could work out.

You'd have to look into making real cartridges with actual ROM chips on them though, authentic box art, a UI interface not too retro (potentially cumbersome) but not too modern (potentially bloated), etc. Set physical carts to limited numbers priced at hundreds of dollars, try developing some retro-spec equivalent in hardware emulation with FPGA logic & cores to target software development towards.

Then make versions of those games later on for modern platforms (PlayStation, Nintendo, Xbox, PC) for digital distribution. It could probably work TBH. Times like these I wish I had money to start up such a venture .

How many people / how usable was the Matrix DSP in the Saturn for this?

SCU DSP for matrix transformation?

I tried something to reduce memory usage and reduce the number of processes vertices, but it didn't work out too well so far, so hopefully someone can suggest me something to speed up the whole process before I just move on to another technique : As mentionned in this post, I imported Quake...

segaxtreme.net

Some people (Quake on Saturn seemed to use it) used all three chips (SH2s and SCU’s DSP) in parallel for 3D processing and lighting… but it is very possibly that with the low clock speed of the SCU and being yet another processor off chip that it was not as huge of a speed boost as people may hope.

I know Sonic R used the DSP for 3D reflections of mirrored surfaces, like the floating Sonic head. There's a Game Hut video (well, two videos) about Sonic R & the SCU DSP from an ex-Traveler's Tales dev that goes deeper into it.

Using the DSP to offload some 3D calculations was very possible, but the problem was bus contention: the calculations done with the DSP would still have to be sent to one of the CPUs to have anything done with them, so alongside bus contention you probably have a potential latency issue if the data can't get to the CPUs in time for aiding in frame composition.

I'm not being clever with it. The decomposition to wireframe in Esppiral old video actually shows how expertly crafted and efficient the underlying asset topology is and how many textures are used. Even working from the wireframes, there is at least 300 quads used just for the 5 sides you see, so at 30fps that's 9000 quads per second of the allocation without even considering a half or similar amount for Lara or anything else moving on screen.

But it is the polygon counts Ryo in the Saturn Shenmue footage and the texturing variety that has greater density and lighting that looks so much more. Even if Tomb Raider was fully optimised is it not logical to conclude it would have either optimal frame-rate or optimal visuals beyond how it released, but not both?
As you increase quad counts on the Saturn you increase the workload for quad sorting on the second CPU for the quads to be rendered with the painter's algorithm that draws those sprites from back to front, increasing fill rate wastage too.

I honestly don't see that Shenmue shot rendering on a Saturn at more than 12fps based on the evidence we have from Tomb Raider scaling from when optimised and the difficulty adding better textures with either baked or per vertex dynamic lighting - like it appears to be - without an accelerator board

Don't forget game logic and physics simulation models, too. Those would fall on the CPUs and take up cycle usage.

The whole thing with Shenmue Saturn is somewhat flimsy in terms of coverage & documentation; there's just as much evidence to suggest the leaked footage could run on a stock Saturn (with caveats, most especially in world simulation of physics and game systems being heavily scaled back, at which point is it even really Shenmue anymore?) as there is it was using a cancelled expansion card.

 

[Spiral1407]

Looks like the title of this thread is aging like milk, and I am sure that PlayStation would prove even better on the next videos. All the extra hardware on Saturn doesn't mean s**** In the end, it was an unbalanced system, just like the N64! Both were one of the worst designed and unbalanced consoles ever.

Nah, the next one is on shmups. Icl, its gonna be a bloodbath in the Saturn's favour...

 

[polybius80]

sega saturn also have wobbling textures, psx is a bit worse I dont think nobody disputes that, you went from no wobbling in saturn to now point every time you see that in a psx game while pretending there is no problem in saturn, but sega saturn has also another problem and that is the VDP2 planes don't align correctly with the scene from VDP1 frame by frame, so the entire floor is shaking depending the game as not avery game uses those planes for the floor giving the impression everything is floating, are you going to paint the entire floor red in the saturn games?

 

[Spiral1407]

sega saturn also have wobbling textures, psx is a bit worse I dont think nobody disputes that, you went from no wobbling in saturn to now point every time you see that in a psx game while pretending there is no problem in saturn, but sega saturn has also another problem and that is the VDP2 planes don't align correctly with the scene from VDP1 frame by frame, so the entire floor is shaking depending the game as not avery game uses those planes for the floor giving the impression everything is floating, are you going to paint the entire floor red in the saturn games?

