The Nintendo 64 Classic Edition.

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Originally Posted by Soulis

Edit: I also tested the European version of Wipeout 2047 Saturn. Reports 50hz as normal and repeats 3 frames. The game is also visibly not as smooth as the US version, i could tell this immediately. So the PAL version is 16,6 fps. Or more likely, 16fps with one extra repeated frame every now and then. Or 17fps with one skipped frame every now and then. I'm not sure how they sync these slower PAL games in order to avoid screen tearing.

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Yeah, now I think this was the issue. The earlier videos were both PAL, and I posted an NTSC video. I don't trust emulators and especially not on my shitty computer, but I downloaded the source video of the one I posted and ran it through VLC Player. The video itself is 30 fps; advancing the video frame-by-frame I see that every third frame is a repeat of the second. Except the HUD sometimes changes in the off frames, so apparently that's running in a 30 fps layer. The pre-game menus, with the rotating 3D icons/ships/course layouts, are also 30 fps.

I don't know why but the 17 fps looks a lot worse to me than 20. It's possible that 20 fps hits some sort of threshold, or it could be that the actual posting of frames is erratic in one of the ways you said.

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Originally Posted by j_factor

I don't know why but the 17 fps looks a lot worse to me than 20. It's possible that 20 fps hits some sort of threshold, or it could be that the actual posting of frames is erratic in one of the ways you said.

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That and IMO, the smaller your frame rate budget is, the more valuable those frames get. The 20fps area is a very sensitive one because anything lower than that and you are getting very close to the point where you start noticing individual frames and this can ruin the illusion of motion. So you can't really afford to lose frames, even if it's only 3 frames.

I'd say the difference between 17 and 20fps is more noticeable than a 50 and 60fps difference, even though the later has 10 frames difference. 50fps is already very smooth and nearly impossible to separate the individual frames so this extra 10 frames difference becomes more subtle (although for the trained eye it's still there).

That said (and since it's on topic) I'm glad Nintendo used US/NTSC games instead of PAL for European mini consoles. VC was terrible on the Wii and WiiU in Europe with all those PAL releases.

So, in conclusion, PAL is shit. :p

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Originally Posted by j_factor

Hmm. I have heard that about the RAM but I'm not really sure how that affects what we're talking about here. I always thought the huge polygons were mainly to reduce texture usage, by stretching out a relatively low-res texture over a large object.

edit: I read that blog post in full and it's not very good. It overall sounds thrown together, it's pretty surface-level discussion, and it contains some inaccuracies. I think there's been better hardware discussion in posts on sega-16.

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Here's a more thorough one and it even has some examples of what RARE did to get around the problems. They confirm some of the stuff that guy was talking about.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...ain.Nintendo64

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Originally Posted by tvtropes

• The system can actually push 500,000 polygons in real time, five times what the Playstation and Saturn can do...yet that required a code that was never released before the system was discontinued. Some codes could still push the system up to 180,000 polygons, but only one or two games went that far. Most N64 games just pushed 100,000 polygons or slightly lower.

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Originally Posted by Soulis

Sega-16 in a nutshell ;)

We've been through these game comparisons already. At least for Decathlete. Show me a game that pushes as many polygons as WDC on the Saturn. Or don't. Who cares.

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You are sadly mistaken. WDC does not display more polygons than Sega Rally 95. The rocks in WDC are large stretched out polygons, while in Sega Rally 95, the rocks are made up of a bunch of quads. You can clearly see that the rocks in WDC are pretty flat with very little variance in surface. When you get to a level where you see a bunch of trees in WDC, it's just a bunch of large flat polygons with the same texture over and over again. There really isn't a lot of polygons involved with those levels. Even the coliseum is just one giant polygon with the texture of the coliseum applied to it.

"Most N64 games just pushed 100,000 polygons or slightly lower."

I would bet that the Playstation, Saturn, and N64 are all very similar in that regard. Remember, the Playstation can do 180,000 gourad-shaded polygons per second, and the Saturn can do 200,000... But that's theoretical maximum, without things like lighting, collision, or, you know, gameplay. "Real world" numbers are quite a bit less, though I haven't seen much in the way of polygon stats for games.

