It's Ken Kutaragi. This was his baby. He could have gotten fired for it. He worked on it almost in secret after Nintendo killed the SNES disc add on until his bosses asked him what he was up to. He was called into the President of Sony at the time Norio Ohga and made his pitch. Luckily Ohga loved the work and decided it had to be run under a separate arm: SCE. Kutaragi worked on the GTE chip to cut it down to only the bare basics of what was required to accelerate 3D polygons, make it as cost effective and efficient as possible. The end result was an elegant, easy to use system with a lot of flexibility and geometry power for developers to play with. Cheap to manufacture disc based games, lots of storage, good CD quality sound, 32 bit RISC CPU. When first demonstrated to developers, they clambered over each other to get hold of the devkits and start. That was why it was such a success, it had exactly what was wanted by lots of developers and publishers so they all backed it hard. Kutaragi then went straight back to the hardware to improve it, kept cost cutting it again and again. Every year there were new revisions. This aggressiveness put Sega's complex and expensive Saturn out of the game and heavy pressure on Nintendo to keep matching the price cuts Sony could afford to do on Playstation. The price heard around the world: $299.
@@lucian2701 It was a bit of a saga where Nintendo negotiated with Sony at first for a disc drive based on the SNES. Nintendo didn't like the deal, they were giving away all disc licensing rights to Sony so went to a rival, Philips. Then all three companies came together for a spell to try to build the drive. Finally it had taken so long and Nintendo saw how the Mega CD flopped they cancelled the whole thing sometime in 1993. Sony had done A LOT of work on the project by this point and had a working drive which had great audio output. This SNES based Sony badged prototype actually exists, it was called........Playstation. Despite the project being binned, Kutaragi saw that he already had half a CD based console on his hands. All he needed to do was sort the rest of the hardware. He worked semi secretly to do so, and when it was nearly ready presented it to his bosses. The rest is history. A lot of successful products from big companies often come out of these internal projects that a few talented employees work on as passion projects.
I remember waiting for the PS1 to come out. The hype was real. Within a year suddenly the old guard , Sega and Nintendo felt outdated. The PS1 just had this high end kind of mature feel to it. Crazy how Sony just changed the whole games industry
It was a time of huge anxiety for Nintendo fanboys. We put all our hopes into the ‘Ultra 64’ and when it finally released it was hugely underwhelming and plagued by constant software droughts. By 1999 most of us had caved and got a PS1 as well. It was cheap too and the software as well.
@@BleakVision Had SEGA not failed with the Saturn and thought more about the Dreamcast, history might have played out differently. I would see a reality where SEGA and Sony competed in the hardware space and Nintendo went third party. Nintendo had some failures with the CDi deal and the virtual boy, if it weren't for the Game Boy, they likely wouldn't be competing in the 2000s. Sony's two back to back console dominance as impressive, then they ruined it with the 599 US Dollars meme.
@@millabasset1710Yes, Sony failed with the PS3 for the same thing that had them winning against Sega and their Saturn which was price. Good thing PS3 had much room for error with Sony's previous success.
@@NYCHeavyHitz212 PS3 Slim price cuts saved the entire trajectory of the PS3, being an early PS3 owner sure was a nightmare. I stand by Nintendo being saved by their handheld market, the GameBoy was more important the NES, I will die on that hill.
@@NYCHeavyHitz212- I remember that era! I still have my fully backwards compatible 60GB PS3 and I also own the 500GB PS3 Super Slim model. Some of the best games released on the PS3.
In all seriousness, the PS1 was the perfect console. Quite possibly the truest successor to the golden age. The ease in which it could be coaxed into giving experiences that far exceeded its specs gave it that edge to be the king. From what I remember leading up to the release of the PS and the Saturn, there was much heated discussions on what it was that made both ‘the best’. As awesome as the Saturn clearly was, the Herculean effort that was required to produce similar results of the PS made more than a few developers jump to Sony’s shiny new machine.
15:50 talking about "they could have added more RAM but they needed to cut costs..." yep, and is also one of the reasons the 3DGE chip lacked a hardware Z-Buffer, it was deemed too expensive, and the reason PS game had the "warping/swimming/melting textures effect" that was a signature giveaway you were watching a PS game :)
The PS1 definitely isn't more powerful than the Saturn but it did let devs access all of ir's power easily. The PS1 was like a well tuned Mitsubishi Evo and the Saturn was like a Ferrari tuned by a kid with a mallet.
The ps1 was the biggest gaming experience for me. Imagine that you came from the 16 bit era ie sega genesis or snes, and play with the ps1. The feeling was epic, it felt a like a gaming revolution gather than an evolution. The polygonal graphics were fresh during the time, the cd quality music was light years ahead of the 16bit era. It was truly memorable. Moving from ps1 to ps2 onwards doesn’t have the same feel. It was truly good old days
My first console was NES, then when PS1 came out, I was blown away. My dream and love for games and computers was born. I'm a software engineer now, mostly because of love for video games. 😅
Man thank the holy YT algorithm for bringing up your video. That Tekken 2 opening ost busted my nostalgia wide open. Great upload, gladly subbed. Will you be making a video on PS's 30th anniversary?
A few things not mentioned that helped the PS innovate and stand out from the competition: - LUT usage: unlike the competition the PS textures were all greyscale with the color applied thanks to the look up tables mentioned. This meant that, unlike other consoles that had more ram, the PS didn’t need to save onto memory 20 different versions of the same texture with different colors and instead needed only a single greyscale version of texture that the GPU would color in real time using the LUTs. This allowed the PS to seemingly have more texture variety than the competition using less memory. - CD Spooling: up to that point CD based systems would dump the graphics onto RAM memory and only continue reading a CD during gameplay for audio, reading graphics and gameplay data between levels. The PS was set up to allow for CD Spooling which meant the game data could continuously be read while the game was being played, allowing for seemingly zero load times when properly used. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, for example, made heavy used of that reason why you never had a load screen between areas outside of the initial one when starting the game. - MPEG hardware decoder: The PS had a dedicated hardware MPEG decoder meaning it could uncompress video in real time. This is what all FMV on the PS played smoother and at a much full screen/higher resolution and color depth compared to the Saturn and other systems, the latter of which had grainier, choppier video that usually played in a slightly smaller window. Other nuggets of note: - The early prototypes of what Sony would do with the PS2 and PS3 could be found on the structure and design of the PS1, from the used of parallel processing (still new for that type of systems at the time), to the use of LUTs, and even the implementation of dedicated video encoding/decoding hardware present to this day on Playstation consoles. - Compared to the Saturn the PS was at a disadvantage when it came to 2D games since these required all animation frames to be loaded onto the tiny memory of the system. Eventually developers of 2d games realized that the PS was designed as a powerful 3D system so they started doing effects and 2D cheats in 3D to avoid filling the memory with 2D graphics. They leveraged the system’s ability to manipulate 3D graphics to replace purely 2d elements with 3d ones that would not even remotely used the amount of memory space as 2d assets. - While lacking a lot of the more advanced features of Sega’s Model 2 arcade board, which was a $12,000 piece of hardware, the PS could still push the same amount of polygons per second (350,000) as that arcade board.
LUT for colors was used in all 2d systems. Why would Saturn and 3do not do this? Saturn has a dedicated palette, while PS1 only has shared cache. Yeah, Jaguar in fact cannot Lut colors. And N64 slows down when it does this. So N64 uses gray scale textures with colored vertices. See Jaguar: monochrome Gouraud is not some genius invention. Just stick to RGB and do colored Gouraud!
I think you could get MPEG dongles for a lot of consoles and evens the CDI? PS1 internally only has JPEG hardware. Jaguar and PC use the CPU for (low res low fps) MPEG.
The PlayStation had an MDEC (Motion Decoder); it was a specialized component in the original Sony PlayStation console, located within the main CPU of the PlayStation. It enabled playback of full-motion video (FMV) at 320x240 resolution and 30 frames per second.
@ yeah, so great the Jaguar has the MMULT instruction and a second register bank in bother DSP and GPU. But for MPEG you need to pay license fee and 299$ don’t cover this.
It really doesn't. It has a great RPG library true, on par with the likes of the SNES and MD, The Sega Saturn Library is also a great one too, most of it being in Japanese though. The PS3, switch and PC are some of the best. The greatest library for sure is the PC It's staggering how many great and influential RPG games it has and the most diverse with plenty of open source games and amazing community modding projects.
PS1 was my first console ever and still holds a big place in my heart. Phenomenal machine. That said, it's not more powerful than the Saturn, just easier to work with.