That guy is actually delusional. How much more proof does he need?

 

[Parazels]

sega saturn also have wobbling textures, psx is a bit worse I dont think nobody disputes that, you went from no wobbling in saturn to now point every time you see that in a psx game while pretending there is no problem in saturn,

Ok, show me the "wobbling" textures in the game.

 

[Panajev2001a]

So 2743 quads is 2-polygon each quad being flat textured 5486 polys per frame vs PS1 1300 polys per frame.

I think you are slightly undercounting PSX numbers (which also assume goraud shading and suffer from less overdraw the more polygons you use and thus the higher overdraw for your forward texture mapping flow) there while looking closer at the theoretical peak of the Saturn and CPUs feeding it as much: (taken from an old B3D thread)

Geometry Transform Engine: (calculated/transformed polygons/sec)
*1.5 million verts/sec
*500,000 polygons/sec

GPU: (rendered, displayed on-screen)
*360,000 flat shaded polygons/sec displayed
*180,000 textured, gouraud shaded, lit polygons/sec displayed

Games that pushed 2-3k vertices per frame and higher were available in PSX’s time too and while you would not map it to polygons 1:1 I would not assume a 1:2 average or so either (also many people now advise that especially to model low detail meshes triangles would probably end up being a more efficient way to define the model).

Nice thread btw: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/questions-about-sega-saturn.58086/page-14

Edit: look at John’s latest video…

 

[Unknown?]

The real answer lies in which has more megaflops?

 

[Panajev2001a]

Ok, show me the "wobbling" textures in the game.

 

[polybius80]

Ok, show me the "wobbling" textures in the game.

is saturn library composed of just one game? nop, you can cherry pick the games with less wobble, but the reality is that there are games with more or less depending how they are made and the amount of quads/triangles they use or subdivide, a video from a DF comparison was posted with plenty of games you even posted a picture from it, in that video you have a snowboarding racing game at 48:30 where the track literally collapses when near the camera, saturn has its own merits but dont try to pretend it doesnt haave its own set of problems in fact the miss align of VDP2 planes in certain games(like in destruction derby) its a bigger problem as well as the disapearing and collapsing of quads when close those camera and edges of screen is far worse overall than in psx generally

 

[Parazels]

is saturn library composed of just one game? nop, you can cherry pick the games with less wobble, but the reality is that there are games with more or less depending how they are made and the amount of quads/triangles they use or subdivide, a video from a DF comparison was posted with plenty of games you even posted a picture from it, in that video you have a snowboarding racing game at 48:30 where the track literally collapses when near the camera, saturn has its own merits but dont try to pretend it doesnt haave its own set of problems in fact the miss align of VDP2 planes in certain games(like in destruction derby) its a bigger problem as well as the disapearing and collapsing of quads when close those camera and edges of screen is far worse overall than in psx generally

I wouldn't spot this invisible glitch on Saturn without a microscope.

And it's nothing in comparison to those giant deformed surfaces everywhere on PSX!

 

[night13x]

Despite if it was actually true or not....didn't matter. Sega of America and Sega of Japan were too busy trying to sabatoge each other on purpose during that era.

 

[RetroGamingUK]

is saturn library composed of just one game? nop, you can cherry pick the games with less wobble, but the reality is that there are games with more or less depending how they are made and the amount of quads/triangles they use or subdivide, a video from a DF comparison was posted with plenty of games you even posted a picture from it, in that video you have a snowboarding racing game at 48:30 where the track literally collapses when near the camera, saturn has its own merits but dont try to pretend it doesnt haave its own set of problems in fact the miss align of VDP2 planes in certain games(like in destruction derby) its a bigger problem as well as the disapearing and collapsing of quads when close those camera and edges of screen is far worse overall than in psx generally

Sega Touring Car

 

[RoboFu]

Ok, show me the "wobbling" textures in the game.

A Yeah I'll say it again you will see warping textures close to the camera as the sprites don't translate correctly going off camera. But other textures do not have the ps1 wobble. That's a strictly ps1 biproduct.
which again is one more way the ps1 sped up rendering and people didn't seem to mind.