So, in practice, the polygon counts are about the same. But in the N64's favor, those polygons are coming with additional effects (TLMMI, anti-aliasing, etc.); if you have the same number of polys the N64 is doing more. But then again, those extra effects aren't exactly a slam dunk. Overall, not especially flattering for the N64, considering it came out a year and a half later and was hyped to high heaven as supposedly a huge leap.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

You are sadly mistaken. WDC does not display more polygons than Sega Rally 95. The rocks in WDC are large stretched out polygons, while in Sega Rally 95, the rocks are made up of a bunch of quads. You can clearly see that the rocks in WDC are pretty flat with very little variance in surface. When you get to a level where you see a bunch of trees in WDC, it's just a bunch of large flat polygons with the same texture over and over again. There really isn't a lot of polygons involved with those levels. Even the coliseum is just one giant polygon with the texture of the coliseum applied to it.

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Nope. WDC pushes way more polys. BOSS disabled some features most N64 had (like Z-Buffer) to push more. You can even sense a slight poly warping (like a PS1 game) although it's too subtle. As a result the game pushes the most polygons on the system.

We had this discussion before remember?
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthr...l=1#post735138

Of course, even without that topic that proved you wrong, you still wouldn't have any proof for what you just posted, would you?

Here's mine:

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/p...5/#post-640265

Some of these posters are devs and one did work on this game. According to these sources the game pushes 100K + polygons with effects (real world results). That's higher than most games during that era. In the same sources they mention that the average PS1 game was less than 50k. On that note, the average N64 Z-Buffer enabled game wasn't much better than that either. Earlier N64 games were even lower than that.

Can't find any sources for Sega Rally specifically but i doubt it pushed even half as many polys as WDC. Overall, all 3 machines should be close in real world numbers but WDC in particular is an exception because of the microcode BOSS used to push more polygons than any N64 game.

The dude couldn't even spell Polygons right, so I'm not buying it. And according to the article I'd posted above, the CPU couldn't even directly access the RAM, so for the CPU to access system memory, it had to be sent to it from the other hardware, which would cause a large amount of latency.

I'm not trying to dog on the N64, I think that it has several dozen titles that could never be duplicated by the Saturn, or PlayStation. But, on the same note, I'd say that there are a lot more titles on the Saturn and the PlayStation that would have given the N64 more trouble to duplicate, and I've never felt like the N64 delivered the kind of experience with racing games that the Saturn and PlayStation could.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

The dude couldn't even spell Polygons right, so I'm not buying it. And according to the article I'd posted above, the CPU couldn't even directly access the RAM, so for the CPU to access system memory, it had to be sent to it from the other hardware, which would cause a large amount of latency.

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What are you talking about? Read the posts by Erp.

You actually trust TV tropes as the better source for something as niche as this rather than something like beyond 3D where devs post. Finding real world numbers of how many polys games use isn't an easy task.

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Originally Posted by Soulis

What are you talking about? Read the posts by Erp.

You actually trust TV tropes as the better source for something as niche as this rather than something like beyond 3D where devs post. Finding real world numbers of how many polys games use isn't an easy task.

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This!

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the engine is designed to push ]polygoons and actually uses the CPU to clip them because it was more efficient than the GPU in that step. The net result is an engine that goes CPU ->RSP ->CPU ->RSP->RDP with almost 7 fields of latency between input and the display update, which is just too much. Triangle seti=up takes orders of magnitude more time than the transform and lighting pipeline.

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He also points out the huge amounts of latency, because of the way that they had to cycle through 3 parts of the system hardware.

Let's look at reviews from a Nintendo love fest site, as well as another site. Their complaint is that the game's AI is non-existent and that the car physics are broken. There's also a mention of the game bogging down when more than few cars are on the screen; that's a huge indicator that the CPU was already dealing with bottlenecks that wouldn't allow it to calculate physics properties of the cars, or allow the other cars to react naturally to your presence on the track.

http://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/...r_championship

This guy points out the very same thing that I noted. The sensation of speed just isn't there.

https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wor.../1900-2544201/

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Originally Posted by gamespot

In the end, World Driver Championship is an average racing game with exceptional graphics. The game's incredible visuals give you a sense of realism for a little while, but the second your car starts to do an excessive slide around a turn, it kind of falls apart. The game also never really gives you the sensation of the speed at which your car is traveling, even later in the game when you have cars that can really move. The speedometer tells you that you're doing 120 MPH, but it feels more like you're going 60. While World Driver isn't a bad game, it is a questionable buy. It's definitely worth renting.

