> That's actually very interesting info, Bart, thanks for sharing that with us. It
> seems in a way quite analogously similar to older 2D tile/sprite-based arcade
> architectures - the main CPU itself only manipulates some registers and some
> pointers, and the actual graphics tile/sprite data remains in ROM and is
> processed by the hardware to generate the display. Except in this case, the ROMs
> contain model/texture data, and the graphics hardware is a 3D rasterization
> pipeline. Adding RAM-based model storage, would be like RAM-based tile storage
> for 2D arcade hardware.

Yes, that's a good analogy. I've heard that Namco System 11 (or 22 or both?) also stored data in ROM. In the case of Namco hardware, textures were usable by the rendering hardware while in ROM.

> > No way. By the time the Riva TNT hit the scene, Model 3 was obsolete.
>
> That seems slightly a stretch. I've used a Riva TNT (16MB PCI) before, to play
> UT, and ... it doesn't even seem in the same world as a Model3 arcade game, as
> far as the graphics go. No way. Enabling AA would make it far, far worse in
> terms of comparative performance.

If not Riva TNT then definitely GeForce. And I still don't know if Voodoo 2 and Riva TNT generation hardware was that far behind. The Voodoo cards were basically just polygon rasterizers AFAIK and I think this limited their performance -- even if they could draw polygons fast there was still a lot of time wasted sending all those polygons every single frame.

I imagine by the time the Riva came out, and certainly the GeForce, the cards were capable of caching display lists. From my limited experience with 3D APIs, the usual programming model is to just send draw commands every frame but OpenGL (and I'm sure Direct3D) has always supported display lists and nowadays vertex buffered objects are the way to go.

My guess would be that by the time these features began to appear in consumer cards, Model 3 had been out-done.

> Well, that's not surprising. I think UT pushes probably around 10K poly/scene
> too, roughly, except that Model3 can add all kinds of nice texture-filtering and
> full-screen AA effects too, without any noticable slowdown that I can see. Try
> doing that on an TNT - bad idea.

Model 3's texture filtering is just tri-linear filtering (mip-mapping.) Besides that and AA, there really isn't anything else going on. And as for the AA, keep in mind that Model 3 games run at 496x384 on a medium res screen.

It's difficult for me to tell how much benefit the AA really gives. In Supermodel with its numerous graphical glitches, slideshow framerate, and full-bright rendering, everything looks awful. Lighting makes a huge difference and things look a lot better when running at 60FPS.

> > Model 3 had 8MB of texture memory. Max texture resolution was 256x256.
>
> Texture space in ROM or RAM or both? I wonder how / if they handled modifiable
> textures, or supported render-to-texture? I'm surprised at the limited texture
> resolution though, considering VivoNono and the Namco Sys22 stuff. (Voodoo2
> hardware was also similarly 256x256 limited, of course.)

Model 3 could only render textures from its 8MB memory. Textures could be stored in ROM but have to be DMA copied to texture memory to be used. Note also that the CPU has no access to the ROM space and can only send texture upload commands to the GPU.

> I was always of the opinion that the Model3 was just ever-so-slightly higher-end
> than the straight-up Naomi or DC systems, although I think they could connect
> multiple Naomi boards in parallel to increase the rendering capability. (Doesn't
> HOTD2 or something use two Naomi boardsets? I'm not super-familiar with that
> hardware.)

No way. DC is vastly superior to Model 3. There's just no comparison between DC/Naomi games and Model 3. PowerVR was a much better piece of kit.


> on what is effectively an XBox inside the machine. I guess that 512MB RAM /
> media-board really helps with that. One little thing that seemed strange to me
> though, when I first saw that game in the arcade, was that the attract-mode
> movies were some sort of MPEG or something, rather than rendered in realtime
> such as most other contemporary 3D racers, like Scud Race / Super GT was.

Don't forget that these polished Sega games have excellent artwork. Model 3 games can still look very nice today, I'll admit, but when you take a closer look, you'll see that the 3D hardware has been pitifully outdated since the late 90's.


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Bart