Great video! I was transitioning to pc gaming during this generation of consoles but the PS was a powerful piece of kit. The only pc hardware that could beat it was a fast pentium with a 3dfx card
Sony had been making parts for every other console well before they put their own together. Sony did the audio chips for the SNES, created by Playstation designer Ken Kutaragi himself even.
Found this channel recently and wanted you to know I appreciate these videos. There’s not enough content on UA-cam specifically diving down into the hardware architectures of older consoles (I only know of 2 others that really go in depth- Zygal Studios and RTL engineering and both seem to be inactive). Keep making these videos please, I love learning about this!
8:30 another feather in the PS's cap was having 15Bit colour with an Alpha channel, which allowed transparencies (i see you mention later at 13:00, but just wanted to link it to the info at 8:20 :) This was a boon to image quality, while the Saturn lacked Alpha, and the workarounds using "dithering/flickering/etc" were a definite drawback to Saturn's image quality. It took some very talented programmers to make transparencies work on Saturn, so only a handful of games had them, while on PS transparencies were in every game in some way or another with ease. It's funny how PS did "everything is 3D, even the sprites", while Saturn did "everything is sprites, even the 3D" :)
Two things that always amaze me when it comes to the PS1’s hardware are that it could run different elements of the screen at different framerates, something the majority of PCs weren’t able to do- for example, even though FF VIII’s battles ran ~20fps, the battle UI and inputs ran at 60fps, which became problematic for its PC port despite being otherwise superior. The other thing is that it was so dead-focused on drawing polygons that it couldn’t draw sprites without gluing them onto polygons(typically two triangles, of course). This stands in extreme contrast to the Saturn, which basically drew everything as sprites instead, manipulating them to create its polygonal effects. As an added bonus, the original production model of the PS1 was an audiophile’s dream, having the sort of support and fidelity that people were paying close to $1000 back in the day to get in a CD player.
Every console post PS1 did sprites like the PS1 unless they just used the CPU to emulate sprites. That's why you very rarely saw 2D games on the N64 since the N64 has very little texture memory and carts did not have a lot space to hold textures. PS1 actually could have done 2D as well as the Saturn if it had more VRAM, since sprites are essentially just textures to the PS1. The CD drive on the PS1 was too slow to constantly stream in textures so basically everything had to fit into VRAM. It's why Mortal Kombat games limited Shang Tsung morphing into 3 characters unless players allowed loading. Why Metal Slug would load mid stage and why Castlevania had those loading corridors.
@@sebastiankulche yes. Unless it is using the CPU or emulation. There are no tile based graphics processors on the market, everything is based on rasterizing polygons. The CPU obviously can do sprites, so modern games could be using the CPU but on older consoles like the PS1, PS2, N64, DC, GC and Xbox were using polygon with texture sprites because the CPUs weren't strong enough.
@@sebastiankulche I should caveat I just meant home consoles. The GBA obviously had a 2D tile PPU. The DS had both, it used a more advanced version of the PPU of the GBA but also 3D rendering hardware. I believe the 3DS still has the graphical subsystem of the DS, while tacking on a whole new 3D graphics system on top of it. It wasn't until the Switch that Nintendo completely abandoned 2D tile based engines. The PSP and Vita though were all 3D.
PS1 and even N64 have a 2d sprite blitting hardware instruction. You can check the timing: on N64 it runs twice the speed of 3d texture mapping. But this is strictly 2d. Even scaled columns in Doom need to use the texture mapper.
It can display more than 4000 sprites per second, sprites are faster to display than polygons. The GPU itself is entirely 2d. The maximum resolution is 720x576, but only for still images and it requires tricks. Games can do 720x512. The GPU can't draw quads, when told to draw a quad then it splits it into 2 triangles. The GPU can only draw 15bit, it can dither to reduce banding but there are only 32k colours when drawing polygons.
@@sulrich70 But when I looked into it, the Drive stuff was hidden behind a complicated SDK? I am not sure if this was just for comfort. This SDK did not support streaming while the game runs. I mean, it only supported streaming CD audio while the game runs? I don't know if anyone understands JaguarCD, but at least the addon itself only knows about audio-CDs and offers the raw bits (after the rudimentary error correction ) in the cartridge slot. I think the developer would need to pull these bits into main RAM using the CPU or the blitter. The great audio player on Jaguar then sends the PCM data to Jerry, while visualizing it on screen. It is at the discretion of the dev what they do with the streaming data. Of course, JagCD came out after PS1 ..
It's just amazing the 5th generation had three major consoles and each was a very different hardware from one another, quite the contrast to today's main consoles. As for your thoughts at the end, IRRÉEL shows what a developer who knows how to harness the Saturn could go beyond even the N64, with huge open 3D areas. Considering Unreal Tournament is a 1999 game, it's a brilliant effort, and he said he can vastly improve the frame rate in an already very playable proof of concept, check it out.
RISC = Reduced Instruction Set, so yes, higher clock don't always help. You have pretty fast instructions, but they are more basic than from CISC CPUs. A popular example would be (has nothing to do with RISC itself) the MOS 6510 of the Commodore 64. It lacks division in hardware completely. So it was not slow for divisions, they was absent. They have to be built in software (today often part of a compiler or framework), what caused more work and resulted in more instruction. So a RISC instruction is always at of fixed cycle amount (short) but often takes multiple instructions to get the same result. For simple tasks that's great, for more complex tasks it could be a downside. On a console, where for sure the compiler libraries are missing or limited, companies had to build their own libraries and code to run a specific action. And this has to be optimized and updated over months or years, to find the best solution. After all this "nonsense" I have to say, that the PS1 design is just a masterpiece, seen from the perspective, that it was "gen1". Would be interesting from where they go the deep knowledge of the used hardware and how to scale it well. It doesn't look like there were bottlenecks for programmers at the beginning, like it was on the PS3. Even earlier games ran very well and looked already solid.
Compiler is for a CPU. MIPS hardware was developed in a tight dialog with the compiler. Actually, the compiler author complained how difficult it was to compile to CISC. Non optimized C is basically PDP-11 machine language, but then C evolved. SH2 and JRISC also have compiler support. You mean : the runtime . Stdlib to allocate memory? Yeah, Apple chose ARM over RISCV because ARM has a stack (CISC).
There were bottlenecks on PS1. Sony created the DTL-H2700 performance analyser, that tells you which part of the console was not being saturated. I think gran turismo was the first game to be optimised using a performance analyser.
Sony got in the game to make history, not to be just another player. PS1 is a powerful hardware for that era, easy to work with, and cheap to manufacture. What else could you want? Sega was caught completely off guard, Saturn would be a great hardware for a world without PS1, but next to it, Saturn looks completely unbalanced and over-engineered.
Great video. Really surprised you didn’t talk more and make more comparisons to Namco System 11. Great videos, looking forward to more. Would love to see a video on Tom and Jerry from the Atari Jaguar and how great it handled Doom compared to everything else at the time, except for the music lol
Yeah, let’s rewrite Doom to let Video run on GPU and Audio on DSP. Problem is that the GPU only has 4kB cache (for code) and the BSP rendering engine is very big. And then you need to add 32 bytes code to work around bugs in the blitter.
Another interesting video, thanks! About this raw horsepower of both consoles, Doom port is good example since it was running without GPU acceleration and Saturn was struggling much more there, PSX also had huge slowdowns to single digit frames per second but overal it was much smoother than on Sega console.
Doom is a terrible example as it was only allowed to run through software and not use the gpu on saturn because carmack hated affine texturing. Just look at quake, duke nukem, or powerslave which were superior on saturn compared to ps1
@@drunkensailor112 Yes I know, that is why it is good example to compare raw CPU power, beacuse in that game consoles are running basically same software renderer. Duke, Powerslave and Quake where build up from the ground up on Lobotomy Soft engine for saturn so they are basically different games/different code.
Excited to watch this one! I had a Saturn 2 years before I got a Playstation, was excited to have some actual transparency in games but the first thing I noticed was how dithered everything look. On an s-video cable connected to a CRT you could still see the patterns and it reminded me of how the genesis used dithering to fake transparency, for a while I thought the Playstation was kinda faking its colors haha
@@joesaiditstrue yeah, I never really thought about it until the last few years. FF7, Vangaurd Bandits, and the aforementioned ones were wildly dithered. Silent Hill might be the most intense. It’s just part of the make up of the ps1. The Saturn does have dithered and true transparencies, but when you upscale the image it still really looks really really sharp.
