Nintendo's Super FX chip is the super addon for the Super Nintendo that gives it sort of Super 3D powers. An extra chip built into the cartridge of some games that, well, it works a lot differently than modern GPUs but does the same job more or less, processing 3D graphics only.

A handful of games ever used it, Stunt Race FX being one of them. An overlooked part of Nintendo's history for sure, but also of course the much better known Star Fox and the legendary Star Fox 2. It is though possible to do 3D on the Super NES without the Super FX.

And I'm going to take a look at the few, the really very few, Super NES games that attempted to do just that. Yeah, I know DS Retro has a video on this, but I'm taking a slightly different tack here. I'm not looking at any sort of 3D-sty graphics.

But in detail, it's purely true polygon-based 3D. The games that have a good try at these sorts of graphics without the massive Super FX processing boost, and I think where we should start is Steel Talons. An ambitious port of the sophisticated arcade game from Atari, a

pioneering helicopter sim with its arcade machine guts based on Atari's earlier Hard Drivin'. The Super NES version is, well, it's a bit of a step down. Everything has been degraded, especially the frame rate. I will say though that it plays way better than it

looks. It's actually quite a fun game. The mechanics have been tuned to the low performance, making it more playable than its very jerky graphics suggest. Undeniably though, it does have a very low frame rate, around five or six frames per second at best. So if you're making a

A game like this, though, why would you leave out the Super FX chip if it can do so much better with these sorts of graphics? Well, price is the answer. The Super FX chip adds costs to the final game on the shelf, costs to the developer, costs to everyone apart from Nintendo, who manufacture the cartridges. No surprise that publishers might want to avoid that if they could.

The other question is why is the Super NES so bad at 3D on its own? Other 16-bit systems could do much better. Well, you might have heard that the Super NES has a slow processor, and yes it does, but there is way more to it than that. The SNES was built for 2D games, and it is really good at that. Take a game like Konami's classic Contra 3, it looks superb. There's loads of action and most of the time it

holds a pretty solid 60 frames per second. A bit of slowdown here and there, but a game that works really well with the Super NES's tile-based graphics. If we look into the graphics memory as the game is running with an emulator debug tool, we can see the 8x8 pixel blocks

that make up all the graphics on the screen. A relatively small number of reusable elements that everything is drawn with. All of those 60 frames per second are made by arranging these fixed elements like a mosaic, and most of the time the only thing that changes from

one frame to the next is the layout of these tiles. Some graphics are loaded in as the game is running, and when a new level starts, but these are just more static elements that are stored in the game's ROM file. If we go back to Steel Talons and look into the memory here, yes

we can see that the game is using a very similar approach. The game is constantly drawing a relatively small number of elements, but by using the hardware efficiently, it can achieve a very smooth and detailed look.

there are some of those fixed tile graphics that are used to draw the user interface and the distant background, but the main play field, the 3D graphics, they aren't drawn this way. For every new frame of 3D graphics, you need a whole new set of tiles to draw them. These

can't just be loaded in from the ROM either; there's just too many combinations of shapes for that to work. Instead, they are drawn by a 3D graphics rendering algorithm, a complex process that takes a while. If we take a look deep into the Super NES memory, we can

actually see the graphics being constructed bit by bit, literally. This is the RAM where they are freshly minted. To ensure that this game has only moderately crappy graphics as opposed to really crappy graphics, this game uses double buffering. There's two areas where graphics are laid down, one being written

to whilst the other is being copied to the video RAM to be displayed. The first part of this process is the graphics from the last frame being deleted. I'm jumping through this one frame at a time in the emulator. We can see that even that takes two frames to do. Then the

graphics are actually drawn, which can take up another 10 or so frames. Names, other stuff is going on in the background, but, well, it takes time for this scene to be rendered. Even after the graphics are complete here, though, we're not done because now the finished

graphics need to be copied over to the video RAM where the graphics chip can turn them into a TV picture. This is again double buffered, one frame being displayed whilst the other is loaded in, but this process takes another three or four frames to do it. It would be much

easier yeah and faster if the graphics could be drawn straight into the video RAM but that's just not possible on the Super NES it's only at the end of this torturous process that we actually get a new frame to display this is the best

case scenario to there's also a firsters mode in this game which bumps the frame rate even lower adding in a moving horizon and ditching the tile-based mountains more stuff to draw means even more time needed to complete the frame so yeah it's even slower the Super NES

