Comment by rasz

Some PSX games did push a lot of triangles to the screen, but its not even about that. GTE is able to brute force process a LOT of geometry per frame. https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/geometrytransformationengineg... Think of GTE as T&L coprocessor, even wiki uses it as an example of early hardware T&L https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transform,_clipping,_and_light...

This is why Pentium 100 could not pull of Playstation 1 games with just accelerated rasterizer like 3Dfx. Multiplying matrices is expensive, you either get specialized hardware to do it or hire Carmack and Abrash to use every trick in the book avoiding as much computation as possible. Lowering resolution does nothing, still have to cull, rotate scale, perspective correct and light same amount of geometry per frame.