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Wat?

Why are you posting a review? What does it prove? It's a review lol!

Here's another review: 10/10. Best game ever, would play again.

We were talking about polygons and now you moved the goal posts and you talk about sense of speed and physics.

Also, AI non existent? Have you played the game personally? What do you expect from cars to do? How can you tell which racing game's cars are "smarter"? You just post this vague nonsense that can't be measured because if it could i would just prove you wrong again.

We get it. You don't like the game. I also don't like it that much because it's too sim oriented. I enjoy Sega Rally and the older Top Gear Rally more myself. But visually neither touches WDC.

Also, lol at your "Nintendo love fest site" comment. The irony.

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Originally Posted by Soulis

Wat?

Why are you posting a review? What does it prove? It's a review lol!

Here's another review: 10/10. Best game ever, would play again.

We were talking about polygons and now you moved the goal posts and you talk about sense of speed and physics.

Also, AI non existent? Have you played the game personally? What do you expect from cars to do? How can you tell which racing game's cars are "smarter"? You just post this vague nonsense that can't be measured because if it could i would just prove you wrong again.

We get it. You don't like the game. I also don't like it that much because it's too sim oriented. I enjoy Sega Rally and the older Top Gear Rally more myself. But visually neither touches WDC.

Also, lol at your "Nintendo love fest site" comment. The irony.

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I own the game, and I've posted pictures to prove it. The AI in the game is horrible, so much so, that I had one encounter where a car bounced of the back of my car at least a half dozen times, just like the one reviewer noted about the pinball like cars bouncing off of you. The controls feel very sluggish, which suggests to me that there is a ton of latency between the CPU and your controller interface, and it was noted in your link to ERP's comments.

Sorry, but I don't see WDC as being visually superior to Sega Rally 95. WDC chugs when you slam the brakes around a corner and it looks like ass on my HD CRT. It has very minimal texture mapping and the cars don't have very realistic sway, or car physics in the corners. It has a lot of shortcuts to make the appearance of it doing more, but it's very evident once you start to break down what you are seeing. It also has really poor visuals off in the distance, and I'm often second guessing what the arrows are pointing to until I'm right on top of the corner.

Where in those links did it ever confidently discuss polygon counts for WDC? He claimed that the game hit 100k polygons per second, but he said to take that with a grain of salt. It certainly doesn't sound like he was confident in that number.

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Originally Posted by Soulis

So, here is one other way i could measure the frame rates using RetroArch (It has the accurate Mednafen Saturn core also). Although the program only has a counter that measures refresh rate updates, it also has a frame advance button. Basically what you do is pause the game and tap the frame advance button to cycle through frames. Each tap equals one screen update. I used a few games at 60, 30 and 20fps to test this.

All games tested are NTSC US at 60hz - 100% speed. I use camera panning so i know the game is moving at all times.

Now at 60fps, each time you tap the frame advance, you get a different frame. 1 tap = 1 different frame. So that's 60 different frames, or 60fps. Simple.

At 30fps you get this: First tap = 1 frame, 2nd tap = the same frame (no change). Third tap = next different frame. So what you get here is 2 repeated frames. 60/2 = 30. There are only 30 different frames every second. That's 30fps.

At 20fps you get one additional repeated frame on top of that. So First tap = 1 frame. Second tap = the same frame (no change). Third tap = the same frame (no change). Fourth tap = next different frame. That's 3 repeated frames. 60/3 = 20. There are only 20 different frames every second. That's 20fps

Wipeout XL falls in the third category guys. It's 20fps. Sega Rally falls in the 2nd category. Something like F-Zero X falls in the first. So if you don't believe me you can test it yourself and at least believe math.