 

[polybius80]

I wouldn't spot this invisible glitch on Saturn without a microscope.

you should pay a visit to an optometrist, also a diet rich in vegetables and grains can greatly improve your vision too

 

[Lysandros]

Well okay in theory maybe geometry throughput was higher on Saturn, but I still think it's something similar to how "on paper" Series X is more powerful than PS5; it's just looking at one metric or a set of metrics in isolation of each other and outside of their relative impacts unto and from other parts of the system design that inform the practical, working total package.

Saturn's higher geometry throughput would still have been limited by bus contention between the two CPUs needing to share data and take turns sending/receiving along the bus, having split caches (I think each SH2 has an L1$, right? But not an L2$), among other things. Yourself and certainly other people have already spoken about those issues in greater detail within the three

Saturn's geometry throughput simply isn't higher though. Even sticking to theoretical figures and assuming the almost impossible dream scenario where the two SH2s works perfectly in parallel at 100%, the theoritical ceiling is in fact much higher (three times as much) on PS1 due to GTE's abilities essentially. Fafalada already addressed the subject.

SH2 divider unit ran at 39clocks - so assuming other operations can run in that block of time (pipeline allowed it - and transform is like 16MADD operations - so it's plausible, but I haven't checked exact math) that gives us theoretical peak of 1.43M vertex transforms per second (but that's fully loading both CPUs).
PS1's GTE was SIMD - so it could transform 3 vertices at the same time at the rate of 1.43M/s - so 4.3M vert/s or exactly 3x more than the Saturn example. Doing it one vertex at a time (if you couldn't parallelize for some reason) - that dropped to 2.2M - still faster of the two.
For a 33mhz chip of its era - GTE was - really quite fast.

I think outside of really naive ports - noone would ever do that though.
Though - there's an important other difference here. Saturn could only render 4 point quads (because it was really just deformed 'sprites' as polys).
PS1 on the other hand supported triangle strips (and IIRC fans) which means a quad was still just 4 verts. And a mesh with 500 triangles would be... somewhere around 600-800 verts (triangle-strip efficiency isn't an exact math - you can theoretically approach 1.0 - but average is more like 1.2-1.4 IME).

Now - both machines could use indexing to accelerate transform throughput of the CPU (theoretical optimum with index buffers is 2:1 ratio between Polygons:Verts, though usually closer to 1:1) - but in the end you had to send those verts to GPU in the native format - and that's where Saturn would have to inflate the vertex counts compared to PS1 (bandwidth and memory usage disadvantage).
But it's not all negative - Saturn GPU was actually rated for the number of sprites it could render - PS1 GPU was rated for vertex-counts(so polygon limit would only be reached in 1:1 scenarios). Assuming you weren't bandwidth/mem limited, Saturn could also claw back some advantage there.

 

[Parazels]

Sega Touring Car

The glitch is visible in literally several games and doesn't exist in the other hundreds of games on Saturn!

On PSX deformed textures present in every single 3d title.

 

[BlackTron]

Looks like the title of this thread is aging like milk, and I am sure that PlayStation would prove even better on the next videos. All the extra hardware on Saturn doesn't mean s**** In the end, it was an unbalanced system, just like the N64! Both were one of the worst designed and unbalanced consoles ever.

2 bogus CPUs instead of 1, the weird inefficient quad polys, the system was complicated for nothing.

Yeah, the system was more complicated. Even though we all know obviously in real life practice being such a clusterfuck made Saturn a bitch, the savant who coded a game in his teens said it's more powerful and made a multiplatform game backing that up, so get over it. Yeah PS1 was a better system to actually make games and get them into peoples hands, no shit. Doesn't mean I'm smarter than that dude (I'm not, but maybe you are).

Spoiler

There is no new evidence to "disprove" this headline. Everyone already knew PS1 games generally look a lot better than Saturn, emphasis on 3D, from eons of history, and we knew it reading this dudes comments. There is nothing to "age", the decades of easily had knowledge passed already.

 

[polybius80]

Show me a screenshot with texture warping on Saturn.

Please!

I have no idea where you got this weird screenshot, but I don't see here texture warping.

I don't see the problem on Saturn.