I didn't play Castlevania Symphony of the nights on PlayStation 1. I played it on PlayStation 2 didn't even know it was made for PlayStation 1 back in the day still one of my favorite Castlevanias I go back to time to time🎉😂😊
It can do fixed point just fine. Why do you need it to float? I guess simulation games with a long viewing distance had concentric spheres around the camera to do the floating. Then first render the outer sphere, go inwards. As the camera moves, polygons transition between spheres. Gets a bit difficult on split-screen.
This was before consoles had active cooling, chassis designed for maximum airflow, and there wasn't a big push to have chips produced on the smallest process nodes. Sure, it was cutting edge tech for the day. But, I like to imagine if Sony was like "screw practicality" and made a bleeding edge fast PS1. I mean, keep all the smart design choices. But, just push for the highest clocks, pack in as much ram, and put out a PS1 on steroids. Not that Sony needed to. But, this is my imagination running wild. I'm envisioning a PS1 that doesn't have texture warping, targets 60fps at higher resolutions, and included dual-shock controllers on day one. The most premium PS1.
PCs and home computers also did not have active cooling. Or well, PCs got a fan in the power supply.. how else are you gonna integrate the PSU? Either use a wall brick exposed to a breeze or see your internal PSU die. The devkit and the arcade version have 4 MB. As a kid I wondered why the 386 had 16 MHz internally, but 8 MHz externally. Kinda like a 486DX2 . I think transistors got so fast that the heat became the sole limit. 3.3 V supply voltage was fixed. I dunno maybe doping level could be used to tune the crossover in CMOS? A big disadvantage of MIPS is that the cache runs at the full clock speed. The binary address generators get hot. At least for code. Only a few instructions access memory and then a lot of them access external memory. Atari with their Jaguar could have got 64 bit for scratchpad memory and load even four instructions in one cycle. Also load 64 Bit from the register file. So you could arrange your 32 bit values in pairs for any instruction which needs two operands. A lot of CPUs have input registers on their ALU, to buffer not only registers, but quick values, or memory reads. Only these need to run at the full clock speed.
I read somewhere a while back that the saturn was initially going to be a 2D based system, but when they heard atari was developing a new console they added more support for 3D (ok, it might've been on a atari website).. I personally think this is balls as the jaguar was a console clearly designed for 2D games that could begrudgingly do 3D. Still, either way, both were apparently a complete pain to program... Yay playstation!
There are all sorts of stories going round about the Saturns development, Ive seen articles that say Sega of America had approached the same Silicon Graphics team that Nintendo did for the N64 but earlier and Sega of Japan vetoed it. But I think its safe to assume the Saturn architecture was altered in some ways after seeing the PS1 as it’s massively complex compared to their simple (well as simple as you can get) but powerful approach with the MegaDrive/Genesis. But I think it was always 3D perhaps just not the main focus
Why is it missing? You either sort by z or use a z-buffer. N64 sorts by texture and thus needs a z-buffer. PS1 rather used a better texture cache and did save memory access for z values. I so wished that Jaguar could have been a successful application of a z-buffer because 68k is too slow for z-sort. So a fast blitter would make it really shine. Also Jaguar chips are too small for chips are so small that they can only cache one line of a texture. So sort by texture is also of no use. Jaguar could have been a super simple system where you throw the polygons at the GPU just in the order they come. Painters Algorithm ( z-sort) is essential for translucency. I would rather invest in higher polygon count to get finer that z sort, instead of a z-buffer. Screen-space effects are a hack. Cry engine?
We all throught that the ps1 was sony’s first entry into gaming but that’s not the case because back in 1984 sony had their but most popular variant of the msx system wich was a hybrid game console and computer system in 1. Sony also came up with many accessoires for it including many different controlers for it. Heck sony did even made some games for the msx. So the msx deserves it’s place in history as part of sony’s experience into video gamong😁
Google always comes up with the full fat manual.pdf, but in there it is mentioned that the SH2 has two instruction decoders . Each of which takes in one word of the 32 bit fetched from memory. Like ARM would do add and shift in every instruction, here the idea was to still do that occasionally when one instruction was ALU and the other shift? I would also say that MUL and DIV should run in parallel. Load store needs the ALU for the memory mode, but what about the zero register?
@@Ehal256 the mips 3000 has 115000 transistors vs 500000 transistors sh 2 no chance here the sh2 is a more modern cpu but the saturn had to do more in software.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt I'd have to check the manuals, but it probably has dual decoders because it fetches 32-bits per cycle and instructions are all 16-bits. I am pretty sure it'll never have two instructions in the alu or retired at once (unless you're counting the divider, which runs on a separate clock)
just think if nintendo didnt kill the snes cd just how much different this would of been since it would of been like the sega cd add on was to the genesis... kinda cute that there are small parts there that show off the snes still but so much more that nintendo didnt have even with there n64, that one mistake with nintendo going with phillips instead all those years later is still costing them dearly
Always wondered: who designed/co-designed the GTE? I know the CPU was a MIPS R3000 so I'm assuming maybe Sony had some assistance from... SGI? since they owned MIPS... but then SGI were contracted with Nintendo, of course. All I can find is that it's a Sony part but... Sony just seemed to be able to jump into a market where they didn't really have any experience particularly when it came to chip design for fast 3D graphics, it's remarkable particularly at the time when a lot of this stuff was dominated by a small handful of industry leaders.
MIPS always allowed coprocessors from third parties. The GTE only multiplies vectors with a matrix. The number of cycles show you that microcode is used. Even Atari got ahold of a Multiplier Macro for the Jaguar. The Jaguar spits out the full 32 bits, while Sony selected 16 in the middle of it. That is really not difficult for a big tech company.
I recommend watching Historic Nerd’s History of PlayStation video, he mentions in it that Sony had a product in the 80s designed for broadcast television (capable of hardware acceleration for 3D rendering and some parts of the PlayStation where based on that). Keep in mind this was a professional, commercial device that retailed for like 30k designed for TV stations to be able to do special VFX during transitions and stuff. Also check out Rodrigo Copetti’s written articles about retro consoles and their architecture.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt The GTE seems custom built for the PS1 architecture, for example, it had instructions that assisted in polygon splitting which was needed to work around the lack of perspective correct texturing in the PS1 GPU.
@ now I need to check how a complete vertex fits into 32bit. If only two components go in, MIPS RISC is already quite fast at taking the average and packing bits. I would have guessed that the bookkeeping in the mesh is more expensive. Also you might want to pull in a displacement map?
If the Saturn had more raw horse power then I'm sure indie devs could use that and make something truly amazing. When the PS1 came out, I remember seeing it at Toys R Us and being blown away by the FMV from Tekken. I then told my friend in 3rd grade about this cool new console. I will never forget it, he said "Playstation?, that sounds like a little kids toy". And then he laughed it off. None of use knew the impact of the console as Sony just entered the video game market.
Aww man, I miss Toys R Us in the 90s, they would have PS1, N64, Saturn units and you could just go in there and play the systems for hours. There was one in my hometown that was a Best Buy and Toys R Us side by side and used to love going there as a kid and playing Mario 64, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider. Good times. Even though it means I’m older now, I’m grateful to have been a kid in the 90s.
I think Sony really learned from the past mistakes from SEGA Saturn, 3DO, Jaguar in the sense that while those consoles had impressive hardware, developers had no idea how exactly to code for it and use them to their maximum potential so a lot of games ended up only using a fraction of the power they were capable of. PlayStation having all of those development tools and Sony taking a hands-on approach to assisting developers making games on the system really showed.
PS1 came out the same time as the Saturn so there is no way Sony learned from Sega Saturn's hardware design. In actuality the Saturn hardware design became a mess because of the PS1. Saturn added the second SH-2 and the SCU after hearing rumors of the PS1 specs from other 3rd parties. Saturn was originally supposed to be a 2D powerhouse with limited 3D capabilities. The 3DO was actually easy to develop for and 3rd parties liked it. Almost every major 3rd party publisher had a game on it. Its main issue was the high cost. $699 back in 1993 was insane. Jaguar was weird and it seems the hardware was never finished because it wasn't tested for bugs. The memory controller had a flaw that caused many bottlenecks. Atari may have rushed the Jaguar into production to beat the competition to market. N64 lost due to Nintendo's arrogance. Nintendo expected Japanese 3rd parties to stay with them. But Nintendo's licensing fees and the high expense of manufacturing carts kept 3rd parties away. Nintendo was charging publishers $15 per game compared to PS1 with $5. Carts cost upwards to $30 to manufacture while CDs were less than a $1.
