Hacker News Reader

Comment by ashark | Hacker News Reader

> The N64, the GameCube, the Wii and subsequent offerings were all underpowered in terms of graphical abilities and raw power after that.

The N64 was underpowered?

View on HN

Definitely not. The N64 outperformed the PSX, but it was far harder to program for and cartridges were far more expensive than discs. That's where Nintendo's lack of 3rd party support began. The Gamecube and Xbox were about on par with each other, and both outperformed the PS2. But the PS2 had a huge lead time and strong 3rd party momentum from the PSX. The Wii was the shift where Nintendo began to fall behind on horsepower, instead focusing on broad market appeal, lower price points, and less intimidating input methods. The Wii U and Switch are continuing that trend, trying to chase the Wii dragon, but so far not succeeding.

I think there's more to it than that. Matt Leone wrote an amazing Oral History of Final Fantasy 7, published over at Polygon: http://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7

The switch from N64 to PS is talked about a lot - Square definitely started development for FF7 on the N64 prototype systems before switching over. Hiroshi Kawai, a character programmer for Square, has what I think are the most telling comments:

"I kind of had a suspicion that things weren’t going too well for the 64 at that point, because … 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."

Kawai has more on the topic, which is fascinating. And the entire piece is just amazing, and I imagine most people on this thread would enjoy reading it.

At the time, this is true. One of the N64's primary limitations was its suboptimal microcode. It wasn't until too late in the console's lifecycle that studios like Factor 5 and Rare really showed its potential with their own custom microcode.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_programming_charac...

At the time the Playstation pushed more polygons per frame. I remember this debate because Nintendo said that they allowed for larger seamless polygons and said that it produced a better image on the screen.

Weren't N64 games over all higher resolution than PS1? I remember PS1 being just a jagged mess compared to N64

I'm not sure about resolution, but the N64 had built in AA and AF.

Maybe I'm super confused here, but I thought there was no such thing as "higher resolution" when it came to analog TV signals. This was before HDMI/HDTV. Your resolution was whatever NTSC/PAL dictated. Or am I wrong?

The screen resolution is the same but the resolution of the image can change. If a system's output renders to the entire screen then just imagine a 1 pixel output would make the entire screen the same color. 4 pixels could have 4 quadrants of colors. 16x8 pixels would have 128.... etc. The max resolution would be the max resolution of the display. Though a topic of interest may be sub-pixel rendering where a system/font/game can take into account the RGB color pixel layouts in an LCD screen into account in order to improve the visual quality of the max resolution.

So a system can have double the resolution of another and games can even choose to render at different resolutions depending on how intensive it is. Some games will choose lower resolution but more polygons and some might choose higher resolution with fewer polygons, among other choices. There are even modern cases where console games will change the resolution they run at to keep framerates solid https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/forums/6e35355aecdf4fd0ac...

I think the main difference was textures: on the 64 they ended up being blurrier/flatter and therefore less pixelated. That said, there were definitely PS1 games that looked great and weren't cursed with jaggies (Wipeout, for instance).

a common criticism of the n64 was that it used cartridges while other consoles of the same era had adopted cd-roms offering much higher capacity. that lead to some games being shorter and/or simplified on the n64 compared to their equivalents on other platforms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com