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First post, by 386SX

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Hi,

I was thinking how would you compare the first Playstation hardware, when the console was released to the usual high end pc back in the same moment?
Reading at Wiki its specifications it still looks quiet well designed and equipped with its R3000 cpu, the coprocessor for geometry, a data decompression engine for image and video, a dedicated gpu for sprite, texture mapping, shading etc..
Thanks

Reply 1 of 4, by shiva2004

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Basically, there's no possible comparation: in late 94 a high end PC was a powerful CPU (fast 486-early pentium) with a SVGA card and a soundcard, perhaps with wavetable capacities, and that's all, it can achieve similar results to a Playstation with brute CPU power but it's also 3-4 times more expensive, dedicated video-3d hardware in PCs was still a pair of years ahead.

Reply 2 of 4, by BitWrangler

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The PlayStation looked good/fast because it ran at low res, only up to 640x480, it had no OS and driver overhead because it was single platform so games could be more on the metal and not need to consider driver standards and differences in hardware.

The 33Mhz MIPs CPU may have been faster on a small subset of instructions than a 33Mhz DX but, instead of having the more complex instructions that were "slower" by taking 2 clocks, it had to use several of it's single clock instructions to do the same thing, so advantages there were a bit illusory.

The Power VR chipset wasn't all that powerful, in PSX form it was pushing 180k textured polygons per second, whereas early PC 3D cards did 300-500k

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 3 of 4, by leileilol

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PSX didn't have PowerVR at all. It would be crazy if it did though, considering Videologic hadn't implement blending functions PSX could do until 1998

I can't even think of any PC 3d hardware that's a match for PSX's capabilities (heavy affine texturing and poor vertex precision without any filtering or Z while also supporting blending functions and frame buffers. Maybe one of the Rages...)

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 4 of 4, by BitWrangler

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Weird, for some reason I had it in my head that the PS had the proto PowerVR chipset, must have been confusion with the dreamcast having the pvr2

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.