Sorry that "CPU's are all it has" comment made it easy to misunderstand, yeah the 32X has a VDP chip, which is what gives it the 32 thousand color palette and double buffered framebuffer that it uses to composite the image. What I was saying was the 32X doesn't have any hardware acceleration at all. All the 3D and sprite scaling have to be done in software driven entirely by the CPU.
On a hardware accelerated system the GPU will handle the sprites/tiles or polygons almost entirely independently from the rest of the system while the CPU is mostly off doing its own thing running the game code, the two just need to check with each other periodically to make sure they know what to do. On the 32X the CPUs need to map out everything on the screen, they do all the calculations and plot pixels into the framebuffer directly and then the VDP just renders that framebuffer out to the screen.
The biggest problem this poses to the console compared to something like the Jaguar is the complete lack of blitter functionality. This makes it extremely difficult for the 32X to move background tiles around the screen quickly which is why most of the games rely on the Genesis to handle the backgrounds, and the ones that don't like Pitfall move super choppy at like 20fps. The problem with this is that the Genesis can only do 64 simultaneous colors in most scenarios so while you will get some color bump since the 32X is handling the sprites and the Genesis can dedicate the full 64 to the background layers it's a far cry from the "32 thousand colors" the 32X supports.
On a hardware accelerated system the GPU will handle the sprites/tiles or polygons almost entirely independently from the rest of the system while the CPU is mostly off doing its own thing running the game code, the two just need to check with each other periodically to make sure they know what to do. On the 32X the CPUs need to map out everything on the screen, they do all the calculations and plot pixels into the framebuffer directly and then the VDP just renders that framebuffer out to the screen.
The biggest problem this poses to the console compared to something like the Jaguar is the complete lack of blitter functionality. This makes it extremely difficult for the 32X to move background tiles around the screen quickly which is why most of the games rely on the Genesis to handle the backgrounds, and the ones that don't like Pitfall move super choppy at like 20fps. The problem with this is that the Genesis can only do 64 simultaneous colors in most scenarios so while you will get some color bump since the 32X is handling the sprites and the Genesis can dedicate the full 64 to the background layers it's a far cry from the "32 thousand colors" the 32X supports.
Last edited:
