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[VGEsoterica]

If there are two things I love its 1) Sega Dreamcast and 2) rare and obscure arcade hardware. So if I can combine the two together...all the better.

Back in the day Sega of Japan and Sega of America were competing head to head (and wasting a ton of money) on the hardware design that would become Dreamcast. SOJ had a Hitachi SH-4 processor married to a PowerVR setup...what would ultimately win and become the Dreamcast / NAOMI we all know, remember and mostly love.

SOA's design was led by an ex-IBM engineer and was pitching a PowerPC processor married to a custom variant of the 3DFX Voodoo3 / Avenger design. It wasn't just a paper design either but a box filled with silicon that could be tested against the competition.

SOJ had "Dural" (the codename of the console and SOA had "Black Belt"...the PowerPC / 3DFX console...which never saw the light of day.

Except it 100% did as Konami would then release an arcade board with the exact same technical specifications as Black Belt down to a tee. RAM/PowerPC/3DFX custom Voodoo3 variant...its almost like SOMEONE wanted to recoup a little investment money and let the platform see the light of day in one way or another...so you get the Konami Viper

Did Sega make the right decision? Absolutely. Dural with the Hitachi / PowerVR combo def performs better than Black Belt...but if you ever wanted to play what amounts to the lost Dreamcast console...you can

 

[tkscz]

This was interesting to know because I would always go to bat to say that Sega made a mistake not going with 3DFX, but seeing how low powered it was, looks like I was wrong and they made the correct choice there.

 

[VGEsoterica]

This was interesting to know because I would always go to bat to say that Sega made a mistake not going with 3DFX, but seeing how low powered it was, looks like I was wrong and they made the correct choice there.

Granted Sega was always a more talented developer than Konami graphically so its hard to say exactly WHAT Sega would have gotten out of Black Belt

 

[roosnam1980]

the games look really bad for a voodoo3 variant , it was certainly more capable than what is shown in the video

 

[nush]

Granted Sega was always a more talented developer than Konami graphically so its hard to say exactly WHAT Sega would have gotten out of Black Belt

Bizarre Creations had a Black Belt prototype. Paraphrasing what I was told way back in the day, "Yeah we have one of those, it's sitting in our store cupboard".

 

[VGEsoterica]

Bizarre Creations had a Black Belt prototype. Paraphrasing what I was told way back in the day, "Yeah we have one of those, it's sitting in our store cupboard".

Oh I am sure one or two of the prelim Black Belt dev kits are still out there somewhere. Wish I could find one

 

[Esppiral]

I allways thought that the scraped black belt was the more powerful of the two, but looking at that video the final Dreamcast is way por powerful, the konami boards shows some really nice postprocessing effects though

 

[nush]

Oh I am sure one or two of the prelim Black Belt dev kits are still out there somewhere. Wish I could find one

Well, now I've given you a lead.

 

[VGEsoterica]

Well, now I've given you a lead.

Which I will use Sadly though unless the dev hardware makes it OUT of a studio with someone when they move on its near impossible to obtain.

All the rare hardware I have amassed has come from ex-devs that took it home with them / studio closures

 

[Drew1440]

Interesting, you could also use 3DFX cards in G4 and G3 PowerMacs of the era. They even ported the Glide API over to MacOS.

Wasnt there another proto Dreamcast design that used the Real3D chipset that was based on the Model 3 arcade?

 

[VGEsoterica]

Interesting, you could also use 3DFX cards in G4 and G3 PowerMacs of the era. They even ported the Glide API over to MacOS.

Wasnt there another proto Dreamcast design that used the Real3D chipset that was based on the Model 3 arcade?

The Real3D was apparently part of the contest but it doesn't seem, at least based on evidence, to have gotten much past the paper design phase. At least as far as I can determine

 

[PaintTinJr]

If there are two things I love its 1) Sega Dreamcast and 2) rare and obscure arcade hardware. So if I can combine the two together...all the better.

Back in the day Sega of Japan and Sega of America were competing head to head (and wasting a ton of money) on the hardware design that would become Dreamcast. SOJ had a Hitachi SH-4 processor married to a PowerVR setup...what would ultimately win and become the Dreamcast / NAOMI we all know, remember and mostly love.

