6 ms·

The bank organization is relatively well-known, so maybe you put the framebuffer in one bank, you put the zbuffer in another bank, and you have two banks left o

The bank organization is relatively well-known, so maybe you put the framebuffer in one bank, you put the zbuffer in another bank, and you have two banks left over without touching expansion memory. I mentioned World Driver Championship specifically because it runs at 640x480, and runs well, without the expansion pack. Yes, memory access by the CPU will slow the RDP down. But the RDP is plenty slow even when the CPU is idle. The reason that we are seeing such improvements with SM64 is because SM64 was in such bad shape to begin with—something to be expected, given the novelty of 3D hardware in 1996 and problems with compiler bugs.

NovaDudely 3y ago
Kaze explained once that a big part of performance issues was related to fill rate which I guess is part of the memory bandwidth issue. Essentially, polygon counts aren't a huge issue provided they don't use a large amount of screen space. While the Z-buffer will help out with larger polygons, it isn't a silver bullet solution. That said, I don't doubt SM64 was in bad shape, this was really Nintendo's 1st attempt at doing 3D at that scale and almost everything was experimental. But even with that, it is amazing to see just how well a lot of it works despite this. But seeing some of the later stuff released on N64, it did seem like a really tapped out resource. Mind you looking at the Portal 64 coming along, it is neat to see that folks are still trying to push it just a little bit more. Back to SM64, one thing I still find really cool is when you get Mario on a rotating platform, the rotation position and angle is calculated as it should be for both location and angle. That is just slick to see on something that old.
mrguyorama 3y ago
Your example of World Driver Championship is important; It had a custom RDP microcode implementation to achieve that. The RDP microcode implementations Nintendo distributed were pretty mediocre, either being very slow but accurate, or fast and too inaccurate, even for 3D games. Some of the most impressive games on the console were only achieved by implementing custom microcode, which was excessively difficult because Nintendo refused to distribute resources to help do so, despite that being an intended use of the console's hardware. Another huge problem in rasterization was that pretty much all graphics resources had to be in a 4kb texture cache to be rasterized, and unless you micromanaged that cache really effectively (and it was cut in half if you wanted certain RDP features!) that cache constantly had the wrong data, and this would slow everything down. If they had given it just a bit more cache for textures, it likely would have been much closer to it's claimed peak performance in normal usage.
rasz 3y ago
Isnt World Driver Championship fast because it doesnt use Zbuffer in the first place freeing half of memory BW normally used by gpu? Afair their custom RDP code sorted triangles back to front and just hoped you wouldnt notice glitches.

NovaDudely 3y ago

Kaze explained once that a big part of performance issues was related to fill rate which I guess is part of the memory bandwidth issue. Essentially, polygon counts aren't a huge issue provided they don't use a large amount of screen space. While the Z-buffer will help out with larger polygons, it isn't a silver bullet solution. That said, I don't doubt SM64 was in bad shape, this was really Nintendo's 1st attempt at doing 3D at that scale and almost everything was experimental. But even with that, it is amazing to see just how well a lot of it works despite this. But seeing some of the later stuff released on N64, it did seem like a really tapped out resource. Mind you looking at the Portal 64 coming along, it is neat to see that folks are still trying to push it just a little bit more. Back to SM64, one thing I still find really cool is when you get Mario on a rotating platform, the rotation position and angle is calculated as it should be for both location and angle. That is just slick to see on something that old.

mrguyorama 3y ago

Your example of World Driver Championship is important; It had a custom RDP microcode implementation to achieve that. The RDP microcode implementations Nintendo distributed were pretty mediocre, either being very slow but accurate, or fast and too inaccurate, even for 3D games. Some of the most impressive games on the console were only achieved by implementing custom microcode, which was excessively difficult because Nintendo refused to distribute resources to help do so, despite that being an intended use of the console's hardware. Another huge problem in rasterization was that pretty much all graphics resources had to be in a 4kb texture cache to be rasterized, and unless you micromanaged that cache really effectively (and it was cut in half if you wanted certain RDP features!) that cache constantly had the wrong data, and this would slow everything down. If they had given it just a bit more cache for textures, it likely would have been much closer to it's claimed peak performance in normal usage.

rasz 3y ago

Isnt World Driver Championship fast because it doesnt use Zbuffer in the first place freeing half of memory BW normally used by gpu? Afair their custom RDP code sorted triangles back to front and just hoped you wouldnt notice glitches.