zeldaring said:
Pemalite said:
Dreamcasts graphics processor wasn't a full "GPU".
It relies on the CPU's (Albeit heavily overhauled and custom) floating point unit to feed to geometry data, not to different from the PS1. - But it's going to be perspective correct due to using 128, 64bit and 32bit floating point operations.
The GPU uses a tiled based deferred renderer which is extremely popular in the mobile space today due to it's bandwidth and power savings, it's also more efficient at culling and preventing over-draw, so it can do more rendering with less work.
What the Dreamcast lacked that would be a signature hardware feature later on in the generation, which was hardware TnL or also known as "Transform, clipping, and lighting".
The Original Xbox had super-seeded that with it's programmable pixel shaders that got standardised with the Xbox 360 and Playstation, so did the Gamecube with TEV... And of course the PC.
Which meant that if it wasn't for the Playstation 2 relying on its vector co-processor for TnL, the Dreamcast would have been at a distinct disadvantage for ports. (If it lasted the entire generation.)
Sometimes being first can be a disadvantage.
The Dreamcast did support light volume generation, parallel light source, point source, environmental lights, illumination for circular and non-circular sections and deferred rendering... Deferred rendering is the interesting one as that is what EA leveraged with Frosbite in a big way with Battlefield 3.
The Original Xbox had a couple of games that used Ray Traced lighting, such as shrek and conker which had single light ray bounce...
The hardware feature set of the Dreamcast probably was better aligned to the Nintendo 64 rather than other 6th gen consoles from a feature set perspective (Which was leagues ahead of the Saturn and PS1), obviously performance was a generational leap ahead which allowed some of those techniques to truly shine and catch up to the PC.
I think the biggest shame is that we didn't get a full generation with the Dreamcast, I would have loved to have seen what PowerVR could have done in the later half of the console generation... Same with the Original Xbox, we didn't really get to see those pixel shaders in their full leveraged glory as many games got shifted to the Xbox 360 fairly quickly. (Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero etc') |
100% agreed that's why ps2 looked like generation ahead of dreamcast. The graphics and lighting is something that really desperated itself from dreamcast which reminded of a super n64 while ps2 looked like cgi back then. |
The gap between Dreamcast and PS2 was nowhere near generational; as hardware released over a year later PS2 does have newer features, but then Gamecube and Xbox both had newer features than PS2 but are still in the same generation. There's just with more difference in core rendering tech than we are used to in more recent generations.
Each of the four demonstrate a stage in the evolution of graphics technology from the late 90s through to the early 2000s
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