Those images are probably possible on an N64 cart. Problem is it will be 4 slides of HD images and that's it.EGM #52 - November 1993
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Project Reality aka Ultra 64 was all smoke and mirrors from Nintendo
- Thread starter SantaC
- Start date
EGM #52 - November 1993
Comparing them to the SNES and Genesis, those images would never have fooled me. They straight up look prerendered.
Those Nintendo are doomed news and discussions are actually propagated by a resistance group that's trying to break everyone out of the matrix, otherwise known as The Nintendo Dojo.
What? Literally anyone that was alive at that time should share that point of view. Nintendo was passing off SGI workstation graphics as their games. Like "Hey this is our mario footage" at CES or whatever and then EGM lifted the tablecloth and there's a fucking silicon graphics station.
Whether you like the end result of it all isn't really the point of the thread: I think N64 games looked great at the time besides the mud filter, but the early demos they showed and shots they were putting in press kits for magazines? WOOO BOY were they fucking fake beyond belief.
Watch this realtime SGI Onyx Infinite Reality demo from 1996. The Infinite Reality graphics system was in the ballpark of 10+ times more powerful than the RealityEngine and RealityEngine 2.
the 7:35 ~ 7:37 part is pretty cute.
the 7:35 ~ 7:37 part is pretty cute.
I loved my n64 so very much back then. Dark rift, extreme g, wave race, beetle adventure racing, mace the dark age, mischief makers, and more looked and still look amazing to me.
I don't think it's really a fair comparison. I would argue that going into the 5th generation/3D era, there were new standards and etiquette which were yet to be established in terms of how a product is presented.
The industry was coming off 20 years of putting beautiful hand-drawn art and pre-rendered imagery in product promotions and packaging with no expectation that this would reflect the appearance of in-game visuals. A lot of games in the PS1/N64 era were still advertised in ways that had nothing to do with how the in-game graphics looked.
These days the developers seem to understand that they should stick with showing something close to what's physically possible to avoid being called out.
The industry was coming off 20 years of putting beautiful hand-drawn art and pre-rendered imagery in product promotions and packaging with no expectation that this would reflect the appearance of in-game visuals. A lot of games in the PS1/N64 era were still advertised in ways that had nothing to do with how the in-game graphics looked.
These days the developers seem to understand that they should stick with showing something close to what's physically possible to avoid being called out.
Cruisn was a joke compared to Daytona, which had already been out for a year by that point.
I remember seeing it in person after magazines had hyped it up, and thought it looked crap. Daytona was mind blowing when I first saw it.
Killer Instinct was decent, but next to Virtua Fighter 2 it looked pretty old school. Sega had the arcade on lock down in the mid 90's when it came to tech showcases!
Nah, advertising is very different. This was literally every gaming rag of the era coming back from every trade show showing pictures of what Nintendo was showing off. This isn't 'back of the box showing a CG cutscene' this is more like showing a CG render of gameplay like you'd see in a high budget movie faking a VR game or something back then.
It's one thing to have a target render, it's another to have a 'target render' that is literal make believe.
Pretty sure the first 3Dfx Voodoo blew the N64 out of the water already.
Yeah, and Voodoo cards came before in europe thanks to the then-mandatory delay in hardware release.
In fact, iirc we got the first working N64 emulator by december the same year as the console release, performing better than the original hardware, thanks to the 3DFX. xD
I started Ocarina of Time on N64 and finished it in emulation, with some hickups for sure but much clearer graphics.
Oh, I distinctly remember Nintendo's "Project Reality" marketing.
I remember getting my Nintendo Power Elite VHS tape hyping-up "Donkey Kong Country" and like a secret scene in the Marvel movies of today; if you let it play past the end credits, you saw people playing "Killer Instinct":
[17:20 is that moment]
I remember playing "Killer Instinct" in the arcades and seeing the demo reel before you put your quarters in, saying: "Available for your home in 1995 only on Nintendo Ultra 64!".
I actually own a "Killer Instinct" arcade machine and every time I think about that nonsense marketing; it pisses me off that I had to wait this long to get this game in this quality in my home.
I remember being super-excited to be able to play that game at home in that quality, only to be unbelievably disappointed when it never happened [By the way, the SNES version absolutely does not count, because it was far, far below the arcade version's graphical prowess] and the "sequel" on Nintendo 64 was a piece of utter shit as well.
Nintendo was dishonest with us in 1995 regarding the capabilities of it's Ultra/Nintendo 64.
What else can be said regarding this issue?
I remember getting my Nintendo Power Elite VHS tape hyping-up "Donkey Kong Country" and like a secret scene in the Marvel movies of today; if you let it play past the end credits, you saw people playing "Killer Instinct":
[17:20 is that moment]
I remember playing "Killer Instinct" in the arcades and seeing the demo reel before you put your quarters in, saying: "Available for your home in 1995 only on Nintendo Ultra 64!".
I actually own a "Killer Instinct" arcade machine and every time I think about that nonsense marketing; it pisses me off that I had to wait this long to get this game in this quality in my home.