@@BurritoKingdom I remember the launches well because I had already finished college at the time so I wasn't a kid when all of these were released and I bought every one(including the SegaCD and 32x before it). They all had the exact same problem. Initially, dozens of 3rd party developers signed on to make games for these new hardwares and one by one they dropped off as soon as they saw the userbase was still tiny because the games were not there to sell the hardware. Then the only ones that were able to really do the hardware justice were the first party titles because they were the most familiar with the machines. Price certainly played a factor(especially with the 3DO and Jaguar) but putting out a piece of kit and telling the devs, "good luck" is a lesson that needed to be learned in order to get to what we have today. Saturns' duplicated CPU was a last minute panic move because they didn't design the hardware for 3d and saw what Sony was cooking up and about to drop to the world.
@rodneyabrett Jaguar was actually cheap. It launched at $250. It was the opposite of the 3do. It was hard to develop for and there was no 3rd party support at all. That's why even though the Jag and 3do had the same lifespan, the Jag only had 73 games while the 3do had 251 games.
@ third party for Jaguar were the kids who learned coding on ST in their bedroom. So it is very clear that Jaguar would foremost had to be simple to code for for amateurs. For example consider that Doom only has 160x180px on Jaguar, a 24 bpp color buffer would fit. 24bpp is easy to understand, looks great, compatible with povray, you could brag about it. Great for colored Gouraud. ST has no sprites and can’t scroll smoothly (in x, but ) So maybe don’t include this caps in the Jaguar?
@@tdome3000 its a simplified comparison to explain to people how a CPU with a slower clock could actually do more, I simplify it so the viewer doesn’t have to know about machine code. And I use a very low number to keep the maths basic, at no point do I say either only does 10-15 instructions per cycle its only an example
3:10 cheating my ass, Sega fanboys with their excuses as always. it's not Sony's fault that Sega's toy didn't have a hardware solution for 3D math. Saturn did all the 3D transformation and lighting calculations on its CPU (in software, like PCs of the 90's before GeForce)
Sega took chips which were already sitting in storage before the design was finished. Kinda like it used off the shelf 68k prior to this. While NEC and Nintendo SNES licensed a CPU core and integrated it with acceleration circuits. Commodore and Atari designed their own ASICs while genesis uses of the shelf TMS like MSX.
Actually they use a very similar system of two layers who are combined only on VIDEODMA. It is like the color conversion on Jaguar. It is a bit of wasted compute if you don’t run on the highest resolution and fps.
The front end of the saturn was actually about twice as powerful as the playstation: 144? MIPS vs 90 MIPS. yet the playstation obviously had much more developed rendering hardware, performing more rendering features per second--RFS.
Also, both processors were single scalar, meaning that they issued one instruction per cycle at most. However, the SuperH could perform a multiply-add and also had several addressing modes allowing a pair of adds before a load-store. Both features were really handy for performing geometry transforms on large matrices. And that's what the second processor was frequently used for. Later on, sega realized that they could use the powerful VLIW DSP to transform (move) 500,000 flat shaded polygons per second far in excess of the PlayStation.
@millabasset1710 Yes indeed, but what the ps1 had is a game for everyone, not like now, same with the xbox and you just play the game around in two minutes on the ps1 not like now when you have to download the god dam game first around 2_4 hours before you play it.
@@gunshipzeroone3546 I started collecting again for PS1, I miss how simple games used to be. I stopped caring with the PS4, the PS3 felt like the end of classic playstation.
@millabasset1710 so true not sure if your a fan but I am a big fan of Ace combat yes Ace combat 8 is out soon but even xbox doesn't hardly have games like this anymore even a helicopter game even command and conquer was out on ps1 again not so much now. G police was a good game too.
The PS1 didn't have a hardware Z buffer. So a table had to be coded in game by the developers, which led to the jittering 3D polygons. This also affected the texture mapping projections, as the PS1 hardware only used simple maths to place them on polygons.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Go for it. Since it's not the PS1, it's completely irrelevant. They're different hardware and process the graphics differently. The reason why the lack of float support matters on the PS1 is because the GTE can only output (x,y) pixel values. There's no ability to have subpixel manipulation. Now, if you did it for the PS1, that would be slightly more impressive.
@ the GTE output is just fine for quasi 2d games like Tekken or Crash. The integer input on that other chip is the problem. Not even 32 bit integers. Not even 16 bit , 9.7 fixed point. Cost cutting gone too far. It is not about maths.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt The jitter issue was amplified by the GPU, which only took integer coordinates for polygons, so it got hit with a huge amount of rounding down from the GTE's internally higher, but also limited, precision. The OP also mentions the Z-order table, which was another Playstation technique which introduced another type of artefact, Z-fighting. There is also polygon sub-division, which introduced more jitter. Jitter came from a lot of different sources.
Saturn is not more powerful than the PSX, let's say they are almost on par. In certain things, Saturn has advantages: 2 CPUs, WRAM expansion, better CDROM drive, VDP2 for 2D backgrounds, VDP1 3D quads do not suffer from texture distortions and the console has more VRAM (1.5 MBytes separated between VDP1, VDP2 and framebuffers), games that use VDP1 together with VDP2 will have advantages that the PSX cannot replicate 100% equally. The PSX also has its advantages: Fast 3D calculations using the GTE (geometry transformation engine, inside the CPU), MDEC that decompresses full-screen videos at 30fps in 15bpp colors, GPU with better Gouraud Shading (using 24bpp color multiplication and optional Auto Dithering when converting to 15bpp), textures with UVmap, semi-transparency effects that work in all modes, textures can use all formats on the same screen (4-bit palette colors, 8-bit palette colors or direct 15-bit RGB colors), 1 MByte of unified VRAM: easy to do frame-buffer effects, several resolution modes that the Saturn does not have, such as 256x240 / 384x240 / 512x240, GPU has a higher fillrate than the VDP1, reaching 66Mpixels, GPU draws lines, triangles, quadrangles and 2D sprites with Flat or Gouraud Shading. In terms of sound, it has the advantage of 24 channels with ADPCM decompression, XA audio streaming (adpcm) directly from the CDrom (without using CPU)
@SNESpower Did you miss what I said? I said the PSX is not more powerful than the Saturn. However, I did not say the Saturn was more powerful than the PSX.
@@Sinn0100 Absolutely! The N64 is technically very powerful, it was very difficult to program and extract performance, but when the devs managed it, the graphical superiority over the Saturn/PSX was noticeable, only in the audio it was lacking a lot because of the use of cartridges with smaller ROM. Today there are homebrewers who are making incredible demos for it, pulling effects and a number of polygons that were not possible at the time.
It's Ken Kutaragi. This was his baby. He could have gotten fired for it. He worked on it almost in secret after Nintendo killed the SNES disc add on until his bosses asked him what he was up to. He was called into the President of Sony at the time Norio Ohga and made his pitch. Luckily Ohga loved the work and decided it had to be run under a separate arm: SCE. Kutaragi worked on the GTE chip to cut it down to only the bare basics of what was required to accelerate 3D polygons, make it as cost effective and efficient as possible. The end result was an elegant, easy to use system with a lot of flexibility and geometry power for developers to play with. Cheap to manufacture disc based games, lots of storage, good CD quality sound, 32 bit RISC CPU. When first demonstrated to developers, they clambered over each other to get hold of the devkits and start. That was why it was such a success, it had exactly what was wanted by lots of developers and publishers so they all backed it hard. Kutaragi then went straight back to the hardware to improve it, kept cost cutting it again and again. Every year there were new revisions. This aggressiveness put Sega's complex and expensive Saturn out of the game and heavy pressure on Nintendo to keep matching the price cuts Sony could afford to do on Playstation. The price heard around the world: $299.
That's interesting. I thought Sony pulled out of making the SNES CD add-on in order to do their own thing (at least, that was the rumour at the time)?
@@lucian2701 It was a bit of a saga where Nintendo negotiated with Sony at first for a disc drive based on the SNES. Nintendo didn't like the deal, they were giving away all disc licensing rights to Sony so went to a rival, Philips. Then all three companies came together for a spell to try to build the drive. Finally it had taken so long and Nintendo saw how the Mega CD flopped they cancelled the whole thing sometime in 1993. Sony had done A LOT of work on the project by this point and had a working drive which had great audio output. This SNES based Sony badged prototype actually exists, it was called........Playstation. Despite the project being binned, Kutaragi saw that he already had half a CD based console on his hands. All he needed to do was sort the rest of the hardware. He worked semi secretly to do so, and when it was nearly ready presented it to his bosses. The rest is history. A lot of successful products from big companies often come out of these internal projects that a few talented employees work on as passion projects.
how things have changed since then..
and did it all on 10 watts. amazing machine
I remember waiting for the PS1 to come out. The hype was real. Within a year suddenly the old guard , Sega and Nintendo felt outdated. The PS1 just had this high end kind of mature feel to it. Crazy how Sony just changed the whole games industry
It was a time of huge anxiety for Nintendo fanboys. We put all our hopes into the ‘Ultra 64’ and when it finally released it was hugely underwhelming and plagued by constant software droughts. By 1999 most of us had caved and got a PS1 as well. It was cheap too and the software as well.
