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points by Lerc 2 days ago | 0 comments

>raw RDP fillrate issues, which was for sure the weakest part of the N64 hardware

I thought weakest part was the size of the texture buffer.

Nobody expects the N64! Our two weakest parts are our raw RDP fillrate, and our tiny Texture buffer.

Ok, from a performance perspective the RDP fillrate was the biggest issue. For artists the texture buffer was a massive challenge.

If the RDP had been clocked 4x faster and had 4x the texture size then it would have been incredible… it makes beautiful pixels!

[–] andrekandre 2 days ago

i've heard the rambus dram latency was also a big deal but does that have any effect on the fillrate as well? or is that mostly a bottlneck affecting the cpu?

[–] cowlevel 2 days ago

and memory bandwidth. Our three weakest parts are our raw RDP fillrate, our tiny texture buffer, our paltry memory bottleneck...and compiling in debug mode... Our four... no... *Amongst our weakest parts... are such elements as... I'll come in again.

[–] skhr0680 2 days ago

Don't shit on the N64 from too high. It introduced 1998 (and 2026) real-time rendering concepts at a time when two years was an eternity in PC hardware.

It's why modern programmers can make it do things that would have given John Carmack sleepless nights if they had accomplished them back in 1996.