Ty4on said:
Not really. The biggest difference was that it didn't have hardware trillinear filtering like the N64. That means the textures weren't smoothed out when you came closer so you could see the pixels, the Saturn and PS1 also didn't have texture filtering.
Could be me allergic to nearest-neighbor interpolation (no texture filtering) and loving flashy light effects, but I think
Perfect Dark really showed how far ahead the N64 was. In my eyes the PS1 and DS had "old" 3D graphics set to high while the N64 has "new" (current) 3D graphics set to very low.
Indeed, I agree. N64 > DS > PSX. The DS's lack of texture filtering and z-buffering (that is, no jaggy smoothing) really ruins its image quality in 3d. DS graphics look like perspective-corrected PS1 graphics, pretty much, with a lot of that same terrible blocky jaggy look the PS1 had, but the N64 didn't thanks to the smoothing and z-buffering. "But it's a small screen so those things aren't needed" is a ridiculous excuse, because they're very noticeably absent and certainly matter, even on a small screen.
345triangle said:
the best thing about the DS's 3D is that it settles the PS1 vs N64 debate forever. no-one would argue that the n64's horrible blurry mess of whatever looked better than the DS (at least i hope not), but in the field of jaggy low-poly stuff the PS1 was clearly superior. therefore, via proxy, PS1 > DS > N64
That's quite crazy, how is PS1 3d better than DS 3d in any way, much less N64?
And anyway, PS1 vs DS says little about PS1 vs. N64. But as for that, the N64 is the more powerful console technologically. That is a fact. It has a faster CPU, more hardware features, etc, etc. It's the more powerful system. It's okay for people do dislike its graphical style, but I find it annoying how many people insist that PS1 (or even Saturn) 3d is better looking than N64 3d, considering the gulf in power between the systems... it always just gets back to people ignoring the N64's strengths and focusing strongly on its weaknesses, I think. As if their criticism of its weaknesses sometimes makes its many strengths irrelevant, somehow. Yes, things like perspective correction, z-buffering, and trilinear filtering matter, when comparing the PSX, N64, and Saturn...
Of course though, given that the N64 came out a good year and a half after the PSX and Saturn, you'd expect it to have better visuals. And it does.
Zee-Row said:
Yeah but the reason 3rd partys left were mainly Cart limitations. With a DS card you could have the best of both worlds and have a pretty big game with almost zero loading times.
Also have you guys seen Mortal Kombat Trilogy for 64 vs Ultimate Mortal Kombat on DS? The DS is a prefect port while the N64 version had missing frames , horrible music and weird glitches.
That's true, but you say why in the first part of your post, MKT had severe space limitations. It was an early N64 game, so all they had to work with was 8MB... it's not easy fitting a whole game from that generation into 8MB.
Celine said:
No, N64 problem was that it was released too late ( and for the sake to have the better hardware at a "cheap" cost ) when PS1 had the time to build it's momentum among developers and publishers and overall PS1 had a far better ecosystem from which third-party publishers could turn a profit.
Nintendo earned handsomely on N64 but it was the only company to do so.
No, Nintendo wasn't the only company that did well on the N64. Acclaim and Midway for instance both did pretty well on the system, through to 2000 at least (the N64 market faded fast in 2001, after the PS2's release). I think at one point in 1998 or so Midway said the N64 was the system they made the most money from, consolewise.
ty4on said:
Think it was mostly just those super expensive carts. To my knowledge the PS1 didn't have that much momentum in 1996, many were waiting for the N64 and had it gotten 3. party support with CDs or something I think it would have competed against the PS1 like the SNES against the Genesis.
Yeah, that's true. In North America, the PSX had a very slow start, and the N64 had a fast one. The N64 faded after that, and the Playstation picked up, so the N64never quite managed to take first place, but it did do well here -- in fact, almost 2/3rds of all N64s sold worldwide (20 million of 32 million) were sold in North America.
And yes, the slow release schedule on the N64 definitely hurt it, both early on and through its life. I do think that the high quality of the games it did get matters more than the low volume, but many people thought otherwise and it did have a thin release list. Between the somewhat tough to develop for hardware, the higher costs, and the stronger first-party competition, you can see why so many third parties went with Sony instead... it is hard to see how the N64 as is could have kept them, honestly. Oh well, I don't mind that it was second, I love it anyway and don't think (design or gameplay-wise) a CD drive would have made it better...
On the 64DD note though, yeah that was really stupid. That should have either been released back in 1998 or so, with Ocarina of Time as an exclusive to sell it, or canned around that time and never released. I can see what they were thinking (lots of space for custom content, without a hard drive? Not a bad idea...), but it was expensive, relatively small (the disks are just 64MB, despite their size), and more. It's easy to see why it failed, and hard to see why it was even released, Nintendo's stubbornness to release the thing anyway even if it was doomed aside.
beje said:
I'll go with the DS just for the framerate. Most full 3D games (this is, with no 2D pre-rendered backdrops) in the PSX struggle to go over 20 fps, have eye-bleeding janky textures and a whole lot of them dip into single digits framerate more often than not.
Games like FF or RE are another story: they have the whole power just to render the character and a some enemies/NPCs so it's obvious they look much better to the naked eye, but comparing them to full 3D DS games like I've seen in this thread is coming as a complete uninformed moron.
A very good point indeed. Whether you're talking PSX or N64 (or Saturn), 3d games that gen usually had bad framerates. The exceptions are more notable for being exceptions than they are for anything else. However, the DS is framerate-locked, if I remember right, so 3d games have good framerates on that system. So, even if the 3d is kind of ugly) and it is, at least the framerates are good... and yes, I agree that it definitely helps the system quite a bit.