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Saturn Was "More Powerful Than PlayStation" Claims Argonaut Founder
- Thread starter Togh
- Start date
Parazels
Member
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s_mirage
Member
Show me a screenshot with texture warping on Saturn.
Please!
It's easier to see in motion. Play Duke Nukem 3D. Warping all over the place.
Warping on the Saturn is typically better than on the Playstation but it is there. On the Playstation you'd have square textures split over two triangles, and the way the textures were interpolated meant that there was a clear dividing line where one triangle would warp in a different way to the other. The Saturn's quads would also warp, particularly as they got close to the viewport, but normally you wouldn't have that dividing line that exacerbated how bad it looked and gave the Playstation its characteristic wobbly straight lines.
On both systems, developers would try to limit the warping by subdividing large polygons/quads into smaller ones as they got close to the viewport.
Parazels
Member
Link, please with a timestamp.
RoboFu
One of the green rats
Show me a screenshot with texture warping on Saturn.
Please!
albeit one of the worst examples the Saturn did have a lot more stable textures than the PlayStation but the nature of how they worked did get warpy close to the camera when going out of view in some games.
Parazels
Member
I have no idea where you got this weird screenshot, but I don't see here texture warping.
albeit one of the worst examples the Saturn did have a lot more stable textures than the PlayStation but the nature of how they worked did get warpy close to the camera when going out of view in some games.
Unless you think there's an abyss on the middle of the track, how can't you see it?
RoboFu
One of the green rats
You don't see the road texture buckling close to the camera?
s_mirage
Member
Here's a good example:
Watch the canyon walls at around the 15 minute mark. The textures squash like crazy as they approach the viewport..
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s_mirage
Member
No texture warping in Duke Nukem 3d
Play the game. Stand at the corner of two walls. Turn. It's easier to see in motion.
Team Andromeda
Member
Yeah, that's why it was able to double the frame rate and also increase the screen res for VF2.
And by the same token it's a myth that the Saturn couldn't do 3D ..
I don't get why you need to bring the cartridge port into it .
Many 2D games looked better on the Saturn that didn't need to use the Cartridge port , possibly the best examples are the terrible ports of Darius Gaiden and Souky on the PS1 .
Don't tell us they weren't good ports and a different developer did the PS 1 conversions, much like for the Saturn poor 3D ports
In the end the Saturn did good 3D and the PS 1 did good 2D, just Saturn did 2D better and the PS1 did 3D better
SmokedMeat
Gamer™
I’ve seen the old Saturn’s more powerful argument.
Even if it’s true it doesn’t mean shit, because in the real world all of the 3D games were worse on Saturn. I say this as a red headed Saturn stepchild back in 1995 that rode the Saturn short bus.
Glad I owned the Saturn, but man did I back the wrong horse.
Even if it’s true it doesn’t mean shit, because in the real world all of the 3D games were worse on Saturn. I say this as a red headed Saturn stepchild back in 1995 that rode the Saturn short bus.
Glad I owned the Saturn, but man did I back the wrong horse.
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RoboFu
One of the green rats
Yeah just watch this video anywhere the player goes down a narrow hallway .
Again it's not extreme like on the PlayStation but it does have some warping.
Team Andromeda
Member
Yep, one got warping on Saturn but nothing like that see on the PS 1 and of course you'll get none when using VDP2 for drawing floors Ect .
I don't know what tricks the GODs at GameArts were using but there is like no warping whatever in Grandia and it for me remains the best example of Saturn 3D
Geometric-Crusher
"Nintendo games are like indies, and worth at most $19" 🤡
vf2 has less polygons on the screen
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nkarafo
Member
My man, what are you talking about?
The Saturn doesn't have stable 3D graphics and neither does the PS1. The N64 is the first console that had zbuffer and all those features that made polys/textures stable.
It might not be as bad as the PS1 in some games but it's there.
It probably helps that the camera is pretty limited and always in an isometric position.
Crash Bandicoot on PS1 also has a very limited/linear camera and that's why it doesn't suffer as much as other games with this.
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Fat Frog
I advertised for Google Stadia
More powerful ? Maybe because they are
Starfox on Genesis... without chip !
More seriously, i don't have a clue for the Sega Saturn vs PS1 battle.
Nonetheless, i love to piss Sony fans off by linking such tweets on console war threads
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hououinkyouma00
Member
Is this the thread where we pretend that the Saturn was better than it was, and that people actually cared about it?
I kid, I kid. I've never owned a Saturn but it's always interested me. Most of the games I would ever be interested in though are mostly JP only which makes it not worth it for me to delve in for a select few games.
I kid, I kid. I've never owned a Saturn but it's always interested me. Most of the games I would ever be interested in though are mostly JP only which makes it not worth it for me to delve in for a select few games.
