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Was the Dreamcast actually powerful at launch? Or the beneficiary of no competition?

Was the Dreamcast a powerhouse at launch?

  • No

    Votes: 117 11.2%
  • Yes

    Votes: 930 88.8%

  • Total voters
    1,047
I'm pretty sure no PS2 game has 14-poly characters - but I figure you meant something else ;) Anyway this goes back to what are we actually measuring though (and why the genre matters - if it does)
If you're just looking for skinned&animated characters set on a polygonal stage - then plenty of PS2 games exceed those numbers (eg. a certain horror game where the final boss exceeded 100k polys by itself, with volumetric shadows and all, or Jak games where realtime cutscene models were in 10-20k range with 4-5 characters on screen at once, alongside using actual AA on them as well), but best in class examples indeed, likely aren't fighters.
Although if you have 4 7k characters on screen does that make it somewhat less impressive than 2 14k? (I can only comment from GPU execution complexity perspective - but I know everyone has their own metrics for what they count and what not).

The light source thing is one of those 'headcanon' topics I referred to above. I've seen plenty of debates in 20+ years across every console gen about 'lighting this/that' and it virtually never gets qualified with numbers. For instance - on PS2 the 'low-end' number of influencing lights per object/triangle (I was gonna say average, but really it was incredibly rare to go below this) was 4. This is in stark contrast to everything that came before it - where indeed, you'd have games with single or even no dynamic light sources for what was being displayed. But no discussion starts from 'lighting on PS2 is 4x more complex on this game' - the common argument usually goes like 'oh they probably have better lighting >because< it's PS2, but textures, colors blahblah'.
Now - it's been decades since I've seen Naomi 2 specs. While I recall total throughput with lots of lights being mentioned, 'spec sheet' does not equal real-world use, as - basically every console ever released demonstrates. 'But but hw acceleration' doesn't really say anything without that context. If VF4 is the measuring stick - what are factual stats being compared - to discuss 'what'(if anything) was 'comparable' we need goal-post to begin with.


I agree DC has a large gap - but so did others, and if there's one console that stands out with having the widest gap from bottom to top - it was XBox.
The best they got was things like Riddick or HalfLife 2 port, or some Gen 6 ports in literal HD (SC2 in 720P, Dragon's Lair 1080p).
The worst was literally 'PS1/N64 pro/high-res' - yes even that console received shovelware from that category.
PS2 had incredible lows/highs as well - but I think XBox gap actually has it beat.
Hahahaha i meant 14K, my bad :messenger_grinning_sweat:. But seriously is there at least any PS2 fighter which looks better than Naomi 2 VF 4? I mean, folks on Beyond 3D have shown that polycount wise there was nothing close per char on PS2 fighting elite (Tekkens, SC 3). Also it would be worth to see how deep are the cutbacks on Initial D and King of Route 66 Naomi 2 vs PS2 ports. Sadly there is nothing similar to Jak games on Naomi 2 to make the comparison, but if we can "extrapolate"the comparison of most complex titles on each plattform, disregarding genre of type of game, we can for example put Shenmue 2 vs any model 3 game and see what DC did better, what did worst and if the gap is that big as some folks in here states.


(eg. a certain horror game where the final boss exceeded 100k polys by itself, with volumetric shadows and all)

any clue?

And who said VF4 uses the power of the PS2? I mean, all Sega games on the PS2 are way way below what a first party could do, I doubt they use at least 60% of what the PS2 is capable of. Yes, no Naomi 2 game is ported 1:1 to the ps2 but from a hardware perspective the ps2 could outperform the arcade Naomi 2 if that is in the producer's interest. Naomi 2 is a 120k per frame poly machine at 60fps, the PS2 can do 150k at 60fps. Perhaps VF4 was the best a recovering Sega could do in terms of deadlines.

