How does the PS1 compare with the N64 hardware wise?

[jDSX]

PS1 is 32 bits and N64 is 64 bits. I heard the PS1 hard a focus on 3d gaming and it had the advantage with CD's. Can some please explain more specifically how the PS1 keeps up and betters the N64 sometimes?

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Well CD have more storage, so that is basically one advantage, but is not always about file size, is how you use what limits you got to make it fun. The games are fun, that is enough to give it merit. People compared stuff by specs, well if it fits the kind of games you wanna play or make, is important, but is also important that the game is good.

If you want facts, The use of cd made it ideal for people to make some epic games for the playstation and even attracted more attention to devs wanting to use it as a platform for games. Like those multidisc 2-4 games rather than a 32MB cart.

 

[Catastrophic]

N64 was technically superior but was severly nerfed by using cartridges. They were much more expensive than CDs and had much smaller storage. They did enable games to be nearly load-free, though.

 

[catlover007]

as far as I know, has the N64 a much more advanced 3d hardware(it supports perspective correct texture mapping, Z-Buffering and linear texture filtering, stuff that the PS1 lacks of, but really should be the minimum standard)

The problem though is that the N64 has less memory, static(in form of expensive cardridge ROM) and dynamic(main memory and texture memory). This is also the reason why most N64 games look rather blurry, because they have to use really tiny textures but they do have access to the more advanced linear texture filtering, which lets the textures be blurry instead of pixelated.

 

[DaMan]

PSX lacks bilinear filtering, perspective correction & z-buffering. Good dev's can work around that while bad ones will give you this. The small N64 carts early on meant small textures and the 4K texture cache meant you couldn't just use 64x64 textures anyway.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Yep, as mentioned the N64 does have slightly better graphical hardware, but the use of low space cartridges and the low dedicated vRAM (the N64 had like 4kb dedicated compared to the 1MB dedicated the PS1 had) limited the amount of textures that could be stored and loaded.

The biggest N64 cartridge was only 64MB, whereas the PS1 had like 700MB of space per disc. Much more content could be stored, which allowed things like proper FMVs and higher quality audio and such to be used.

Developers had to make some serious sacrifices to port games to the N64 (just compare N64 and PS1 RE2 releases), which is why the N64 library is considerably tiny compared to the thousands of games the PS1 had.

The PS1 was also out for like 2 years before the N64 and was able to generate a serious userbase in that time