http://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7
...one of my responsibilities ...was to write performance applications that compared how well the 64 fared against the prototype [PlayStation]. And we'd be running parallel comparisons between the [PlayStation] where you'd have a bunch of 2D sprites bouncing off the screen and see how many polygons you could get within a 60th of a second.
And even without any kind of texturing or any kind of lighting, it was less than 50% of what you would be able to get out of the [PlayStation]. Of course, the drawback of the [PlayStation] is it didn't really have a z-buffer, so you'd have these overlapping polygons that you'd have to work around so that you wouldn't get the shimmering [look]. But on the other hand, there was no way you'd be able to get anything close to what FF7 was doing [on PlayStation] on the 64
at that time.
There was actually this one trip that [Nintendo] organized for me, [main programmer Ken] Narita-san, a few other lead devs who were working on the battle portion for the Final Fantasy 6 [Siggraph] demo at that point...
I think Nintendo had been getting signals from Square saying, you know, ”Your hardware isn't up to snuff. Not only in terms of raw 3D performance, but in terms of storage." And they said, ”We're gonna fabricate this brand new chip," which was supposed to have a bunch of hardware improvements to get a little bit more performance. Which, my suspicion is they probably just repeated that verbatim from SGI, and I think there was, in general,
a disconnect between SGI and Nintendo in terms of what they were expecting the hardware to do... But Nintendo had certain specific performance metrics that had to be met, but I don't think those were communicated well to SGI... We spent a few days, I remember, optimizing my code, to try to get a few more polygons out, but it didn't really make much of a difference...