Why did the Gamecube fail?

[Pemalite]

Leynos said:

Pemalite said:

The OG Xbox was a step up over Gamecube in regards to balance.

The Xbox's CPU was potent, but the awesome Soundstorm audio chip offloaded audio tasks, the GPU offloaded things like TnL from the CPU meaning the CPU could punch above it's weight... It came with a chunky amount of Ram for the time too which enabled games like Morrowind, Doom 3, Half Life 2 to be on the console which were traditionally PC experiences.

But relying on commodity PC hardware which had gone through decades worth of research and development already by that point, was a known quantity in regards to development nuances and balance, really hard to argue with that approach.

The Dreamcast was also fairly refined, but it was definitely memory limited, 26MB of total memory (16MB system, 8MB video, 2MB audio) was not well suited for the entire generation... But it did release in 1999 I guess.

Dreamcast released in 1998 in Japan. 1999 in the US.  I always kinda wondered if they were somehow pushing the DC launch to a WW release in 9/9/99 and able to pack in a Voodoo 3 with 24 MB of main ram (34 in total) a DVD drive and a second analog stick (I know the V3 is a stretch esp as they were originally going for a Voodoo2 before settling on PowerVR2) and if DC was successful enough to launch a 7th gen system. The hardware existed in Lindbergh arcade board. With a few tweaks.

If it launched with a Voodoo 2 and 34MB of memory in total it would have closed the hardware gap with the PS2.
It would definitely had an advantage in fillrate which was one of Voodoos biggest strengths... It's just the hardware feature set was always behind. I.E. 16-bit colour, no TnL so on and so forth. But if you wanted the best performance, Voodoo was where it was at.
Still would have been 3x slower than the OG Xbox in 3D tasks though... Especially with high geometric complex scenes with lots of particle effects.

Although the PS2 did TnL operations on the Emotion Engine anyway and the Dreamcast did it on a separate Hitachi core.

I wonder if Dreamcast did pick 3dfx and was a success if 3dfx would still be around today?