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Originally Posted by Exophase
You hit on basically what I was getting at... the 2D ports to Saturn tended to be better because Saturn had more VRAM and CD-ROM cache memory, but it really had little to do with the extensive dedicated 2D hardware it had. If you ask me all of that hardware was a waste of silicon.
Now, I admittedly haven't done much in the realms of 3D programming but aren't non-coplaner quads a little uncommon? I haven't heard of a PC video card that can do them either.. how are they rendered on Saturn? As being curved between the vertices? Does this have a speed hit at all? Unfortunately I have a very hard time believing that excellent non-coplaner quad usage could make Saturn's games comparable to those on modern consoles. That seems quite extreme to me...
- Exo
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Did you play through the entire game of Panzer Dragoon Saga? I thought the later parts were quite amazing.
Less Vram and Cache isn't the reason why Psx ports had horrible slowdowns in the capcom arcade ports. Considering the PSx is processing a lot less frames than the saturn was, if the psx has the 2d power, it shouldn't have those slowdowns. The saturns 2d hardware is quite powerful and is one of the reason why there wasn't much slowdowns in those games. The larger vram and cache enabled less load times and more animation frames.
Quad rendering is very uncommon. No video card does non-coplaner quads these days. The last quad rendering graphics cards were the older Nvidia cards(pre geforce) and old voodoo1 cards.
You can think of it this way. The saturn could draw a 3d 6 sided cube with 6 quads. The psx has to break those quads up into 12 triangles. The saturn can then bend those quads to create some curves. Like the effects in Nights. I'm not too sure of performance impact of such a thing, but playing nights shows that it can be done with minimal if any performance hit.
As to the original guys questions: Emutalk.net has a very long Saturn emulation screenshots thread.
http://www.emutalk.net/showthread.php?threadid=13850
Here is a screenshot of Christmas Nights. Look at the ground near the hill. The quads are bent to make the curvature of the hill. The lines around the quards are where the Bilinear Filtering stops.