Doom speed on various consoles

This is more like a technical question.

Why Doom is so slow on 3DO?

Another slow version is Saturn but is kinda faster than 3DO.
Saturn and 3DO had similar logic for GPU. Instead of giving a full triangle rasterizer and transformation functionality like PS1, they just have a quad rasterizer that can be used either for 2D sprites or 3D polygons if you will use the CPU to code everything else. 3DO just is a better version of this than the Saturn also supporting gouraud and alpha blending. Needless to say, Doom is just column renderer, so maybe for all consoles maybe it was a pain to use the GPU (but PS1 does it, how?) and change the core rendering mechanism (and also add and move tons of vertices in the maps, because only Quads) to use the console hardware efficiently.

My guess is they just made a crude port of the software renderer engine of Doom for these consoles? Since 3DO CPU is 12.6mhz and Saturn is 28.5mhz, it would make sense in this case, Saturn even if still slow seems 2 to 2.5x times faster than 3DO. I am wondering what PS1 does? What if you don't go for polygons (convert wall to 2 triangle or 1 quad, instead of rendering individual columns), but use 1 pixel width quads to draw those columns, or maybe it would break if vertices of the quads where one upon the other and had to go 2 pixel width columns instead? Or maybe you couldn't throw so many small/wide quads and get away easilly?

What's your theory?

Those lil' hamsters in the machines get really tired out- I guess one console has more hamsters than the other consoles.
It also depends on the species of hamster- some can be very strong whilst others not so suitable for running and are better at climbing.

The other factors could relate to their coats too- a black coat would absorb heat differently that a different colour, therefor heat distribution would be effected different as well. Tried to run a PC on incorrect hamsters? Me neither.

Optimus said:
[BMy guess is they just made a crude port of the software renderer engine of Doom for these consoles?[/B]

Pretty much, yeah. 32X and Saturn actually have pretty similar underlying hardware, while the 3DO itself wasn't much better (12.5 MHz ARM CPU as main....heh), if you took away away their GPUs.

The only Doom ports of their time that had a proper GPU programming were the PSX and N64 one, all others were more or less just a port of the software engine, which OFC didn't work out that well, considering the CPUs were 386/lowly 486 level.

The Jaguar one was probably an in-between situation (renderer partially rewritten for its custom "Tom" graphics chip, but the main CPU was just an ordinary 68000!). Perhaps the 3DO also had some form of porting to its custom chips, but Doom is an engine which doesn't map well to polygon-based acceleration, without a major rewrite (which is what the N64/PSX had).

Simply put, they didn't have the computrons to run Doom at full speed like a PC ;-) Doom on a PC needed a combination (to be enjoyable of at least 50 MIPS (so that would be a 486 DX/50 or DX2/66) and 8 MB of addressable RAM, if you didn't want to go with minimum specs.

None of those consoles had even 4 MB of addressable RAM space (they might have, at best, 2 MB RAM + separate video/audio RAM, or >=4 MB addressable combined ROM+RAM space). No ability to use caching/dynamic loading from hard disk, either.

I recently read they were planning to make a much better version of Doom for 3DO, but due to development hell for 2 years, they just scrapped it and made a fast port in much fewer time. It's a pity because the music is amazing, imagine if all the rest were great too, like an enhancement of original Doom (like what the PS1 sort of did)

But yeah, it's both CPU and GPU bound, that's why even the PS1 version in later more detailed levels it starts getting too choppy.

I read somewhere that Jaguar doom was 15fps to my surprise. Didn't noticed it at first (trying it for the first time on the Jaguar) but at least it's a stable 15fps.