War stories: how Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Playstation (2020)

Re:War stories: how Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Play... by ranma42 on Monday December 20, 2021 @06:49AM (#29623791)

Wouldn't x86 have the higher code density?

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=56207 "Finding an IA-32 CPU most like the MIPS R3000A"

"a 40MHz MIPS R3000 gets 18.1 MFLOPS, while a 66MHz 486DX2 only gets 3.1 MFLOPS. So, the MIPS is downright Pentium-class for floating-point code. For integer code, the MIPS R3000/40 manages a score of 22.6 in SPECINT89, while the 486DX2/66 gets 34.0"

So its also only "Pentium-class" for floating point math, not for integer.

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Re:War stories: how Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Play... by hrydgard on Monday December 20, 2021 @07:03AM (#29623895)

The PSX CPU did not even have floating point support. It's nowhere close to a Pentium 90.

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Re:War stories: how Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Play... by flatiron on Monday December 20, 2021 @07:54AM (#29624348)

It’s a video game system. You can make do without floating point. The whole “it doesn’t have fp so whobbly textures” is a myth.

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Re:War stories: how Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Play... by monocasa on Monday December 20, 2021 @12:31PM (#29627376)

It did have a fixed point vector coprocessor instead though.

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Re:War stories: how Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Play... by mysterydip on Monday December 20, 2021 @06:56AM (#29623851)

It should, by nature of CISC. However, the other coprocessors on the playstation meant you weren't wasting all your CPU cycles on rendering, which was the majority of the time on a 3D game of the era.

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