I remember being super-excited to be able to play that game at home in that quality, only to be unbelievably disappointed when it never happened [By the way, the SNES version absolutely does not count, because it was far, far below the arcade version's graphical prowess] and the "sequel" on Nintendo 64 was a piece of utter shit as well.
Nintendo was dishonest with us in 1995 regarding the capabilities of it's Ultra/Nintendo 64.
What else can be said regarding this issue?
Last edited:
wasn't the actual N64 hardware finished in 1995 but held back because no game was ready? i remember reading something like that.
it would have been more impressive if it released when it was supposed to but the hard to develop architecture bite everyone in the ass by extending dev times.
The Voodoo 1 came close but wasn't quite on par with the N64, lacking many of the signature features that the N64 was really known for.
Nothing notably better came out on the PC until Voodoo 2 in 1998; which of course completely blew the N64 out of the water (and it was only by this point that 3D graphics acceleration finally really started to take off on PC, with massive advancements in a short span of time from this point onwards). The release of the Voodoo 2 in 1998 was the inflection point where PCs finally started to really overtake consoles (and maintain a lead, not counting the release years of the GCN/Xbox and the 360).
UltraHLE didn't arrive until 1999. You're thinking of the Voodoo 2.
Last edited:
Damn, my memory is fuzzy... thanks for the correction.
Anyway, GLQuake using minigl and MotoRacing using directx (3?) looked much better than anything the N64 could produce to me, even though the voodoo hardware didn't have programmable microcode.
Remember that Quake didn't have hardware acceleration support initially, it was (slow) software rendering only on launch. The Quake you see now is not the Quake it was back then.
I know i know, my P75 with a Tseng Labs ET6000 struggled keeping 400x300 at playable framerate before i got the voodoo (i think only the Matrox Millenium could make 640x480 playable) . The first glquake version didn't have transparent water either, that came later, but seeing it running at a lan party made me take my car and buy the voodoo right away, it was out-of-this-world performance boost.
Hmm, there are a few things here
1 - Nintendo's hype fo NU64 was nuts, they did paint a picture they were never going to hit
2 - If I am not mistaken, Cruisn USA and Killer Instinct had exactly zero commonality with the intended NU64 hardware
3 - Everyone knew exactly what they were getting and was still hype af when they released the first Spaceworld 95 sizzle
4 - Everyone was even more hyped when the E3 1996 sizzle came out, and it was very accurate. I mean, just look at this
I am getting hyped even now for an N64
1 - Nintendo's hype fo NU64 was nuts, they did paint a picture they were never going to hit
2 - If I am not mistaken, Cruisn USA and Killer Instinct had exactly zero commonality with the intended NU64 hardware
3 - Everyone knew exactly what they were getting and was still hype af when they released the first Spaceworld 95 sizzle
4 - Everyone was even more hyped when the E3 1996 sizzle came out, and it was very accurate. I mean, just look at this
I am getting hyped even now for an N64
Haaa i am happy i found it, the 1992 bullshit (Raytraced ;) ) demo was of F15 Strike Eagle III
yeah, i was one disappointed preteen. one of the reasons i switched to PlayStation. never got to play Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time but whatever, i had Wipeout.
That was so infuriating. The PS2 figures were so theoretical it couldn't even draw them, only calculate plain vectors.
And the Gamecube ended up having by far the highest in-game polygon counts of the generation (far above PS2 and Xbox) in the Rogue Leader games.
Timestamp 0:20 > Nintendo's Ultra 64 "Advert" on the Killer Instinct Arcade
I remember a load of hype etc generated by the "Ultra 64"... It was huge at the time.
And Criterion dev says PS2 was more powerful than GameCube.
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showth...mcast-Graphics&p=645458&viewfull=1#post645458
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showth...mcast-Graphics&p=645473&viewfull=1#post645473
SGI workstations with the right hardware could display that in real-time. The graphics shown are not ray traced either. It is possible that prototype Ultra hardware could run a demo like this but demos and games are different things.
Black Falcon fighting the good fight against the nonsense in that thread.
Gamecube got the best actual in-game polygon counts of the generation by far, that's the end of story when it comes to polygon counts.
EDGE had many articles on Nintendo Project Reality / Ultra 64 and Silicon Graphics.
Last edited:
For what it's worth, Soul Calibur was an Arcade > Dreamcast port. In San Francisco Rush 2049's case, it was an Arcade > N64/DC port. It's interesting to note that you only saw non-Japanese arcade to N64 ports. Games from Midway and Atari, primarily. This means that when comparing how games fared being ported from arcades to the N64, DC, and PS1, you've only got stuff like Hydro Thunder to look at. (You get none of the graphically ambitious 90s Japanese arcade games.) Looking at Hydro Thunder, I think the root of the "Some N64 games can pass for Dreamcast games" is pretty obvious. Does it match the DC version? No it doesn't. But there's a huge gulf between the PS1 version and the N64 version, but a smaller gap between the N64 and the DC. If you squint, it looks like a muddier version of the DC version.
