/vr/ - Retro Games

>>2331863
>N64 texture cache bottleneck affected how many texture tiles could be onscreen without hitting a fill rate wall.
Actually, texturing was never responsible for the fill-rate wall on the N64. That was the z-buffer.

The texture cache is the single fastest component of the system. The bottleneck would be RAM latency for loading textures from the RAM into the texture cache (an entirely software, not hardware, managed process). Every game would need its own independent streaming and RAM fragmenting process to optimize texturing speed. Most didn't bother.

>You know how Vigilante 8 blurs terrain past a certain point, replacing textures with a smooth colour?
I saw this trick more often on Playstation, quite honestly. It's just basic LOD. Spyro is the most prominent user of the technique. Take for instance this emulated image. See how the nearest mountains are textured but the distant ones are shaded. Similar thing for the walls. The nearest ones are textured, the further ones are shaded. This technique was good on the PSX for not just performance sake but also because of affine texture mapping: you have to tessellate like crazy to prevent distant 3D textures from distorting, so better to drop the texturing and just shade.