Biggest leap from one system to its successor in the 3D era in your opinion

[Leynos]

firebush03 said:

JackHandy said:

Seems I misread the title of the thread again. Ugh.

But yes, I was talking about the Saturn, N64 and PS1. Dreamcast made the jump before PS2. So when we first played it, it was mind blowing. When PS2 came out, those of us who had already marinated in the leap were not nearly as impressed as those who didn't. And since PS2 went on to obliterate everything, and not many people had a Dreamcast, PS2 is usually cited as the console that made the jump, but that just isn't true. That Dreamcast, and it was unreal.

Well I’m glad I’m not the only one lol. Also, that’s neat. IDK I always see DC and see nothing more than a sup’d up N64… granted, I wasn’t even as much as a sperm cell by this point, let alone experience the generational jump firsthand. But seeing DC to GCN, for instance, just seems like sucha a massive upgrade.

Nothing on N64 comes close to Shenmue.  98-99 Nothing even on PC looked as good as Soul Calibur or Shenmue.  Sonic Adventure at the time was seen as Pixar like. Magazines did articles trying to explain this is not per-rendered cutscenes but real time. Crazy Taxi big city driving around with NPCs everywhere was pretty nuts. Characters having fingers and lip syncing was just insane at the time.  Having ports of NAOMI games like House of the Dead 2 and seeing real time damage on the zombies was something else. Seeing physics in console games was very novel. Even something as simple as 18 Wheeler with items on a dashboard moving. Shenmue also has simulated physics like turning off a light by a pullstring and it sways back and forth and slows down. The first Resident Evil in full 3D with Veronica. However DC is hardware from 1998. 4 years older than Gamecube so Gamecube was better looking.  One thing DC did better than everything sans Xbox was the 8MB for Texture memory. A lot of DC ports to PS2 look worse on PS2. (this is not saying DC was more powerful just had sharper textures) and could do AA where PS2 did not. 

DC topped out in real time performance at 3 million Polygons Per Second. Gamecube was 12 million (but the highest I know of is Rogue Leader at 9 million). PS2 I believe was 6 million. I don't know what Xbox was. Thing is in 1998 even 1 million on PC was considered pretty high. N64 was topping out at about 150K and piss poor textures. These numbers are taking real time performance with game logic,textures,lighting and such.  The best part at the time was DC was rendering games in 480P. N64? Typically 240P. DC was well beyond N64 and well beyond just suped up N64. It was a monster when it launched but 4 years newer hardware yeah it will be a bit better.

This was blowing minds in 1999. Now granted these are not in game models and just static but this was the era of using human faces to show how powerful new hardware was.

Last edited by Leynos - 1 day ago