RoboFu
One of the green rats
SirTerry-T
Member
Saturn was a proper coders machine...for the Assembly big boys with hairs on their chests and a woman on each arm.
PS1 with it's C/C ++ was for the bum fluffed uni-grads with their parents dropping them off to their game making jobs each morning.
In author power terms...the Saturn was Earnest Hemingway and the PS1 was Beatrix Potter.
/JK
PS1 with it's C/C ++ was for the bum fluffed uni-grads with their parents dropping them off to their game making jobs each morning.
In author power terms...the Saturn was Earnest Hemingway and the PS1 was Beatrix Potter.
/JK
Alexios
Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Er, no, Powerslave on PS doesn't "aim for 60fps", they increased the cap so it can reach that in the smallest, simplest rooms/corridors/views but that just meant you get a worse moment to moment variance of 60-20fps instead of 30-20fps (or less in both cases of course) and to reach even that, much like Tomb Raider had major cuts in draw distance, Powerslave has major level changes to accommodate additional culling with more walls hiding views, smaller rooms, missing decorations, even missing animations for Ramses' ghostly head providing exposition and directions, so, it doesn't perform better in the same game. Let me guess, just like 2D game animations, backgrounds, foregrounds, effects, performance and loading, here in a mostly full 3D game these cuts also don't matter (but somehow they're not equally "efficient optimizations"when Saturn ports need to do similar cuts as they result in less polygons/enemies/action on screen). Essentially removing a somewhat problematic area is totally the same as improvement in performance in the same scenario! The definitive version was the Saturn's (before the recent remaster that amalgamates both versions' best aspects and adds new stuff) even if they added some decorations here and there in the smaller scale and scope, simpler, more claustrophobic PS levels (and lack of fun bomb jumping shenanigans and analog controls). Way too much bs here, from the usual clowns. Good thing much of it is so well documented so you don't have to take the word of a shitposter feigning objective & factual arguments while constantly pushing a certain narrative in bad faith with at best constant stretching of the truth as much as the potential random reader's ignorance allows and fall for it, but you can see it for yourself:
Yep, it did hit 10 fps there. Of course actually explaining shit and detailing or showing the real differences as above or in the (cartridge-less) CPS2/2D examples apparently turns someone into a "fanboy" nobody should ever read. It's so much better to spew vague bullshit like how Powerslave on PS "aims for" double the fps with no further discussion as the like minded haters and clowns pile on the likes and never look back, busy as they are scrutinising the slightest error of any positive Saturn comment. That's totally not being fanboys, no, it's the objective and full truth that is the fanboy
Yep, it did hit 10 fps there. Of course actually explaining shit and detailing or showing the real differences as above or in the (cartridge-less) CPS2/2D examples apparently turns someone into a "fanboy" nobody should ever read. It's so much better to spew vague bullshit like how Powerslave on PS "aims for" double the fps with no further discussion as the like minded haters and clowns pile on the likes and never look back, busy as they are scrutinising the slightest error of any positive Saturn comment. That's totally not being fanboys, no, it's the objective and full truth that is the fanboy
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Alexios
Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
That rolling demo was so promising, it sucks the final game didn't really deliver (possibly because of the troubled development and how different they had to make the engine for the platforms it did end up releasing on). Much like Lobotomy, Sega should have supported these guys and given them the SOR IP for it like they wanted to use at first, or at least work with them for a different, greater game. Hell, just with the first demo scenario you can see how it could basically handle something like Yakuza a whole generation before that became a thing post-Dreamcast's and Shenmue's death...
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Team Andromeda
Member
Sarah Avory was one of staff at CORE design who said the system was more powerful.
She also said in a latter EDGE mag that she had found a way to speed up the VDP 1 which was the where the Saturn came up short against the PS 1 GTE.
SEGA missed a trick with not buying CORE in 1995 when they were looking for investment, I think it was US Gold who bought the stake in CORE Design
And like you said SEGA should have come to Lobotomy rescue and out them to work on the DC port of Half Life
Team Andromeda
Member
You sound like Dave Perry who used to say to program on the PS 1 was to read a book, to program on the Saturn was to learn the machine.
Saturn was really designed with the expectations of 2D games in mind, as Sega thought that capable 3D hardware was way out of reach for the average consumer, and arcade would be home for 3D games for the generation. I believe the positive reception of 3D games for the 32X and 3DO caused Sega to panic and to start throwing more chips at the design, some of which were redundant in most of the game. Do you really need a dedicated SH1 CPU for controlling the CD drive when a normal dedicated controller would have been enough? Then you had the 68000 that functioned as the sound CPU (Same as the CPU used in the Mega-Drive, but the Saturn wasn't compatible with mega-Drive games for some reason) The dual SH2's were mostly because the yield's maxed out at 28Mhz, less than the PlayStation's 33.8Mhz MIPS CPU.
