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is perfect tense and past tense the same in german?

Yes, kind of. There’s different forms of the past tense, the perfect (Plusquamperfekt) and imperfect (Präteritum).

The perfect past tense is made up of person + auxiliary verb (conjugated haben or sein) and the past participle. For example, I stayed at home all day: “ich bin (aux. verb - sein conjugates to bin with ich) den ganzen Tag zu Hause geblieben (past participle of bleiben) or I played football: ich habe Fußball gespielt.

The imperfect tense is not as common in spoken language but still important. Some phrases always use the imperfect tense e.g. “es war gut”. That is the imperfect tense with “war” (was) being the conjugated form of sein. Sein is mostly used in the imperfect tense but haben is sometimes e.g. “wir hatten keine Probleme mit dem Hausaufgaben”.

The more you speak and learn German the more you’ll get used to using both forms of past tense, they’re useful in different situations.