the PlayStation 1 and Nintendo 64 are both beloved consoles of the fifth generation they were extremely different and I'd like to compare them for fun if you only learned about retro games over the Internet you'd expect that the Nintendo 64 won this generation but that's clearly not the case so let's look over why these consoles turned out the way they did and at the end I'll score each console to see which one I think came out on top but first history time Sony entered the console business by making the super Nintendo's sound chip then they began working on a CD version of the SNES which would have been similar to the mega CD it was going to be called the Nintendo PlayStation though G2 arguments over licensing Nintendo parted with Phillips and made the cdii which gave us many funny and very bad games but Tony was mad and wanted Revenge they decided to focus on 3D graphics and launched the PlayStation in late 1994 in Japan in September of 1995 in America and Europe and in November in Australia the Nintendo 64 launched roughly a year later in June 1996 in Japan in September of 1996 in America and in March 1997 in Europe and Australia 3D gaming was the hot new thing and both these consoles were pretty capable of it but how capable let's go over the hardware now so we can understand why these two consoles are different how they're different at a all lower level the PS1 CPU was a myips r351 base CPU its main core was only capable of 30 mips of computing power so Sony added a GTE the geometry transformation unit was a course specifically designed to work with 3D graphics and environments and it could work with them at 66 mips of power the CPU also had an M deck unit which could decompress 320x 240 mjpeg videos without clogging up the main CPU of data the CPU was connected to 2 MB of EO Ram which was optimized for low latency the PS1 CPU famously lacked a floating Point Unit which meant that it needed to work with fixed Point arithmetic but that didn't cause any of the wobble or Texture Waring issues the PlayStation 1 is known for the GPU was actually responsible for that the PS1 GPU could basically only draw triangles though routines existed that let you translate Sprites into triangles the GPU could not work decimal numbers which is why the PlayStation 1 graphics wobbled quite a bit to draw textures it used a fine texture mapping which meant that it didn't consider the depth of a texture when drawing it basically drawing it as if it was always directly facing the screen it also had no zbuffer meaning that it didn't really know what object was in front of what other object and that was on the CPU to sort out it basically needed to sort the polygons in the correct order and send them to the GPU correctly finally the PlayStation 1's GPU had a texture cache of 2 Koby but it could load in larger Textures in multiple Cycles the ps1's textures and Screen did not use filtering so the PlayStation 1's video output and textures were sharp but a little B Jagged the GPU was connected to 1 MGB of SG Ram which was not only optimized for graphics but also dual ported which meant that multiple devices could read and write to it at the same time this would mean that for instance the M deck could decode and send mjpeg frames to the GPU while the GPU was drawing the previous frame to the screen all of this could be done without the cpu's help thanks to the direct memory Access Controller which the CD ROM M deck GPU and spu had access to audio wise the ps1's spu was a very Advanced sound engine it had 24 channels that could play 80 PCM samples which could be stored in the 512 Koby of DRM you could also do tons of things to modify how the output sound so you could have a pretty solid MIDI controller and you can also stream music directly from the CD the CD itself was a 2X speed unit so it could transfer data at 2.4 megabits or 300 Koby per second each disc could store 650 MB of data now let's deal with the Nintendo 64 the Nintendo 64 CPU was an NEC VR 4300 capable of 125 mips quite a lot isn't it it's supposedly a 64-bit CPU but in reality the 64-bit operations were unnecessary and almost never used the CPU did have an FPU unit in it though which meant it could handle floating Point units the GPU on the Nintendo 64 had two parts of it the reality signal co-processor consisted of a cutdown r4000 CPU that lacked any actual general purpose functions it had a vector code processor that performed Sim tasks and it basically did a similar thing as the GTE in the PlayStation 1 though with some expanded function that we'll get into later it also had an exray unit that did dma and controlled the RDP the RSP was special because it had 4 kiloby of instruction and 4 KOB of data c meaning that it was not hardwired and inserted could be programmed developers today are still optimizing the micro code to get the most out of this nearly 30-year-old console the RDP reality display processor was controlled by the same unit that did the dma in the RSP it just drew things to the screen with some pretty Advanced features for the time