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Re:Super Mario 64 – 1996 Developer Interviews by modeless on Thursday September 22, 2016 @06:35PM (#12560899)
That quote is referring to a game that runs at a 640x480 resolution. According to a quick search, most N64 games including Mario 64 run at 320x240 which reduces the fill rate requirements by a factor of 4. That would leave plenty of room for using the Z-buffer along with texture sampling.
Re:Super Mario 64 – 1996 Developer Interviews by MBCook on Thursday September 22, 2016 @07:51PM (#12561326)
640x480 was only possible with the memory expansion pack IIRC.
Re:Super Mario 64 – 1996 Developer Interviews by corysama on Thursday September 22, 2016 @08:18PM (#12561431)
The N64 only had 4 megs of unified RAM. 640x480x3bytesx2buffers would be 1800k. It was technically possible to run that without the expansion pack. But, losing that 1350k compared to 320x240 really hurt. 4x fillrate cost hurt even more.

N64 had a form of antialiasing support https://www.google.com/patents/US6999100 That was the motivation for the "9-bit RAM". Worked well enough for the time and was cheap enough to use. Much cheaper than running at a higher rez.