SOA's design was led by an ex-IBM engineer and was pitching a PowerPC processor married to a custom variant of the 3DFX Voodoo3 / Avenger design. It wasn't just a paper design either but a box filled with silicon that could be tested against the competition.

SOJ had "Dural" (the codename of the console and SOA had "Black Belt"...the PowerPC / 3DFX console...which never saw the light of day.

Except it 100% did as Konami would then release an arcade board with the exact same technical specifications as Black Belt down to a tee. RAM/PowerPC/3DFX custom Voodoo3 variant...its almost like SOMEONE wanted to recoup a little investment money and let the platform see the light of day in one way or another...so you get the Konami Viper

Did Sega make the right decision? Absolutely. Dural with the Hitachi / PowerVR combo def performs better than Black Belt...but if you ever wanted to play what amounts to the lost Dreamcast console...you can

Love the video, but the conclusion is completely wrong IMO if the the tech specs of the custom Voodoo 3 and PowerPC shown are correct.

The spec sheet show a pixel shader unit on the Voodoo 3 - a 2nd gen 3D accelerator for the PC with dither 20bit colour with phong shading - which would have been way ahead of the Gourand 16bit colour 2D accelerator in the Dreamcast relying on the SH4 for 3D transformations.

The PowerPC was also far more advanced than the SH4, just that both it and the Voodoo3 together would have placed the BoM at the time of a Dreamcast north of $400 IMO, hence why it was kept for long life arcade units - that Konami wouldn't have used as one game and done - and Konami just weren't using UE1 or UE2 tooling that Sega used for games like Shenmue in all likelihood, going by the engine cinematics which was UE's engine USP compared to iDTech of the era. Konami's game using full screen fog was a hardware fillrate flex in the video, and the boxing game looks like it uses phong shading, so pretty sure if they had used the black belt, the Dreamcast would have competed against the PS2 and (edit) Gamecube - not N64 like I mistaken put - longer and better.

/edit
This is also the interactive demo from the Voodoo1 3DFX disc, which would easily have scaled to Soul Calibur and beyond on a Voodoo3 IMO.

 

[VGEsoterica]

Love the video, but the conclusion is completely wrong IMO if the the tech specs of the custom Voodoo 3 and PowerPC shown are correct.

The spec sheet show a pixel shader unit on the Voodoo 3 - a 2nd gen 3D accelerator for the PC with dither 20bit colour with phong shading - which would have been way ahead of the Gourand 16bit colour 2D accelerator in the Dreamcast relying on the SH4 for 3D transformations.

The PowerPC was also far more advanced than the SH4, just that both it and the Voodoo3 together would have placed the BoM at the time of a Dreamcast north of $400 IMO, hence why it was kept for long life arcade units - that Konami wouldn't have used as one game and done - and Konami just weren't using UE1 or UE2 tooling that Sega used for games like Shenmue in all likelihood, going by the engine cinematics which was UE's engine USP compared to iDTech of the era. Konami's game using full screen fog was a hardware fillrate flex in the video, and the boxing game looks like it uses phong shading, so pretty sure if they had used the black belt, the Dreamcast would have competed against the PS2 and N64 longer and better.

/edit
This is also the interactive demo from the Voodoo1 3DFX disc, which would easily have scaled to Soul Calibur and beyond on a Voodoo3 IMO.

The spec sheet is just for the PC part. Closest specs you can get.

Konami just wasn't the best at graphics in arcades. Never were. But damn they made fun games

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Even to this day SC looks good.

5:22 mark.

 

[VGEsoterica]

Even to this day SC looks good.

5:22 mark.

Probably the best aged game on the system IMO. If 3D never got any better than that I'd have been fine with it

 

[PaintTinJr]

The spec sheet is just for the PC part. Closest specs you can get.

Konami just wasn't the best at graphics in arcades. Never were. But damn they made fun games

I can't say I remember playing their games in arcades....except for Golfing Greats which is both a looker and a fantastic game IMO, the 3D styled intro from the clouds dropping in really sells that 2D game as 3D for me.

As for the specs sheet, the earlier SLI Voodoo Konami arcade machine would have been the bare minimum performance of the custom Voodoo 3, and that would have been enough to hit 1024x768 in PC games with two 640x480 Voodoo1 cards, whereas the Dreamcast PowerVR like a Voodoo1 could hit 800x600 in easier situations but was also designed around targeting the 640x480., so I would still expect the Black belt to be much higher performance hardware, even if not quite the PC Voodoo3 spec. I'm also pretty sure all the PowerPC chips of the time had a x86 compatibility mode at the time which might have been some Sega US thinking too for ports. I remember booting Dos and Windows on a brand new school Mac in the school library in 96 to try PGA Tour golf by switching it out to PC mode .

