Jump to content

  2. View New Content
  3.  
  2. → Viewing Profile: Posts: Atari_Owl


Atari_Owl's Photo

  • Overview
  • Profile Feed
  • Likes
  • Friends
  • Topics
  • Recent Activity
  • Gallery
  • Blog
  • Issues
  • Stats

Atari_Owl

Member Since 29 Jul 2002
OFFLINE Last Active Private

Posts I've Made

In Topic: Jaguar's polygon pushing "power"

Yesterday, 5:34 PM

View PostVladR, on Sat May 26, 2012 11:52 AM, said:

View PostAtari_Owl, on Sat May 26, 2012 2:03 AM, said:

How many polys depends on what kind of polys, size and if you use the not really very good Atari renderer.
If you run the 3D JAZ demo you can see how many polys/sec the Atari renderer can draw.
OK, here are the details of the scene:
1. Top-Down camera at Fixed Height (for slightly less computations per frame, or even precomputed transformations - though 2MB of RAM is awfully low)
2. Outdoor environment - e.g. Flat terrain (2 tris), but obviously covering whole screen, composed of several tiles (say, ~10) - this could be just a simple , huge, 2D sprite - though I`m not sure If I can combine 2D&3D easily on jag. It would be great if I could just use Blitter and draw the whole 320x200 bitmap in one go.
3. Buildings - about ~10 on average (per scene). Polycount is 12-50
4. Characters - Sprites - there`s no way that from that altitude about 15 meters from ground), you could see some nice textured characters from polygons - that would be just a pixel mess, and since there`s no antialiasing, sprites will look better (at the cost of memory)
5. Props - trees/stones/barrels - probably just sprites, prerendered from different angles
6. HUD - Lower part of screen (say, 15-20% of screen height - depending on how I fit all info into just few lines in that low resolution) - a 2D Bitmap (like in Doom)

Doesnt seem unreasonable.. i wish you the very best of luck and shall eagerly watch progress, when you feel confident to announce something please let me or zerosquare know and we'll put it in the homebrew project list

In Topic: Jaguar's polygon pushing "power"

Yesterday, 10:08 AM

View PostStephen, on Sat May 26, 2012 8:58 AM, said:

View PostVladR, on Fri May 25, 2012 1:20 PM, said:

I read the whole thread and still have only a very vague idea about the jag`s poly throughput.

If Fight For life pushes roughly 30.000 tris/sec, that means it`s just 1000 tris per frame in 30 fps (or 500 tris in 60 fps).

And it has been said that even this is questionable.

As a PC/Xbox game programmer, growing up with Atari, who would like to give a Jag try (I got several shitloads of art assets and C++ code/engine), I`d appreciate if I got some more precise answer - e.g. does 30k textured tris per second (under normal game load - e.g. AI/Audio/Input) sound about right ?

Depending on game / camera, 30 fps might be more than enough. Hell, a top-down action RPG is usually playable even in 15 fps.
And that would give me 2,000 tris per frame, which might be enough for a relatively decent-looking scene.


So, 30k textured tris/second - as a ballpark figure - is it representative of an easily achievable performance on Jag ?
FFL is nowhere near 30 FPS. 12 to 15 maybe. It's not a great game, but I do think it is an impressive demo of nicely textured good graphics 3D engine. I really wish the designer would have went for the look of Tobal No 1 (flat shaded polys).

Zero 5 has a very high framerate, but it uses 256 colour mode flat shading, and honestly, only looks to have a few dozen polys on the screen at any time.

The Jag was just not designed for 3D. It is a 2D power house but if you look at the way the video is built up, it is really a 2600 on steroids. The screen is built line by line. It's been a very long time since I looked at any of the demos that came with BSG + Jugs, but I am pretty sure they had a 3D demo with FPS and poly counter. I seem to remember 8-10k/sec is the best I ever saw it do - and they were small.

That sounds familiar, maybe for textured? I dont really remember

Anyway thats what can be done with the Atari renderer... if you're prepared to go to the pain of writing your own then very substantially higher numbers can be achieved.
Plus if you're prepared to go for flat or just gouraud, and without z buffering this will increase even more

In Topic: Jaguar's polygon pushing "power"

Yesterday, 2:03 AM

Let me put it this way

Tomb Raider II on the PS1 is 15fps and less, i've measured 12 even in relatively empty scenes so it will surely get much lower
Majora's Mask on the N64 is 16fps and less and it has been claimed although i have not measured such that it drops below 10fps in busy scenes (OoT is slightly higher than MM but not massively)

How many polys depends on what kind of polys, size and if you use the not really very good Atari renderer.
If you run the 3D JAZ demo you can see how many polys/sec the Atari renderer can draw.


And no i'm not going to get into how many AOP is drawing because its a sure fire recipe for trouble and p***ing contests

In Topic: The Blitter Trick?

Sat May 19, 2012 3:57 AM

it'd have to be blitted into the GPU as columns too, but thats ok as it would be in pixel mode anyway due to the scaling

In Topic: The Blitter Trick?

Sat May 19, 2012 2:55 AM

I thinl i must have been really tiired when i posted that it wouldnt work anyway

  1. AtariAge Forums
  2. → Viewing Profile: Posts: Atari_Owl
  3. Guidelines