| TheBardsSong said: What areas does the Gamecube beat the Xbox? |
This article covers some of it:
http://www.purevideogames.net/blog/?p=479
A few quotes for people that don't want to click:
1. Xbox’s system bandwidth isn’t a true 6.4GB/sec, considering any info from the CPU to the GPU and vice-versa is bottlenecked at 1.02GB/sec; one-third of GCN’s overall system bandwidth in realtime.
2. Xbox claims to have more effects than GameCube, and better texturing ability in its GPU, when the XGPU can only do 4 texture layers per pass, and only 4 infinite hardware lights per pass (8 local lights can be done, also). GCN, on the other hand, boasts 8 texture layers per pass, and 8 infinite hardware lights and local lights per pass, all realtime.
3. Tecmo said “was impossible on any system other than Xbox” due to the amount of polygons onscreen, is a 9-10mps game, tops. The character models (which were also claimed to be an impossibility elsewhere) consisted of 9,000 polygons each- the same amount of polygons in characters in StarFox Adventures, Eternal Darkness, and even in Luigi’s Mansion (end boss). Resident Evil 0, however, boasts the highest polygonal “low-end” model to-date- a whopping 25,000 poly character. Now why is this possible (even against prerendered backgrounds) on a “less techincal” console? Why isn’t Xbox smothering GCN to death with games that are impossible to be done on any other console?
4. On CPU performance: GameCube, having this architecture, has a significantly shorter data pipeline than Xbox’s PIII setup (4-7 stages versus up to 14), meaning it can process information more than twice as fast per clock cycle. In fact, this GCN CPU (a PowerPC 750e IBM chip) is often compared to be as fast as a 700mhz machine at 400mhz. So GCN could be 849mhz compared to Xbox’s 733mhz machine performancewise.
5. Rare was contacted, and confirmed that StarFox Adventures does indeed display massive amounts of bumpmaps, and realtime reflection/refraction effects by directly manipulating GCN hardware. When asked about one of the largest areas in the game (Krazoa Palace) regarding fillrate and polygonal display, Rare actually stated this was one of the easier levels to get running on the GCN.
6. Some Xbox fanboys I’ve run across have even been sore enough to say Xbox has faster loadtimes. I then point to Luigi’s Mansion and Metroid Prime, which are impossible on Xbox because they HAVE NO LOADTIMES (the game is constantly streamed from the GameCube disc in burst packets).
7. And summarises with: Either way, neither console can be proven more powerful than the other unless benchmarked properly, since the machines are so totally different from each other.
Basically they're just different.
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