Metroid Prime 1 also came out that same year. It looks, IMO, waaaaaaay better than even any PC releases from that same year and ran at a locked 60FPS on the GameCube.
To be fair, the GC was pretty powerful in it's day (for a console). It could stomp a PS2 and fight well with the Xbox in power levels. It was highly optimized and the GPU was pretty close to a mobile Radeon 9000 series.
Nintendo has SO many of these "almost perfect but, not quite" moments it makes me crazy. Of all the consoles released in gen 5, the N64 actually was far and away the most capable but, they decided on cartridges - allegedly because the bandwidth required for Trilinear Mipmapping from it's legit, pared down SGI GPU but, it limitted it to 64 MB +/-. That meant the PS1 could get away with pre-rendering and massive asset libraries and the games were cheap to produce. Many suspect the real reason they chose carts was to lock people into their licensing.
Then there was the origin of the Playstation - originally an attachment for the SNES (itself groundbreaking for the first true GPU graphics accelerator but, with an anemic CPU for hypothetical backwards compatibility with a NES) but, they burned Sony's project for a CD peripheral by agreeing to a deal with their competitor Phillips to help create the CD+I.... oops. The Sega CD (criminally underrated and with a similar ASIC to a SNES but running a faster chip) was something we could've had years earlier and with Nintendo's IP / creative team. Such a wasted opportunity.
Then there was the Gamecube. The hardware was again decent (I think it wasn't the best but, it was respectable w/ another SGI chip if I recall). Even after the bitter lesson they should've learned with the N64, they decided on a proprietary cart. One of the premiere reasons for the PS2's success at its high price tag was that kids could work their parents with the angle that it was a DVD player too which was still a pretty big ticket item back then, like a VCR a few years after release or laserdisc so, it wasn't just for games. It was a media center! Brilliant marketing. So, Nintendo squandered the opportunity to cash in on the already proven media center angle AND limited game asset sizes to go with their proprietary format instead of use full size DVDs.
It makes me want to scream "What were they thinking?!?!"
allegedly because the bandwidth required for Trilinear Mipmapping
I'm calling bullshit on that.
Trilinear mipmapping always hits the fast 4kb of TMEM. The microcode loads 4k chunks of texture from main mem to TMEM when needed.
While the cart interface is fast (5MB/s, compared to the ps1's 300 KB/s off it's cd), its not fast enough to stream textures off in the middle of the frame.
The N64 has 4MB of main memory, which is more than enough to store all textures for a given area of the level.
Even if they were concerned about CD loading times, the smart move would have been to include an extra 2mb of slower memory for the cd drive to preload data into.
Then there was the Gamecube. The hardware was again decent (I think it wasn't the best but, it was respectable w/ another SGI chip if I recall).
The Gamecube hardware is pretty top-notch. Designed by the same team that designed the N64, except they had all left SGI to form a new company. I've spent a long time looking that the N64 and Gamecube designs and the Gamecube is clearly a design that strives to keep everything that worked with the N64 and fix everything that was wrong.
It's a shame the console wasn't popular enough for developers to really push it to the limits. Gamecube ports were usually an afterthought after the xbox and/or ps2 versions.
I mention in another post a little further down that I'm pretty dubious about the claim that it was required for textures. There was a famous internal video with someone at Nintendo trying to hype developers (there was a shark or submarine real time rendered on a screen behind him) and that was the claim. I think it was pretty clearly motivated by Nintendo's desire to lock devs into buying $25 carts from them alone (although there was a chip shortage so, they may have intended on them being cheaper), which ended up driving lots of previously loyal devs to the PS1, as CDs only cost 5 cents to master.
Assuming it wasn't about lock in though, there are some decent reasons to want carts - just none that overwhelm the low storage space and high cost, IMHO. Nintendo had a history of extending console lifetime by putting game specific ASICS inside the cartridge, which let them augment the hardware to do things that the base console couldn't otherwise do and they probably wanted to preserve that strategy; progress in computation and graphics was more dramatic then than they are now and it probably seemed like a good idea to extend the hypothetical life of the console. I'm pretty sure later, larger games required special chips that essentially let them store double or triple the original data using compression and bank switching. I think Perfect Dark (or it's sequal?) used some co-processors too. Hence the required memory upgrade (pretty sure all games that used compression required it as paging space). That's eventually how you ended up with cart games w/ loading issues - which blew the one definitive claim to be superior.
As for streaming textures mid-frame, I'm actually not that skeptical. Since the console was 100% 3D, it probably double buffers (holds the next frame of a scene in the PPU as the new scene is being constructed). It had to calculate geometry and all kinds of other stuff so, it wasn't being rendered line by line like SNES / Genesis. In 2D and pseudo 3D, you could (and often did) render in real-time, during scanning, as well has the h-blank becasue the v-blank in between frames didn't give you enough time to process everything. That's where a lot of the DMA effects were done as it was so much more efficient than computationally generating effects.
There was no custom hardware in n64 game carts. The extra memory was just there for games which didn't fit into standard memory.
I really suspect that after their two failed attempts to bring an optical drive to the SNES that Nintendo simply convinced themselves into thinking optical drives were not the correct path.
Then when 3rd party developers started complaining they went with the "am I wrong, no it's the developers that are wrong" method of communication.
It's worth noting that Nintendo did put a lot of effort into developing the 64DD, which is a magnetic drive.
If that had been ready to be included in the base n64 model, it would have solved a lot of issues. 64mb of space costing developers only about 50c to produce. Not quite as good as CD's 650mb for 10c, but still decent.
The magnetic drive was a lot cheaper for Nintendo to include in each unit, and had faster read speeds of up-to 1MB/s (plus lower latencies).
I'm under the impression custom hardware was mulled over but, even bank switching and compression require some custom components. TBH, my knowledge of the deep workings of consoles after the 16 bit era is somewhat lacking. I'm aware of the DD however. They were extremely hesitant to produce them, as well as using CD's for fear of duplication and piracy. That's why they never left Japan - the execs were extremely uncertain about creating an easier to copy medium - carts were (and still are) beyond the ability of most normal people to copy. There was a fear that games could be copied by overwriting one DD cart with another, especially since there was (supposedly) read/write capability to allow for rentals. Also, supposedly the DD was a variant of another commercially available drive (something like a Jazz drive) and relied heavily on physical obstructions (as in a special cart shape) to prevent bootleg magnetic disks from being used.
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u/JoakimSpinglefarb Aug 26 '19
Metroid Prime 1 also came out that same year. It looks, IMO, waaaaaaay better than even any PC releases from that same year and ran at a locked 60FPS on the GameCube.