I wouldn't spot this invisible glitch on Saturn without a microscope.

The glitch is visible in literally several games and doesn't exist in the other hundreds of games on Saturn!

 

[Parazels]

And? It proves, that texture deformation on Saturn:
A) Is absent in 99% of games (99%≈100%).
B) Is present in 1% of games.
C) Barely noticeable, if present.

 

[polybius80]

And? It proves, that texture deformation on Saturn:
A) Is absent in 99% of games (99%≈100%).
B) Is present in 1% of games.
C) Barely noticeable, if present.

so far you have presented no proof of what you said, in fact you even contradicted yourself

 

[Parazels]

so far you have presented no proof of what you said, in fact you even contradicted yourself

I have placed a dozen of comparisons side-by-side.

Show them to any random person and ask: what is he/she seeing there?
Deformed roads on Saturn? No.
Deformed everything on PSX? Yes.

 

[Fafalada]

Wrong. Just because developers invested the time to make 2D on the console doesn't mean it was easy nor straight-forward : it wasn't.

I have to question this one - what exactly wasn't straightforward about it?
PS1 handled 2d the way every console handles 2d for the past 25 years - you literally just paint the scene.
The old-school acceleration practices around sprites, planes rasters and what not were only adding complexity when it comes to putting it all together - if your entire scene is just a list of sorted polygonal primitive draw-calls, things are ultimately much simpler to manage.
To put it another way - Saturn still required manipulating all the moving pieces either way - 2d or not, so nothing got more straightforward about it.
The one silver lining was that hardware actually did things to improve quality when manipulating sprites on Saturn (distortions, rotations etc had some pixel filtering treatment) but that didn't change complexity any.

A Yeah I'll say it again you will see warping textures close to the camera

There's affine warping all over the scene in that game, especially in background objects. I guess it goes to show people are too used to it (maybe thanks to the PS1 being so dominant) in that era - but it's far from isolated to near-camera.

But there's a simple reason it's less noticeable in common genres when rasterizing quads:

Ground polygons are the case where a rectangle will avoid the diagonal introducing that extra distortion - most of the time.
It won't look like the 'correct' image (saturn was still using affine interpolation) - but it won't have that line down the middle, which reduces the visible distortion. The moment you rotate the polygon or look at non-flat objects - that advantage is less obvious - bust large majority of genres especially in the 90ies have you facing a lot of flat ground texture ... most of the time. It's also what's usually closest to the camera, amplifying the problem.
Hell it wouldn't be until PS4 era that grounds stopped being mostly flat in 'some' genres (looking at JRPGs in particular).

 

[PaintTinJr]

I think you are slightly undercounting PSX numbers (which also assume goraud shading and suffer from less overdraw the more polygons you use and thus the higher overdraw for your forward texture mapping flow) there while looking closer at the theoretical peak of the Saturn and CPUs feeding it as much: (taken from an old B3D thread)

Geometry Transform Engine: (calculated/transformed polygons/sec)
*1.5 million verts/sec
*500,000 polygons/sec

GPU: (rendered, displayed on-screen)
*360,000 flat shaded polygons/sec displayed
*180,000 textured, gouraud shaded, lit polygons/sec displayed

Games that pushed 2-3k vertices per frame and higher were available in PSX’s time too and while you would not map it to polygons 1:1 I would not assume a 1:2 average or so either (also many people now advise that especially to model low detail meshes triangles would probably end up being a more efficient way to define the model).

Nice thread btw: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/questions-about-sega-saturn.58086/page-14

Edit: look at John’s latest video…

Completely agree, CoPilot - that gave me that info to infer polygon counts for Saturn) clearly hasn't seen John's video because the geometry on screen, draw distances, texture resolutions and frame rate advantage on PlayStation was like 3x or 4x gains.

In fact, returning to CoPilot and asking it about texture limits on Saturn it explicitly claimed the VDP1 could only do 1200-1300 textured polygons per frame and with a 32x32 texture size provided the VDP1 wasn't doing other fx, which would be consistent with the Tomb Raider footage and consistent with all the games John showed wireframes of, where the Saturn in games it did worst had more than 600 textured quads on screen, or a small number of quads with bigger textures resolutions and the games it did best on used coloured polygons with limited use of texturing , or used large quads with vdp2 sprite filling and sprite floors and backgrounds..