The NAOMI (New Arcade Operation Machine Idea) is also Japanese for beauty above all else.
CPU : 2 x Hitachi SH-4 32-bit RISC CPU (200 MHz 360 MIPS / 1.4 GFLOPS)
Graphic Engine : 2 x PowerVR 2 (PVR2DC-CLX2) GPU's - (under the fans)
Geometry Processor : Custom Videologic T+L chip "Elan" (100mhz) - (Under Heatsink)
Sound Engine : ARM7 Yamaha AICA 45 MHZ (with internal 32-bit RISC CPU, 64 channel ADPCM)
Main Memory : 32 MByte 100Mhz SDRAM
Graphic Memory : 32 MByte
Model Data Memory : 32MByte
Sound Memory : 8 MByte
Media : ROM Board / GD-Rom
Simultaneous Number of Colors : Approx. 16,770,000 (24bits)
Polygons : 10 Million polys/sec with 6 light sources
Rendering Speed : 2000 Mpixels/sec (unrealistic max, assumes overdraw of 10x which nothing uses)

Additional Features : Bump Mapping, Multiple Fog Modes, 8-bit Alpha Blending (256 levels of transparency), Mip Mapping (polygon-texture auto switch), Tri-Linear Filtering, Super Sampling for Full Scene Anti-Aliasing, Environment Mapping, and Specular Effect.
Compatibility : Fully backwards compatible with all Naomi and GD-Rom gam

''2x pvr2 overclocked'' 10M pps
''Polygons : 10 Million polys/sec with 6 light sources''
''2x 1,4gflops'' < 6,2Gflops


How many polygons does ps2 make with 6 light sources ?
So VF 4 did not use the power of PS2, but does Tekken 4 or 5, or SC3, or any PS2 elite fighter looks 40% better than VF 4 Evolution? It would be worth to verify this "How many polygons does ps2 make with 6 light sources ?" and of course to see under the hood if really PS2 is above Naomi 2 level contrary to popular belief, even stated by experts....
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
How awesome we end up with a PS2 vs Naomi 2 string in a freaking Dreamcast thread just because someone praising Model 3 as better than Naomi 2 (while just talking about DC Model 3 ports/comparisons) was questioned so now we must once again prove PS2 is the king of everything forever!

The additional content in the PS2 releases of VF4/Evo is something that didn't happen often for their arcade ports and shows it was a pretty big (and with two releases, continued) effort for Sega with one of their still famous IP and not some throwaway release they didn't put resources to make it good in. Hey, maybe Sega sucked at making games and ports (and sabotaged their own games/sales out of spite for Sony). The DC never had a chance with such a first party turned shit third party, too bad Sony never made anything on it (to prove it sucks & was maxed out, with a Vib Ribbon port).

Also let's ignore Tecmo, earlier proposed as easily able to make a late Model 3 game to top DOA2 on DC and Virtua Fighter 4 on Naomi 2, seemingly couldn't really top VF4 on the newly stronger PS2 (after the initial release fiasco with the properly updated and finished game and of course let's ignore they seem to have easily done just that on the Xbox instead, obviously the multi/other platform fighters didn't get there because fighting games suck, not because of the lowest common denominator king of the consoles and everything forever). Never mind Namco. I guess now we can just say all fighting games simply suck instead because consoles are only really utilized in other genres, never mind everyone going on about how fighting and racing games were the easy way to show off a machine and that's all the reason why DC has some good shit there and much less elsewhere. With this new real scientific development we should have thought of before, all fighting games of the gen are essentially crap (despite previously praising the PS2's output for pages) so any hint of a decent DC showing in comparison is now void, the whole genre is useless (but it maxed the DC)! Naturally, you should also ignore this particular string of thought started from a game that does have a higher spec arcade version that they were unable to port without sacrifices to a given system so it's not at all like not having any higher spec version because the genre sucks to begin with.

