>>6531216
>the PS1 spending polygons mitigating texture warping managed to look more detailed than N64 games which did not have this concession to make. The N64 clearly did not have the polygon crunching power the PS1 did
Actually the PS1 has a fairly similar "visible" polygon count to the N64, if not actually somewhat lower. A good example is Rayman 2. Because the PS1 version has to tessellate so many polygons on the landscapes (which are still cut-down in detail from the N64 version) in order to prevent insane texture warping, they had to cut polygons from the character models to compensate (see pic). And Rayman 2 wasn't a bad port. Unlike MM64 which is a straight-port of the PS1 engine to N64 (even the fucking tessellation is still there despite not being needed!), Rayman 2 on PS1 had its own dedicated engine created just for the console.
And don't give me that "but what about those high-poly FF8 summon models". That's just called frontloading the polygon budget into one part of the picture, with bare backgrounds. N64 has its own equivalent with Neon Genesis Evangelion which also has high-poly character models (perhaps even more polygons than any of the FF8 summons) and the bare backgrounds.
What PS1 often has the advantage in is higher resolution textures, but not always. Later N64 games like Conker surpass PS1 there.
>z-buffer and texture filtering were too intensive and wasted too many system resources
Texture filtering is basically "free" on N64. Well, to be specific, bilinear filtering is completely free. Trilinear filtering is not free, but it works out to be free in practice. Because the N64 can trilinear faster than it can z-buffer, with z-buffer enabled (which was almost always) the console can do trilinear in the time it takes for memory to respond to the z-buffer stuff.