After watching John's video It feels very much like the Saturn wasn't blocked in quad rendering by fill-rate or polygon transforms alone but by texturing large quads as though the texturing over large skewed areas killed performance, and that maybe the optimal performance for the Saturn with texturing and 3d geometry throughput was to go to tiny textures
of 16x4 and 4 colour to alleviate a texture cache bottleneck, or maybe it was caused by the sprite filtering on larger colourful textures.

Here in John's ideal results on the console it looks like 4 colour textures everywhere, along with the VDP2 doing the 2D skybox, and big flat coloured quads for wheels and main car body, with the other texture quads used as masked decals as shown below. So maybe the Saturn could push more quads/polys than games showed, but it had to do so without bottlenecking the texture cache,

 

[PaintTinJr]

...

There's affine warping all over the scene in that game, especially in background objects. I guess it goes to show people are too used to it (maybe thanks to the PS1 being so dominant) in that era - but it's far from isolated to near-camera.

But there's a simple reason it's less noticeable in common genres when rasterizing quads:

Ground polygons are the case where a rectangle will avoid the diagonal introducing that extra distortion - most of the time.
It won't look like the 'correct' image (saturn was still using affine interpolation) - but it won't have that line down the middle, which reduces the visible distortion. The moment you rotate the polygon or look at non-flat objects - that advantage is less obvious - bust large majority of genres especially in the 90ies have you facing a lot of flat ground texture ... most of the time. It's also what's usually closest to the camera, amplifying the problem.
Hell it wouldn't be until PS4 era that grounds stopped being mostly flat in 'some' genres (looking at JRPGs in particular).

Looking at the affine texturing issue on PS1 specifically and how they used active division(tessellation) at the near plane to alleviate it, I'm wondering why they didn't use a 3 part Frustum cascade, say part one near = 10, far 40, part 2, near 40, far 100, part 3, near 100, far 1000.

Was the PS1 GTE able to switch out the Projection matrix cheaply to render from cascade 3 to cascade 1, and back to front with polygons that passed 1 or 3 of the frustum cascade culling tests? and did the GTE clip polygons cheaply? Or was it cheaper to put the burden on the CPU to do the active subdivision than use a camera position and geometry position agnostic approach I'm suggesting?
edit.
Or is it the case that the texturing wouldn't see any change with my suggestion - because the clamping of the texture coordinates would still be with the 3 as they were, rather than the GTE be sophisticated enough to create new vertices on the clipping edges to create an automatically smaller polygon on either side of the cascade planes?

 

[s_mirage]

After watching John's video It feels very much like the Saturn wasn't blocked in quad rendering by fill-rate or polygon transforms alone but by texturing large quads as though the texturing over large skewed areas killed performance

I mentioned this earlier on. According to the Sega Europe tutorial, the time it takes to render a quad is directly related to its size. At the most ridiculous end of the scale, and I'm not sure what the point of doing this would be, drawing the maximum sized quad the Saturn can draw (504x255) would leave you doing one per frame at 60fps with not a lot of rendering time left over.

So yeah, there's a trade-off between polygon size and the number you can draw. Really though, isn't that just the fillrate limitation? It's just that the VDP1's fillrate is a bit shit and ideally needs VDP2 to take some of the load off.

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

Looks like the title of this thread is aging like milk, and I am sure that PlayStation would prove even better on the next videos. All the extra hardware on Saturn doesn't mean s**** In the end, it was an unbalanced system, just like the N64! Both were one of the worst designed and unbalanced consoles ever.

Sato was an idiot. There's no way to forgive him, after he put in all those microchips and at the end of the day Sega Saturn being a weak PlayStation with 15-20fps and worse visual effects. It would have been better to have made the Saturn just for 2D or accepted working with the Silicon Graphics console. Believe me, Sega didn't go bankrupt for nothing.

 

[SirTerry-T]

Can someone invite this Argonaut founder here to let him explain his statement?

Please do....there wouldn't be enough popcorn to go round when the resident NeoGaf coding Gods start trying to tell him he's talking shite.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

And Atari jaguar was more powerful than both since it was 64-bit. /s

End of the day PS1 destroyed Saturn. Saturn had lots of good games, but PS1 was better.

