Why do some psp games have no depth buffer?

[cavencruiser]

I was wondering why some games like the tomb raiders on the psp have no depth buffer, was this some kind of hardware constraint like the n64, or is this just stupidity on the developers side? feel free to let me know why.

 

[Trimesh]

Most likely because they were ported from systems that had no Z-buffer and hence the code already had some other method to control polygon visibility - if it worked and provided adequate performance there would be no reason to change it.

 

[pato]

Made me recall the PSP architecture was closer to PS1 than PS2.

 

[cavencruiser]

I was wondering why some games like the tomb raiders on the psp have no depth buffer, was this some kind of hardware constraint like the n64, or is this just stupidity on the developers side? feel free to let me know why.

but the ps2 does have a zbuffer... Strange.. Come to think of it, does the psp even have hardware support for skinning or weighting?

 

[Ioncannon]

Didn't Tomb Raider come out for Saturn first? Did the Saturn have a depth buffer?

 

[Trimesh]

Didn't Tomb Raider come out for Saturn first? Did the Saturn have a depth buffer?

No - it just rendered primitives in the order they were supplied. SGL had support for maintaining Z-sorted display lists so you could add them in any order and they would be rendered from back to front. The PS1 used basically the same approach.

 

[FamilyGuy]

Most likely because they were ported from systems that had no Z-buffer and hence the code already had some other method to control polygon visibility - if it worked and provided adequate performance there would be no reason to change it.

I see you've met¹ professional programmers...

¹ Or are, but I was under the impression that you were more of an electrical engineer.

 

[Trimesh]

I see you've met¹ professional programmers...

¹ Or are, but I was under the impression that you were more of an electrical engineer.

Yeah, I'm an EE, but I have done some bits of software development. I long ago came to the conclusion that if it ain't broke don't fix it.

 

[reifert]

Trimesh is right

Enabling the depth buffer - at best, the output might look different from the other ports, and in the worst case, it might expose bugs in the models or game engine.