The Jaguar GPU flexibility

[sd32]

From what i have read on this forum, one of the Jaguar strengths over its contemporary systems is the flexibility of its chipset. I was wondering if this would make the Jaguar better at stuff like voxels and elipsoids (is that what they are called?), when compared with PSX, N64, SAT and 3DO.

Has anyone played both Phaze Zero and Amok (for Sega Saturn)?, are the engines similar, how do they compare?. I have played AMOK, but not Phaze Zero.

[Gorf]

From what i have read on this forum, one of the Jaguar strengths over its contemporary systems is the flexibility of its chipset. I was wondering if this would make the Jaguar better at stuff like voxels and elipsoids (is that what they are called?), when compared with PSX, N64, SAT and 3DO.

Has anyone played both Phaze Zero and Amok (for Sega Saturn)?, are the engines similar, how do they compare?. I have played AMOK, but not Phaze Zero.

 

The fact that there is no dedicated 3D hardware is why

hardware in the Jaguar is extremely flexible. It makes it

'better' in the sense that there are no restrictions to the

kind of features you can add on the fly.

 

PSX, Saturn and the rest can do it but they could not do it

with same flexibility the Jaguar can. You can fake Vertical line

draws with polies but its not nearly as flexible as directing a

blitter in software. Of course you can do it in softwre on the

other machines but you render useless the dedicated hardware

advantage.

 

For instance the PSX would draw the same multi effect voxel

landscape as theJaguar could but would not be able to do it

with the poly hardware. There goes all your speed advantage.

Why? The R3k in the PSX would have to do ALL the work along

with the game logic where the Jaguar can split the tasks among

3 processors.

 

Just so you understand, most of today super duper cards do things

with a GPU and blitters and shaders. Very similar to the thought

behind the Jaguar. Like GFX cards, the Jaguar II was to have added

hardware effects and the ablility to draw trips with ONE command like

the PSX can. So the flexibility would have gotten better like todays

GFX cards, had the Jaguar line and Atari stayed afloat.

 

 

The sad truth sd32 is that the Tom & Jerry chip combo are monsters

put in a design with a 68k that chokes the system. That in itself was

not a problem if the tools were written to use the machine without the

68k in the main loop. "stop #$2000" he 68k and the increase in

performance is instantly and significantly noticable.

 

If you want to use the 68k as an interrupt controller and let it sleep until

needed, you can but why? The RISC's can handle the interrupts just

fine. That 68k was not even needed and wound up a good part of the

reason why the game look and play like they do.

 

 

Saturn would be very good at voxel land scapes due to its quad based

renderer. It would have to believe it definitely outclasses the PSX in this

category. Remember voxels are 2D ( they do not require nearly the kind

of trig and matrix math of 3D) even though you can fake 3D beautifully

with them.

Edited August 27, 2007 by Gorf

[sd32]

Thanks for taking the time to explain that Gorf, i had that doubt for a long time, but am to lazy to research .

[Gorf]

No problem!

[Doskias]

No problem!

 

 

LOL I still have no idea what that all meant. I guess the abridged version is that the Jaguar was one beast of a maching whose power was sadly never tapped into .