Compare sports games as an example. Yikes. Saturn stuff looked like trash.

And even for FMV (which was a big thing back in the day of CD rom games), PS1 video was much clearer. Saturn cinema clips were grainy.

 

[Fafalada]

Was the PS1 GTE able to switch out the Projection matrix cheaply to render from cascade 3 to cascade 1, and back to front with polygons that passed 1 or 3 of the frustum cascade culling tests? and did the GTE clip polygons cheaply?

It accelerated clipping - but that process is never exactly - cheap (as the algorithm also involves generating triangles in traditional GPUs). But someone would have to test out the different costs for what you suggest.
Matrix was one of the inputs into transforms - as long as it's not changed for every vertex I don't think there was much cost to doing so.
But what exactly does the projection matrix switching entail?

Really though, isn't that just the fillrate limitation?

It is - the same applies to every polygon rasterizer.
Special mention only goes to NDS - where instead of taking longer to render - it would just skip the polygons if drawing took too long (very much behaving like an old school sprite engine in that way).

At the most ridiculous end of the scale, and I'm not sure what the point of doing this would be, drawing the maximum sized quad

Well - there's overdraw (so you'd want more fillrate than 1 full-screen update per frame), and also if you're doing it all through polygons, you may well fill the screen a few times over for other things.
PS1 capped out at around 18x for this - PS2 - 70x (that was on the extreme end of things though).

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

What is extra in this already ? Nothing.

Both CPUs were there day-one and documented. You didn't have to use both. Bogus ? Lol, these were very capable CPUs individually. Quad polys made as much sense as triangles in a day when 3D was still a novelty on home consoles. It also made sense for a company pursuing both proper 3D AND 2D through hardware, unlike PS/N64 that were natively incapable consoles in terms of 2D, where everything had to be done through software.

But SEGA had not planned to invest a ton of money in marketing to discredit 2D, unlike Sony and Nintendo, who did not have the choice anyway. Quads made sense for SEGA's hardware, as they also wanted those proper 2D layers and sprites functionalities.

Your post is overall the usual ignorant bullshit being spread indefinitely over the internet, do you really want to be a part of this ?

sorry, Sega is that company that almost went bankrupt, right? just so I can be sure

 

[Saturn Dragon]

Conclusion basically is that... We don't know exactly how much more advanced or how good looking games would have been developed for the Saturn if 6 years down the line (let's say by mid 2000) the console would be in the position Ps1 was, that's being the best selling leading console of the whole industry, receiving tons of games and being top priority for all developers.

Because, by early 1997 Saturn was basically dead, and things were just getting started for Ps1 and N64.

Yeah, Saturn got its very own turbo-nerd cult following in Japan. But that wasn't relevant in terms of mass gaming development, there was the odd hidden gem here and there only for Japan and that was it. Things like Bulk Slash, Taromaru or whatever, mean nothing compared to the dozen similar games you can find on Ps1.

 

[diffusionx]

Conclusion basically is that... We don't know exactly how much more advanced or how good looking games would have been developed for the Saturn if 6 years down the line (let's say by mid 2000) the console would be in the position Ps1 was, that's being the best selling leading console of the whole industry, receiving tons of games and being top priority for all developers.

Because, by early 1997 Saturn was basically dead, and things were just getting started for Ps1 and N64.

Yeah, Saturn got its very own turbo-nerd cult following in Japan. But that wasn't relevant in terms of mass gaming development, there was the odd hidden gem here and there only for Japan and that was it. Things like Bulk Slash, Taromaru or whatever, mean nothing compared to the dozen similar games you can find on Ps1.

True to some extent, but even later Sega fighters like Last Bronx cut back on some of the elements of VF2 and later Sega racers didn't impress beyond Rally. So I'm not totally sure how much juice we would have gotten on Saturn without an additional board built for 3D which was rumored for a while (especially for VF3). If Saturn held on i do think we would have seen that.

