[user____name]

This is really cool. Kaze Emanuar[0] seems to be able to hit 60hz consistently with his Mario 64 rework, I wonder if such perf is achievable for these wide open landscapes. Iirc Shadow of the Collosus rendered distant geometry into the skybox, which always struck me as a neat trick.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64

[smithcoin]

VRAM goes vroom vroom.

I emailed him the video from OP and he mentioned they’ve done some collaboration. I’m assuming there’s a retro programming discord that I’m not worthy of.

[uyjulian]

A lot of stuff is happening on the n64brew discord. https://discord.gg/WqFgNWf

[charcircuit]

VRAM on the n64 is notoriously slow.

[msk-lywenn]

It's RAM that is notoriously slow. VRAM is fast, but there's only 4K...

[charcircuit]

That 4K buffer is not VRAM. The 4/8MB of RAM is also used as VRAM.

[msk-lywenn]

Well, it’s texture RAM, the only one that RDP can access. It’s closest thing to « video memory ». Although, you’re right as the framebuffer lives in main ram. But that just means the system is sharing like in modern hardware, so I wouldn’t call the main RAM VRAM in any way.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Yeah I remember hearing that SOTC's "SuperLow" LOD was a 2D image. Trespasser also did that, but only for trees and props, not for terrain objects. Trespasser being basically a heightmap with dinosaurs dropped in

[dcrazy]

Even modern games replace distant geometry with billboards. Simplygon is one middleware that does this. The Remedy folks talked about how Alan Wake 2 used it at GDC last year or the year before.

[estebank]

Hey! It also had a barely working physics engine.

Then again the dinosaurs were physics entities, so maybe you already mentioned it. :)