2 posts tagged with "Rendering"

The original PlayStation is not just a slow modern GPU. It is a different rendering model. That difference is the reason Polygon Engine treats PS1 rendering as a content and tooling problem, not only as a runtime problem.

The editor can show a clean 3D scene. The PS1 runtime has to turn that scene into ordered GPU primitives with no z-buffer, fixed-point transforms, small memory pools, and a very unforgiving camera near plane.

The original PlayStation has 1 MB of VRAM, but treating that number as a simple texture budget is misleading. VRAM is a 1024 x 512 field of 16-bit words shared by display buffers, texture data, and color lookup tables.

Every rendering decision changes that layout. Resolution, color depth, double buffering, texture format, and palette placement all consume the same address space.