@@BleakVision Had SEGA not failed with the Saturn and thought more about the Dreamcast, history might have played out differently. I would see a reality where SEGA and Sony competed in the hardware space and Nintendo went third party. Nintendo had some failures with the CDi deal and the virtual boy, if it weren't for the Game Boy, they likely wouldn't be competing in the 2000s.
Sony's two back to back console dominance as impressive, then they ruined it with the 599 US Dollars meme.
@@millabasset1710Yes, Sony failed with the PS3 for the same thing that had them winning against Sega and their Saturn which was price. Good thing PS3 had much room for error with Sony's previous success.
@@NYCHeavyHitz212 PS3 Slim price cuts saved the entire trajectory of the PS3, being an early PS3 owner sure was a nightmare. I stand by Nintendo being saved by their handheld market, the GameBoy was more important the NES, I will die on that hill.
@@NYCHeavyHitz212- I remember that era! I still have my fully backwards compatible 60GB PS3 and I also own the 500GB PS3 Super Slim model.
Some of the best games released on the PS3.
In all seriousness, the PS1 was the perfect console. Quite possibly the truest successor to the golden age. The ease in which it could be coaxed into giving experiences that far exceeded its specs gave it that edge to be the king.
From what I remember leading up to the release of the PS and the Saturn, there was much heated discussions on what it was that made both ‘the best’. As awesome as the Saturn clearly was, the Herculean effort that was required to produce similar results of the PS made more than a few developers jump to Sony’s shiny new machine.
15:50 talking about "they could have added more RAM but they needed to cut costs..." yep, and is also one of the reasons the 3DGE chip lacked a hardware Z-Buffer, it was deemed too expensive, and the reason PS game had the "warping/swimming/melting textures effect" that was a signature giveaway you were watching a PS game :)
The PS1 definitely isn't more powerful than the Saturn but it did let devs access all of ir's power easily. The PS1 was like a well tuned Mitsubishi Evo and the Saturn was like a Ferrari tuned by a kid with a mallet.
The ps1 was the biggest gaming experience for me. Imagine that you came from the 16 bit era ie sega genesis or snes, and play with the ps1. The feeling was epic, it felt a like a gaming revolution gather than an evolution. The polygonal graphics were fresh during the time, the cd quality music was light years ahead of the 16bit era. It was truly memorable. Moving from ps1 to ps2 onwards doesn’t have the same feel. It was truly good old days
My first console was NES, then when PS1 came out, I was blown away. My dream and love for games and computers was born. I'm a software engineer now, mostly because of love for video games. 😅
Man thank the holy YT algorithm for bringing up your video.
That Tekken 2 opening ost busted my nostalgia wide open.
Great upload, gladly subbed.
Will you be making a video on PS's 30th anniversary?
A few things not mentioned that helped the PS innovate and stand out from the competition:
- LUT usage: unlike the competition the PS textures were all greyscale with the color applied thanks to the look up tables mentioned. This meant that, unlike other consoles that had more ram, the PS didn’t need to save onto memory 20 different versions of the same texture with different colors and instead needed only a single greyscale version of texture that the GPU would color in real time using the LUTs. This allowed the PS to seemingly have more texture variety than the competition using less memory.
- CD Spooling: up to that point CD based systems would dump the graphics onto RAM memory and only continue reading a CD during gameplay for audio, reading graphics and gameplay data between levels. The PS was set up to allow for CD Spooling which meant the game data could continuously be read while the game was being played, allowing for seemingly zero load times when properly used. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, for example, made heavy used of that reason why you never had a load screen between areas outside of the initial one when starting the game.
- MPEG hardware decoder: The PS had a dedicated hardware MPEG decoder meaning it could uncompress video in real time. This is what all FMV on the PS played smoother and at a much full screen/higher resolution and color depth compared to the Saturn and other systems, the latter of which had grainier, choppier video that usually played in a slightly smaller window.
Other nuggets of note:
- The early prototypes of what Sony would do with the PS2 and PS3 could be found on the structure and design of the PS1, from the used of parallel processing (still new for that type of systems at the time), to the use of LUTs, and even the implementation of dedicated video encoding/decoding hardware present to this day on Playstation consoles.
- Compared to the Saturn the PS was at a disadvantage when it came to 2D games since these required all animation frames to be loaded onto the tiny memory of the system. Eventually developers of 2d games realized that the PS was designed as a powerful 3D system so they started doing effects and 2D cheats in 3D to avoid filling the memory with 2D graphics. They leveraged the system’s ability to manipulate 3D graphics to replace purely 2d elements with 3d ones that would not even remotely used the amount of memory space as 2d assets.
- While lacking a lot of the more advanced features of Sega’s Model 2 arcade board, which was a $12,000 piece of hardware, the PS could still push the same amount of polygons per second (350,000) as that arcade board.
LUT for colors was used in all 2d systems. Why would Saturn and 3do not do this? Saturn has a dedicated palette, while PS1 only has shared cache. Yeah, Jaguar in fact cannot Lut colors. And N64 slows down when it does this. So N64 uses gray scale textures with colored vertices. See Jaguar: monochrome Gouraud is not some genius invention. Just stick to RGB and do colored Gouraud!
I think you could get MPEG dongles for a lot of consoles and evens the CDI? PS1 internally only has JPEG hardware. Jaguar and PC use the CPU for (low res low fps) MPEG.
The PlayStation had an MDEC (Motion Decoder); it was a specialized component in the original Sony PlayStation console, located within the main CPU of the PlayStation. It enabled playback of full-motion video (FMV) at 320x240 resolution and 30 frames per second.
@ yeah, so great the Jaguar has the MMULT instruction and a second register bank in bother DSP and GPU. But for MPEG you need to pay license fee and 299$ don’t cover this.
N64 and saturn use LUT
Dude I love your channel. The Playstation is my favorite console ever. Learning how these old consoles worked is like magic.
ps1 has one of the, if not the best RPG libraries of all time
It really doesn't. It has a great RPG library true, on par with the likes of the SNES and MD, The Sega Saturn Library is also a great one too, most of it being in Japanese though. The PS3, switch and PC are some of the best. The greatest library for sure is the PC It's staggering how many great and influential RPG games it has and the most diverse with plenty of open source games and amazing community modding projects.
The PSP has a good library of RPGs too.
Add the racing game genre to that!
Vou ser obrigado a concordar com um cirista.kkk. Brincadeira!Ciro tem razão em muitas coisas.
@@gipgap4 Just Gran Turismo would do
tekken 2 intro fmv music instantly choked me up. Still my favorite intro fmv ever.
PS1 was my first console ever and still holds a big place in my heart. Phenomenal machine. That said, it's not more powerful than the Saturn, just easier to work with.
Great video! I was transitioning to pc gaming during this generation of consoles but the PS was a powerful piece of kit. The only pc hardware that could beat it was a fast pentium with a 3dfx card
Sony had been making parts for every other console well before they put their own together.
Sony did the audio chips for the SNES, created by Playstation designer Ken Kutaragi himself even.
Found this channel recently and wanted you to know I appreciate these videos. There’s not enough content on UA-cam specifically diving down into the hardware architectures of older consoles (I only know of 2 others that really go in depth- Zygal Studios and RTL engineering and both seem to be inactive). Keep making these videos please, I love learning about this!
8:30 another feather in the PS's cap was having 15Bit colour with an Alpha channel, which allowed transparencies (i see you mention later at 13:00, but just wanted to link it to the info at 8:20 :)
This was a boon to image quality, while the Saturn lacked Alpha, and the workarounds using "dithering/flickering/etc" were a definite drawback to Saturn's image quality. It took some very talented programmers to make transparencies work on Saturn, so only a handful of games had them, while on PS transparencies were in every game in some way or another with ease.
It's funny how PS did "everything is 3D, even the sprites", while Saturn did "everything is sprites, even the 3D" :)
Just subscribed , loving this content!!
Two things that always amaze me when it comes to the PS1’s hardware are that it could run different elements of the screen at different framerates, something the majority of PCs weren’t able to do- for example, even though FF VIII’s battles ran ~20fps, the battle UI and inputs ran at 60fps, which became problematic for its PC port despite being otherwise superior.