Shortly after release there were rumors of the 64X addon which would have incorporated the Lockheed Real3D rendering technology that was used in the Model 3 arcade board, but this thankfully never came to fruition.
Shortly after release there were rumors of the 64X addon which would have incorporated the Lockheed Real3D rendering technology that was used in the Model 3 arcade board, but this thankfully never came to fruition.
Fess
Member
Yeah I remember some Saturn games doing stuff that PS1 seemingly couldn’t do. But most games ran worse.
In the end it was all about multi threading, multi core versus single core programming. It’s still complex. More powerful for some operations but weaker for others if you can’t use the cores properly. Similar to PS3 with the complex Cell and it’s SPE units vs Xbox 360 and the simpler Xenon architecture. Or what’s happening on PC with 7950x vs 7800x3D. Etc. If programmed right a multi core processor can run circles around one with less cores, but otherwise it just adds unnecessary complexity.
In the end it was all about multi threading, multi core versus single core programming. It’s still complex. More powerful for some operations but weaker for others if you can’t use the cores properly. Similar to PS3 with the complex Cell and it’s SPE units vs Xbox 360 and the simpler Xenon architecture. Or what’s happening on PC with 7950x vs 7800x3D. Etc. If programmed right a multi core processor can run circles around one with less cores, but otherwise it just adds unnecessary complexity.
DeVeAn
Member
There was a written interview with one of the guys that designed the Saturn? He mentioned Ken telling him you will lose. Something to the effect that Sony had access to in house parts that help them cut costs. SEGA had to buy everything and put it together.
If I find the interview I'll link it. Hideki Sato
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DetectiveBananas
Member
(Checks Google to see the Saturn Price in 1995…$399 US - Equivalent to $826 in 2024).
(Checks Google to see PS1 price in 1995…$299 US - Equivalent to $619.00 today)
Damn that shit was expensive back then. Surprised so many kids even had a PS1
(Checks Google to see PS1 price in 1995…$299 US - Equivalent to $619.00 today)
Damn that shit was expensive back then. Surprised so many kids even had a PS1
Spiral1407
Member
Didn't know there were still Saturn fanboys in this day and age...
Lysandros
Member
Saturn wasn't a "multi core" system though. It had multiple separated chips on the motherboard, that is not remotely the same thing. It was very impractical for those chips to communicate usefully due to very high latency connections/buses compared to a truly multi component chip. Which brings us to PS1 which was much closer to a multi core system with its CPU complex in a single chip which contained the Mips core + GTE co-processor (CP2) + (the quite powerful) MDEC decompresor and CP0 in a similar fashion to PS2's EE.
As to PS3/Saturn analogy, i am truly struggling to make sense of it. Those aren't remotely similar systems designed by the same engineering vision. Just the difficulty of programming isn't enough of a criteria. I mean just look at the Saturn mainboard and just compare it to PS3's and then PS1's, which ones look similar? PS3 eventually catch up with X360 in multiplatform front overcoming its complexities in later years beacuse the machine had truly the required grunt for it. Saturn simply didn't had the necessary hardware grunt to catch PS1 in 3D graphics no matter the length of the support, that is the big and overlooked distinction.
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Both chips only did affine texture transforms on 'polygons' - so when it comes to 3d perspective there was no difference in how it was handled - PS1 rasterizer was still just a 2d accelerator in reality. But IIRC Saturn had no UV on the rects - so when they came near camera you couldn't scissor them against the camera in a sensible way, so that led to more artifacts.
But on flipside Saturn did have perspective correct planes on the other chip - which obviously helps in an era where games still rendered ground mostly flat though.
Parazels
Member
RAIDEN1
Member
End of the day it didn't matter there was a reason why it flopped globally, look at how the original Xbox trounced the PS2 in power but still didn't come out on top...on the flip side was it Yu Suzuki who said that Virtua Fighter 2 was using 60% of the power of the Saturn...you had to know the system inside and out from the get go to get the best out of Sega's answer to the Neo Geo (ie Saturn..) PSX was more developer friendly a big reason why things ended up the way they did
cireza
Member
We indeed know for a fact that there is a lot of texture wobbling on PS1, and this does not affect Saturn. So yes, there are many PS1 games where it looks pretty bad. This is due to the fact that it uses triangles and lacks perspective correction, which is not as much an issue on quads. So at least that makes one argument in favor of quads, as well as having to push less polygons to draw the same amount of visuals. So that's a second argument as well.
