re: NX to be announced before E3?

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The N64 was held back by the cartridge medium, which brought storage limitations and made the system challenging to develop for. Its rival had no such drawbacks and was able to play host to blockbuster titles with CD-quality sound and FMV cutscenes. One of the few disadvantages of the CD format was loading times, an area where the N64 emerged on top, with games offering the same plug and play quality traditionally associated with home consoles. Cartridges were also more robust, but this was hardly a significant selling point where developers were concerned. Graphical comparisons between the two platforms is a contentious issue. While 3D titles on the PlayStation looked pixelated and rough around the edges, skilled developers had numerous means of compensating for this. Many N64 titles ran much smoother by comparison, yet the machine struggled with textures and CGI.

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Multi-platform releases often appeared more impressive on the PlayStation, yet on the occasions where the N64 was at its best, it outshone its rival. There weren't too many releases on the Sony platform that could hold a candle to Rare's Conker's Bad Fur Day or Perfect Dark.

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While theoretically less powerful than both the Sega Saturn and N64, the PlayStation’s architecture was far simpler than either. It featured a single cpu as opposed to the Saturn’s dual cpu’s and a unified memory architecture, something the N64 lacked. Because of this and the dedicated video decoder and sound chip the PlayStation was relatively easy to program for and could harness full motion video and high quality audio with little system overhead. This allowed for the PlayStation to run games that matched or even exceed in graphics quality and feature set of the N64 despite it’s lower performance.

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While the N64 had some impressive specifications compared to the PlayStation and Saturn on paper, the reality was much different. The RCP, while a very advanced design for 1996, had a serious crutch in that it only had 4Kb of texture memory (compared to the PlayStation which had 1Mb of dedicated video memory, a variable amount could be dedicated to textures). This meant that developers had to make serious concessions in texture design. Two common solutions were to either tile small textures across a surface or resort to Gouraud shading of polygons instead of proper textures. Many games (Mario 64 being an example) used Gouraud shading heavily to make up for a lack of texturing. This contributed to the cartoony look of many N64 titles as opposed to a more realistic look of competing PlayStation games. Gouraud shading is a shading technique used in 3D games that allows light to be properly rendered on models. It is not the same as texturing, it is a shader, however in the case of the N64 solid color textures with heavy Gouraud shading are used to create the illusion of detail when textures cannot be used.

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The issues were not limited to the texture cache. The RCP also lacked DMA which means that in order to access system memory it had to go through the cpu in order to do so. RDRAM was at the time some of the fastest memory available but it also suffered from heavy latency, by forcing the RCP to go through the CPU for memory access the CPU had to quickly switch back and forth from RCP requests to it’s own memory needs which exacerbated the heavy latency and defeating the benefit of such high bandwidth. The RCP was also featured reprogrammable microcode, a nice feature on paper but the stock Nintendo-supplied microcode, known as Fast3D, was intended more for high precision 3D modeling and not raw performance. Estimations show that using the supplied microcode and conventional programming models, the RCP was only capable of 100,000 polygons per second. That is 1/10th the theoretical power that Nintendo promised. Nintendo did not supply developer tools for modifying the RCP’s microcode until later in the N64’s life which meant many titles were poorly optimized for the hardware and didn’t take full advantage of it.

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