The Dreamcast was the first console that could offer gaming experiences on par with arcade hardware. Faithful ports, basically. The N64 couldn't do that, but it could offer ports that were less crippled than the consoles prior. The N64 was the first home console that didn't have huge 3D rendering problems. If you rendered something on a Dreamcast or moreso PC, you could get a decent approximation on the N64.
iirc the 'rogue leader polygon count' claim is just fanboy garbage with no basis that I've seen floating around for years that nobody ever has a source for. In and of itself it's a BIZARRE statement, since it both means nothing and is incomplete in regards to what it's saying. Like, does it just have the most random models with the most total polygons on the disc? Why does that matter, and who is measuring it? etc. Are you talking about triangles on a screen at once? What other effects are going on, what resolution what framerate, etc, these are all relevant if so. It's just a worthless stat even if you fill out the questions surrounding it.
The GC was an impressive bit of hardware, but to pretend it was more powerful in general than the xbox that gen is ridiculous. It had a few little tricks you could do, but so did the other machines. It's pretty safe to say in general Xbox>=GC >>> PS2
The claims were made by Factor 5, in an EGM interview. Up to 20 million triangles per frame. 60fps fully bump mapped. The top number claimed on Xbox was 13 million in Rallysport challenge. Of course it was a game created around the limitations of the Gamecube so played to its strengths, and poly counts are not everything, but polygon counts are the topic of discussion.
That's not the only measure of power, and nobody said it was. Xbox>=GC >>> PS2 was clearly reflected in games overall, though even the clearly weakest PS2 had advantages in some cases, primarily max potential fill rate.
Is the raw polygon fill rate linked to the power of the programmable vector processing units? As in you could fill the screen with stupid amounts of plain polygons *if* you were skilled enough at writing microcode for the VPUs (and you didn't want to do anything fancy to said polygons)?
Good times :)
I'm pretty sure that the OP just used that as a comparison to how graphics were hyped up. Sony's Motorstorm and Killzone 2 early demos were believed to be real time at first (although it was confirmed rather quickly that it wasnt from what i remember, at least with Motorstorm).
The console wouldn't have made an appearance until the fall of 1997 at the earliest, so I don't think the raw rendering technology is out of the ballpark of what should have been possible. I'm less convinced that developers had the tools or saw the market potential necessary to invest in building games for it, and evidently Matsushita felt similarly. It would have been much more interesting if Sega had decided to go ahead with a partnership.
Whether the silicon design was actually in good shape or not is something I'm not in a position to speculate about. It could have been buggy, or too expensive to manufacture, or failing to hit clock speed targets – but it was certainly plausible.
Fall of 1997 wouldn't have been long after the N64 which most certainly couldn't have matched those visuals.
Those "demos" showcased what looks like volumetric effects, bump-mapping, depth-of-field, specularity. Just look at the way the helicopter's searchlight plays realistically off the asphalt in the racing game.
We didn't visuals like that on the Dreamcast, or the PS2, or the Gamecube. It looks to me like it might have been realistic on the Xbox. But I dunno.
man, those tech demos really got the blood pumping back in the day. Remember the FFVII tech demo?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPO7c_XmesU
Man I got excited for that when I saw the spread in Gamefan. Little did we know at that point...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPO7c_XmesU
Man I got excited for that when I saw the spread in Gamefan. Little did we know at that point...
https://archive.org/details/Gamefan_Vol_3_Issue_07
Man, I wanna see a Robotech game that looks like that, using Nvidia RTX / raytracing on all the shiny reflective surfaces!
while using one of the best lightning systems and using f5 custom bump mapping technique every where.
other titles have no business being compared considering it was employing light scattering.
I understood some of those words ;)
Yes it's possible its oddball architecture would have allowed a scene to technically have a higher polygon count, I don't know. But no release game ever came anywhere close to the top performing Gamecube games, and it's was patently obvious that Gamecube outperformed PS2 even when it got lazy outsourced ports. On the odd occasions Gamecube games were ported to PS2 (mostly Capcom games) the results on the games ranged from 'clearly worse image quality and performance' (Viewtiful Joe) to 'Devastating downgrade in performance, detail and effects' (Killer 7, Resident Evil 4).
Yeah, now maybe just F5 were crazy wizards, but in the end, that console had the best in-game poly results and in an extremely high performance game to boot. If we're talking polys, Gamecube won.
They had a global illumination done on gpu the level of cube and it basically took us til the maxwell generation for devs with much better hardware for them to get something servicable.
Why Julian never educates the industry at large on their achievements is beyond me. We've lost a lot of talent that knew what to do with power when there was very little or methods were super simple or low level.
Wizards is understatement if you look at their rogue leader and pilot wings works for the cube/wii architecture.
LMAO! More revisionist BS. There was an entire thread back on GAF sahying how it could easily be done on 360/PS4. Not to mention BOTW is more advance than that demo.
N64 had AA and filtering. PSX looked terrible by comparison. Not sure what exactly you're talking about.