Didn't the PSX use MPEG for videos? They were tons of these ingame...
Also, PAL resolutions for instance were a bit like SVGA, but the PSX did most of games at 320x240, as scaling them on fuzzy CRT's gave them almost a free antialiasing. 320x240 was easier to render on couch/bed TV's far away than Unreal or Quake 2 based games at 640x480.
The PSX pushed tons of triangles? At 320x240 on my 14" Nokia TV, they could look astounding, not so much on a PC desktop having to be rendered into a better quality CRT for PC's where 320x240 would look so-so.
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.
Also, PAL resolutions for instance were a bit like SVGA, but the PSX did most of games at 320x240, as scaling them on fuzzy CRT's gave them almost a free antialiasing. 320x240 was easier to render on couch/bed TV's far away than Unreal or Quake 2 based games at 640x480.
The PSX pushed tons of triangles? At 320x240 on my 14" Nokia TV, they could look astounding, not so much on a PC desktop having to be rendered into a better quality CRT for PC's where 320x240 would look so-so.