News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Sega Saturn Architecture – A practical analysis by mmaniac on Thursday March 28, 2024 @02:14AM (#39848227)
The memory access pattern of inverse texturing is just as chaotic when it comes to reading texels, which is why the Playstation's texture cache plays an important role in its performance characteristics.

Saturn doesn't have a texture cache, since texel reads should be nice and sequential. But then it pays a penalty when writing to the framebuffer.

Re:Sega Saturn Architecture – A practical analysis by phire on Thursday March 28, 2024 @04:25AM (#39848846)
I guess since forwards rendering doesn't need a proper texture cache, you could used the savings to implement a write combining buffer.

But I'm only saying that because I know write combining is a thing, and I'm not sure a hardware engineer in 1993 would have gone down that path.