It's not that we're always arguing with whatever gotcha of the moment only to say essentially the opposite in the next sentence that suits our new argument and subject better, no, it's all logical, scientific even, trust the process people, that's how epic vidya gaem discussions are made. Polygons? Here's many! What, you got more? But polygons don't matter, let's talk effects! Resolution too?! Well less with fullscreen effects is more! What, you got better resolution and other stuff than this other thing that doesn't have screen effects either? Polygons matter the most, are you listening? What's that, between these two things you got more polygons and lights and effects and pretty much everything visible seems to be better on that side? Well, what about those 3 particles in that one spot, what a fail to not have anything like this awesome beast has! What a fail that it's not my personal preference! What, even with all these repeated epic fails of yours you just brought the real receipts in how this thing could push more tech like x light sources on loads of polygons, with effects? That's just too damn many light sources obviously, it epically fails for being overkill, less is more!

The above works even better if you have 3 people all piling on against one poster simultaneously with all these different hot takes so that if they even attempt to debunk one or miraculously even two of them, a third that both nods in agreement with the other two and proposes the opposite wins!

Gotta love this dude going all, I don't know anything about this hardware or its games but let's start with the assumption you're basically all wrong in any praise for it and we can work from there by propping up whatever it was you compared it with to quantify its qualities. Let's go, my confirmation bias can only get so erect in its google search/vague memory citations for anything to minimise your thing with/prop mine up. With science! Science needs a spec sheet for this goal post, only to say spec sheets aren't realistic anyway moving it, only to praise the spec sheet of another and, SCORE!

Some of you can always go make PS2 threads so you can pour all this sweet, precious, unstoppable love that ends up leaking out every chance it gets somewhere it belongs, er, somewhere every lover of the king of everything forever can see it instead of miss it because it's in a topic about trash.​
 
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Fafalada

Fafracer forever
How many polygons does ps2 make with 6 light sources ?
It's been awhile since I've looked this up - but more importantly - like with all programmable shader solutions, the answer is 'it depends' - on type and composition of lights.
IIRC - single VU throughput worked out roughly as follows.
Precomputed/no lights -> 40M pp/s
4 directional lights -> 18M pp/s
8 -> 12Mpp/s.
6 point(or spot)-lights ~6Mpp/s

I could write an essay here on (lack of)practicality of using 6 influencing point-lights 'per polygon' on entire scene basis - but suffice to say it woud require some pretty exotic setup that games of that era just didn't do(it really only starts to make sense if you're doing virtual point-lights to simulate GI, and vertex density has to go above gen-6 or switch to pixel-light sources entirely, to really benefit going from 3 influencing lights to 6). So usually numbers would be some combination of there-of. Flipside is that very few games of that era were actually vertex-limited to begin with - average 3rd party game on PS2/GC/XBox ran around 3mpp/s - and it wasn't because geometry processing was running slow.
Now - it 'was' technically possible to double those numbers (two VUs doing geometry) but this was quite uncommon setup (and largely unnecessary because - rasterization throughput of 10-20M rendered polygons was on the very high end for that generation of consoles - even with XBox GPU).

Hahahaha i meant 14K, my bad :messenger_grinning_sweat:. But seriously is there at least any PS2 fighter which looks better than Naomi 2 VF 4?
I play so few fighting games I'd never have known tbh. The moments I was impressed by fighting games were SC1, and later the TTT reveal at TGS (which didn't quite make it into final game). The rest all kind of melded together for me into nothing standing out particularly during PS2 era, and starting with 360 onwards, the genre as a whole seems like it lost funding confidence to compete with the big 'AAA' releases, no matter the hardware/developer behind it, so nothing stands out anymore.

I mean, folks on Beyond 3D have shown that polycount wise there was nothing close per char on PS2 fighting elite (Tekkens, SC 3).
Sure - but that's also a bit arbitrary metrics. As I asked above - having multiple chars add up to the same polys (or similar) doesn't work out GPU any less. But not sure how that works out across different fighters either - like I said - no expert there. And that's also a metric for performance, not 'better/worse' looking - which is the original point. What are we even comparing.

