3DO ZONE Forums

Looking at games like Tempest, Missile command, Checkered Flag etc., it's sort of struck me that the Jag is dreadful at textures but actually pretty good at 'naked'/wireframe polygons.

Is this because of the architecture? I mean polygon are down to pure number crunching and throwing them at the screen?

The 3DO on the other hand, looking at NFS, Hauzer, WCIII doesn't seem quite so exuberant with the number of polygons, but wipes the floor with the texture mapping, which I guess is down to the fact the ARM60 (which does the number crunching) being a bit busy most of the time but the Video Co-Processors were designed to actually do texture maps.

Am I on the right track?

This is what I meant in that other thread when I say your 3DO bias is a bit much at times. Iron Soldier has plenty of great textures. Check out the tanks, helicopters etc. They move super smooth and look realistic and are full of great looking textures. Battlemorph and Hoverstrike unconquered lands are 2 more examples on the Jag CD with nice textures. Iron Soldier 2 as well, though you did say you don't like how that games textures look.

But I wouldn't go as far as saying the Jag is "dreadful" at textures... It's perfectly adequate when you compare textures Jag games to other textures games on other systems from 1993 - early 1995. Of course the PS and Saturn were better, and possible even the 3DO to an extent, but the 3DO had more money and more games. The JAg CD was perfectly capable of doing any game the 3DO could, textures etc. I think it's hte cart format that was limiting the amount of textures that could be used in a game. Look at supercross 3d, TONS of textures but it hurt the framerate.

Plus the Jag was hard to program for, whereas I've never heard about the 3do being hard to program.

The Jag is like a body builder with a low iq... It has the muscle, but it's a scatter brain.

Then there's the fact that Atari was working with much less $ than 3DO. Many 3do games had the benefit of being developed by large high powered dev teams. Hardly, if any Jag games had this. Then of course the Jag CD came out too late to get the most potential from it.

Jag / 3do is just like PS / Saturn to me. Sega and Atari had much less money to work with than 3do or Sony respectively. Also the Jag and Saturn had the downfall of being hard to program for.

I think the 3DO is going to be able to do a wider variety of texture maps because it has 1gb vram which is faster than regular ram and the Jag has no vram. I dont believe it would be able to do as wide a variety of textures as well.

However I think if the Jags HS:CD were really reworked to max it out with only the same amount of different textured polygons I believe the Jag has the muscle to womp the 3do in raw horsepower.