a zbuffer MIP mapping perspect effective correct texture mapping and bil linear filtering which made everything look blurry and smooth the texture case was 4 kiloby which was twice as much as a PlayStation 1's however it could not read a texture in more than one cycle which meant you needed to limit texture sizes to 4 KOB Ram wise the Nintendo 64 had depending on if you had the expansion back and not 4.5 or 99 MB of data though the final 512k or 1 MB were only accessible by the GPU which is why its Ram is commonly stated as 4 megabytes the CPU could not access the ram by itself it had to access it by the GPU the ram was actually Rd Ram which was connected serially and because of that the latency would actually increase when the expansion pack was plugged in which is why it often lowered frame rates when used audio wise the Nintendo 64 didn't have a dedicated sound chip the CPU would load sound data into the RAM and send it to the RS P which then played The Sounds in a midi format the cartridges themselves could do either 5 MB or 40 megabits per second and the cartridge size varied between 4 MGB up to 64 MGB later in the console's life but what does this actually mean let's talk about both what's going on in the background and how the average user would see it now the Nintendo 64 should be far faster than the PlayStation one on paper but on average both consoles could push around a 100,000 triangles per second or around 3,300 triangles per frame in a 30 FPS game this meant that often PlayStation 1 games and Nintendo 64 games would look quite similar but the Nintendo 64 ones were blurrier with worst looking textures and worse sound due to the necessary compression to make them fit onto the cartridges while on the other hand PlayStation 1 games had some accuracy losses with the textures now let's let's talk about the differences between cartridges and CDs before we talk about the largest difference we have to go over the data transfer rate the Nintendo 64's cartridge was too slow to read data off of it directly data needed to be copied into RAM and then ran from there eliminating the main benefit cartridges used to have while both consoles could utilize data streaming the Nintendo 64's small cartridge spaces meant that often there wasn't that much to stream speaking of streaming the PlayStation 1's 80 PCM impression meant that only 44 out of a theoretical 300 Koby per second needed to be used to stream music directly off the CD this would leave us with around 256 Koby of Maximum bandwidth for other things now consider that we have around half of a ram vam and audio RAM used for the game frame buffer and sound effects we would need to load in around 1.7 to 1.8 mbes of data during load screens this would mean that during a loading screen we could often be sitting there and waiting for about 8 seconds the extra bandwidth that I mentioned earlier though could be used to load data on the Fly instead of in a loading screen for instance Crash Bandicoot can use a level that's around 30 MB in total size by just loading and unloading it in chunks this couldn't be done on the Nintendo 64 for a couple reasons the largest one being that because of the small cartrid sizes there wouldn't really be that much data to load and unload I mean two of those crash levels would fill up the largest cartridge on the Nintendo 64 now that we made it clear that cartridges only really hurt the console if we'd be honest we have to consider the cost of these games the average Nintendo 64 game could cost 60 70 or even $80 because of the cost of cartridge making more in this later meanwhile many PS1 games cost 50 40 30 even $20 that meant that you could either Buy turck for $80 a Final Fantasy 7 and Resident Evil for $90 a sub 8 Hour FPS with clunky controls versus a 40-hour critically claimed RPG and also a critically claimed 15-hour survival horror game in short you'd be getting your money's worth on the PlayStation 1 especially when these two systems often sold for the same pric as retailers though some Nintendo 64s did come with games packaged in let's quickly go with the controllers the PlayStation had two controllers the original one was basically an Asus controller with a better d-pad and an extra set of shoulder buttons this was because the extra shoulder buttons would be helpful in 3D games then Nintendo came in and built a what the controller they took the NES controller added an analog stick and a z button in the middle of it and then they split the X and Y into 4 C buttons we also don't have a selected button any more and we can't access all three parts of the controller at once and the stick also sucks you'd basically have one less button than on the sanded PS1 controller because instead of having 10 buttons and your d-pad you had a joystick and nine buttons then in 1997 the dual shock was made it included Rumble two whole joysticks that actually felt good to use you could click down on the sticks and every other controller ever made afterwards basically copied this one except the weote memory card wise both