Also it would be worth to see how deep are the cutbacks on Initial D and King of Route 66 Naomi 2 vs PS2 ports.
Those would be interesting to analyse - I imagine ram is as always - the biggest differentiator if other Arcade ports to DC/PS2 etc. are anything to go by - but indeed.

Sadly there is nothing similar to Jak games on Naomi 2 to make the comparison, but if we can "extrapolate"the comparison of most complex titles on each plattform, disregarding genre of type of game, we can for example put Shenmue 2 vs any model 3 game and see what DC did better, what did worst and if the gap is that big as some folks in here states.
I think if it's purely to measure hw-throughput (not some arbitrary art-style powered visual appeal) that can work. It's just important to keep in mind 'what' we're measuring. When I complained about CT compared to simulation heavy open-world games, that wasn't in reference to 'polygons on screen' - just everything else those games do (which for open-world titles back then was the real bottleneck - pushing polys was mostly on the backburner).
 
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Geometric-Crusher

"Nintendo games are like indies, and worth at most $19" 🤡
So VF 4 did not use the power of PS2, but does Tekken 4 or 5, or SC3, or any PS2 elite fighter looks 40% better than VF 4 Evolution?
unfortunately no fighting game pushes the ps2 even close to its limits, I mean until the beginning of the sixth gen with Tekken Tag, fighting games received prominence and big budget but as it became cheap to just make a game that works, they took their foot off the accelerator. for example DOA3 is running on a very powerful system being described as an 8.4M game according to urban legend I don't need to say how much superior to the arcade version of VF4 it is. To make matters worse, some teams at Sega have always made games PS2 grudgingly.

According to the user who extracts the models from DC/Naomi VF4, in overview, 120k poly per frame (the limit) 60fps 7.2M is the limit in real world games on Naomi 2 (all games) I'm not sure but the data I have says that VF4 operates with 5 light sources.
In the fight when it says ''round 1'' Naomi 2 pushes ~ 80k so it's 5M in-game. The PS2 version does in game 2,5 to 3,6M 3 light sources.

Games like Tekken 5 and SC3 are also far from making good use of the ps2 hardware, I mean Namco was focused on making the Tekken franchise evolve but then retreated again finding the sweet spot in Tekken 5, SC3 is a glorified SC.

The PS2 lacked that fighting game with characters with 15,000 polygons, fake bump mapping, lots of particles like in Burnout, etc.
an intermediate game between doa3 (xbox) and sc3, even low poly with fake shaders etc.

PS2 (contrary to popular belief) was the console that had the least correctly used hardware in history, only Shadow of the Colossus, MGS3 and Hitman made decent use of the console, all those 60fps games you know could have been even better at 25~30fps all them.
 
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Geometric-Crusher

"Nintendo games are like indies, and worth at most $19" 🤡
It's been awhile since I've looked this up - but more importantly - like with all programmable shader solutions, the answer is 'it depends' - on type and composition of lights.
IIRC - single VU throughput worked out roughly as follows.
Precomputed/no lights -> 40M pp/s
4 directional lights -> 18M pp/s
8 -> 12Mpp/s.
6 point(or spot)-lights ~6Mpp/s

I could write an essay here on (lack of)practicality of using 6 influencing point-lights 'per polygon' on entire scene basis - but suffice to say it woud require some pretty exotic setup that games of that era just didn't do(it really only starts to make sense if you're doing virtual point-lights to simulate GI, and vertex density has to go above gen-6 or switch to pixel-light sources entirely, to really benefit going from 3 influencing lights to 6). So usually numbers would be some combination of there-of. Flipside is that very few games of that era were actually vertex-limited to begin with - average 3rd party game on PS2/GC/XBox ran around 3mpp/s - and it wasn't because geometry processing was running slow.
Now - it 'was' technically possible to double those numbers (two VUs doing geometry) but this was quite uncommon setup (and largely unnecessary because - rasterization throughput of 10-20M rendered polygons was on the very high end for that generation of consoles - even with XBox GPU).
Thank you very much for the technical opinion. In my layman's opinion, the Naomi 2 would be more competitive hardware against the ps2 despite the ps2 having the edge. The King of Route 66 runs on Naomi 2 with 120k per frame, ps2 version has the same geometry the same, with only 26,000 tris per frame, it also has better lighting.
try to remember the 100k boss from the horror game.
 
