Dreamcast vs Original Xbox

[curl-6]

Farsala said:

curl-6 said:

I still wonder though, if DC has been supported longer, how far could it have been pushed. Even consoles that are easy to develop for tend to advance graphically over time as tools, engines, and rendering techniques get better. PS2 did eventually pull ahead, but it had a lot more time to advance. Considering the DC is earlier tech I find it impressively competitive.

I would have been more interested in GC or Xbox for that, but then the 360 released very soon after. PS2 was simply in the sweet spot of not too early or too late, launching by itself after PS1.  Here are some examples of the Dreamcast falling a bit too short compared to the others, while the PS2 keeps it close enough, and even has the best processor (aside from PC).

System	Dreamcast (1998)[12]	NAOMI (1998)[13]	PC (1998)	PC (1999)	PlayStation 2 (2000)	GameCube (2001)	Xbox (2001)
Geometry processor	Hitachi SH-4 (200 MHz)	Hitachi SH-4 (200 MHz)	Intel Pentium II (450 MHz)	Intel Pentium III 800EB (800 MHz)[n 1]	Emotion Engine (294.912 MHz)	ATI Flipper (162 MHz)[n 2]	Nvidia NV2A (233 MHz)[n 3]
Matrix transformations [n 4]	Matrix FLOPS	1.4 GFLOPS[n 5]	1.4 GFLOPS	230 MFLOPS[n 6]	1.1 GFLOPS[n 7]	5.5 GFLOPS[n 8]	7.5 GFLOPS[n 9]	5.8 GFLOPS[n 10]
MACs/sec	800 million[n 11]	800 million	130 million[n 12]	420 million[n 13]	2 billion[n 14]	3 billion[n 15]	2 billion[n 16]
Vertices	50 MVertices/s[n 17]	50 MVertices/s	8.4 MVertices/s[n 18]	47 MVertices/s[n 19]	140 MVertices/s[n 20]	162 MVertices/s[n 21]	116 MVertices/s[n 22]
Perspective transformations	16 MVertices/s[n 23]	16 MVertices/s	2.6 MVertices/s[n 24]	11 MVertices/s[n 25]	80 MVertices/s	160 MVertices/s[n 26]	110 MVertices/s[n 27]
Lighting	1 light source	14 MPolygons/s[n 28]	14 MPolygons/s	2 MPolygons/s[n 29]	7.2 MPolygons/s[n 30]	39 MPolygons/s[n 31]	90 MPolygons/s[n 32]	46 MPolygons/s[n 33]
4 light sources	6.8 MPolygons/s	6.8 MPolygons/s	1.1 MPolygons/s[n 34]	5.8 MPolygons/s[n 35]	9.8 MPolygons/s[n 36]	20 MPolygons/s[n 37]	16 MPolygons/s[n 38]
Rendering processors	PowerVR CLX2 (100 MHz)	PowerVR2 (100 MHz)[n 39]	2x Voodoo2 (SLI) (90 MHz)[n 40]	Neon 250 (125 MHz)	Voodoo3 SE (200 MHz)[n 41]	GeForce 256 (120 MHz)	Graphics Synthesizer (147.456 MHz)	Flipper (162 MHz)	NV2A (233 MHz)

It is worth noting, theoretical performance metrics like FLOPS don't always translate to real world perfomance. But yeah, PS2 had more grunt then DC, but fell significantly behind the more modern GPUs of Xbox/GC.

I still think DC is really impressive for its time of release though; despite being older than PS2 it had some advantages and its best looking games top most of PS2's output, even if the maximum ceiling was higher on PS2.