systems use memory cards though a lot of Nintendo 64 games could also saf to the cartridge though many early ones needed these controller packs a 128 KOB PS1 memory card cost about 20 bucks a new and used flash memory while a 32 KOB controller pack costs around the same but it used s Ram instead of flash memory meaning that it needed constant battery power in order for you to not lose your save data but enough about the theoretical stuff let's talk about the games on the Nintendo 64 people mostly talk about Mario Zelda dony Kong and banjo then other games like golden ey perfect dark conquer Pokémon Stadium Star Fox maybe churck fzero Yoshi story Kirby 64 Doom 64 or a couple other ones get some mentions but not as much as the main few titles on the PlayStation front Spyro and crash are often seen as the faces of the PlayStation 1 and while they were very popular the truth is that the PlayStation had so many games it's really hard to list all of the icons of the PlayStation Final Fantasy Gran Turismo Tekken Spyro and crash Dragon Quest Tomb Raider driver Dino Crisis Resident Evil parasite needs for speed rid racer Arc the Lad the legend of Dron siphon filter Twisted Metal Xeno gaze you could go on forever and these are just from the best sellers list there's far more keep in mind the PlayStation sold 960 million games well the Nintendo 64 only sold 225 million this was not only because the PlayStation 1 sold 102 million versus the Nintendo 64's 33 million but because the average Nintendo 64 owner only really had 6 to seven games while the average PlayStation 1 owner had around 9 to 10 this this was of course due to the higher cost of owning new games on the Nintendo 64 and speaking of game counts the entire Nintendo 64 Library sold as much as the top 50 PS1 games combined and the total PS1 game amount is around 4,000 the Nintendo 64s is only 388 if we would take the top 50 best sellers on the Nintendo 64 that would equate around 134 million copies and this this is also something important to consider both of the best sellers list that I've been using only showed games that have sold 1 million units or more meaning that while the PlayStation 1 bestsellers contain about 3% of the library and 24% of the game sold the Nintendo 64 list contains 12% of the library with 60% of the game sold this shows how topheavy the already small Nintendo 64 game library is if we'd exclude the top sellers on the Nintendo 64 the remaining 339 games would get around 91 million sales or an average of 260,000 sales per game meanwhile on the PlayStation 1 the remaining 3,880 games would get the remaining 735 million sales or 190,000 per game of course averages mean that basically all games sold more or less with the average being that at average the reason why so many more games came to the PlayStation one was because the development costs were far cheaper according to a famitsu published table from 2001 a ps1's average development costs again average meaning some cost more some cost less with the development and everything being included were around $18,000 while on the Nintendo 64 they were around $540,000 but why according to a guy who had a Nintendo 64 contract in the 9s for the developers on the Nintendo 64 you'd only earn around 6 to seven bucks per profit per cartridge you sold meaning that the costs per cartridge were far higher meanwhile on the PlayStation 1 those profits could rise up to $27 per game this is why developers and Publishers hated Nintendo and wanted to move to Sony Nintendo also forc you to buy at least 15,000 copies of the game for $150,000 so you didn't up spending a large amount of game budget making not that many copies of the game of course those development costs are average and the first party Nintendo games didn't take royalties from anyone else because they owned the factory they were being made in this is also why first party games were often cheaper and therefore far more popular that and then being pins basically to break even a Nintendo 64 developer needed to sell between 7,000 and 9,000 copies at either ad80 or $60 meanwhile a PlayStation 1 developer would either need to sell $3,600 copies at $50 4,500 copies at $406,000 copies at $30 or $9,000 copies at $20 we also need to consider the launch titles that these systems had the Nintendo 64 launched on the 29th of September of 1996 and it came with Super Mario 64 and pilot wi 64 however the 1 launched on the 99th of September of 1995 and came with far more games Ace Combat Kik the Raiden project Rayman Ridge Racer Total Eclipse Turbo ESPN extreme games NBA Jam tournament Edition power serve 3D battle arena Tashan Street Fighter the movie and zero divide a ton of games are sure and while not all of them were brilliant you still had far more Choice than the ones of Nintendo 64's launch but also consider that the Nintendo 64 came out far later and a ton of PS1 games came out between the launch of the PS1 and the Nintendo 64 so which ones were they or they were a lot of them here are some of the more notable ones PGA 296 offw