So VF 4 did not use the power of PS2, but does Tekken 4 or 5, or SC3, or any PS2 elite fighter looks 40% better than VF 4 Evolution?
what constitutes 40% better? what it requires in order to be 40% better? that is not really clear, and the comparisons have far more deeper problems

for example let say you have a classic 2 character fighting game and the characters are 10K triangles each model, if you compare it to another game that have 5k triangles models for each character you would say the one with 10k its better but what if the 5k triangles games is a wwe game with 6 5k characters on screen? let say there are just 4 character on screen so 20k triangles in the 2 fighters games and 20k triangles in the 4 fighter's games, you would say the complexity is the same? but what happens with the logic and physics? obviously managing 4 characters on screen is more expensive than 2 so even if you have the same amount of triangles per character you cannot say it requires the same complexity to run both game, the objective is to run a game not to put as many triangles as possible in a character for the sake of it, its a developer choice unless there is a problem to achieve that

and lets not forget that triangles when compared are measured in triangles per second that is the total amount of triangles multiplied by the number of frames, what if its a PAL game? is that being considered too? cause they run at 50 fps max, is the resolution of screen, textures, shadows, number of lights, if it have environment maps, considered?, what if it uses a strict LOD system but giver better graphical results?, there are so many things to make a game "better" but its difficult to put a %
 
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TNT Sheep

Member
PS2 (contrary to popular belief) was the console that had the least correctly used hardware in history, only Shadow of the Colossus, MGS3 and Hitman made decent use of the console, all those 60fps games you know could have been even better at 25~30fps all them.
According to which metrics exactly? Even if it was a difficult system to develop for, it's the best selling console of all time with arguably the most diverse library of all time and one of the longest lifespans of any console. It was also the lead platform for most of the third party games and had proper budget for its games. Yet it's the most underutilised in history?

Besides, no, many 60 fps games were so for a reason e.g. fast paced gameplay, gameplay that requires precision/timing. I for one would not like to play DMC3 at the 15~30 fps of SotC just because it would "look" better.
 
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N30RYU

Member
Do ppl ignore threads they have interest in them?
I had interest in this for about... 20 pages... now I don't want to see this bumped anymore.
 

SkylineRKR

Member
To get back to the original purpose of this thread, yes the DC was powerful when it launched. It clearly outclassed the N64 and PS1 on every possible level. I believe at launch, and we have to measure 1998 since it was released in Japan then, it did go toe to toe with high end PC, like most new consoles do the day they launch. I think we're talking Pentium 2, with voodoo 2 or something. I think I had that setup when DC launched in Japan. DC had GD-Rom, which held more storage than CD (which I had in my PC). DC was kind of above 1998 PCs, it could do better than NFS3, Blood 2 etc. Half Life in 1998 looked worse than the DC version too. I remember playing HOTD2 in the arcade in 1998, and it looked much better than anything I had at home. DC delivered a perfect port of this game only a few months later.

In 1999 DC was still powerful, at least it looked like to me, but its problem was that technology went very fast back then. Geforce came around, Quake 3 looked impressive etc. DVD was still very expensive (this was true in 2000 still, as PS2 was one of the cheapest DVD players), so DC came out too early for this.