 

[Esppiral]

Love the video, but the conclusion is completely wrong IMO if the the tech specs of the custom Voodoo 3 and PowerPC shown are correct.

The spec sheet show a pixel shader unit on the Voodoo 3 - a 2nd gen 3D accelerator for the PC with dither 20bit colour with phong shading - which would have been way ahead of the Gourand 16bit colour 2D accelerator in the Dreamcast relying on the SH4 for 3D transformations.

The PowerPC was also far more advanced than the SH4, just that both it and the Voodoo3 together would have placed the BoM at the time of a Dreamcast north of $400 IMO, hence why it was kept for long life arcade units - that Konami wouldn't have used as one game and done - and Konami just weren't using UE1 or UE2 tooling that Sega used for games like Shenmue in all likelihood, going by the engine cinematics which was UE's engine USP compared to iDTech of the era. Konami's game using full screen fog was a hardware fillrate flex in the video, and the boxing game looks like it uses phong shading, so pretty sure if they had used the black belt, the Dreamcast would have competed against the PS2 and N64 longer and better.

/edit
This is also the interactive demo from the Voodoo1 3DFX disc, which would easily have scaled to Soul Calibur and beyond on a Voodoo3 IMO.

Competing with the PS2 and N64? Does not compute, also that tech demo looks like an upresed N64 game way behind of what the Dreamcast can do, I don't understand your post.

 

[PaintTinJr]

Competing with the PS2 and N64? Does not compute, also that tech demo looks like an upresed N64 game way behind of what the Dreamcast can do, I don't understand your post.

I meant Gamecube and PS2, sorry.

The tech demo is just that, a sample program of early results by the 3dfx glide API team, and not a port of SC, and certainly not representative of a Voodoo1 limits whether running Quake3 much prettier than the DC version, or like Turok or Shadows of the Empire on proper Glide drivers, rather than on ugly directx and opengl that removed the Gourand shading and lighting.

In of itself a first gen PC 3D accelerator like the Voodoo1 was impressive for gaming, but a Voodoo3 was different level, even if it was just 70% of the PC card in the Black belt or Viper.
I had both PC accelerators at the time of the Dreamcast in different PCs, and the Dreamcast PowerVR was nowhere close in performance to a custom Voodoo3 IMO. even if it was better or worse in aspects to the Voodoo1.

 

[VGEsoterica]

I meant Gamecube and PS2, sorry.

The tech demo is just that, a sample program of early results by the 3dfx glide API team, and not a port of SC, and certainly not representative of a Voodoo1 limits whether running Quake3 much prettier than the DC version, or like Turok or Shadows of the Empire on proper Glide drivers, rather than on ugly directx and opengl that removed the Gourand shading and lighting.

In of itself a first gen PC 3D accelerator like the Voodoo1 was impressive for gaming, but a Voodoo3 was different level, even if it was just 70% of the PC card in the Black belt or Viper.
I had both PC accelerators at the time of the Dreamcast in different PCs, and the Dreamcast PowerVR was nowhere close in performance to a custom Voodoo3 IMO. even if it was better or worse in aspects to the Voodoo1.

tech demos are always so hard to gauge

 

[Fafalada]

The PowerPC was also far more advanced than the SH4

The articles quote 603e, which was - somewhat contemporary to SH4, not that far apart.
Clock speeds were up to 300mhz (so it might not have been clocked much differently) and on a per-clock basis - well it was a 3-way superscalar chip with larger caches than 2-way SH4, so yes - it should perform better but we're talking incremental improvements, nothing that drastic.
Now the big question is whether they'd customize it with SIMD - as out of the box it's just single FP chip - so unmodified SH4 would obviously perform much better on FP math.

 

[SomeGit]

I meant Gamecube and PS2, sorry.

The tech demo is just that, a sample program of early results by the 3dfx glide API team, and not a port of SC, and certainly not representative of a Voodoo1 limits whether running Quake3 much prettier than the DC version, or like Turok or Shadows of the Empire on proper Glide drivers, rather than on ugly directx and opengl that removed the Gourand shading and lighting.

