Comment by m45t3r | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m45t3r | Hacker News Reader

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> you'll see that the design of a 3D-capable console in the 90s was a significant challenge for every company.

While this is true, I still think that the PlayStation had the most interesting and forwarding looking design of its generation, especially considering the constraints. The design is significantly cheaper than both Saturn and Nintendo 64, it was fully 3D (compared to Saturn for example), using CD as media was spot-on and also having the MJPEG decoder (that allowed PlayStation to have not only significantly higher video quality than its rivals, but also allowed video to be used for backgrounds for much better quality graphics, see for example Resident Evil or Final Fantasy series).

I really wanted to see a design inspired in the first PlayStation with more memory (since the low memory compared to its rivals was an issue it seemed, especially in e.g.: 2D fighting games where the amount of animations had to be cut a lot compared to Saturn) and maybe some more hardware accelators to help fix some of the issues that plagued the platform.

It is not really any more 3D than the Saturn as it still does texture mapping in 2D space, same as the saturn. It's biggest advantage when it came to 3D graphics, aside from higher performance, was it's UV mapping. They both stretch flat 2D textured shapes around to fake 3D.

The N64 is really far beyond the other two in terms of being "fully 3D", with it's fully perspective correct z buffering and texture mapping, let alone mipmapping with bilinear blending and subpixel correct rasterization.

This is very true. I consider then N64 to be the first to use anything that resembles hardware vague similar to what the rest of the industry ended up with.

It is a shame that SGI's management didn't see a future in PC 3D accelerator cards, it lead to the formation of 3DFX and with things like that SGI's value in the market was crushed astoundingly fast. They had the future but short term thinking blinded them to the path ahead.

But N64 was a more expensive design, and also came almost 2 years later, and from an architectural standpoint it also had significant issues (e.g.: the texture cache size that someone said above).

This is why I said considering the constraints, I find the first PlayStation to be impressive.

Sure, a year or two back in the 90s was huge. :)

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