Re: [stella] Hardware comparisons

Subject: Re: [stella] Hardware comparisons
From: Glenn Saunders <cybpunks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 22:23:26 -0700
At 05:36 PM 4/26/00 -0700, you wrote:
processors.  I also recall reading articles that
developers hated working with the Saturn's dual main
processors.  The implication of the articles was that
they worked in tandem, you couldn't use just one.

The Saturn was an overdesigned unit. That is not meant as a compliment. By overdesigned, I mean they threw in two kitchen sinks when one would have been just fine, and in the process, one of them rarely gets used. In other words, an overabundance of hardware doesn't mean an overabundance of performance unless the hardware is very carefully integrated. Everything has to have a purpose, othewrise it's just dead weight. People should remember this when looking at the raw specs for any console, including earlier comparisons in this thread like Intellivision or Astrocade vs. 2600. The signal path between memory, the CPU, the graphics and sound processors, and the output are all very important. Bottlenecks in critical areas can put artificial limits on what a seemingly more advanced system can do vs. a "primitive" system.


I read a story in a magazine that the Saturn was meant to only have one CPU, but that there was some concern late in the design phase that the machine might not be powerful enough to compete or live long on the marketplace, so they kludged the 2nd CPU in there. Supposedly, the design did not need it at all, but they put it in, hence increasing product cost and not really increasing performance much. The reason being that multiprocessor systems require careful design in order to avoid so much bus contention that they cancel eachother out.

So developers hated the 2nd CPU because it was a pain in the ass to wrench the extra performance out of it that they needed. So very few took good advantage of it. I think VF2 was one of those.

I think the Jaguar design also suffered somewhat because the system bus/es were not well optimized for multiprocessors. The fastest processor on it has, I believe, only 4096 bytes of on-chip cache which needs to get constantly flushed and refreshed. That's why despite the fact that it has, what, 5 processors in it, few games really found the sweet spot in getting the most from all of them. Battlesphere probably being the penultimate example of optimized Jaguar code, and Tempest2K. But most Jaguar games do not push the Jaguar even close to its theoretical maximum performance. It takes a great deal of manual effort, more than most developers were willing to bear.


Glenn Saunders - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698 Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc


-- Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/

Current Thread