Interceptor extreme cyber speed cyber sled Mortal Kombat 3 XCOM UFO defense jumping flash Doom lemming 3D Nova storm Wipeout Twisted Metal Road Rash high octane Jupiter strike gex Firestorm Thunder Hulk 2 Street Fighter Alpha assault rigs D alien Trilogy Crazy Ivan descent Resident Evil Romance of the Three Kingdoms Need for Speed starblade Alpha battle arena to shinon 2 skeleton Warriors Top Gun Persona shell shockk a train epidemic Sim City 2000 star fighter jumping Flash 2 beyond the Beyond and on September 9th Crash Bandicoot so you could see the Nintendo 64 had quite a challenge to go up against so how did the console sales go in America by the end of April of 1997 so in s months the Nintendo 64 sold 2 million units the PlayStation 1 at this point sold 3.5 million uh but it sold 1.5 million more units right well yeah but in 19 months but in America by the end of 1998 the Nintendo 64 sold 7 million while the PlayStation 1 sold 11.8 million globally the Nintendo 64 sold 5.8 Million by April 19 97 15.2 Million by April of 1998 23 million by April of 1999 and 29.5 Million by the April of the year 2000 by the time the GameCube released the Nintendo 64 was dead and achieved its final figure of 32.93 million the PlayStation sold 4.3 million units by April of 1996 13.5 Million by April 1997 3283 million by April of 1998 and at this point it basically sold the same amount as the Nintendo 64 did during its entire life but it kept selling 5453 Million by April 1999 72.9 3 million by April of 2000 and at this point the PS2 was releasing but that didn't stop the PS1 8223 Million by April of 2001 and by April of 2005 it sold his grand total on of 10253 units during 2002 it sold about as many units as the Nintendo 64 did between 1998 and99 and it was competing with the PS2 an extra reason why the Nintendo 64 crash and burned was the giant software drought by the end of 1996 there were only a total of eight games released for the Nintendo 64 the PS1 on the other hand had an ocean of games released for it by this point so we talked about the consoles the grapple capabilities that the games on them had the sales of the consoles the sales of the games the controllers let's talk about the games themselves so let's go over 20 of the very highly rated Nintendo 64 and PS1 games to see the game quality and game variety on the Nintendo 64 we had Mario 64 Ocarina of Time maor's mask Benjo and kazui Perfect Dark Star Fox 64 Paper Mario Mario Super Smash Bros golden I f0x Mario Party 3 Diddy Kong Racing Mario Kart 64 1080 snowboarding banjo Tui Donkey Kong 64 Pokémon Stadium 2 tck space station Silicon Valley and Yoshi story on the PlayStation 1 we had Crash Bandicoot Metal Gear Solid Castlevania Symphony of the Night final fanty 7 Resident Evil 2 Grand Turismo Silent Hill Wipeout Spyro the Dragon Twisted Metal 2 driver you are the Wheelman Time Crisis Tomb Raider vagrant story Final Fantasy Tactics Ridge Racer Tye 4 a Honda Final Fantasy 8 doom and siphon filter both libraries had quite a few high quality games especially the PlayStation 1 but there's a very large difference between the genres these games were the Nintendo 64 only really had two main genre of games 3D Platformers and action adventure games it also had some fighting games nobody talked about excluding Smash Bros some firstperson Shooters too but the majority of the library uh around half of the US Library consisted of racing and sports games and most of them were Dreadful the PlayStation 1 had basically every genre known to man on it it still had tons of action adventure games and 3D platforms sh and also loads of sports and racing games but the racing games could have far more depth due to the PlayStation 1 CDs RPGs were huge on the console tons of different types of RPGs hell even racing RPGs there were also simulation games vehicular combat FPS strategy even though the PS1 maybe wasn't the best choice for a strategy game fighting games rail shooter light Gun Game survival horror I could go on forever it had basically everything and the reason why is pretty simple PlayStation 1 games came on discs and Nintendo City 4 games came on cartridges the storage difference between these two is massive the average Nintendo 64 cartridge could be anywhere between 4 to 64 mbes but the average is only 24 this is because the larger cartridges are always more expensive meanwhile a four disk dual game would have 2.6 GB of data and you could make it for roughly the same price as a single six 50 megab game more importantly when you were buying the game as a consumer a single disc game was the same price as a four pack with such a gigantic amount comparably of storage space it was far easier to store larger levels more music textures game mechanics story elements it's insane Resident Evil 2 was ped to a 64 MB cartridge when for reference Mario 64 was 8 MB banjo Tui Donkey Kong 64 turo Zelda and the Mario Party games were 32 megab the only real 64 megab games were Resident Evil 2 Pokémon Stadium 2 and Conquer bad F day and those basically came out at the tail end