I'm going to be very lame (but also kinda awesome) and bump a 25 year old thread (I was 4 when this thread was made, and feel like being nerdy talking about the old consoles from childhood, lulz).

The N64, with all graphical features enabled (textures, lighting, z-buffer, mip-mapping, texture filtering, floating point unit of 100 MFlops) could render 160,000 polygons per second. Its 4 MB of RAM and 8 MB of RAM expansion allowed for some incredibly
huge open areas with lots of stuff, as seen in games like Zelda - Ocarina of Time and even Super Mario 64. In terms of 2D however, it was pretty weak, often having devs use flat polygons with animated textures. It had some pretty good transparency though,
and was even technically capable, through software, of bump maps. It was the most powerful console of the generation for 3D, simply due to it being the only console of the generation to have a z-buffer, floating point unit, mip-mapping, ability to have
perspective correct textures, texture filtering, a shared system RAM which is great for CPU-based effects, and its large amounts of RAM for the time. Its only downside was the hardware didn't allow for higher texture resolutions compared to the
competition, and the cartridges couldn't store as much data. That and it was difficult to develop for.

The Sega Saturn was capable of 140,000 polygons per second with texturing and lighting. It was capable of transparency when using the VDP-2 chip, but most devs settled on using the VDP-1 chip instead, not utilizing the full power of the console and thus
giving a dithered effect to simulate transparency instead. The Saturn was however most likely the best 2D machine of the generation, capable of large scaled sprites, lots of detail and parallax scrolling, and very rarely suffered any kind of slowdown. It
didn't need to use a polygon with animated textures to achieve this ability, either. Its wonky hardware meant that it was the hardest to develop for, often giving results that made the Saturn look like the weakest console of the generation in terms of 3D.

The PS1 could achieve about 90,000 polygons per second with textures and lighting. It was capable of 2D, but devs often used flat polygons with animated textures or just flat polygons that are themselves animated, to achieve the desired results. It was
the weakest console of the generation in terms of both 2D and 3D, but it was also the cheapest and easiest to develop for, which put one in more people's homes than the other consoles, and made developers want to spit out more games for it due to how
easy it was to make them. It was like the Nintendo Wii of the 5th generation. Weak, cheap, and successful.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

XPost: alt.games.sony.yaroze

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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)