Another issue is that the DC received a lot of quick and dirty PC ports, and PS1 remasters. Those games didn't always show what the DC could do. Tomb Raider TLR was a Windows CE game, and could've been better when developed for the actual hardware, but it was probably the best version when it came out. Then there is ofcourse the lack of third party support and budget. When they tried, you would get some impressive results ie. Code Veronica.
 

PaintTinJr

Member
It would more fitting to change the thread title to 'Dreamcast against the world' at this point. The original question was answered a long time ago, poll result is clear cut but as it tends to happen with sega consoles, this is never enough.

All consoles of the 6th Gen, with the exception of the Dreamcast can do H/w accelerated T&L (on the GPU or a co-processor) and (Phong) per pixel lighting, and hw shadow mapping as a result of the two previous capabilities.

Putting performance aside, all the other consoles compete with the later PC GPU card capabilities of ATI 8500/ATI 970 Pro that were part of series that ATI showcased two tone speckled car paint shaders and Carmack used the latter (ATI 980 Pro) to do the Doom 3 alpha showcase with his stencil buffer shadowing technique., which represented a paradigm and gen shift even in the gen-less PC gaming at the time.

By comparison the Dreamcast and even the NAOMI were like a Voodoo 2000/3000 setup (as they didn't do GPU accelerated Transforms or pixel shaders), although the NAOMI with a second CPU could do the hardware accelerated Transformations, so was arguably a little closer, and could have had far more advanced results with custom solutions on the second CPU probably low resolution shaders including phong shading, but unlikely shadow mapping because of the locality of both the video ram and the second CPU and probably needing a slow readback to RAM..
 

nkarafo

Member
DC had GD-Rom, which held more storage than CD (which I had in my PC)
I agree with most of your points but this one doesn't make a difference. Size of games was never an issue on PCs ever since the hard disk became standard. Games could either be fully compressed before installation or/and come packed in multiple install CDs/floppies.
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Even if DC is similar to these as said (to put it down), it had plenty untapped potential (more if barely playable fps are as :messenger_ok: as when enabling PS2's amazing effects in compressed glitch gif iq). Here's a range of low (Banshee) & high (Voodoo 3) end models, note the high res eating performance.

That's ignoring Dreamcast should be more capable than most of these if properly utilized as Konami's Viper (some say it's the Sega Blackbelt repurposed) with actual Voodoo 3 hardware has no games indicating anything remotely equivalent (even if Konami was no Sega they were far from bad).

Shame we didn't get more (& better) PC ports (even if they used Windows CE, that still brought us good shit like StarLancer). Consolized MechWarrior 3, Homeworld, Battlezone 98, Shogo, Carmageddon 2, Descent 3, Freespace, Tachyon, SiN, more QII/III engine games, older games last gen consoles struggled with or couldn't get ports of over new games DC struggled with, more adventures & RPGs etc., more multiplatform ports (and not less) would be great, Turok or Rogue Squadron with better settings/assets/performance could be transformed much like V-Rally 2 & offer more meat than UT.​
 
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Seider

Member
I had Diamond Monster 3D.... Creative Blaster Voodoo 2 12 Mb and 3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 from STB. And i was shocked by a lot of games in Dreamcast. House of the Dead 2 was impressive. Dead or Alive 2 was awesome too... and Soul Calibur was incredible, a lot better than the arcade and the most beautiful fighting game seen ever to that moment.

I cant believe we are discussing this. Dreamcast had great hardware when it was launched in 1998.
 

Esppiral

Member
Esppiral Esppiral
You should try to extract Douglas's face from Silent Hill 3 and apply it to Genfu's model, it would be a nice troll on your youtube channel:
- In engine "cut scene" on PS2 #Pop corns
- "Playable" on Dreamcast #For the Players 🥳