Texture warping on the borders of the screen happen for both consoles.
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cinnamonandgravy
Member
thats all theyre saying--shit was squeezing blood from a rock.
but if you had a +5 alchemy ring you could make it work.
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
.....
No it wasn't, this is just comedy now. Even stuff like the 3D stage in Sonic Jam or titles like Bulk Slash show otherwise.
The PS1 is better at 2D than people give it credit for, agreed.
However, you're underselling the Saturn's 2D advantages. VDP2 could draw effectively infinitely-sized (technically 4096 x 4096 IIRC, which was massive back in the mid '90s) background planes with full Mode 7-style scrolling, which could take off a lot of polygon-crunching load from the GPU. On PS1, making similar planes required dedicating tons of polygons. FWIW, the PS1's GTE is very powerful and actually limited in its cap by the CPU if anything, but due to that it would potentially have an issue with background planes as large or detailed as Saturn's in a game using a mix of 2D & 3D.
Not that it wouldn't be able to do it; the PS1 definitely could. I just think it'd be a bit more taxing so less left over for polygonal processes or CPU-bound logic. But that's why I used the specific example of 2D/3D game hybrids, and it was mostly impractical at the time because most devs were leaning to 3D. For whatever 2D elements they used in games, it was mainly character sprites or different special effects, or HUD elements. In all those cases, PS1 had no issues keeping up with the Saturn.
So we'd have to be talking about a very specific type of 2D/3D hybrid game also requiring vast open fields and areas, lots of sprites, and a similar polygon & sprite budgets on both platforms while achieving the same frame rate for both systems.
But I think this kind of example is unfair because it would likely put the PS1 at a bigger handicap in terms of cutting off its polygonal budget, even if the Saturn would also be somewhat less handicapped by not pushing VDP2 to its absolute max..
FWIW, neither console supported floating point, only fixed-integer math. That's the reason for texture distortion on PS1, but there are some instances of supposed texture distortion that's actually deliberate texture being moved across polygon surfaces.
I think the main reason texture distortion happened less on Saturn was because of both the use of quads, and hard-mapping textures to quadratic surfaces. But that came with drawbacks which would happen when trying to fold two points to form a triangular polygonal surface, and also for transparency in 3D games (which is why Saturn relied so much on dithered meshes & CRT blending to give the illusion of transparent shadows).
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Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
There are several games on PS1 where the superior geometry throughput allowed for denser tesselation that reduced this problem a lot and as other pointed out neither platform (aside from infinite background planes) had perspective correct texturing so would wobble and/or have distortion (you can see it even in the screenshots posted above). If you warp the geometry to warp the texture you are not going to be artifact free unless you get perspective correct UVs interpolated across the triangle you are rendering.
On PS1 you could more easily afford near camera plane clipping of geometry (clipping warped quads on Saturn would definitely be… more “fun”).
Fess
Member
I don’t know the low level stuff but I remember some dev talking about using the two processors in Saturn in ways that just wasn’t possible on PS1. And getting higher framerates that way. Sadly I don’t remember the game but iirc they could let one processor do the 2D backgrounds and the other do the 3D calculations, simultaneously. Sounds to me like multi threading.
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Spiral1407
Member
My guy, what are you even trying to argue here? Most people here already agree that texture warping is worse on PS1, but both consoles still have that problem.
Parazels
Member
I don't see the problem on Saturn.
cireza
Member
Still worse with triangles by nature. This was hardly an issue on Saturn, never bothered me. On PS1 though, it gets very ugly.
The only annoying thing was the warping on the edges on Saturn. Which also affects PS1.
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It'd be an interesting experiment.
Back of the napkin math - PS1 had enough fillrate for about 18 full-screen overdraws at 60hz.
So taking say - 2-4 full-screen planes (I don't know what Saturn could do here - some online spec claims 2 3d planes, but 4-8 '2d' ones - so not sure what the real number was), and assuming they're screen axis aligned (for say - Doom like experience) you'd need about 25 (horizontal), or 40 (vertical) polygons for each full-screen perspective correct plane to be stable (8 pixel steps is what Quake used for its perspective correction - and that was generally considered reference in 320x200 era).
So on paper - up to 160 polygons, and 20-25% of the fillrate budget - not trivial, but doable while still having space for the 'rest of the game'.
Math gets a bit wonkier if the planes don't stay screen-space axis aligned so those cases would be harder(and possibly much more polygon hungry). I have an idea how you could still keep polycount under control(since primary use would still be ground/sky planes) - but it's been ages since I've played with affine+fixedpoint math, so would need to actually try it to verify temporal stability.
Spiral1407
Member
Because you're a fanboy. 1/3rd of the road is literally deforming in that pic, stop the cap
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