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What is the roughly equivalent of a PS1 CPU (which is R3000A @ 3.33MHZ ) vs old PC hardware ?

I will roughly say that PS1 CPU is basically a "low end" 486 CPU (with a 3D card) but maybe i'm wrong.

Note that i'm comparing only CPU part, not the GPU. I know that PS1 have a hardware accelerated 3D.

On this wikipedia page they say a 80486@50 mhz can deliver 50 MIPS, while a PSONE give 33 MIPS. One if CISC, the other is RISC, not sure if its important.

Also: to my surprise the PSONE lacks FPU but this is pretty the same for 486, which have a FPU (for some) but perform quite badly (on wikipedia they explain this is one of the reason 486 died at beginning of 3D accelerators card age and that most PC gamers moved to pentium). Why would Sony choose a CPU that lacks FPU for 3D games ?

oh it's 33.3 MHZ not 3MHZ off course. an "edit" button would be nice sometimes.

you're a few years late with that one aren't you?

You shouldnt´even try to compare shoes with handshoes!
You are a programmer AND you have access to emulators, simply said: HAVE A GO and try it yourself! Not worth all the action tho, as Consoles always lacked behind Computers after the video game crash!
The ps1 is the last piece of shit i´d code on! It sucks for many reasons, especially if you want to do demoscene-stuff! ;)

@harDy.:
I am surprised, since the PS1 SDK seemed to me quite firendly.
Some programmers I was reading the pages of (in the early y2k) had a quite different opinion about PS1 programming too.
AfaIr, Andreas Tadic of Team17 too (the author of Project X 2 - No relief).

BTW. Nice post time, dude =).

I remember the 3Dfx with pod game, with a Pentium 166/200, MMX was there too, and many started to overclock on the socket 7. A year later the riva TNT... So I don't get why it killed the 486, there were the Pentium 60,66,75,90,etc

sim: sure, gameWise it delivered what coders wanted/needed! ;)
But you cant do good demos on that, repitition of geometry for example is a thing you dont want to hassle with on ps1 ;) The RAM in general is a bitch to handle!
Time: time to zero it all out! ;)

I'm interpreting this as a need to release something (lame) for psx at the incoming datastorm. ;))

So many memories. Like sand thru the hourglass....

I think this was because of cost effectiveness?

or because it was slow? or unnecessary? it had the gte.

dudes, the psx had a fixed-point geometry transfer engine that did object transformation (matrix calculations etc.) in HW (similar to what vertex shaders do), so no need for a FPU.

Because it had hardware support for fixed point transformations, and the FPUs of that time weren't exactly blazing fast either.

Was it the fixed point geometry engine that was the main reason for distorted near-field textures?

i think the gpu doesn't do z-buffering, so you need a lot of polys to minimize the effect. that's what i heard!

1.) the fact that the gpu doesn't do z-buffering meant that you had to insert your objects/faces into so-called ordering tables which were then sorted in hardware
2.) the distorted textures however are a consequence of the fact that the rasterizer did not support perspective correction (which is unrelated to z-buffering vs. sorting)

check, thanks for sorting that out!

wasn't that called texture perpective correction? and it wasn't there. neither was z-buffering. right.

oops. that was a slow ninja. :D

What, no z buffer and no perspective correction? Next you're going to say that it doesnt even have fragment shaders, right?! Oh the horror. How can anyone make demos for something like that.

Well, they didn't..

Well, they did (just not a whole lot of them).

Ok! That must be why the demo scene was invented only after directx 8 where making demos was easy enough. We in the demo scene require that tools and technologies are top notch and the programming api comes with a decent amount of easy to use spikeball objects and mp3 files with trip hop so you dont have to do any really hard stuff.

Like scrollers.

Some PS1 engines did adaptive tesselation on the CPU to alleviate the artifacts from the missing z-buffer and perspective correction. I eg. used it for a few racing games because the road polys were pretty giant and looked like crap when tilted, plus it was hard to put eg. lantern poles on the road because the sorting was so off. A dot product and a few adds/shifts later this was solved :)