I encountered this HW comparison between Saturn/PS1/N64, just not sure if I can fully trust it:
https://segaretro.org/Sega_Saturn/Hardware_comparison
I don't really care about the comparison itself (e.g. against, say, PS1), but I quite like that all the benchmark numbers are together at one page, giving me a really nice summary of Saturn's bandwidth and hardwired shading/texturing capabilities.
Is that comparison a bogus fanboy site, or is it legit ?
There is one area that doesn't appear to make much sense, however: Flatshading (Both 8-bit and 15-bit) shows identical value : 28 MPixels/s via VDP1.
I don't know how it's internally implemented in a silicon, but there's half amount of data being written for the 8-bit color, so it should be roughly double the value of the 16-bit (minus the scanline traversal overhead, of course, which is identical for both cases), given that all other benchmarks show differences at different color depths.
Another thing: Gouraud shading: 16 MPixels/s (10x10). According to note No 45, Saturn can shade 164,576 polygons/s (10x10 pixels). That would be roughly 2,743 quads at 60 fps.
Given that these are theoretical numbers where all performance is spent just on that single feature alone, it sounds, kinda, low - no ?
Those numbers, are obviously, still an awesome boost over Jaguar, let alone the fact that on jag you have to do scanline traversal, and compute endpoint data for Bliiter for every scanline (basically, killing 90% of RISC's performance on just that). Here, it appears, you just give the Saturn coordinates, colors, and it'll shade and interpolate whole polygon for you, automagically.
Which is, obviously, pretty awesome, as you suddenly also gain 90% of GPU's performance for other stuff and effects, as you don't have to handhold Blitter for each scanline of the polygon...
What's the most detailed Gouraud shaded game on Saturn ?
https://segaretro.org/Sega_Saturn/Hardware_comparison
I don't really care about the comparison itself (e.g. against, say, PS1), but I quite like that all the benchmark numbers are together at one page, giving me a really nice summary of Saturn's bandwidth and hardwired shading/texturing capabilities.
Is that comparison a bogus fanboy site, or is it legit ?
There is one area that doesn't appear to make much sense, however: Flatshading (Both 8-bit and 15-bit) shows identical value : 28 MPixels/s via VDP1.
I don't know how it's internally implemented in a silicon, but there's half amount of data being written for the 8-bit color, so it should be roughly double the value of the 16-bit (minus the scanline traversal overhead, of course, which is identical for both cases), given that all other benchmarks show differences at different color depths.
Another thing: Gouraud shading: 16 MPixels/s (10x10). According to note No 45, Saturn can shade 164,576 polygons/s (10x10 pixels). That would be roughly 2,743 quads at 60 fps.
Given that these are theoretical numbers where all performance is spent just on that single feature alone, it sounds, kinda, low - no ?
Those numbers, are obviously, still an awesome boost over Jaguar, let alone the fact that on jag you have to do scanline traversal, and compute endpoint data for Bliiter for every scanline (basically, killing 90% of RISC's performance on just that). Here, it appears, you just give the Saturn coordinates, colors, and it'll shade and interpolate whole polygon for you, automagically.
Which is, obviously, pretty awesome, as you suddenly also gain 90% of GPU's performance for other stuff and effects, as you don't have to handhold Blitter for each scanline of the polygon...
What's the most detailed Gouraud shaded game on Saturn ?