In of itself a first gen PC 3D accelerator like the Voodoo1 was impressive for gaming, but a Voodoo3 was different level, even if it was just 70% of the PC card in the Black belt or Viper.
I had both PC accelerators at the time of the Dreamcast in different PCs, and the Dreamcast PowerVR was nowhere close in performance to a custom Voodoo3 IMO. even if it was better or worse in aspects to the Voodoo1.

Quake 3 wasn't prettier on Voodoo 1 compared to the DC version, even on the lowest setting you'd be lucky to get much more than 10FPS with a Pentium II. Even a Voodoo 2 12MB would likely spend a good chunk of its time around the 15 to 20 FPS mark with decent settings on some maps.

Voodoo 3 was much better but in Quake 3 the Neon 250, a cutback GPU based on the DC's PowerVR was very competitive with the Voodoo 3, I wouldn't say nowhere near close in performance.

 

[EverydayBeast]

Sega needed the Dreamcast all it did was go one on one with n64, ps1 and even Xbox, GameCube and ps2. It had online, 2K sports, it seemed like an easy console to develop for.

 

[PaintTinJr]

Quake 3 wasn't prettier on Voodoo 1 compared to the DC version, even on the lowest setting you'd be lucky to get much more than 10FPS with a Pentium II. Even a Voodoo 2 12MB would likely spend a good chunk of its time around the 15 to 20 FPS mark with decent settings on some maps.

Voodoo 3 was much better but in Quake 3 the Neon 250, a cutback GPU based on the DC's PowerVR was very competitive with the Voodoo 3, I wouldn't say nowhere near close in performance.

Are you sure you didn't have a broken one, or just a really poor CPU or poor 2D accelerator feeding it. At 512x384 I was able to get a solid 60fps with lightmapping lighting enabled, and it looked raiser sharp compared to the lower geometry and fuzzy DC textured look as I recall

 

[SomeGit]

Are you sure you didn't have a broken one, or just a really poor CPU or poor 2D accelerator feeding it. At 512x384 I was able to get a solid 60fps with lightmapping lighting enabled, and it looked raiser sharp compared to the lower geometry and fuzzy DC textured look as I recall

I'd say you'd have a special version of the Voodoo 1 because 60 FPS on Quake 3 is impossible even at 512x384, with even a Pentium 3 class CPU. Hell Quake 2 wouldn't even reach that level of performance. You are recalling incorrectly, but if you want to insist you are free to find a video or any benchmark of the Voodoo 1 running Quake 3 at 60 FPS.

 

[crazyriddler]

Are you sure you didn't have a broken one, or just a really poor CPU or poor 2D accelerator feeding it. At 512x384 I was able to get a solid 60fps with lightmapping lighting enabled, and it looked raiser sharp compared to the lower geometry and fuzzy DC textured look as I recall

What are you talking about dude? You can't get 60fps on quake 3 with a voodoo 1, not even with a sli.

 

[Pimpbaa]

I'd say you'd have a special version of the Voodoo 1 because 60 FPS on Quake 3 is impossible even at 512x384, with even a Pentium 3 class CPU. Hell Quake 2 wouldn't even reach that level of performance. You are recalling incorrectly, but if you want to insist you are free to find a video or any benchmark of the Voodoo 1 running Quake 3 at 60 FPS.

Needed a GeForce 1 to get good performance in Quake 3 at the time.

 

[PaintTinJr]

I'd say you'd have a special version of the Voodoo 1 because 60 FPS on Quake 3 is impossible even at 512x384, with even a Pentium 3 class CPU. Hell Quake 2 wouldn't even reach that level of performance. You are recalling incorrectly, but if you want to insist you are free to find a video or any benchmark of the Voodoo 1 running Quake 3 at 60 FPS.

Are we talking at cross purpose? Because my Voodoo certainly didn't have a built-in 2D accelerator and cost me nearly £200 from PC world back in the day , and either used my S3 integrated mobo chip for 2D from my original IBM Aptiva M series (Pentium 120Mhz) with 128MB, which needed me to buy an after market CPU socket converter with a Cyrix 586 clocked at 233Mhz IIRC to get 60fps, while using the latest glide drivers and using q3config.cfg graphical tweaks.