The other thing is that it was so dead-focused on drawing polygons that it couldn’t draw sprites without gluing them onto polygons(typically two triangles, of course). This stands in extreme contrast to the Saturn, which basically drew everything as sprites instead, manipulating them to create its polygonal effects.
As an added bonus, the original production model of the PS1 was an audiophile’s dream, having the sort of support and fidelity that people were paying close to $1000 back in the day to get in a CD player.
Every console post PS1 did sprites like the PS1 unless they just used the CPU to emulate sprites. That's why you very rarely saw 2D games on the N64 since the N64 has very little texture memory and carts did not have a lot space to hold textures.
PS1 actually could have done 2D as well as the Saturn if it had more VRAM, since sprites are essentially just textures to the PS1. The CD drive on the PS1 was too slow to constantly stream in textures so basically everything had to fit into VRAM. It's why Mortal Kombat games limited Shang Tsung morphing into 3 characters unless players allowed loading. Why Metal Slug would load mid stage and why Castlevania had those loading corridors.
@@BurritoKingdom Are you sure? Even PS4 uses polygons for every 2d game?
@@sebastiankulche yes. Unless it is using the CPU or emulation. There are no tile based graphics processors on the market, everything is based on rasterizing polygons.
The CPU obviously can do sprites, so modern games could be using the CPU but on older consoles like the PS1, PS2, N64, DC, GC and Xbox were using polygon with texture sprites because the CPUs weren't strong enough.
@@sebastiankulche I should caveat I just meant home consoles. The GBA obviously had a 2D tile PPU. The DS had both, it used a more advanced version of the PPU of the GBA but also 3D rendering hardware. I believe the 3DS still has the graphical subsystem of the DS, while tacking on a whole new 3D graphics system on top of it. It wasn't until the Switch that Nintendo completely abandoned 2D tile based engines. The PSP and Vita though were all 3D.
PS1 and even N64 have a 2d sprite blitting hardware instruction. You can check the timing: on N64 it runs twice the speed of 3d texture mapping.
But this is strictly 2d. Even scaled columns in Doom need to use the texture mapper.
It can display more than 4000 sprites per second, sprites are faster to display than polygons. The GPU itself is entirely 2d. The maximum resolution is 720x576, but only for still images and it requires tricks. Games can do 720x512. The GPU can't draw quads, when told to draw a quad then it splits it into 2 triangles. The GPU can only draw 15bit, it can dither to reduce banding but there are only 32k colours when drawing polygons.
There are only so much lines a TV can display. VGA was already standard on PC and Mac. I could not stand consoles after that .
I sense it was also tightly integrated with cd rom architecture.
Fantastic system, stellar first effort by sony entering the market.
Mechanical integration in the case? Shared power supply? Main CPU also controls the head? Data is directly DMAed to main RAM like a floppy on Amiga?
@ to be honest I am not sure but streaming data in real time was a key feature of it. The drive struck me as being an integral part of the system
@@sulrich70 But when I looked into it, the Drive stuff was hidden behind a complicated SDK? I am not sure if this was just for comfort. This SDK did not support streaming while the game runs. I mean, it only supported streaming CD audio while the game runs? I don't know if anyone understands JaguarCD, but at least the addon itself only knows about audio-CDs and offers the raw bits (after the rudimentary error correction ) in the cartridge slot. I think the developer would need to pull these bits into main RAM using the CPU or the blitter. The great audio player on Jaguar then sends the PCM data to Jerry, while visualizing it on screen. It is at the discretion of the dev what they do with the streaming data. Of course, JagCD came out after PS1 ..
@ ok good point, stand corrected. The machine was well designed that’s for sure.
the tekken 2 intro music = nostalgia 😍😍
It's just amazing the 5th generation had three major consoles and each was a very different hardware from one another, quite the contrast to today's main consoles.
As for your thoughts at the end, IRRÉEL shows what a developer who knows how to harness the Saturn could go beyond even the N64, with huge open 3D areas. Considering Unreal Tournament is a 1999 game, it's a brilliant effort, and he said he can vastly improve the frame rate in an already very playable proof of concept, check it out.
3dfx and N64 already look the same to me. Just twice the resolution.
nice video, ps2, ps3 next please, longer the better
RISC = Reduced Instruction Set, so yes, higher clock don't always help. You have pretty fast instructions, but they are more basic than from CISC CPUs. A popular example would be (has nothing to do with RISC itself) the MOS 6510 of the Commodore 64. It lacks division in hardware completely. So it was not slow for divisions, they was absent. They have to be built in software (today often part of a compiler or framework), what caused more work and resulted in more instruction.
So a RISC instruction is always at of fixed cycle amount (short) but often takes multiple instructions to get the same result. For simple tasks that's great, for more complex tasks it could be a downside. On a console, where for sure the compiler libraries are missing or limited, companies had to build their own libraries and code to run a specific action. And this has to be optimized and updated over months or years, to find the best solution.
After all this "nonsense" I have to say, that the PS1 design is just a masterpiece, seen from the perspective, that it was "gen1". Would be interesting from where they go the deep knowledge of the used hardware and how to scale it well. It doesn't look like there were bottlenecks for programmers at the beginning, like it was on the PS3. Even earlier games ran very well and looked already solid.
Compiler is for a CPU. MIPS hardware was developed in a tight dialog with the compiler. Actually, the compiler author complained how difficult it was to compile to CISC. Non optimized C is basically PDP-11 machine language, but then C evolved.
SH2 and JRISC also have compiler support.
You mean : the runtime . Stdlib to allocate memory?
Yeah, Apple chose ARM over RISCV because ARM has a stack (CISC).
There were bottlenecks on PS1. Sony created the DTL-H2700 performance analyser, that tells you which part of the console was not being saturated. I think gran turismo was the first game to be optimised using a performance analyser.
Top video love it very interesting the whole series so far
Sony got in the game to make history, not to be just another player. PS1 is a powerful hardware for that era, easy to work with, and cheap to manufacture. What else could you want?
Sega was caught completely off guard, Saturn would be a great hardware for a world without PS1, but next to it, Saturn looks completely unbalanced and over-engineered.
Great video. Really surprised you didn’t talk more and make more comparisons to Namco System 11. Great videos, looking forward to more. Would love to see a video on Tom and Jerry from the Atari Jaguar and how great it handled Doom compared to everything else at the time, except for the music lol
Yeah, let’s rewrite Doom to let Video run on GPU and Audio on DSP. Problem is that the GPU only has 4kB cache (for code) and the BSP rendering engine is very big. And then you need to add 32 bytes code to work around bugs in the blitter.
Great insight video on the Hardware of the PS1!
Hope to see new videos appear on my sub feed soon!
Another interesting video, thanks! About this raw horsepower of both consoles, Doom port is good example since it was running without GPU acceleration and Saturn was struggling much more there, PSX also had huge slowdowns to single digit frames per second but overal it was much smoother than on Sega console.
Doom is a terrible example as it was only allowed to run through software and not use the gpu on saturn because carmack hated affine texturing. Just look at quake, duke nukem, or powerslave which were superior on saturn compared to ps1
@@drunkensailor112 Yes I know, that is why it is good example to compare raw CPU power, beacuse in that game consoles are running basically same software renderer. Duke, Powerslave and Quake where build up from the ground up on Lobotomy Soft engine for saturn so they are basically different games/different code.
@@juu226 but for cpu you need to at least use both saturn cpu's, while with doom they used one.
@@drunkensailor112 That is good argument.
@@drunkensailor112you can't run both Saturn CPUs in parallel, they're on the same bus
Excited to watch this one! I had a Saturn 2 years before I got a Playstation, was excited to have some actual transparency in games but the first thing I noticed was how dithered everything look. On an s-video cable connected to a CRT you could still see the patterns and it reminded me of how the genesis used dithering to fake transparency, for a while I thought the Playstation was kinda faking its colors haha
metal gear solid and Silent Hill 1 went hard with the dithering
@@joesaiditstrue yeah, I never really thought about it until the last few years. FF7, Vangaurd Bandits, and the aforementioned ones were wildly dithered. Silent Hill might be the most intense. It’s just part of the make up of the ps1. The Saturn does have dithered and true transparencies, but when you upscale the image it still really looks really really sharp.
Yess! Been looking forward to this one!! Sitting down with my tea to watch now 😁😁
I didn't play Castlevania Symphony of the nights on PlayStation 1. I played it on PlayStation 2 didn't even know it was made for PlayStation 1 back in the day still one of my favorite Castlevanias I go back to time to time🎉😂😊
Don’t forget the performance analyser which was used for Gran Turismo and other games.
that aesthetic has such a vibe. it changed the world.
