@tendoboy1984 said:
Is polygon count no longer important? Everyone talks about resolution and textures, but polygons are the most important asset of 3D graphics. The more polygons you have, the more detailed your game will be. No one ever says how many polygons these new systems can produce.
Polygon count was never informative. There were a lot of polygon numbers thrown around in the PS1/Saturn/N64 era, but they didn't tell us much. Here is a passage which explains why (written by a guy who was clearly a fan of Sega, but his tech talk meshes with what I've seen and read over the years).
http://www.gamepilgrimage.com/SATPScompare.htm
Another popular theory on why the Saturn failed to capture the masses' interests is that it didn't have comparable 3D performance to the PS1. The Saturn, is significantly more powerful than the PS1 in 2D capabilities, but it is also able to run at higher resolutions (640x224, 704x480), and capable of higher resolution and color count textures with less effort. The Saturn is more capable of these things because it has 66% more Video RAM. On the Saturn, as is true on any hardware, more RAM allows for higher color, higher resolution texture mapping, and higher screen resolution. Combine this with the specs directly from Sega and Sony's web pages, showing that both systems were capable of similar polygon performance, shows clearly that the Saturn was no slouch in the 3D department either.
The catch is that Sega achieved comparable polygonal performance with the Saturn by including more processors in the Saturn, which made development more difficult at first than it would be on the more simple PS1. In addition to having better developer support from Sony than Sega gave for the Saturn, and better more mature development kits, the PS1 also had built in special effects in the form of transparency and gouraud shading. This allowed the PS1 to generate lightsourcing and transparent special effects or polygons with a minimum hit to the system's polygon performance. Since the Saturn had to generate these effects through sheer processing muscle, developers of Saturn games usually had to lower the resolution to 320x224 in order to program effects similar to those on the Playstation. What this all means is that because the PS1 could just "turn on" light sourcing and transparency, the effects were achieved with uniform results across any game that used them, while the same effects on the Saturn were subject to the quality of the code, written by each individual developer, to display it.
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