QUOTE(Khatoblepas @ Jul 17 2006, 03:22 PM)

I'm pretty sure you'd HAVE to use the 3D chip to get any speed. And also, to my knowledge the SH4s are pretty beefy processors. WITH floating point - that's probably why they were used as expansion chips, I'd think.
Extremely so; one of my favorite CPU architectures (along with ARM and 680x0

). The SH-4 has an extremely fast 128-bit floating point unit, and I'm positive the 3D hardware was used. Software rendering is slow even on very modern desktop processors. The raw 3D hardware is probably why the performance is so stellar-- the PSX's CPU was an integer-only MIPS unit similar to the one in the PSP, albeit a couple generations back and at a massively lower clockrate. It's also distinctly possible SH-4s have a higher IPC level than ARM920Ts (Instructions per Cycle, actual raw performance per clock tick / Hz).