Thread 720528681

Was it a mistake to use squares instead of triangles to make 3D games or is it unrelated to the Saturn's poor performance in 3D?
I know the hardware itself was too complicated to code for and whatnot, but i wonder if using squares also played a role, since it seems like it would take more computational power to render something with more edges/sides. It seems like you could probably make the same models with less polygons if you are using triangles.

I don't know why i've been thinking about it recently.

>>720528681 (OP)
I miss Segata Sanshiro.

You're the only fuckin' square here, pal

>>720529645
RUDE WHAT

>>720529516
Imagine you're just walking around as a kid talking about how your parents were going to buy you a Playstation and he showed up out of nowhere and started kicking your ass until your swore to buy a Saturn.
Truly the best ad campaign ever made, would have outsold the Playstation and 64 if they did the same in the US/Europe.

>>720528681 (OP)
Sega should of cancelled it and focused on the Dreamcast.

It would of been a mix of ps1 disc tech with n64 hardware.

>>720528681 (OP)
practically, the math for triangles makes a lot more sense for render pipelines
maybe sega thought the render pipeline could be simplified with quads, but quads aren't well-behaved, and usually get broken down to triangles anyway

>>720528681 (OP)
It's less that triangles are better and more that everyone else used triangles. So if you tried to port a game you'd have to hack in triangles by defining a quad with two co-incident vertices, and the Saturn would waste time trying to draw the invisible half of your "triangle" quad which made everything perform worse.

The reason graphics is based on triangles is that three points are always in the same plane, while four points usually aren't. Think of a tetrahedron (a triangular pyramid), which has four points that do not form a single rectangle. Since three points are always coplanar, any planar projection of them is coherent. Because of this, the "world space" triangle can be drawn as an equivalent "screen space" triangle.
If you project four points onto the screen, there are a lot of ways of filling them in.

>>720528681 (OP)
Saturns poor performance comes from the graphics chip being trash (PS1 gpu was over 3x faster), and Sega considering third parties to be a barely tolerated cancer and not sharing proper devkits with them until very late in the consoles life.

the square vs tri thing comes down to the fact that saturn was forward rendered. ie. it reads a sprite from graphics memory and passes through every pixel of it one by one. if you render that as a triangle, you have to collapse to corners into one, and that results in a lot of pixels overlapping. this means you waste half of your VRAM on making the textures square sized, and you waste half of your drawing speed overwriting pixels.

>>720534494
by comparison the playstation first calculated where to put the triangles, and then mapped textures onto the triangle. so there was no pixel overlap, and any pixel would get drawn only once.

let's assume you want to draw a right triangle where a & b are 32 pixels wide. on the playstation this means you draw as many pixels equivalent to the area of the triangle, ie. 512 pixels. on the saturn you have draw a 32x32 square, with two corners collapsed to the same point to form a triangle, so it takes 1024 pixels written to draw it on screen.

saturn gpu was therefore literally 2x slower simply because it used squares.

>>720531836
>It would of been a mix of ps1 disc tech with n64 hardware.
Both Sony and Silicon Graphics offered partnerships with Sega. In both cases, Sega of America was all for it but Japan said no and pushed the Saturn their own insane way.

>>720528681 (OP)
A square is just two triangles overlaid on one diagonal, mirrored...

>>720535846
I always trust history books written by a person who can't even read the majority of the sources, and who is presenting only one side's perspective

>>720535846
>Sony offered a partnership
Man I wonder if it was anything like the one they made to Nintendo. You know the ALL YOUR IPS WILL BELONG TO US.

>>720536286
>and who is presenting only one side's perspective
Blame the Japanese side for simply not discussing those matters with the same candor as Kalinske.