But it is possible I'm misremembering and it was 320x240 or maybe interlaced rendering when all visual features were enabled. I remember the game being heavily dependent on 2D accelerator and CPU clock, which on my Aptiva were directly linked. And the only other 2D accelerator I tried the card with was in my Workstation, Dual CPU Pentium 2 350Mhz, Matrox G100 and 384MB or RAM IIRC.

I played it 2 player against my brother over LAN with those two machines and only remember the smaller monitor being the issue for fair-ish competition. Who knows? maybe it was locked 60 vs 30 and I'm misremembering. I do remember playing it on Dreamcast briefly at my friends and thinking what a poor spectacle the game was on there, even ignoring degraded controls with a pad.

 

[Danknugz]

Quake 3 wasn't prettier on Voodoo 1 compared to the DC version, even on the lowest setting you'd be lucky to get much more than 10FPS with a Pentium II. Even a Voodoo 2 12MB would likely spend a good chunk of its time around the 15 to 20 FPS mark with decent settings on some maps.

Voodoo 3 was much better but in Quake 3 the Neon 250, a cutback GPU based on the DC's PowerVR was very competitive with the Voodoo 3, I wouldn't say nowhere near close in performance.

iirc i managed 40-60 fps most of the time with my voodoo2 sli . although th it was so long ago i might have been running a riva TNT2 at that point.

 

[Danknugz]

Are we talking at cross purpose? Because my Voodoo certainly didn't have a built-in 2D accelerator and cost me nearly £200 from PC world back in the day , and either used my S3 integrated mobo chip for 2D from my original IBM Aptiva M series (Pentium 120Mhz) with 128MB, which needed me to buy an after market CPU socket converter with a Cyrix 586 clocked at 233Mhz IIRC to get 60fps, while using the latest glide drivers and using q3config.cfg graphical tweaks.

But it is possible I'm misremembering and it was 320x240 or maybe interlaced rendering when all visual features were enabled. I remember the game being heavily dependent on 2D accelerator and CPU clock, which on my Aptiva were directly linked. And the only other 2D accelerator I tried the card with was in my Workstation, Dual CPU Pentium 2 350Mhz, Matrox G100 and 384MB or RAM IIRC.

I played it 2 player against my brother over LAN with those two machines and only remember the smaller monitor being the issue for fair-ish competition. Who knows? maybe it was locked 60 vs 30 and I'm misremembering. I do remember playing it on Dreamcast briefly at my friends and thinking what a poor spectacle the game was on there, even ignoring degraded controls with a pad.

yeah, the voodoo 2 also didnt support 2D, i actually had 3 GPUs running in my pentium 2.

 

[PaintTinJr]

The articles quote 603e, which was - somewhat contemporary to SH4, not that far apart.
Clock speeds were up to 300mhz (so it might not have been clocked much differently) and on a per-clock basis - well it was a 3-way superscalar chip with larger caches than 2-way SH4, so yes - it should perform better but we're talking incremental improvements, nothing that drastic.
Now the big question is whether they'd customize it with SIMD - as out of the box it's just single FP chip - so unmodified SH4 would obviously perform much better on FP math.

Very interesting point you've raise dthere, although it was at a time where adding 100Mhz to a CPU could nearly double a game's frame-rate on PC, so I would have still thought it would have been like comparing a Pentium2 350Mhz(excluding MMX) to a PS2's MIPS R5900 for running linux, where responsiveness for general flow control was world's apart from what I recall with PS2 Linux and linux on PC at the time. It is interesting that the Wiki mentions the 603e was the first to hit that clockspeed of desktop chips and was very power efficient - probably going hand in hand with its clocking capability

Motorola electing to use the chip for its 66 satellite mobile coverage Iridium project suggest the chip was excellent in general compared to all rival options, given it was satellite launches at scale and repeatedly. But without the SIMD customization, I agree that the chip performance would have needed the extra clock and additional hardware thread to be making a big difference with the superscalar capability to be outclassing the SH4, or for the Voodoo3 customization to have enough T&L to offset the missing SIMD and collectively see the 603e and Voodoo3 outclass the SH4 and PowerVR comprehensively

 

[SportsFan581]

This was interesting to know because I would always go to bat to say that Sega made a mistake not going with 3DFX, but seeing how low powered it was, looks like I was wrong and they made the correct choice there.

