I didn't know they're actually making a DC game with Spiral Engine (same one that showed off the stencil shadow volumes and Doom 3 assets in a previous post), I thought they're just loading random assets to show off this or that feature, that's neat.
The SM64 port looks like it runs just about perfectly. However, I wish it got a graphical upgrade. Maybe people will do that in the future; we know the DC could easily get a better-looking version of that game running at 60. Maybe comparable with Sunshine for Gamecube.
Speaking of cancelled games getting finished, I'd really like if someone could finish that survival horror game Agatha. The concept sounded very novel and interesting, and the story seems like it'd of been a banger if the game were actually completed. Not like there aren't assets out there to use or build off of.
Esppiral
you wizard!!
Oooh, makes me wonder what a R&C port to Dreamcast would look like
...
This needs to be read over and over again by lotta folks on GAF and YT!
Some people have a weird fetish of treating the DC like an M2 when comparing it to PS2 (and is probably a slight on my part to M2 because it'd of probably been closer to a DC than N64 had it came out; we just don't know much anything about its GPU architecture or at least, I haven't found any documentation on that unfortunately). They just look at some paper specs and go with oft-repeated talking points that they don't even bother checking to see if they're true or not.
Now I'm gonna say something that'll probably ruffle some feathers: out of
all the home consoles released across the 6th and 7th gens, I'd consider the Dreamcast and Xbox 360 as the "smartest", most wholly efficient architectures of the bunch. I'm including things like how forward-thinking they were, how they tackled certain challenges that could've been bottlenecks, price to performance, and influence on succeeding hardware design architectures among other things.
On those metrics, I think it's increasingly difficult to not consider the Dreamcast and Xbox 360 as the cream of the crop for console hardware between 1998 - 2012. Speaking purely home console hardware here tho, not handhelds or anything like that. Though I think GameCube is in close running with those, especially when looking at features of the TEV unit. OG Xbox is complicated, because while it was kind of indicative of the x86 shift consoles would take in the 2010s, its own design is kind of a hodgepodge and not totally elegant. It's part of the reason they wanted to move so quickly on to the 360.
I think the PS2's design was
somewhat forward-thinking in terms of the eDRAM cache (something the 360 would utilize tho for a different purpose and more efficiently), and of course DVD (that was an inevitability tho IMHO). And the VU0 and VU1 units being precursors to an extend for enabling the type of custom graphics programming that GPU shader cores would take up the role of in successive generations. But it lacked a lot of hardware-accelerated features in areas it could've, and relied on tons of multi-passing with lackluster compression (3:1 indexed palette texture compression support only) and heavy immediate mode rendering to achieve its performance. A design philosophy the rest of the industry was kind of starting to shift away from.
And the PS3? Well, I don't even need to really go into that one. Split memory space (and no external ASIC to at least enable data acquisition for multiple components to reduce copying from main RAM to VRAM), non-unified shaders, cumbersome method (vs 360) for doing procedural geometry synthesis, and I still think Blu-Ray as a push wasn't worth it or at least they maybe could've done it with a cheaper new PS2 model instead and still gotten the adoption rates needed to win the format wars without losing so much money on PS3 to do so. The SPEs in Cell being an evolution of the vector units from PS2, and even more a precursor to the more GPGPU-centric shaders GPUs would adopt in the following years. Though, the Cell itself was something of a dead end, since it assumed that type of work would stay CPU-side when in fact it shifted to the GPU (and the 360's GPU already had some very early consideration for GPGPU since it supported vector5 SIMD where the 5th unit could be used for some different non-graphics tasks, IIRC, tho it wasn't particularly great at it).
That said, a lot of this can be said thanks to power of hindsight; with PS3 & 360 in particular no one could have definitively said which design would have became favored until some time after their launch, into early 2008 I'd argue. That was enough time after PS3's launch to really gauge things between it and 360 to see which design was doing more for 3P devs of the era.