of the console's life you could fit 10 of the largest Nintendo 64 games on a single PS1 in short the PS1 and Nintendo 64 were very similar in terms of practical power output during the console's lives and while the Nintendo 34 Graphics were blurrier they were also more accurate than the ones in the PlayStation 1 although overall the PS1 had far better audio a better controller cheaper Games Far More content a far larger gameplay variety due to its gigantic Library Nintendo had some good first party games sure but they were often far shorter than Sony's offerings when we look at the third party offerings theno had almost nothing well the PlayStation had too many games to list there's a reason why it sold as much as it did though if you spend a lot of your time online you see people talking about Nintendo 64 games far more and the reason why is simple a lot of people are interested in gaming because of YouTube it's one of the largest platforms on Earth and a lot of YouTubers seem to be Nintendo fans especially Retro Game YouTubers the Nintendo 64 retro scene really started up around the early 2010s and if you own the Nintendo 64 as a child in the '90s you you'd be turning 20 sometime in the early 2010s far more Nintendo owners were families with children while a lot of PlayStation owners were teenagers and adults and because of that the picture a lot of people have of the fifth console generation is pretty skewed because these YouTubers played all ages games of children many of the more serious or deeper games released in the previous console generation are often talked about far less than the child- friendly ones and I think that's kind of sad because a lot of these other games also deserve a pretty good mention as they're really good games but that's a discussion for later so how do these consoles compare let's start with the capabilities of these two systems the Nintendo 64 is definitely more powerful with Homebrew developers pushing it far past what it could do in the '90s so the Nintendo 64 was more powerful in paper and had anywhere between a megab to 5 megab more of main system memory but in practice both consoles were pretty similar during the '90s due to the Nintendo 64's High latency RAM on the other hand the PlayStation had far better sound far better textures it could store far more data so I think it's fair to give the Nintendo 64 a point for the peak raw power and maximum system memory while the PlayStation gets a point for the sound textures and discs controller and memory card wise the Nintendo 64 solution was clunky and fully thought out the PlayStation controller was far more comfortable to use with modern feeling features far better memory cards and sticks that don't grind themselves into pieces or cut into your thumbs the PlayStation gets a point here first party games wise while the Nintendo 64 had a lot of very memorable games the PlayStation 1 had far more of them I can't even list all of them but in short the first party PS1 games had far more gameplay variety than the Nintendo 64 ones while the Nintendo 64 ones are talked about far more in comparison to their PlayStation counterparts so I think it's fair to give each console one point here as well the Nintendo 64 for memorability and the PlayStation 4 variety third party-wise the Nintendo 64 was a desert when it compared to the absurdly large library of PS1 games 388 versus over 4,000 the PS1 gets a point here without question crossplatform games are an interesting extra side note as well the Nintendo 64 games would often have slightly longer draw distances but would also come with worse audio worse textures and sometimes some content would need to be cut in order to fit on the cartridge overall more multiplatform games ended up looking better on the PlayStation 1 than they did on the Nintendo 64 so the PS1 gets a point here as well price-wise the Nintendo 64 cost 200 on releasee while the PS1 cost 300 however before the Nintendo 64 even came out the PlayStation 1's price dropped with $200 by mid 1997 both consoles cost $150 and later on their prices dropped even further to$ 130 and eventually to $100 so they're even here with their games though the PlayStation 1 had far cheaper games as stated earlier and therefore is awarded an extra point so the Nintendo 64 has two points the PlayStation one has six it really does make sense and why it outsold the Nintendo 64 by so much and why it sold so many more games I also prefer it personally but that preference did not affect how I rated these two consoles of course as said before because more people played the Nintendo 64 as children more people have fun memories and that's always fair so while obviously Some people prefer the Nintendo 64 or the PlayStation won because they were nostalgic for console a over console B I really do think that if we objectively looked at it the PlayStation one definitely won it is simply because it had more games it was better you know the drill anyways I'll see you next time when I have more things to show you goodbye [Music] get [Music]
