/vr/ - Retro Games

Wish the thread had more technical discussion but I should probably go to Beyond3D or other forums if I wanted to do that unfortunately.

>>6902527
Because the vector/SIMD performance on the Gamecube was terrible due to them choosing/underpaying for a PowerPC CPU without AltiVec which was in the iMacs with Apple which IBM PowerPC processors had. A lot of the vector processing was used for transform, clipping, and lighting or T&L which only some GPUs had like the Flipper on GCN and the main problem the T&L on the Flipper was fixed function so the graphics pipeline which had more and more tasks that needed to be accelerated in the process of rendering as the generation went by needed more help from the CPU. The 1.9 GFLOPs on the CPU was not enough and was bottlenecking the system with regards to balancing compute and graphics. The GPU would've been able to handle it if GPGPU capabilities existed but that capability was literally a console generation away with CUDA and OpenCL. The PS2 had weaker CPU vector processing with 0.64 GFLOPS but the programmable vector units in the VU0 and VU1 units which was a primitive version of this that needed to be used for basic GPU tasks that the GCN included but could blow its vector processing out of the water with a combined 6.2 GFLOPS across the CPU and VUs. And the Xbox had a Pentium with 2.8 GFLOPs of SIMD vector processing.
>>6900096 was the result of this issue. Unfortunately, a lot of people except programmers who worked on these systems at the time knew about this and tech websites like Anandtech didn't have the expertise that they have now to point out this. The easiest way for Nintendo to rectify the situation outside of using better SIMD with AltiVec was to just clock the CPU higher from the 486 MHz. G3 Macs were able to clock up to 700 MHz so the problem could've been avoided. But they were stubborn about yields and were probably losing money on other aspects of the system so they couldn't do that.