Another $199 Console

"Hardware Z-buffering—that truly is a killer feature." An engineer marked it emphatically in his notebook. "Handling polygon sorting on the Jupiter consumes a massive amount of CPU resources. They solved it directly with hardware."

Masayuki Uemura's voice echoed through the hall.

"Anti-aliasing is also native to the hardware," Masayuki Uemura continued. "The edges of objects will be extremely smooth, no longer jagged like pixelated mosaics. What we offer is true 3D environment rendering. The lighting, shadow, and fog effects have all reached workstation-level standards."

He spoke with great technical expertise, displaying the N64's advantages in polygon generation and visual effects to the fullest.

Yet the audience's reactions varied.

The technically knowledgeable people quickly spotted the issue.

"He's avoiding the heavy and dwelling on the light," a Sega engineer said to his companion. "Its capabilities really are powerful—far beyond both the Jupitr and the PlayStation. But he hasn't said a word about storage capacity."

His companion nodded.

"Cartridges currently max out at just sixty-four megabytes. Discs hold six hundred megabytes." His companion lowered his voice. "No matter how powerful the hardware is, without enough storage space for high-quality textures and audio data, those polygons can only be covered in solid colors or low-resolution textures. He knows this is their biggest shortcoming, so he simply won't mention it."

Masayuki Uemura indeed did not waste many words on the capacity issue.

He placed all the emphasis on the processing power of the custom chips and the graphical effects.

"The N64's capabilities are sufficient to support developers in building the most complex 3D game worlds." Masayuki Uemura offered a conclusion. "As for how games will actually look and perform, there will be a more intuitive demonstration shortly."

He paused, clasping his hands before him.

The entire hall fell silent.

Even the photographers stopped pressing