For 3D games you should have a bitmap mode not a tile based GPU and a fast CPU. At the release of the Genesis other hardware manufacturers had the higher integrated 68040 ready. the 8-bit home computers MSX2 CoCo3 and CPC can run simplified 3D CAD programs.
The processor is part of it, but neither were going to generate great 3D graphics in real time. Most "3D" games that people considered fun and good games used tricks on both consoles that gave the illusion of 3D without trying to render polygons. Pilot Wings, F-Zero, Road Rash, etc. The Super FX chip was designed to add specific capabilities that were very useful for helping the SNES draw 3D graphics. As seen in Yoshi's Island it also helped even if you didn't want to draw polygons but still needed certain processing abilities. Obviously Doom used it as well and not for drawing polygon models either.
Oh you Sega fanboys... Can't you let the ignorant 90s marketing die? Despite what you'd choose to believe, the 68000 @ 7.67 MHz does not run circles around the 65816 @ 3.58 or even 2.68 MHz in real applications. Console games spend most of their time evaluating object logic (generally 8-10 bit coordinates), something the 65XX architecture is fairly efficient at with its quick instruction periods or a "high IPC" (for the time); this is such the case that optimized routines may be carried out FASTER than the 68000 is capable of, clocked at over twice the frequency. The 68000's actual strengths (wide registers, complex addressing modes and microcoded multiplication/division) are rarely if ever a necessary bottleneck for 2D or even pseudo-3D games. Under the best circumstances the MD's 68000 has less than a 100% general performance advantage--possibly less than 50%, which is nothing to brag about considering the cost, and how that cost affected the rest of the hardware's budget such as the VDP which I'd argue is lacking. I'd also argue that the SNES made far better use of its budget thanks to its high integration and cheap (unfortunately slow) memory. The SNES also has a separate multiplier(/divider?) "accelerator" which may be "single-cycle" (combinatorial), not a shift-add algorithm like the 68000 implements, so the MD might not even have much of an arithmetical lead for big numbers (which are never used anyway). Back on topic: for pseudo-3D, games probably make heavy use of trig look-up tables--something I suspect the SNES will actually be faster at. Anyways not all 3D engines are created equal, so uninformed comparisons between games to assert platform dominance is quite absurd.
Exactly, and even though one system may push polygons better, that doesn't mean dick as long as the games themselves are fun. It truly is astounding how some people here haven't seemed to really move on from the SNES/Genesis/TG16 wars twenty years down the line.
Off the top of my head, some of the doors in a few of the bowser's castle levels were giant polygons that would crush you by falling towards the screen. But mainly the SFX2 was used for sprite scaling, warping, skewing, and rotation in that game. Nintendo played it off at the time by saying that the SFX2 let them "treat sprites like polygons" in the game. Remember, rotation and scaling and all that good stuff was limited to a single background layer on the vanilla SNES. Without the SFX2, things like the lava monster in Yoshi's Island wouldn't have worked.
The Lava Monster and other bosses made from squiggly lines are easily done without the SFX chip. They're just a background composed of a triangle with the scroll adjusted each scanline (same as raster driving games, basically.) But yes, sprite scaling & rotation require the SFX for any decent speed.
Yes there are a few places like in castles some falling walls and barrels. Nothing fancy but it is there. Watch here directly after 10 seconds ^^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqH-qipGEEI
How about we all have a debate against something interesting like "Sega Dreamcast vs PSP" since to me they seem a lot similar in a way. But seriously everyone seems to forget how much popular the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive was, over South America, Russia, & China/Taiwan! And made much support from companies like TecToy & other pirate communiters. Like some originals & unlicensed multicarts and STILL Continue the stuff they do to this day! So again who's still making sales across the world?! SEGA that's who!
Get cancelled because it sucked? One tenth of the polygons at a lower frames per second? All of the megadrive games with 3d graphics that were any good used extra chips.
There's only 1 MD game that uses special chips and that's Virtua Racing which blows away Wild Trax / Stunt Racer FX. I love both the MD and SFC. I have owned both machines since Japanese launch and a large amount of games for both and over the years have played pretty much every game on both systems thanks to the good old "back up" units. Each system has its strong and weak points. The SFC can create audio that the MD could never ever dream of doing but on the other hand the MD in the right hands has an amazing sound chip for that pure chip sound of game music. The SFC blows the MD away in the RPG area while the MD is much better in the action area, especially shooters. It's the same thing with this 3D argument. Basically the MD was better at it but that doesn't mean it was great, just better than the SFC.
I think you are misremembering the lava monster. I am intimately familiar with the technique you're referencing, and that's not at all what is happening in Yoshi's Island. It's not scanline scroll, the monster doesn't just skew. It also stretches, distorts, rotates, and skewers. And, most importantly - it's not drawn on any background layer. It's drawn on the sprite layer. Perhaps we're talking about two different monsters in the game? Although I can't remember off hand any monster that used that scanline scroll effect. EDIT: Come to think of it, I might be misremembering the specific monster. It might not have been a lava monster, it might have been a water monster or something. Regardless, the monster I'm referencing definitely isn't a simple scanline raster effect.
Conversely the reason it wasn't an exceptionally big ROM was because it had a coprocessor to do transformations instead of storing precomputed tiles. Anything you see on screen is still limited by the constraints of the underlying tile hardware. So technically anything you can do with coprocessor, you could do without, though it may be not be feasible due to memory constraints (addressing capability or ROM cost).
Well, the SNES does have a highcolor bitmap mode that doesn't rely on the tilemap, but it is theoretically too slow to be useful for any practical gaming uses. However, I believe I've seen some demos that use h-DMA in conjunction with this bitmap mode to draw directly onto the screen without the tile map. In any case, yes, while it's theoretically possible for an extremely large amount of memory could hold every possible permutation of a sprite, you're going to run into problems of addressing and, if the game uses any sort of compression to get this data into the theoretical amount of memory needed to hold all these possible transformations, loading times (ala street fighter alpha 2). So, I mean, you're not wrong, but it's much more feasible to do things the way they were done in Yoshi's Island, using the SFX2 to deform the sprites. Pier Solar for the Genesis works the way you're describing for the mode 7 effect, though.
Both consoles (and the Amiga 500/1200 and N64) used cheap hardware and not very much RAM to keep down costs. Look at the Sharp X68000 or the Colour Nextcube to see what overpriced hardware was capable at that time. The secret behind the SuperFX is nintendo paid a lot to Argonaut for "Next-gen graphics" and the IC is just a reprogrammed standard DSP like the "Math co-processor" in Pilot Wings.
Unless I'm horribly mistaken the SuperFX was also in development for PCs. At its heart it contains a floating point processor, and like any coprocessor you'd feed it instructions to perform and offload the results when done. It had its own ram to operate in too. Sort of a mutt by modern standards, but good at what it did at the time. I'd imagine Nintendo dumped a lot of money into Argonaut to pioneer tech they planned on using with the N64, then stuff happened.
I'm pretty sure Argonaut pitched it to Nintendo. Also floating point? What does the SNES need with floating point? The SuperFX is a RISC microcontroller, probably running at approx 10.5 MIPs (21 optionally for the SFX2). Its "power" is that it can independently access the cart's SRAM (and render to it), then the SNES can DMA from the SRAM to VRAM.
Floating point precision is extremely important when dealing with 3D math. Which is primarily what the SFX chip was used for. Games like Star Fox used the SFX as a math co-processor. At best, a stock SNES would have to resort to inaccurate look-up tables of pre-calculated values because it laked a FPU.