I've seen the instruction set of PSX and its hardware layout and the only thing i took out clear is that it severely lacked a floating point unit.
It can do fixed point just fine. Why do you need it to float? I guess simulation games with a long viewing distance had concentric spheres around the camera to do the floating. Then first render the outer sphere, go inwards. As the camera moves, polygons transition between spheres.
Gets a bit difficult on split-screen.
This was before consoles had active cooling, chassis designed for maximum airflow, and there wasn't a big push to have chips produced on the smallest process nodes.
Sure, it was cutting edge tech for the day. But, I like to imagine if Sony was like "screw practicality" and made a bleeding edge fast PS1. I mean, keep all the smart design
choices. But, just push for the highest clocks, pack in as much ram, and put out a PS1 on steroids. Not that Sony needed to. But, this is my imagination running wild.
I'm envisioning a PS1 that doesn't have texture warping, targets 60fps at higher resolutions, and included dual-shock controllers on day one. The most premium PS1.
PCs and home computers also did not have active cooling. Or well, PCs got a fan in the power supply.. how else are you gonna integrate the PSU? Either use a wall brick exposed to a breeze or see your internal PSU die.
The devkit and the arcade version have 4 MB.
As a kid I wondered why the 386 had 16 MHz internally, but 8 MHz externally. Kinda like a 486DX2 . I think transistors got so fast that the heat became the sole limit. 3.3 V supply voltage was fixed. I dunno maybe doping level could be used to tune the crossover in CMOS? A big disadvantage of MIPS is that the cache runs at the full clock speed. The binary address generators get hot. At least for code. Only a few instructions access memory and then a lot of them access external memory. Atari with their Jaguar could have got 64 bit for scratchpad memory and load even four instructions in one cycle. Also load 64 Bit from the register file. So you could arrange your 32 bit values in pairs for any instruction which needs two operands. A lot of CPUs have input registers on their ALU, to buffer not only registers, but quick values, or memory reads. Only these need to run at the full clock speed.
I've got both consoles, I also emulate both consoles.
I think the Saturn has much crisper graphics.
I read somewhere a while back that the saturn was initially going to be a 2D based system, but when they heard atari was developing a new console they added more support for 3D (ok, it might've been on a atari website).. I personally think this is balls as the jaguar was a console clearly designed for 2D games that could begrudgingly do 3D. Still, either way, both were apparently a complete pain to program... Yay playstation!
There are all sorts of stories going round about the Saturns development, Ive seen articles that say Sega of America had approached the same Silicon Graphics team that Nintendo did for the N64 but earlier and Sega of Japan vetoed it. But I think its safe to assume the Saturn architecture was altered in some ways after seeing the PS1 as it’s massively complex compared to their simple (well as simple as you can get) but powerful approach with the MegaDrive/Genesis. But I think it was always 3D perhaps just not the main focus
And what about missing z-buffer?
Why is it missing? You either sort by z or use a z-buffer. N64 sorts by texture and thus needs a z-buffer. PS1 rather used a better texture cache and did save memory access for z values.
I so wished that Jaguar could have been a successful application of a z-buffer because 68k is too slow for z-sort. So a fast blitter would make it really shine. Also Jaguar chips are too small for chips are so small that they can only cache one line of a texture. So sort by texture is also of no use. Jaguar could have been a super simple system where you throw the polygons at the GPU just in the order they come.
Painters Algorithm ( z-sort) is essential for translucency. I would rather invest in higher polygon count to get finer that z sort, instead of a z-buffer. Screen-space effects are a hack. Cry engine?
Great channel and videos 😃 sub!
We all throught that the ps1 was sony’s first entry into gaming but that’s not the case because back in 1984 sony had their but most popular variant of the msx system wich was a hybrid game console and computer system in 1.
Sony also came up with many accessoires for it including many different controlers for it.
Heck sony did even made some games for the msx.
So the msx deserves it’s place in history as part of sony’s experience into video gamong😁
Engaged for the Al Gore rhythm.
The system that dragged me away from the PC Master Race 😉
wonderful vid
What’s that music at the start please I know it but can not put my finger on it
Saturn's sh-2s can't perform more then one instruction per clock..
wel for sure way more than a mips 3000 cpu from 88.
@@athos5359pretty sure they're about the same performance per clock cycle, main difference is that the saturn has two.
Google always comes up with the full fat manual.pdf, but in there it is mentioned that the SH2 has two instruction decoders . Each of which takes in one word of the 32 bit fetched from memory.
Like ARM would do add and shift in every instruction, here the idea was to still do that occasionally when one instruction was ALU and the other shift? I would also say that MUL and DIV should run in parallel. Load store needs the ALU for the memory mode, but what about the zero register?
@@Ehal256 the mips 3000 has 115000 transistors vs 500000 transistors sh 2 no chance here the sh2 is a more modern cpu but the saturn had to do more in software.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt I'd have to check the manuals, but it probably has dual decoders because it fetches 32-bits per cycle and instructions are all 16-bits. I am pretty sure it'll never have two instructions in the alu or retired at once (unless you're counting the divider, which runs on a separate clock)
Gud vid 💯💥
Aardvark.
just think if nintendo didnt kill the snes cd just how much different this would of been since it would of been like the sega cd add on was to the genesis... kinda cute that there are small parts there that show off the snes still but so much more that nintendo didnt have even with there n64, that one mistake with nintendo going with phillips instead all those years later is still costing them dearly
Always wondered: who designed/co-designed the GTE? I know the CPU was a MIPS R3000 so I'm assuming maybe Sony had some assistance from... SGI? since they owned MIPS... but then SGI were contracted with Nintendo, of course. All I can find is that it's a Sony part but... Sony just seemed to be able to jump into a market where they didn't really have any experience particularly when it came to chip design for fast 3D graphics, it's remarkable particularly at the time when a lot of this stuff was dominated by a small handful of industry leaders.
MIPS always allowed coprocessors from third parties. The GTE only multiplies vectors with a matrix. The number of cycles show you that microcode is used. Even Atari got ahold of a Multiplier Macro for the Jaguar. The Jaguar spits out the full 32 bits, while Sony selected 16 in the middle of it. That is really not difficult for a big tech company.
I recommend watching Historic Nerd’s History of PlayStation video, he mentions in it that Sony had a product in the 80s designed for broadcast television (capable of hardware acceleration for 3D rendering and some parts of the PlayStation where based on that). Keep in mind this was a professional, commercial device that retailed for like 30k designed for TV stations to be able to do special VFX during transitions and stuff. Also check out Rodrigo Copetti’s written articles about retro consoles and their architecture.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt The GTE seems custom built for the PS1 architecture, for example, it had instructions that assisted in polygon splitting which was needed to work around the lack of perspective correct texturing in the PS1 GPU.
@ now I need to check how a complete vertex fits into 32bit. If only two components go in, MIPS RISC is already quite fast at taking the average and packing bits. I would have guessed that the bookkeeping in the mesh is more expensive. Also you might want to pull in a displacement map?
If the Saturn had more raw horse power then I'm sure indie devs could use that and make something truly amazing.
When the PS1 came out, I remember seeing it at Toys R Us and being blown away by the FMV from Tekken. I then told my friend in 3rd grade about this cool new console. I will never forget it, he said "Playstation?, that sounds like a little kids toy". And then he laughed it off.
None of use knew the impact of the console as Sony just entered the video game market.
I was impressed by FMV only once. Then I wanted it to go away. Ruined so many consoles.
Aww man, I miss Toys R Us in the 90s, they would have PS1, N64, Saturn units and you could just go in there and play the systems for hours. There was one in my hometown that was a Best Buy and Toys R Us side by side and used to love going there as a kid and playing Mario 64, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider. Good times. Even though it means I’m older now, I’m grateful to have been a kid in the 90s.
I think Sony really learned from the past mistakes from SEGA Saturn, 3DO, Jaguar in the sense that while those consoles had impressive hardware, developers had no idea how exactly to code for it and use them to their maximum potential so a lot of games ended up only using a fraction of the power they were capable of.
PlayStation having all of those development tools and Sony taking a hands-on approach to assisting developers making games on the system really showed.
PS1 came out the same time as the Saturn so there is no way Sony learned from Sega Saturn's hardware design. In actuality the Saturn hardware design became a mess because of the PS1. Saturn added the second SH-2 and the SCU after hearing rumors of the PS1 specs from other 3rd parties. Saturn was originally supposed to be a 2D powerhouse with limited 3D capabilities.