Oh and before i forget, this is for the wheels argument:

https://s33.postimg.org/x0bohyvbj/Wo...123-212038.pnghttps://s33.postimg.org/x0bohz31b/Wo...123-212043.pnghttps://s33.postimg.org/rc5dr36en/Wo...123-212047.png


Edit: I also tested the European version of Wipeout 2047 Saturn. Reports 50hz as normal and repeats 3 frames. The game is also visibly not as smooth as the US version, i could tell this immediately. So the PAL version is 16,6 fps. Or more likely, 16fps with one extra repeated frame every now and then. Or 17fps with one skipped frame every now and then. I'm not sure how they sync these slower PAL games in order to avoid screen tearing.

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you again with your emulator. I wouldn't trust a saturn emulator for the life of me. wipeout 2097 definitely runs higher than 20 fps, let alone 16 fps. I tested the actual game on both pal and ntsc saturns.

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Originally Posted by Soulis

Maybe that's how it looked to you, maybe you read that on a magazine, maybe speed and frame rate aren't linked and you continue to confuse the two, who knows.

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It's not how it looked, back in the mid 90's all one got was screenshots. I'm just saying that the likes of Saturn Mag or Maximum made a big deal over the Pal Optimisation on games like Sega Rally, these were mags edited by Digital Foundry very own Rich rich Leadbetter. I'm quite honest, in that, I've never owned or played the Pal versions on a Pal system as it so very clear on my Youtube channel. Games like Rally, VF II, Panzer Dragoon I imported as soon they come out on NTSC. I never lowered my self to play crappy Pal versions with the only exception of Exhumed, Saga, Die Hard Arcade, Tomb Raider (which didn't run probably on my Import Saturn) Winter Head and Deep Fear on the Saturn.
I was done with Pal, when the Mega CD came out in Japan in 91 and that system would only work on a NTSC Mega Drive and so began my Import and NTSC life, never wanted to go back to slow games and horrible black borders after that.

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Show me a game that pushes as many polygons as WDC on the Saturn.

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I gather VF on the Saturn pushed more and is pushing with over 120,000 polygons, Dark Savour said to push over 140,000. But looking over that, show me N64 games that run at 60 fps or run at High Res like 704x480. N64 marked a system where frame rates and screen res went down and not up (unlike with each new console gen at the time).

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Originally Posted by Team Andromeda

It's not how it looked, back in the mid 90's all one got was screenshots. I'm just saying that the likes of Saturn Mag or Maximum made a big deal over the Pal Optimisation on games like Sega Rally, these were mags edited by Digital Foundry very own Rich rich Leadbetter. I'm quite honest, in that, I've never owned or played the Pal versions on a Pal system as it so very clear on my Youtube channel. Games like Rally, VF II, Panzer Dragoon I imported as soon they come out on NTSC. I never lowered my self to play crappy Pal versions with the only exception of Exhumed, Saga, Die Hard Arcade, Tomb Raider (which didn't run probably on my Import Saturn) Winter Head and Deep Fear on the Saturn.
I was done with Pal, when the Mega CD came out in Japan in 91 and that system would only work on a NTSC Mega Drive and so began my Import and NTSC life, never wanted to go back to slow games and horrible black borders after that.



I gather VF on the Saturn pushed more and is pushing with over 120,000 polygons, Dark Savour said to push over 140,000. But looking over that, show me N64 games that run at 60 fps or run at High Res like 704x480. N64 marked a system where frame rates and screen res went down and not up (unlike with each new console gen at the time).

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IMO there is nothing wrong with running pal saturn games on pal systems. I never noticed any less speed or frame rate unless not optimized. sega rally is a good example but are so are others like virtua cop.

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Originally Posted by bultje112

IMO there is nothing wrong with running pal saturn games on pal systems. I never noticed any less speed or frame rate unless not optimized. sega rally is a good example but are so are others like virtua cop.

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I had quite a few and the only time I went with Pal is when the Pal copies came out before the NTSC versions like with Exhumed or Tomb Raider or as with Deep Fear, Jonah lomu Rugby or WWS 97 it never came to the USA. Pal Die Hard Arcade had issues with the text not being displayed tidy, Exhumed run ok on my NTSC system, but the games intro speech was messed up, Pal Tomb Raider I couldn't play at all on my NTSC the screen was too messed up, the FMV video was not displayed quite right when playing Pal Saga on my import Saturn, World League Soccer doesn't run quite right but still plays ok and jonah lomu rugby plays fine but slows down a little more when played on a NTSC system to a Pal.