Agreed, definitely looks like a downgrade from what we got. Only possible advantage it could have had was supply since they had some trouble getting the components together for DC. Although maybe this unit would have had the same issues.

 

[SomeGit]

Are we talking at cross purpose? Because my Voodoo certainly didn't have a built-in 2D accelerator and cost me nearly £200 from PC world back in the day , and either used my S3 integrated mobo chip for 2D from my original IBM Aptiva M series (Pentium 120Mhz) with 128MB, which needed me to buy an after market CPU socket converter with a Cyrix 586 clocked at 233Mhz IIRC to get 60fps, while using the latest glide drivers and using q3config.cfg graphical tweaks.

But it is possible I'm misremembering and it was 320x240 or maybe interlaced rendering when all visual features were enabled. I remember the game being heavily dependent on 2D accelerator and CPU clock, which on my Aptiva were directly linked. And the only other 2D accelerator I tried the card with was in my Workstation, Dual CPU Pentium 2 350Mhz, Matrox G100 and 384MB or RAM IIRC.

I played it 2 player against my brother over LAN with those two machines and only remember the smaller monitor being the issue for fair-ish competition. Who knows? maybe it was locked 60 vs 30 and I'm misremembering. I do remember playing it on Dreamcast briefly at my friends and thinking what a poor spectacle the game was on there, even ignoring degraded controls with a pad.

You can easily find benchmarks online of the voodoo 1 with later 2d cars and even paired with a +1Ghz Pentium III it would average in the low 20s even a low settings 512x384, and this is the best case scenario as with any software t&l card scaled heavily with the CPU. I really doubt at half the resolution it would compare favorably to the DC version, especially since the low VRAM forced a lower texture setting in Quake 3. Like here's one:



I won't use my setup at the time as an example, it had a s3 virge(?) and an AMD K5 100, it wasn't that great by late 99. Upgraded to a P4 2Ghz with a GF4 ti later, that was a good boost.

It just wasn't up to he the task, Voodoo 1 was a beast in 96 but wasn't up to the task for a high end late 99, stuff evolved really fast in the 90/early 00s.

iirc i managed 40-60 fps most of the time with my voodoo2 sli . although th it was so long ago i might have been running a riva TNT2 at that point.

Yeah I believe that, 3dfx cracked the multi GPU rendering like no other.

 

[PaintTinJr]

You can easily find benchmarks online of the voodoo 1 with later 2d cars and even paired with a +1Ghz Pentium III it would average in the low 20s even a low settings 512x384, and this is the best case scenario as with any software t&l card scaled heavily with the CPU. I really doubt at half the resolution it would compare favorably to the DC version, especially since the low VRAM forced a lower texture setting in Quake 3. Like here's one:



I won't use my setup at the time as an example, it had a s3 virge(?) and an AMD K5 100, it wasn't that great by late 99. Upgraded to a P4 2Ghz with a GF4 ti later, that was a good boost.

It just wasn't up to he the task, Voodoo 1 was a beast in 96 but wasn't up to the task for a high end late 99, stuff evolved really fast in the 90/early 00s.



Yeah I believe that, 3dfx cracked the multi GPU rendering like no other.

What drivers are they using? DirectX and opengl performed badly compared to glide in those games IIRC, and I used glide in every game I could with a Voodoo1 or Voodoo3 (and Voodoo 5 for my sins ).

 

[Fafalada]

Very interesting point you've raise there, although it was at a time where adding 100Mhz to a CPU could nearly double a game's frame-rate on PC, so I would have still thought it would have been like comparing a Pentium2 350Mhz(excluding MMX) to a PS2's MIPS R5900 for running linux, where responsiveness for general flow control was world's apart from what I recall with PS2 Linux and linux on PC at the time. It is interesting that the Wiki mentions the 603e was the first to hit that clockspeed of desktop chips and was very power efficient - probably going hand in hand with its clocking capability

Yes the clock-speed would help (along with being a wider super-scalar design). However I'm not sure how high they'd be able to clock for DC launch. SH4 was capable of operating at clocks above 200mhz also - but clearly there are thermal/power targets they needed to hit for DC sized box.
As for PentiumII comparison - that's not entirely fair - 603e was stil in-order design, just like R5900 and SH4 - and was more of a classic P5 competitor (as were the other two). But in the end - it is the SIMD extensions that are the bigger question indeed. SH4 had leapfrogged Intel there in FP throughput, and R5900 was on another level there (in addition to dual VUs, there was a full 128bit Integer SIMD with substantially more capable instruction set and register array as well).