 

[cireza]

have to question this one - what exactly wasn't straightforward about it?
PS1 handled 2d the way every console handles 2d for the past 25 years - you literally just paint the scene.
The old-school acceleration practices around sprites, planes rasters and what not were only adding complexity when it comes to putting it all together - if your entire scene is just a list of sorted polygonal primitive draw-calls, things are ultimately much simpler to manage.
To put it another way - Saturn still required manipulating all the moving pieces either way - 2d or not, so nothing got more straightforward about it.
The one silver lining was that hardware actually did things to improve quality when manipulating sprites on Saturn (distortions, rotations etc had some pixel filtering treatment) but that didn't change complexity any.

It is much slower at handling 2D this way, instead of having proper tilemaps. This was also the method every developer had been using for years, so of course it was straightforward.

A good example is X-Men COTA, which made it early on Saturn but was pushed back to 1998 on PS1 by Probe, admitting it was challenging running the game on the console.

So yeah, things are maybe simpler to manage, for sure different. And then you reach a ceiling, and it becomes not good enough to push your huge backgrounds, several layers of parallax and enormous sprites. At which point, finding solutions is not exactly straightforward anymore.

 

[Team Andromeda]

One use I know of was in the Resident Evil games for the backgrounds, fitting more of them into RAM/on the disc at higher quality than possible otherwise. That was the apparently the reason the RE2 Saturn port was canned: no equivalent decoding hardware and likely not enough RAM to store uncompressed backgrounds, even if reduced to 256 colours as they were for RE1, or to use as a buffer to decompress into if the backgrounds retained the compressed format. MDEC could decompress directly into the PS1's VRAM AFAIK, so no such buffer was needed.

It wasn't . Capcom made it clear the Saturn version didn't need it make use of the 4MEG cart and it was canned because of Dreamcast

Just as an additional note, John is rather a Saturn boy akin to Richard Leadbetter and doesn't have a particulary high esteem for PS1 hardware itself by his own admission. He is quite fond of its library though. Didn't watch the video yet but that would be just 'his' layman take on the matter ultimately.

I've always had John down more as a PS2 fan above any other console .

I'm sure someone trie playing it with the wheel. It might've been Pandamonium Games, IIRC they have a video of Touring Car on their Youtube channel and they talked about the controls (and some methods they used to fine-tune them).

One should've included a racing wheel, IIRC.



For a long time I thought that too but I've come across Japanese sales for both PS1 and Saturn and the truth is, PS1 was quickly gaining ground on Saturn there since even early 1995.

Source: VG Sales

1994:

Saturn: 800K

PlayStation: 300K

1995:

Saturn: 2500K (2.5 million)

PlayStation: 2000K (2 million)

1996:

Saturn: 4800K (4.8 million)

PlayStation: 4200K (4.2 million)

So you can see here, yes, Saturn did maintain a lead in Japan over PlayStation from 1994 to 1996, but it was never anything where I'd say they were "dominating" PlayStation at all. It was fairly close and, if you look, it's the early launch shipments that gave SEGA that early lead. Retailers just trusted their name as a console maker more than Sony's at the time, which was understandable, and Virtua Fighter was a phenomenon in Japan during the era.

For both '95 and '96 though, Sony's PlayStation shipments were statistically tied with SEGA's to Japan; it's also worth considering that since PlayStation was performing so much better outside of Japan than Saturn, Sony likely had to curb some stock for Japan to prioritize other markets, something SEGA has less need to do. So it's very possible had Sony prioritized Japan with more shipments in '95 and '96, they probably could have exceeded SEGA's and PlayStation could've outsold Saturn there earlier than '97.

For 1997, Saturn moved another 800K units in Japan but PlayStation sold a massive 4400K (4.4 million) there the same year. That's more than 7x what Saturn did. I'd agree that FFVII was a major factor in helping PS1 see such massive sales. I'd even say SEGA cut short Saturn's sales in Japan that year both due to Dreamcast development (and its planned release a year later) and also something Jenovi mentioned in one of their videos where SOJ deliberately scaled back production of hardware to not report losses in fiscal reports due to unmoved hardware sitting in the channels.

That said, I think PS1's huge sales boon in '97 for Japan was more than just FFVII...it was also just a swell of other great games hitting the system at the time like GT, continued sales for games like RE etc. that helped PS1 see a surge. But even without FFVII, I think eventually PS1 was going to overtake Saturn in Japan, it might've just been 1998 instead of 1997. Having exclusives like RE2 and MGS were going to put it over the edge of Saturn eventually, but it's possible SEGA could've still kept competitive in that scenario between what games they DID release in '98, that 3P were releasing, and if they pushed back Dreamcast while moving some of those Dreamcast titles to Saturn instead.