Something like this?
6W7pRQx.png


Or like this? 😜

WGx9QPa.png
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
CT is 'very' light game simulation wise (eg. one rigid-body on screen 95% of the time - outside of occasionally hitting boxes/chairs that drop the framerate badly anyway).
Once again CT isn't even the best form of it, CT2 is vastly improved with longer draw distances and still 99% of the time flawless framerate (liar, CT doesn't "badly drop" often as videos show and it's not like your precious PS2 does it - CT or GTA for that matter - better so it may be a software issue).
This bothered me considering a) playing it b) all real footage of the game(s) showing near 0 drops and c) lying fanboys pretending to be authorities to push their agenda are the worst, so here are the receipts (again, not the improved CT2). In 8+ minutes there's one momentary drop you may call bad and 2-3 hitches, all have nothing to do with any physics collision (boxes or traffic), are likely not reproducible (considering there's nothing like it in most footage) and could be for any reason like the (now over two decades old) Dreamcast's GD-ROM drive stalling (or a missed capture issue)🤷‍♂️

Neat new channel by the way, one of the few places to see Sega Rally 2's 30fps code which doesn't let the game go over that for a consistent experience. It's how I play it and it's rad given all the new tracks with varied conditions in the 10 year championship mode, great stuff if still disappointing.

The 60fps code may have worked ok if there was no vsync pushing it down to 30 every hitch just like with no code but, as it is, it is what it is (meaning pretty useless considering the reduced visuals for momentary benefits, though it seems to maintain 60 well in the snow stage shown here at least).
 
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Fat Frog

I advertised for Google Stadia
NJhc5QG.png

FFX ingame model on the left:

Compared to cutscenes(on the right) the Emotion Engine allows no compromise, hard to see a difference 😍😍😍.

Esppiral Esppiral
I know that the Dreamcast is only on par with the N64+ Ram Pack but, please, could you try to extract the model on the left and recreate a new one at least as decent as Natalia in Golden Eye ?
drAduFL.png
 
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SkylineRKR

Member
Yep Model 3 is from 1996. And I doubt its really more powerful than DC. It could do a few specific arcade genres very well, like racing and rail shooters. But I don't see Model 3 rendering Guilty Gear X, Shenmue, Code Veronica etc. Its very one note. Dreamcast ofcourse runs a fuckton of different type of games, but even Naomi did. That hardware just as easily ran SFA3, CvS2 as it ran DoA 2.

And some of the best looking Naomi games such as HotD2 and Dead or Alive 2 didn't look worse than Model 3 in my opinion. I could also add Giant Gram and Virtua Tennis, which were jaw dropping first time I saw them.

Its just that DC had an entirely different architecture. If you factor out SR2, which was ported via Windows CE, then Model 3 games on DC were very faithful. VF3 was outsourced to fucking Genki, but to me still 95% identical. Virtual On, Get Bass, Fighting Vipers 2 were very close. Also, Model 3 wasn't cheap, I think up to 20k in 1996.
 

Geometric-Crusher

"Nintendo games are like indies, and worth at most $19" 🤡
A question that has always been asked by Dreamcast fans is ''what about sparks/particles in Dreamcast games?''

Firstly, I'd like to know from a technical perspective, what are particles? if they are a variation of transparencies or some kind of flat polygons .
When a game has particles only in collision, before the collision is the gpu used?
But even if the collision doesn't occur, such a possibility routine takes up room in Ram memory, right?

What I can say about particles is that they enrich the game's graphics, the first 3D fighting game with a particle system was Killer Instinct, even in the N64 version there are a lot of particles.

I don't want to say that the Dreamcast took a step back in this regard, but it's good to analyze it. Tech demo showed a small dinosaur built from 1,000 particles on a pyre of fire.

N64 Star Wars Episode I: Battle for Naboot claims 3,000 particles in the game's background. This may be true, but they cannot be seen all at once in the frame.

I counted (yes this is the interesting part) in this games a peak of 140 particles in the frame, avg 110.
In Killer Instinct gold a peak of 70

In case anyone is wondering about the ps1, I counted 36 particles in Street Fighter Ex2 during a hadouken collision.
Games like Ergheiz, Tekken 3, Blood Roar 2 have excellent graphics but few particles a dozen.
Soul Blade is most impressive constantly producing 15-18 particles, but this number can reach 30.