 

[Alexios]

Even if Konami wasn't Sega (which has its own duds) they were far from bad when trying (in the last thread folks were positive & they made MGS sequels in this era) so some game would have shown off the juice, technically if not artistically too, if it was there. I doubt Sega would do way better.


At a glance they may appear closer to DC than some of the example games in the OP as they have nice production values but any closer inspection reveals much the same loss in fidelity compared to Dreamcast and Naomi games (and that's before getting into the resolution and performance).

Silent Scope itself looks & runs better on Dreamcast (but hey, maybe Konami was only super bad utilizing their own hardware and somehow were Dreamcast porting wizards, so it's natural they performed better on it & Dreamcast still sucks in comparison/in general or whatever some narrate)?

Who knows, maybe the small gamma/contrast (crushed blacks on Viper) differences in whatever capture/display method/hardware somehow mean the Viper is more capable than Dreamcast, lol, never mind the near PS1 level polycounts in larger scope/scale games to maintain performance.​

 

[dem]

I remember posting on a forum called the Black Belt Headquarters

 

[Esppiral]

Even if Konami was no Sega (which has its own duds) they were far from bad when trying (even in the last thread about this folks were way more positive) so some game would have shown off the juice, technically if not artistically too, if it was there. I doubt Sega would do any better than these.

At a glance they may even appear closer than some of the example games in the OP as they have great production values but any closer inspection reveals much the same loss in fidelity compared to Dreamcast and Naomi games (and that's before getting into the resolution and performance).

Silent Scope itself looks and runs better on Dreamcast (but hey, maybe Konami was only super bad utilizing their own hardware and somehow were Dreamcast porting wizards, so it's natural they performed better on it, Dreamcast still sucks in comparison/in general or whatever some narrate).

Maybe the small gamma/contrast (crushed blacks on Viper) differences in whatever capture/display/whatever method/hardware will somehow mean the Viper is more capable than Dreamcast, lol.​

I didn't know Silent Scope arcade wasn't running on non Naomi hardware, the game is fun but it allways looked like trash to me, that would explain lol.

 

[BlackTron]

Probably the best aged game on the system IMO. If 3D never got any better than that I'd have been fine with it

SC is the last time I was truly floored by a generational leap.

 

[VGEsoterica]

Even if Konami was no Sega (which has its own duds) they were far from bad when trying (even in the last thread about this folks were way more positive) so some game would have shown off the juice, technically if not artistically too, if it was there. I doubt Sega would do any better than these.

At a glance they may even appear closer than some of the example games in the OP as they have great production values but any closer inspection reveals much the same loss in fidelity compared to Dreamcast and Naomi games (and that's before getting into the resolution and performance).

Silent Scope itself looks and runs better on Dreamcast (but hey, maybe Konami was only super bad utilizing their own hardware and somehow were Dreamcast porting wizards, so it's natural they performed better on it, Dreamcast still sucks in comparison/in general or whatever some narrate).

Maybe the small gamma/contrast (crushed blacks on Viper) differences in whatever capture/display/whatever method/hardware will somehow mean the Viper is more capable than Dreamcast, lol.​

Police 911 is def a vibe with some of the best graphics on Viper IMO

 

[Xaeroxcore666]

Police 911 is def a vibe with some of the best graphics on Viper IMO

Konami should had released anyway ports of this games on DC and PS2...

 

[T8SC]

Still got my Voodoo 3 in the box. I remember the day they went under, such a big loss, would've been nice for this partnership to help keep them afloat so we could've maybe seen the Rampage chips go head to head with the Geforce 2 series.

 

[Alexios]

A couple more unique motion controlled stuff on Viper. Not exactly Mazan there with the swordfighting (almost a what if Namco was still using system 12 or made a system 13 for that game or something, like a Soulcalibur arcade vs Dreamcast situation, heh) but the boxing game has a decent style.

​

 

[RoboFu]

Ehh I'm more interested in the other sega 32bit console that was suppose to be closer to the n64.

 

[SF Kosmo]

I didn't realize that Konami's Viper had any connection to Black Belt.