Ok, from a performance perspective the RDP fillrate was the biggest issue. For artists the texture buffer was a massive challenge.

If the RDP had been clocked 4x faster and had 4x the texture size then it would have been incredible… it makes beautiful pixels!

i've heard the rambus dram latency was also a big deal but does that have any effect on the fillrate as well? or is that mostly a bottlneck affecting the cpu?

and memory bandwidth. Our three weakest parts are our raw RDP fillrate, our tiny texture buffer, our paltry memory bottleneck...and compiling in debug mode... Our four... no... *Amongst our weakest parts... are such elements as... I'll come in again.

Don't shit on the N64 from too high. It introduced 1998 (and 2026) real-time rendering concepts at a time when two years was an eternity in PC hardware.

It's why modern programmers can make it do things that would have given John Carmack sleepless nights if they had accomplished them back in 1996.