Pemalite said:
burninmylight said:
The GCN had an easily debunked and undeserved reputation for being weak among non-forum dwelling denizens for A) going with mini-discs with a smaller storage capacity, B) Looking like a preschooler's lunchbox and C) getting half-ass ports of games made with other systems in mind.
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Anyone who claims the Gamecube was underpowered, knows nothing about technology.
It did things differently, it certainly was not underpowered.
ConciousMan said:
Other than that there's no handheld that can play games like Switch 2 in this price bracket.
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Switch 2 can't play games like the Switch Lite in the Switch Lite price bracket... Price and capability is one of those goal posts you can move around indefinitely.
Arguably, no other handheld can match the GPD Win 5 in terms of capability at it's price point.
It's one of those "stupid" arguments that constantly rears it's ugly head.
ConciousMan said:
Also, I had to chime in since I believe Tegra T239 is a custom chipset as stated by Nvidia.
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Again. Stupid argument.
Companies are for-profit companies and make claims all the time which often stray from the real truth.
Remember... The Switch 1 SoC was "claimed" by nVidia/Nintendo to be "custom" and it 100% wasn't.
curl-6 said:
Yeah it's remarkable how many people back then thought Gamecube was weaker than the PS2, when even at the time the specs and info were easily accessible online.
Bit like how so many people thought Switch 1 was on par with PS3/360 or Switch 2 is on par with PS4, again despite all the proof to the contrary.
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Switch 1 and Switch 2 have more advanced hardware capable of more modern effects, which always pushes that hardware past it's compared peers.
Switch 1 has the Polymorph engines, so it could have meshes/models that were a hundred times more complex in terms of polygons than what the Playstation 3 could have.
The Switch 2 has RT cores fpr lighting a generation ahead of the PS4.
But it's hardware isn't just capable of more modern effects, it can also do old techniques more efficiently.
..Which is why black and white spec wars is not going to hold any water.
Soundwave said:
GameCube was the best engineered system that gen and dollar for dollar the best performance and just flat out better than the PS2, GameCube was more like a PS2 Pro.
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Xbox was the best platform in terms of hardware that generation. It was in another league entirely.
Not even up for debate. Dollar for dollar, you got more with the Xbox as Microsoft was trying to undercut the competition to gain a foothold in the industry.
And whilst the Gamecube was technically capable of almost every graphics rendering technique of the Xbox thanks to the Cubes' TEV... Which was a powerful and programmable 16-stage colour blender. - Where it combines multiple texels (lighting, textures and constants) to achieve an massive amount of texture effects that will eventually be applied over the games polys... This was at the time when the ENTIRE industry was moving to programmable pixel shaders, which the original Xbox had... And which became the defacto' approach with the PS3, Xbox 360.
The Xbox also had a Hard Drive, which was instrumental in some games even being able to operate on a console at the time. (Doom, Half Life, Halo 2, Morrowind etc')
bonzobanana said:
Wii U should be included on that list too as came to the market much later than 360 and PS3 but had much weaker performance overall with lower CPU and GPU resources. Most if not all multi-platform games ran worse on Wii U than those much older consoles and loading times were much longer typically mainly because there wasn't a hard drive to cache from. Often games felt worse too as the Wii U removed analogue triggers so many shooting and driving games didn't feel as good as the versions on PS3 and 360. Also I suppose you can make the case too that many of their portable systems were underpowered however I always wanted that. Yes the PSP and Vita were nice but on a portable system I want longer battery runtime and I felt that was the big benefit of Nintendo handhelds. I was a huge fan of DS and 3DS years ago.
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The WiiU was many things.
I don't think the hardware capability or graphics was the main issue with that console... The WiiU's GPU was certainly more powerful than the Xbox 360/Playstation 3, the VLIW5 GPU was more modern, more efficient... It was let down by slow DRAM and an "okay" CPU.
Remember the CPU is an Out-of-Order Design which is more like AMD's Jaguar in philosophy but obviously at a lower thread and clock rate... Whilst the Xbox 360/Playstation 3 were built on an In-Order design which clock-for-clock was terrible and more or less was like an Intel Atom processor... But tried to compensate with more threads and a high (at the time) clock rate.
Keep in mind that the WiiU's best games all ended up being ported to the Switch... Which ended up also being some of the best selling games in history... But were also visually competent and have aged well.
You are right that developers did not stream data from the WiiU's internal storage... And that was probably a good thing considering how terrible quality the internal eMMC SSD of the WiiU was.
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I disagree, XBox is an example of a company just willing to brute force hardware to the market and lose hundreds of dollars per unit to make it happen.
If the GameCube was developed around that philosophy it probably could have been much more powerful. The losses on the XBox per unit were too high even for Microsoft as they basically opted to kill the system early in 2004 even though Halo 2 was a massive hit and hardware sales were up, that's pretty much the dictionary definition of shit hardware design that the higher ups at the company want the system killed and moved out.
It's just an example of MS throwing money at every kind of challenge like a spoiled rich kid going off to college using daddy's credit card to try and make anything work. They lost $4 billion reportedly on the original XBox in like only 4 years, lol that's horrendous hardware management.
When Nintendo announced the Dolphin at E3 1999 officially and basically said it would be as good as the PS2 or better many people scoffed at this claim ... Nintendo delivered on that promise and probably then some. And they did it at $200, not $300.
I can kinda see why Nintendo was frustrated after the GameCube, they had made great hardware and fixed just about every problem from the N64 and even landed massive exclusive deals like Resident Evil, one upped the PS2 in hardware and basically got no credit for any of that effort.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 24 January 2026
