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 cou

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.