The Dreamcast supported a lot of advanced effects which have only recently started to see good usage in games. Being so early with the functionality and getting discontinued so quickly by January 2001 (with internal developer focus beginning to shift over a year earlier even), it really left a lot of untapped potential. It had barely turned two years old.
Design is the factor chiefly responsible for the look of a game, which is why Pong or Joust from an Atari Anthology pack can still look like Pong or Joust on modern consoles. It's what allows some games to look timeless, yet it's also the unfortunate culprit of bad modeling that causes many games, especially older ones that could compare from the DC era, to look so dated. Well modeled DC games needn't be particularly wanting for geometry, like the World Series Baseball line, Samba de Amigo, F355, Sonic Adventure 2, etc. shows.
dark10x,
The DC hardware subscribed to the old PC ideal of "detail via textures".
There are no such ideals. The PS2 would've needed over an order of magnitude more polygon performance than it had in order to be able to offer polygons as some kind of substitute paradigm for texture detail over the Dreamcast. The reason the PS2 did more geometry wasn't because of a difference in philosophy; it was because it came out later and cost more. When the T&L era rolled around with the GeForce and the PS2, the DC architecture did a lot of polygons too with ELAN.
It was beyond any PC at the time, of course,
In actuality, the FPU on the DC's SH-4 was ahead of its time and helped to give the system quite impressive geometry performance. There probably wasn't another system that could sustain as many polygons until the T&L era started over a year later.
but it still relied heavily on the usage of flat textures to make up for lack of geometric detail.
Any system with lower poly power would have to use textures to make up for the detail of a more powerful system. The PS2 would have to rely on flat textures too in order to model the extra geometry that the Xbox provides.
Initially, the DC could hang with the PS2 due to textures and IQ, but PS2 has more than caught up in the texture department
The DC's PVR vector quantization allows it to handle the variety of nice, big textures that Sonic Adventure 2 uses and that aren't matched in PS2 games, including Sonic Hereos.
and is starting to offer 480p on more and more titles these days (usually the most impressive looking titles as well).
The PS2 is not balanced for proscan as well as DC. The limited framebuffer space prevents even top titles like Champion's of Norrath, Gran Turismo, and Killzone from rendering with a full height front buffer necessary for proscan. A separate mode with a different framebuffer also must be set up to allow the output on PS2, making it less automatic and less likely for devs to bother.
Image quality and texture abilities were really the ONLY areas where DC stood ahead of PS2. They are far from the most important aspects.
Image qualities act very globally upon graphics and are therefore among the largest and most visible contributors to the overall impression. IQ is a reflection of whether things were rendered well or whether they had to be shortcutted. Lower image qualities result from lower precision renderings.
The largest difference in workload and visuals between pre-rendered CG and real-time graphics is in IQ.
Multi-sampling was supported,
The DC supports FSAA via supersampling and has an architecture especially suited to performing it.
PS2 had a very rocky start, but it still managed to step up to the plate with much higher polygon counts, better lighting abilities
It can do more complex vertex lighting. The DC has acceleration for per-pixel lighting in its dot-product bump mapping and is faster for volumetric lighting and shadowing effects.
and tons of effects that had never been seen before in games (the famous post processing effects found in many PS2 games were unheard of prior to the PS2).
Well, not to the same quality at least. On the other hand, the DC's volumetirc performance can be great for all sorts of special effects like fog, fire, and water.
Also, from a percentage standpoint, there are more 3D 60 fps titles on PS2 than any other console in history.
Framerate is chiefly a design choice. But anyway, 60% of PS2 games run at 30 fps or less. The Xbox, GC, and DC may be comparatively stocked with 60 fps titles.
As I've said many times before, I'm not impressed with the DC VGA adaptor.
The VGA signal is of the highest quality.
Arguments about demographics are not relevant to technical matters. Besides, a signal is not related to a TV/monitor set's imaging characteristics, the imaging characteristics of sets are not tied to broad labels like PC-monitor/arcade-monitor/HDTV, VGA compatible high-quality arcade monitors can be bought from Wells Gardner if personal preference is the issue, and there are HDTVs which support VGA if personal preference is the issue.
A lot of DC games had that "nVidia TNT 16-bit color" look...which is to say that it just looked ultra grainy. 16-bit color doesn't necessarily mean something will have that appearance ya know...but DC certainly did in most cases.
Color integrity on DC is superior to PS2. The DC performs all color operations at 32-bit precision, so output even into a 16-bit buffer would retain similar integrity to full 32bpp. The PS2, relying on its raw fillrate to render many passes for the more advanced effects, dithers the colors again at each alpha blend.
ypo,
Voodoo 1 was superior to DC. 800x600 > 640x480.
DC goes higher than that.
dark10x,
Using textures to make up for lack of geometry is a HORRIBLE idea that I am glad is in the past. It was necessary back then, but that is no longer the case.
The alpha bushes when you look outside the bedroom window in Silent Hill 4 or the alpha hair/grass in so many modern titles demonstrate that the problem is the same as always and just relative to its time.
I don't believe the DC could produce the types of effects the PS2 was doing.
The DC could do the type of effects, just not to the same degree. There were motion trails and cross dissolves in Dead or Alive 2 during the Kasumi vs Kasumi cinematic and during the Tengu introduction, Virtua Tennis does motion trails in replay shots, and other distortion effects were used in various games.
Tsubaki,
Some of Team Andromeda's members went to Overworks. The other members went to Smilebit.
One of the dev leads now works at Microsoft, and some of the staff went to UGA too. They're really all over, yet still concentrated within SEGA.
dark10x,
Please show me any DC game that displays depth of field properly.
There's no such thing a "proper" DOF.
Regardless, the first two games run at 60 fps during gameplay...but while those effects are being used, the framerate is 30 fps.
Metal Gear Solid 2 on PS2 drops to 30 fps when it uses those effects most intensely, as well.
If it was SO EASY for the DC, why did every single developer fail to take advantage of it?
Those effects haven't been used in many games for any system, let alone when DC still had decent dev support back in 2000.
and the lack of mipmapping combined with the limited draw distance actually creates a sharper image.
It creates a more defective image. You raise resolution exclusively if you want increased sharpness. Lack of mipmapping is a technical downgrade; the engineers of the algorithm didn't waste transistors on an effect to make graphics worse.
The Graphics Synthesizer selects mip levels based only on how far a pixel is from the viewpoint. However, the rate at which the position within the texture is changing between pixels must be accounted for or else mip selection can't be counted on to suppress alaising. The DC is more sophisticated for this and does it right.
The DC version of Ecco has the advantage of proscan.
Code Veronica PS2 was proven to look EXACTLY the same as the GC version which in turn looks just like the DC version.
The DC version has the advantage of proscan.
Ports are not a good judgement of machine ability, but in this case, the PS2 handled each of them very well.
Two consoles that have respective advantages can't handle each other's games just as well if those games are truly representative of their platform's capabilities.
Some of the developers whose games were downgraded by getting ported from DC to PS2 were Visual Concepts with NFL 2K2 and NBA 2K2, Melbourne House with Test Drive Lemans, AM2 with F355, Bioware with MDK2, Amuze with Headhunter, Acclaim with Crazy Taxi, and many others.
