Xbox vs GC .. Which had best looking games? Would love an outside perspective

[Viper1]

Mr Puggsly said:

Viper1 said:

It also sacrififed a lot of textures and polygons.  In some sections, it's really bad.  Even the cutscenes were just video of the GC builds in-game rendered cutscenes.

As for the debate, both were able to top each other in different aspects.  Neither "easily" overpowered the other.  Claiming so is beyond the scope of objectivity.

What it really came down was that the Xbox was easier to work with thanks to DirectX yet the GC's TEV shader system was almost equally as capable for those developers that took the time to learn it.   You really can't answer this question definitively because of the trade offs each console had over the other and the subjectiveness inherent with the question to begin with.

But I don't think Gamecube could top the Xbox at anything. I mean in regards to specs was the Xbox not superior? Furthermore the Xbox was easier for developers to work with.

It certainly must be easier to bring the best looking Gamecube games to Xbox than vice versa.

Specs cannot be directly compared without understanding the efficiency behind them.

While the Xbox's CPU ran at 733 Mhz, if was far less efficient than the GC's copper based 485 Mhz CPU.  Mhz for Mhz, the Xbox is obviously faster but considering the GC CPU could do more operations per clock cycle, they are far closer than the numbers suggest.

It should also be noted that the polygon counts are incomporable.  MS posted absolute peak wire frame polygons while Nintendo posted very conservative real world, fully lit and textured polygon rates (figures that were quickly blown away by EA Canada generating 3 times the published figure in testing).

Another factor is that while MS had 64 MB's of unfiied RAM, the GC had 42 MB of which 24 MB was 1T-SRAM which is insanely fast.

Spec for Spec, the Xbox dominates but it was very inneficient compared to the GC which did as much with less.

As for porting, easy is nto how I'd describe it either way.  Porting over TEV shaders to Direct 3D is a pain in the ass and usually resulted in a lot of performance drop.  The GC's TEV is fixed function.  That means it is capable of certain built in shaders at no performance cost at all.  This is why Factor 5 could never port the Rougue Squadron games to the Xbox.   Rewriting those functions as a programmable shader meant each one ate up resources on the Xbox.  By the time they converted them all, it would run like shit.  

But that often goes the other way too.   Xbox games designed with programmable shaders that the GC didn't have an equivelent fixed function for was very difficult to address.