Nope, Gamecube was, and I'm the only person educated on the subject.

*spams screenshots instead of sources*.

I'm not going to get into this discussion but from my experience the Xbox was a lot more powerful on paper but the Gamecube came pretty close in real world performance. Some stuff I distinctively remember from last gen:

- Sony and Microsoft published spec sheets with the absolute maximum performance peaks of their systems. When Nintendo gave us some real world performance stats people were shocked and thought the Gamecube was much weaker than the PS2 even

- The PS2 was the weakest system by a good margin but most games were heavily optimized for it due to its large install base

- 3rd party games looked worse on Gamecube because developers didn't put any effort into them. Need for Speed Underground 2 on Gamecube looked worse than its predecessor... this was often the case. The Gamecube had by far the lowest install base in the west (and smaller storage... and "3rd party games don't sell on Nintendo systems") so western developers wouldn't put a lot of resources into the games. In real world performance the Xbox and Gamecube were pretty close but Xbox games had more resources put into them.

I owned everything EXCEPT an Xbox last gen. All I know is that, when a game was multi-plat, the Xbox Version was always better than the Gamecube and PS2 version. Sometimes the PS2 version would beat out the Gamecube due to storage (Gamecube games would leave out entire levels, musical scores, cutscenes, extras, etc.) to fit the game onto those tiny discs. Sometimes the 'Cube would have the better version due to its raw power. The Xbox ALWAYS had the better version (except for MGS2, from what I've read.)

Anyway, the general consensus of the day was that the Xbox was the most powerful, the Gamecube was a close second and a little better at doing certain thins, and the PS2 was the most popular and quite capable in its own right. It all came down to what the developer was willing to put into the console. Despite the power, Xbox didn't have many companies willing to push the hardware to the limits like iD did with Doom 3.

Got plenty of Xbox 1 games, now (to play on my 360) and I admit that they look good. They just didn't have the "love" put into their creation like Zelda, Resident Evil 4, etc. and it shows.

I have to agree   to what he says.   Look at Super Mario 64's   Intro floating face  and compare it to the Ingame face of mario.    The same goes for Final Fantasy 10 or alot of Ps3 games like  HeavyRain   or look at Ratchet and Clank  they play 1080p videos with almost no compression instead of rendering the stuff in  real game graphics.  (they might use higher poly models  instead of video Im not sure here but you can clearly see that the game looks worse than the cutscenes.)
And btw he never said "Final Fantasy X only looks incredible to people who don't know what they are looking at and Sony fans"   and the only purpose of this was to make fun of him  very unchildish dude.

And God of War just looks good because people don't get its zoomed out.  Go ahead and zoom in  you will see how shitty the game looks like.  And the thing with the sony fans that was said   is kinda true because  no matter what you say they are always right. There is no way a Sony fan can be wrong.

I mean remember the WHO HAS THE WORST FANBOYS thread?  Guess who "won".  Just sayin.   (im not hating on sony or all of sony's fans look at my avatar please   I'm making fun of alot of those fans ego)

nothing comes close to this

Yeah. One thing about Nintendo--no matter what the power of their hardware, they always seem to have developers on their side that can make magical things happen.

I thought this was ancient history but it seems the debate still rages.

The X-box and Gamecube were very similar in power. On a technical level, the Gamecube was capable of features the X-box was not but had some annoying architecture based problems as well as the smaller storage space due to the small discs. X-box on the other hand was effectively a PC and had the advantage of DirectX. PC developers flocked to the system due to the ease of porting and the familiar, easy-to-code architecture. This meant the X-box had numerous games that looked amazing for the gen (in particular Halo 2 which was the first game to use normal mapping) and would have been incredibly difficult and time consuming to reproduce on Gamecube and PS2 (with many features being removed from these versions of games).

If you look at Gamecube exclusives or titles where some effort was put in, you can see the Cube was possible of some amazing feats but was held back by the limitations I mentioned above. Developers simply weren't willing to make the effort and from a business perspective it wouldn't make sense to put in the extra effort for a poor selling console.

Personally I see it as GC+Xbox>PS2>Dreamcast

Have fun

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NintendoGameCube?from=Main.Gamecube

http://cube.ign.com/articles/092/092458p1.html

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/interview/2146

http://www.gamecheatsmaster.net/articles/790500c4f6d7a6db

http://www.nintengen.com/2007/07/wii-has-more-power-than-you-think.html(posted for the GC facts listed)

http://www.gamespot.com/star-wars-rogue-squadron-iii-rebel-strike/previews/star-wars-rogue-squadron-iii-rebel-strike-updated-preview-6075808/?page=3

http://www.the-magicbox.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5342

Please show me an Xbox game pulling this off. I'll be waiting right here when you get through chasing red herrings.(ie, attacking gameplay and design preference)

This link might help:

http://www.purevideogames.net/blog/?p=479

A few quotes from the article:

"The Xbox’s fillrate is nowhere NEAR 4 Gtexels/sec (more like 250-750 Mtexels, according to developers). Xbox’s system bandwidth isn’t a true 6.4GB/sec, considering any info from the CPU to the GPU and vice-versa is bottlenecked at 1.02GB/sec; one-third of GCN’s overall system bandwidth in realtime.

Xbox’s GPU also requires 16MB of the 64MB DDR just to cull a Z-buffer (which is embedded on the GCN GPU at no cost to system memory), and also GCN’s internal GPU bandwidth is more than twice that of Xbox’s (25GB/sec compared to 10GB/sec).

Also, Xbox claims to have more effects than GameCube, and better texturing ability in its GPU, when the XGPU can only do 4 texture layers per pass, and only 4 infinite hardware lights per pass (8 local lights can be done, also). GCN, on the other hand, boasts 8 texture layers per pass, and 8 infinite hardware lights and local lights per pass, all realtime."

and:

Dead or Alive 3, a game Tecmo said “was impossible on any system other than Xbox” due to the amount of polygons onscreen, is a 9-10mps game, tops. The character models (which were also claimed to be an impossibility elsewhere) consisted of 9,000 polygons each- the same amount of polygons in characters in StarFox Adventures, Eternal Darkness, and even in Luigi’s Mansion (end boss). Resident Evil 0, however, boasts the highest polygonal “low-end” model to-date- a whopping 25,000 poly character. Now why is this possible (even against prerendered backgrounds) on a “less techincal” console?

I see some screenshots here of HD versions of PS2 games and PS2 games running on PC graphics cards.
Those are not accurate representations at all.

Anyone who had all systems knows that the GC had the best graphics, even though the Xbox was in theory more powerful.