CPU is an unusual one that is probably less powerful than the processors you'd find in other systems of the era absolutely but there is more standing in the way of smooth 3D graphics than that but well that's something I will come back to in a moment steel Talons might

not be the best game on the Super NES but it's not the worst either there's a good candidate for that coming very shortly but I honestly enjoyed playing this way more than I expected there is a hacked version of this game that is altered to run with fast rum chips

giving slightly better performance nothing too exotic it will work on the real hardware but even that doesn't make much difference this that we're looking at now though is overclocked with emulation in a way that you just can't do with real hardware and yet it is much

smoother but this would never be possible on a real console let's move on now to race driving and yeah there's really no way to sugarcoat it if this isn't the worst licensed Super NES game well I don't want to know what is it's

an awful conversion of the sequel to hard driving, so it's of the same pedigree as Steel Talons, but dear God, there's no saving this. It really is terrible. Yes, the Mega Drive version of this game is better. The Game Boy version of this game

is better. It just doesn't work. The view of the track is slimmed down to a narrow strip, like you're viewing this out of a post box. The models are simplified to the point of total abstraction, and even then, I've seen PowerPoint presentations with better frame rates. I

really can't think of any redeeming features that this game has at all. It runs even more slowly than Steel Talons, probably because it has more stuff to draw, and that's really put fines it as a driving game where the jerky motion is

so obvious and distracting. It does, though, help to show how the Super NES is just not that well suited to 3D games and why it's more than just the CPU at fault. No, that's not just by being terrible. Let's take a look at a much

improved, hacked version of this game by Super NES hacker Victor Vella. Yes, this is Race Driving modified to make use of the SA-1 Super NES enhancement chip. What on Earth is that? Well, it's basically the same CPU as the Super NES, but three times

faster, and this isn't just something cooked up for this hack either. It's an official Nintendo thing, and quite a few commercial games used it in the Super NES's commercial lifespan, including the classic Super Mario RPG. And this hack can easily run on the original hardware if

You have the right flash cards, so what this does is offload the code from the original game to the much faster CPU of the SA-1 chip, giving quite a significant performance boost to put it mildly. This is still not a great game at all. It's

more playable now, but all it really does is just help to underline how badly it controls and how bare-bones the whole thing is. Briefly entertaining for the novelty of it, but really not a fun experience long term. And it seems insane that it ever made sense at all to

include a whole new CPU with a game, but well, that was the market at the time. And what it does show is that even with this chip, the 3D performance of the Super NES is limited. This game gets around 20 frames per second pretty solidly, but

that is all. And it wouldn't matter if it's using the SA-1 chip, the Super FX chip, or a Ryzen 9 because the frame rate is bottlenecked by how long it takes to copy data into the video memory for anything to be displayed on the screen.

Graphics data needs to be sent to the video memory so the graphics chip, the PPU, can use it to create the TV signal. There's no way around it. And this process is relatively slow with sprite-based 2D games where most of the time you're just rearranging existing data.

This is fine, but for a 3D game where every new frame needs new data, it creates a tough limit on the final frame rate. This is made worse by the fact that the Super NES CPU is, well, kind of weird and pretty slow in some key respects.

other overheads in the system too ADD problems as well so 3D Graphics just don't work that well on the Super NES. A dedicated chip like the Super FX can overcome some of this; it can add CPU power and set things up so that Graphics

can be loaded in as quickly as is possible, but trying 3D without that extra help is always going to be making the best of a bad job. But actually, there is one game that I think does do that quite well: the Star Trek Starfleet Academy Starship Bridge simulator. A bit

of a mouthful, and I'm not talking about Bridge, the card game, which I do think would somehow be sexier and probably have a broader appeal than what this actually is. A game that puts you in the role of a Starfleet Cadet learning the

ropes on the Starfleet Bridge simulator. Yes, it's a simulator simulator, probably not as well known as the later Star Trek Starfleet Academy for PC and Mac, but for hardcore Trekkies who want to pretend to be pretending to be in a Starship, this

late release is really not a bad game at all, and actually, the 3D looks pretty nice as well. Yes, there is a lot of 2D in this 3D game. The massive Bridge display cuts the actual visible outside view into a very small window, but it does fit

with the theme. This trick didn't save race driving, but it does seem to help here along with the sparse view of virtual virtual deep space, a blank starfield populated mostly by single dot sprites of stars and yes, some quite nice 3D models when you do catch a glimpse of

them this intro screen shows a nice example of what the 3D graphics actually look like without having to go tracking them down in game and yeah not only is it running at a relatively silky 10 or so frames per second we've also got some

lighting too the polygons of the models are flat shaded they're color changing as the ship moves as if they're being lit by a distant light source it looks quite a bit like those 3D Sega arcade games of the time like Virtual Racing and Virtual

Fighter which I'm sure were an inspiration for this game's graphics and the 10 frames per second frame rate honestly puts this pretty close to some of the actual Super F games that came out at the time so not bad at all and

honestly helps to put this well away from being a second tier novelty to a game that can well stand up on its own merits pretty well yes the developers made that life easier by cutting down on the amount of polygons that need to be drawn but there is some clever

programming going on here it takes about six frames worth of time usually to render each frame of 3D graphics here in this game giving the effective frame rate of about 10 frames per second and cutting it down so much can't have been easy the graphics are literally twice as

smooth as the previous two games we've seen and the lighting effects well that is the icing on the cake undoubtedly the Star Fleet Bridge Simulator is the best game of the three we've seen so far then after this well it does become pretty slim pickings for real 3D on the Super