Expendable constantly exceeds 70 particles per frame, basically it is a very advanced game by PS1 standards, Dreamcast version has many particles, looks beautiful but it's not impressive at all.

More impressive was MDK2 which I counted 120 particles when destroying enemies, it's interesting that they fall to the ground and take a while to disappear.

Soul Calibur I counted 36 in game, when falling into the water less than 30, something like 26.
Boss Inferno when destroyed fragments into something like 60 pieces.
Dead or Alive 2 in water stage splashes something like 30 particles but it can reach 40 I guess.

Virtua Fighter 3 has many special effects and physics, the Dreamcast version pushes around 36 particles per frame maybe a little more however, most of the time a third of this.

Model 3's Virtua Fighter 3 is a little more. I mean, in the Dreamcast version only the feet emit particles or leave footprints, the body doesn't, so falling into the water doesn't raise particles, just kicking the water does. In the arcade, both the body and feet emit particles, I counted up to 200 particles per frame in game. Model 3, despite being less powerful than the Dreamcast, managed about 6x more particles in my imprecise count, not bad for 1996 hardware in a 1996 game.

again , these are not accurate numbers
There's a lot of information, I'll post about other games later.
 
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SkylineRKR

Member
Any proof for this claim? All the downgraded ports say a different story. Some unported racing Model 3 games are also beyond what we have seen in DC.

What about the different steps? Is DC/Naomi more powerful than the later Model 3 steps as well?

Okay, but what do the downgraded ports say about the DC itself? Model 3 is completely different architecture to begin with. MGS2 looks worse on Xbox than it does on PS2, so I guess PS2 is more powerful?

And exactly what Model 3 games look better than Soul Calibur, DoA2, Shenmue, MSR, Sonic Adventure 2 to name a few?

SR2 and Daytona 2 look fantastic, but if you inspect them closely they look rather flat also (i've played the original coin op for countless hours, as well as the Gaiden freebie). And they are very pre baked. If you take MSR with its day and night, headlights, rendered cities and fauna, and AI cars looking as good as your own, then i'd wager DC had more potential than Model 3.
 
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Geometric-Crusher

"Nintendo games are like indies, and worth at most $19" 🤡
Any proof for this claim? All the downgraded ports say a different story.
I was being ironic

particles were downgraded in vf3 on the order of 6x , in the island, ice and desert stages.

They added fog in the subway stage to hide bad textures, changed the background in the dojo to remove the light
reduced the sparks in the building stage, the bodies don't leave a mark in the sand or water, in the shun di stage a huge texture was removed, in the castle stage, leaves were reduced.

These details show us vram saturation, and SH4 processor souns exhausted to sustain 60fps on these assets.

On the positive side I would say increase the resolution from 384p to 480p, they avoided sacrificing the polygon count (although there is an arcade version with the daytime island that pushes even more polygons, they didn't even try to port that version).

Example Scud Race 1997 produces something like 70 particles when bumping into walls, like Burnout. It makes me wonder how much effort Sega put into Crazy Taxi, perhaps the only 60fps racing game on the Dreamcast to display this kind of spark (there are about 40 sparks).
 
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Laptop1991

Member
Yes it was powerful, my mate got a Dreamcast to replace his Playstation 1 at the time, it was the 1st console to have 3D acceleration in and i knew all about 3DFX, i had already had a Voodoo 1, 2 Voodoo 2 cards and 2 Voodoo 3 cards made by 3DFX in my PC's back then and the graphics were really good on the Dreamcast, it's a shame more software didn't support it, i remember him playing Quake 2 on his PS1 and it was terrible compared to the PC version, there wasn't many crossover games back then due to the lack of 3d acceleration apart from Tomb Raider, The Dreamcast would of handled Quake 2 no problem.
 
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