Pemalite said:
zeldaring said:
Agreed ps2 started the trend of games actually starting to look like cgi while dreamcast just looked a super n64 which permalite explained well by saying it's tech was more similar to n64 then 6th gen consoles. I could not believe mgs 2 was actual gameplay. |
The Nintendo 64 and Dreamcasts hardware feature set shared similarities from a fundamental perspective in the way it handles things (I.E. Lack of TnL, AA, hardware motion blur etc'), however the Dreamcast chip was "smarter" and more efficient (Due to it's tiled based approach) plus had more resources to truly shine. (8MB of Ram vs 26MB total.)
I think people are confusing the difference between "power" and "hardware capability/feature set" they aren't actually the same... We need to also remember that the Nintendo 64 was based on SGI's technology which was actually significantly more advanced than competing solutions found in the Saturn, Playstation 1, 3DO, Jaguar and was more in line with PC GPU's of the time. (I.E. Direct X 6.0 graphics processors with full filtered textures.)
Let's take the Gamecube and Original Xbox... Gamecube used TEV or "Texture Environment Unit" which is a cute acronym for what is fundamentally a colour combiner... Not to different (But still different) to a pixel shader. - Difference with the TEV is it also conveniently bundles a texture read as part of that pipeline... The Xbox didn't need that as it was rather proficient at Single-pass Multi-Texturing anyway.
So theoretically the Gamecube and Original Xbox from a GPU feature set (At-least in regards to shader-like effects) are capable of a similar level of output.
The Original Xbox however was just significantly faster... So it could use those effects more often and more prominently...
Which is why we got things like pixel shader water in Morrowind... The Gamecube could do it also, but just not to the same level or scope, despite not technically even having direct X compliant "pixel shaders".
Another example is the 3dfx voodoo effect... Even though it's feature set was technically a generation behind the nVidia, ATI, S3, Matrox, Rendition etc' GPU's of the day... It could offer significantly more performance, so whilst other GPU's took a significant hit to performance by enabling certain features like texture filtering, the voodoo didn't, so it could use it more often and games looked better as a result.
The Playstation 2 did have some distinct hardware nuances that really could showcase what the hardware was capable of... But it was also a console that was supported heavily by the entire gaming industry due to it's install base and length of time on the market, something the Dreamcast didn't have.
A Super Nintendo 64 is probably not an accurate way to really describe what the Dreamcast was... It was a console that technologically straddled two generations, similar to the Nintendo 64.
If Nintendo had a decent memory sub-system (I.E. No 4kb texture cache) and could use single/half precision floats, the Nintendo 64 would have been a far more impressive beast visually. |
I remember reading about this stuff back in the day; if I recall correctly, the TEV in the Gamecube/Wii was less flexible than the pixel shaders in the Xbox, but highly efficient and performant at doing things like multitexturing/EMBM, which allowed games like Mario Galaxy 1/2, Rogue Squadron 2/3, Jet Rocket, etc to spam shiny and bumpy surfaces on almost everything while still running at 60fps.