NES without the Super FX, even with the Super FX there isn't that many games, but carrying on with this theme we do have Power Monger, a god game from Bullfrog, headed by Peter Molyneux, you know well known for this sort of thing, and yes it is

real polygon based 3D, you can rotate the view 360 degrees, and it's even got texture mapping, sort of simple repeating patterns mapped to the polygons in screen space. The textures don't move with the polygons like they do with proper texture mapping on later games systems. It's also got

some lighting too, shading the surfaces of the polygons depending on which way they're facing. Very advanced stuff for the unexpanded Super NES, but also very slow too. You might think that that wouldn't matter so much in a game like this, it being slow paced, but well this

is real-time strategy. You do need to keep on top of things and moving around the map quickly gets frustrating, especially when the weather effects kick in, which slows things down even more. This game does support the Super NES Mouse which definitely makes things easier, but it's

just a bit too clunky to be a really good version of this game. I remember having quite a lot of fun with the Amiga version at one time, way back when, which does run much better apparently. The landscape in this was inspired by the game Zarch, also known as Virus, that

appeared on several 16-bit home computers of the time, which runs even more smoothly, but anyway, that's besides the point. So anything else we should look at in the Quest for Super Effects, less 3D? Well, it seems like golf is all that's

left not that I really have anything against golf games at all and I do like the aesthetic of this next game and the very chill music this is true golf Classics Wicked 18 which is well it's not quite as memorable as Neo Turf Masters or any of those other sort of arcade golf games but it's still not bad at all and when this came out in 1993 it was surely very impressive it is definitely genuine real polygonal 3D with more simple flat shading Shadows

you know it does look good the 3D rendering is very slow but well in this case it really doesn't matter it only needs to change the view when you hit a shot or whatever slow is only mildly annoying the way this game is set up it

doesn't even bother trying to double buffer anything it just puts the graphics data directly on the screen which is just fine when your frame rate is so low but that's not all the World of Golf on the Super NES has to offer is for Real blistering golf action there is

from the same company Toft the I think Japan only Pebble Beach no hatto new tournament Edition and this this is supercharged with the SA one chip yes the same as was used to soup up race driving making it I think the only official SA-1 game to accelerate 3D

and I do think this is a polygon based 3D though it's not as obvious as Wicked 18 I think the green is rendered with texture mapped polygons but it's also embellished with software rendered scaled Sprites it looks great for a Super NES game but it's still not very

fast at all, not that it needs to be, but this is nothing like the real-time 3D rendered scenes that systems like the PlayStation were already doing when this came out in 1996. The chill aesthetic definitely works for me again in this game, but now

I think it's time to move on for one last game from the same developer from 1996 again. It's not golf, it's something entirely different. It's Q on par, Q on par does sound like a golf term, doesn't it? But it's not. This actually

began life as a PC game called Endor, a sort of action puzzle game that reminds me a bit of golden age arcade classic Q*bert, or maybe the sequel Q*bert's Cubes. And yeah, it is sort of, kind of, maybe 3D over a classic 2D parallax

backdrop, but the main Cube does actually seem to be real-time rendered. And this might be the best game of the whole bunch that we've seen, but it does feel a bit like cheating. There's so little 3D, there's plenty of other

examples of minor 3D effects on the Super NES like the intro to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but well, listing all those might be stretching the point a bit. And yet, there are loads of games with pseudo 3D of one form or

another, F-Zero, Mario Kart, all the Mode 7 stuff. But well, this isn't about Mode 7, and there's also a very small handful of raycasting games, or raycasting adjacent rendering for the sticklers in the audience. Again, though, this isn't about

that though these games do face the same problem that real 3D stuff does, that is moving graphics data around quickly enough. Jurassic Park uses a clever technique to get around that, but well that really is another video. It's hard to deny that the Super NES was

outclassed by the Mega Drive when it came to 3D, not that the Mega Drive was massively suited to it, but well race driving is much better playable, even close to being fun, dare I say it. And that's not even the best 3D racing game

on the system. Super Bug Challenge is even better. This game is actually genuinely fun and is definitely recommended, but let's not get too sidetracked by that. 16-bit home computers can maybe top even this, though. Yes, despite the Omega 500 and the Atari ST

having basically the same CPU as the Mega Drive, they could do even more impressive 3D sometimes thanks to quite different architecture internally. Shown off well by RoboCop 3 here. So now, definitely time to glide to the end of another video. Thank you so much once

again to all my lovely Patreons, these amazing people here. If you would like to join them, there is a link below. It does help me out an awful lot, honestly. And now I will say thank you for watching and goodbye.

3D Games on the Super Nintendo Without the Super FX Chip

3D Games on the Super Nintendo Without the Super FX Chip