The 3DO was actually easy to develop for and 3rd parties liked it. Almost every major 3rd party publisher had a game on it. Its main issue was the high cost. $699 back in 1993 was insane.
Jaguar was weird and it seems the hardware was never finished because it wasn't tested for bugs. The memory controller had a flaw that caused many bottlenecks. Atari may have rushed the Jaguar into production to beat the competition to market.
N64 lost due to Nintendo's arrogance. Nintendo expected Japanese 3rd parties to stay with them. But Nintendo's licensing fees and the high expense of manufacturing carts kept 3rd parties away. Nintendo was charging publishers $15 per game compared to PS1 with $5. Carts cost upwards to $30 to manufacture while CDs were less than a $1.
@@BurritoKingdom I remember the launches well because I had already finished college at the time so I wasn't a kid when all of these were released and I bought every one(including the SegaCD and 32x before it). They all had the exact same problem. Initially, dozens of 3rd party developers signed on to make games for these new hardwares and one by one they dropped off as soon as they saw the userbase was still tiny because the games were not there to sell the hardware. Then the only ones that were able to really do the hardware justice were the first party titles because they were the most familiar with the machines. Price certainly played a factor(especially with the 3DO and Jaguar) but putting out a piece of kit and telling the devs, "good luck" is a lesson that needed to be learned in order to get to what we have today.
Saturns' duplicated CPU was a last minute panic move because they didn't design the hardware for 3d and saw what Sony was cooking up and about to drop to the world.
@@rodneyabretthow is the SegaDSP not designed for 3d?
@rodneyabrett Jaguar was actually cheap. It launched at $250. It was the opposite of the 3do. It was hard to develop for and there was no 3rd party support at all. That's why even though the Jag and 3do had the same lifespan, the Jag only had 73 games while the 3do had 251 games.
@ third party for Jaguar were the kids who learned coding on ST in their bedroom. So it is very clear that Jaguar would foremost had to be simple to code for for amateurs. For example consider that Doom only has 160x180px on Jaguar, a 24 bpp color buffer would fit. 24bpp is easy to understand, looks great, compatible with povray, you could brag about it. Great for colored Gouraud.
ST has no sprites and can’t scroll smoothly (in x, but ) So maybe don’t include this caps in the Jaguar?
2:07 10 or 15 instructions per cycle 😂😂😂. You have no idea about machine code.
Educate us, or point us to the correct information.
@@Alan_ChapmanGTE needs 10 cycles per instruction like an i8087 from 1982 .
@@tdome3000 its a simplified comparison to explain to people how a CPU with a slower clock could actually do more, I simplify it so the viewer doesn’t have to know about machine code. And I use a very low number to keep the maths basic, at no point do I say either only does 10-15 instructions per cycle its only an example
It's a Sony
3:10 cheating my ass, Sega fanboys with their excuses as always. it's not Sony's fault that Sega's toy didn't have a hardware solution for 3D math. Saturn did all the 3D transformation and lighting calculations on its CPU (in software, like PCs of the 90's before GeForce)
Sega took chips which were already sitting in storage before the design was finished. Kinda like it used off the shelf 68k prior to this. While NEC and Nintendo SNES licensed a CPU core and integrated it with acceleration circuits. Commodore and Atari designed their own ASICs while genesis uses of the shelf TMS like MSX.
It wast more powerful but more flexible
Saturn had worse transparencies than the SNES
Actually they use a very similar system of two layers who are combined only on VIDEODMA. It is like the color conversion on Jaguar. It is a bit of wasted compute if you don’t run on the highest resolution and fps.
You should watch his Saturn video...
The front end of the saturn was actually about twice as powerful as the playstation: 144? MIPS vs 90 MIPS. yet the playstation obviously had much more developed rendering hardware, performing more rendering features per second--RFS.
Also, both processors were single scalar, meaning that they issued one instruction per cycle at most. However, the SuperH could perform a multiply-add and also had several addressing modes allowing a pair of adds before a load-store. Both features were really handy for performing geometry transforms on large matrices. And that's what the second processor was frequently used for. Later on, sega realized that they could use the powerful VLIW DSP to transform (move) 500,000 flat shaded polygons per second far in excess of the PlayStation.
Fun fact the latest ps5 is 368 times more powerful then the ps1 original.
Not really a surprise, the PS1 is 30 years old, there should be a vast gap in power.
@millabasset1710 Yes indeed, but what the ps1 had is a game for everyone, not like now, same with the xbox and you just play the game around in two minutes on the ps1 not like now when you have to download the god dam game first around 2_4 hours before you play it.
@@gunshipzeroone3546 I started collecting again for PS1, I miss how simple games used to be. I stopped caring with the PS4, the PS3 felt like the end of classic playstation.
@millabasset1710 so true not sure if your a fan but I am a big fan of Ace combat yes Ace combat 8 is out soon but even xbox doesn't hardly have games like this anymore even a helicopter game even command and conquer was out on ps1 again not so much now. G police was a good game too.
368? That sounds too low tbh. How do you even measure anyway?
Unusual pronunciation of some words (much, but, buffer...)
The PS1 didn't have a hardware Z buffer. So a table had to be coded in game by the developers, which led to the jittering 3D polygons. This also affected the texture mapping projections, as the PS1 hardware only used simple maths to place them on polygons.
The jittering was caused by the PS1's lack of floating point maths. ua-cam.com/video/x8TO-nrUtSI/v-deo.html
@@hendy643Comments like these push me to write an actual running demo for Jaguar without floats and without jitter.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Go for it. Since it's not the PS1, it's completely irrelevant.
They're different hardware and process the graphics differently. The reason why the lack of float support matters on the PS1 is because the GTE can only output (x,y) pixel values. There's no ability to have subpixel manipulation. Now, if you did it for the PS1, that would be slightly more impressive.
@ the GTE output is just fine for quasi 2d games like Tekken or Crash. The integer input on that other chip is the problem. Not even 32 bit integers. Not even 16 bit , 9.7 fixed point. Cost cutting gone too far. It is not about maths.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt The jitter issue was amplified by the GPU, which only took integer coordinates for polygons, so it got hit with a huge amount of rounding down from the GTE's internally higher, but also limited, precision. The OP also mentions the Z-order table, which was another Playstation technique which introduced another type of artefact, Z-fighting. There is also polygon sub-division, which introduced more jitter. Jitter came from a lot of different sources.
More powerful than the Saturn? No, it was easier to develop for, but not more powerful. I got both on 9/9/95.
Saturn is not more powerful than the PSX, let's say they are almost on par.
In certain things, Saturn has advantages:
2 CPUs, WRAM expansion, better CDROM drive, VDP2 for 2D backgrounds, VDP1 3D quads do not suffer from texture distortions and the console has more VRAM (1.5 MBytes separated between VDP1, VDP2 and framebuffers), games that use VDP1 together with VDP2 will have advantages that the PSX cannot replicate 100% equally.
The PSX also has its advantages:
Fast 3D calculations using the GTE (geometry transformation engine, inside the CPU), MDEC that decompresses full-screen videos at 30fps in 15bpp colors, GPU with better Gouraud Shading (using 24bpp color multiplication and optional Auto Dithering when converting to 15bpp), textures with UVmap, semi-transparency effects that work in all modes, textures can use all formats on the same screen (4-bit palette colors, 8-bit palette colors or direct 15-bit RGB colors), 1 MByte of unified VRAM: easy to do frame-buffer effects, several resolution modes that the Saturn does not have, such as 256x240 / 384x240 / 512x240, GPU has a higher fillrate than the VDP1, reaching 66Mpixels, GPU draws lines, triangles, quadrangles and 2D sprites with Flat or Gouraud Shading. In terms of sound, it has the advantage of 24 channels with ADPCM decompression, XA audio streaming (adpcm) directly from the CDrom (without using CPU)
@SNESpower
Did you miss what I said? I said the PSX is not more powerful than the Saturn. However, I did not say the Saturn was more powerful than the PSX.
@@Sinn0100 Sorry, both consoles are great, each one has certain things that perform better than the other.
@SNESpower
Oh definitely! Both were excellent. Wait, wait all three were fantastic! Can't forget the N64!
@@Sinn0100 Absolutely! The N64 is technically very powerful, it was very difficult to program and extract performance, but when the devs managed it, the graphical superiority over the Saturn/PSX was noticeable, only in the audio it was lacking a lot because of the use of cartridges with smaller ROM. Today there are homebrewers who are making incredible demos for it, pulling effects and a number of polygons that were not possible at the time.