Original XBOX performance

[Pemalite]

Azzanation said:

I believe the GC could run any Xbox game where as I see the Xbox struggling to run games built around the GC's hardware. As examples, Splinter Cell was designed around the Xbox hardware and the GC could run it (Not as good) but far from broken, where as the Xbox judging by Rogue Leader could barely do half the frame rate of the GC version, hence why there was no Xbox port. Now that's just rumours stated from Factor 5 at the time.

The Xbox could run Rogue Leader, it will just need some cut backs to the Geometry.

By the same token... The Gamecube wouldn't have been able to handle Halo 2 with all it's new-fangled shader effects, but could run it in a reduced fashion.

The best evidence we have for the 6th gen is with the games that are currently released, we need to look at how the rendering pipelines of those games are handled and how they leverage the hardware.

Azzanation said:

Xbox also had better multiplats because its design was very similar to PCs where as the GC like most consoles were alienated and were a little harder to work with, so in many cases the lead platform was Xbox.

The Xbox having superior Audio, CPU and Ram also played a significant part of that.
A console isn't just a GPU, it's the sum of all it's parts.

Azzanation said:

I also strongly disagree when people say the Xbox could render the better looking water.. I find it that gen that the best looking water in games were on the GC. Games like Mario Sunshine looked absolutely amazing and the GC was actually rendering the waves, it wasn't just a texture placed ontop of another texture to make the water detail look good and mimic waves, it actually did waves. Also Wave Race Blue Storm still has some of the best wave effects iv seen apart from Black Flag and Sea of Thieves and that game was made 17 years ago.

Yeah. But Mario Sunshine wasn't leveraging compute heavy shadered water effects like for example... Morrowind.
Which plays into my prior claim that the Gamecubes texturing capability was pretty potent... There are some types of water which can be rendered more effectively on the Gamecube, whilst other types of water is rendered more effectively on the Xbox.

Morrowinds water actually has more in common with allot of todays games in how it's "done".

Azzanation said:

I just find the Xbox's design just wasn't as good as the GCs. I find the Xbox had bigger bottle necks when it came to things where as the GC had a perfect blend between CPU and GPU. Xbox was all about brute force and basically was a supercharged PS2 however the GC was a cleverly designed machine capable of much more with less horse power.

I think people don't take nVidia's Geforce 3 seriously enough, it was actually surprisingly capable... And had a myriad of efficiency edges over it's peers.
There is a reason why nVidia have been a leader in GPU's for decades.

I am not discounting the fact that the Gamecube wasn't a well designed machine, it most certainly was and it certainly pulled it's weight visually, but the Xbox simply had the superior GPU, CPU, Ram and Storage.

HoloDust said:

Doom 3, Chronicles of Riddick, Morrowind...to name a few...I doubt they could've run on GC without some serious cutbacks.

Morrowind would have been impossible, it was extremely memory hungry, the Xbox not only had more Ram, but also faster Ram... And it still chugged.
Plus the Gamecube not having SM1.0/1.1/1.4 compliant shaders would have meant it lost one of Morrowinds biggest visual flairs, that water.

...That's not to say that Bethesda couldn't have done a similar effect with a few passes on the TEV... But that would have come with a performance reduction.

haxxiy said:

Those two GPUs have exactly the same chip. The R9 280s were a rebrand of the HD 7900s. Besides, we've no idea of which version of the cards are being compared, and it probably isn't the GHz edition.

It wasn't the Ghz edition. Anandtech would have listed it as such like they used to.
Base Radeon 7970: 2048:128:32 layout, 925Mhz core, 264GB/s of bandwidth.
Boosted Radeon 7950: 1792:112:32 layout, 925mhz boosted Core, 240GB/s of bandwidth.
Base Radeon 280: 1792:112:32 layout, 933Mhz boosted core, 240GB/s of bandwidth.

Both are GCN 1.0, but you are right that the Radeon 280 is a rebadged Radeon 7950.

Using the Radeon R9 290 against the RX 470 is a bit tricky as well... As the RX 470 doesn't spend all it's time at it's maximum clockrate... But that just reinforces my point that flops is bullshit number anyway.

All GPU's have bottlenecks... And flops doesn't take into account a GPU's texturing, geometry capability either, let alone bandwidth and tricks to drive up efficiency like culling, colour compression and so on.