[QUOTE="charizard1605"][QUOTE="i5750at4Ghz"] N64 had limited ram if I remember correctly, which is true for both the PS3 and 360.charizard1605
Yes, and wasn't there an issue with latency and Z buffering too? I think I'll look it up and post it here. Yes, so it seems I was right.From Wikipedia:
The Nintendo 64 had weaknesses that were caused by a combination of oversight on the part of the hardware designers, limitations on 3D technology of the time, and manufacturing capabilities. One major flaw was the limited texturecacheof 4KB. This made it difficult to load anything but small, lowcolor depthtextures into the rendering engine. This small texture limitation caused blurring due to developers stretching small textures to cover a surface, and then the console'sbilinear filteringwould blur them further. To make matters worse, due to the design of the renderer, ifmipmappingwas used, the texture cache was effectively halved to 2KB. Towards the end of Nintendo 64's lifetime, creative developers managed to use tricks, such as multi-layered texturing and heavily-clamped, small texture pieces, to simulate larger textures.Perfect Dark,Banjo-Tooie, andConker's Bad Fur Dayare possibly the best examples of this ingenuity, all of which were developed byRare. Games often also used plain coloredGouraud shadinginstead of texturing on certain surfaces, especially in games with themes not targeting realism (e.g.,Super Mario 64).[36]
There were other challenges for developers to work around.Z-bufferingsignificantly crippled the RDP's fill rate. Thus, for maximum performance,[37]most Nintendo 64 games were actually fill-rate limited, not geometry limited, which is ironic considering the great concern for the Nintendo 64's low polygon per second rating of only about 100,000;[38]however, some of the most polygon-intense Nintendo 64 games, such asWorld Driver Championship, frequently pushed past the Sony PlayStation's typical in-game polygon counts.
The unified memory subsystem of Nintendo 64 was another critical weakness for the machine. TheRDRAMhad very high accesslatency,[39]which nearly negated its high bandwidth advantage. In addition, game developers commented that the Nintendo 64's memory controller setup was poor. The R4300 CPU was severely limited at memory access since it had to go through the RCP to access main memory,[40]and could not useDMAto do so.
One of the best examples of custom microcode on the Nintendo 64 was Factor 5's N64 port of theIndiana Jones and the Infernal MachinePC game. The Factor 5 team aimed for the high resolution mode (640×480)[41]because of the crispness it added to the visuals. The machine was taxed to the limit running at 640×480, so they needed performance beyond the standard SGI microcode. The Z-buffer could not be used because it alone consumed the already-constrained texture fill-rate. To work around the 4KB texture cache, the programmers came up with custom texture formats and tools to let the artists use the best possible textures. Each texture was analyzed and fitted to best texture format for performance and quality. They took advantage of the cartridge as a texturestreamingsource to squeeze as much detail as possible into each environment and work around RAM limitations. They wrote microcode for real-time lighting, since the SGI code was poor for this task and they wanted to have even more lighting than the PC version had used. Factor 5's microcode allowed almost unlimited real-time lighting and significantly boosted the polygon count. In the end, the game was more feature-filled than the PC version, and unsurprisingly, was one of the most advanced games for Nintendo 64.[42]
Factor 5 again used custom microcode with games such asStar Wars: Rogue SquadronandStar Wars: Battle for Naboo. InStar Wars: Rogue Squadron, the team tweaked the microcode for a landscape engine to create the alien worlds. ForStar Wars: Battle for Naboo, they used what they learned fromRogue Squadronand made the game run at 640×480, also implementing enhancements for particles and the landscape engine.Battle for Naboohad a longdraw distanceand large amounts of snow and rain, despite the high resolution.[43]
guess it was more than just limited cache. :P
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