| bdbdbd said:
While I agree with your point that you didn't get what was technically possible at the time, in the end this still boils down to what could be done with the high end hardware. You didn't really see the games start taking advantage of PC hardware before the game centric computers started to disappear. On consoles the cost per efficiency is on a whole different level, but on PC you're able to get more power when you're willing to pay for it. I think an editor on an PC magazine that commented Xbox 360 launch back in the day nailed it. He commented that he doesn't understand the fuzz around 360 being able to draw hundreds of characters on screen that all look the same, when on a PC you're able to draw hundreds of characters that all look different, though GPU capable of doing that costs as much a a 360. What I really love about console hardware, are the technical tweaks used to boost on-screen performance. PS2 had insane VRAM bandwidth, GC CPU used L2 cache as a buffer to eliminate empty clock cycles, Dreamcast didn't draw off-screen (or behind an object) polygons, 360 CPU was designed to have low internal latencies, Megadrive's DMA controller was interesting enough to have it's own marketing term, SNES had a number of cheap special purpose processors to boost the performance of the weak hardware, to name a few.
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If I may nitpick here, that's callled view frustum culling, which wasn't introduced on the dreamcast, and rather was one of the very first optimizations in computer 3D graphics.
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