[mng2]

It's interesting to consider the N64 in contrast to the first Voodoo card. One is a console and the other is an add-in card, but both launched in 1996, with underlying 3D technology from SGI. The Voodoo used EDO RAM, 8 chips of 256k x 16b, 2 MB for the z+framebuffer and 2 MB for the texture memory. With 50 MHz EDO RAM, wired in a 64-bit bus, the peak texture bandwidth would be 400 MB/s, dedicated to that purpose alone; in contrast the N64 RDRAM was main memory and had to service other functions.

The N64 launched at $200, the Voodoo at $300. Of course you would additionally need a computer to run the Voodoo, but I remember thinking the N64 was already way too expensive back in the day. It would've been even more expensive to support a 64-bit memory bus.