However, the global situation would've likely made that impossible, so still likely SEGA would've pushed '98 for Dreamcast which would negatively impact Saturn in Japan anyway, and ironically probably give the PS1 a major boost over Saturn. That's even supposing the Saturn got FFVII instead of PS1, which if that happened I almost imagine would have been a '97 Saturn release and maybe would've helped Saturn increase its lead over PS1 to 1 million or slightly more. Even then, you'd still get Dreamcast in late '98, which would damage Saturn momentum in Japan, while games like RE2 & MGS releasing exclusively for PS1 helping close up that gap to maybe at most 300K-500K.

Then '99 seeing even more releases, especially from companies like Squaresoft, Enix and Capcom, probably finally closing up that gap and giving PS1 the lead as SEGA has to juggle between Saturn and Dreamcast. Maybe they catch a lucky break, maybe Squaresoft develop Dreamcast versions of Vagrant Story, Parasite Eve, Einhander but those wouldn't be exclusive; they'd have PlayStation versions as well to guarantee enough market share for sales. I'd still see Sony trying to court Squaresoft BTS though for something like FF VIII, maybe aiding for dev on a PS1 version in exchange for timed exclusivity while Squaresoft work on a Dreamcast version. Maybe Sony start talking about the PS2 a bit earlier, maybe they push for a late '99 launch in Japan instead of March 2000.

Basically I don't see a scenario where the Saturn is effectively competitive against PS1 in Japan any much longer than it actually was, if you remove FFVII from PS1 or even give that a Saturn version (I think it's highly likely PS1 would still get a FF game of some type be it a port of VII or an offshoot, or maybe it's the Saturn that gets the offshoot, whatever). But that scenario might give the Dreamcast a somewhat better chance in Japan against PS1 & PS2, at least early on. But, it'd still come at the expense of Saturn within the same market.



You got a source on that? I'm only recalling from memory the Sega Rally figures from the leaked SEGA fiscal document, so I know in America the game did not perform well overall which really disappointed SEGA of America at the time.

I don't think I ever said dominating, but Saturn had a lead of a million units and had FF 7 come out to Japan it would have ensured the Saturn won. I seem to remember even the Panzer Dragoon team saying that SEGA had thought they won Japan until FF7 when at the GDC on the making of Panzer Dragon
ALPS gave SEGA Saturn a market share of 42% to the PS 36% or maybe 38% in July of 1996 I seem to recall

And as for SEGA Rally breaking records for the ever best selling CD game that was the case in the UK at the time.
I'm see to remember SEGA Japan holding the record in Japan for the most pre-ordered game over there with VF2 with over a million Pre orders. Those were the days

 

[Team Andromeda]

True to some extent, but even later Sega fighters like Last Bronx cut back on some of the elements of VF2 and later Sega racers didn't impress beyond Rally. So I'm not totally sure how much juice we would have gotten on Saturn without an additional board built for 3D which was rumored for a while (especially for VF3). If Saturn held on i do think we would have seen that.

Last Bronx cut back? That came out on 2 CDs and had tons of extra content it went way above Saturn VF2 for features and extra's.
Daytona CE was sucking more tune out of the Saturn than Rally it's still to the day one of the few games having to handle 40 cars on track and it's remarkable what the team did with that game in terms of graphics and a decent frame rate, it's just a shame the team changed the handling and AI of the game, which disappointed all fans of the coin up and those looking forward to the game . Its a shame mind because as a game in itw own right its a great game

I don't think polygons budgets have gone up much, just that SEGA Japan would have been able to refine the code more and make games more stable with a longer life and Saturn would have enjoyed some fine games too with the likes of Shenmue, Sonic Adv started life as Saturn projects, even Skies of Arcade started life out on the Saturn but I think it was about tanks on the ground, rather than airships It just would have been nice to see the Saturn hold out until late 1999 and go out with a bang more with SEGA Japan, Treasure, GameArts really getting to grips with the system and it would have been nice to see what Travels Tails could have done next on the system too

I think 5 to 6 years was the sweet spot of when to call it a day on a console back then mind.