Interesting Wii U hardware overview

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If this N64 discussion goes much further, maybe we should take it to a different thread in Other Retro Dev. I made one a while back, actually...

regularly hosted games that looked worse than similar titles on a system

I don't think this is quite true if you take a truly holistic approach

I'm not taking a holistic approach. I'm just saying that there was a surprising amount of overlap given the power difference, which may be attributable to the N64 being hard to program, compounded by the inefficient official microcode holding the system back. Comparing bad N64 games with good PlayStation games can make it look like the PlayStation was more powerful, which is not something you tend to get with (say) the NES vs. the SNES.

missing lighting effects makes emulated N64 games look really bland

I noticed this with F-Zero X. I play the real one regularly. It's higher res in emulation, if you want it, but the shiny is gone.

Well the Playstation didn't have half the RAM of the N64.

I realized about the VRAM after posting, and figured it wasn't important enough to warrant an edit. With audio RAM it comes pretty close to even... and Expansion Pak games were usually not the worst-looking ones, so I can't really claim that as a trump card...

Speaking of RAM, what was the latency like on the RCP side? I've heard figures as high as 600 ns for a CPU cache miss, but I can't imagine that's representative of RCP random access... Also, I believe the N64's RAM was divided into four banks; did this have any relevance to latency?

People tend to forget that the N64 uses a lot of its processing power to clean up 3D image quality behind the scenes - it's not a straight-up polygon count contest.

Absolutely.

And yet, it seems that certain late games, such as World Driver Championship, managed to match or exceed the PlayStation's advertised capabilities (180,000 textured tris per second) while maintaining the additional features that made N64 polygons so power-intensive...

I think the only sane way to use hardware additive blending on N64 is just where the RGB values in your scene are very low

I'm sorry; I can't accept that without more detail. What's wrong with the methods I proposed? I could guess, but that's not a path to edification.

[realityengine]

I'll take you up on that offer. Do you know how they managed to join three PPC750's together in the Wii U?

I have to admit that I don't know too much about Wii U specific features, and have not been privy to any detailed information about it. From memory, the PPC750 did have an incomplete SMP implementation which was finally completed in the G4 design, so I'm guessing IBM may have done some 'backporting' of G4 SMP technology into the PPC750.

If this N64 discussion goes much further, maybe we should take it to a different thread in Other Retro Dev. I made one a while back, actually...

I think I will take you up on that. I have posted to this thread viewtopic.php?f=23&t=16414&p=216380#p216380