lol @ Xbox having better loading times than Gamecube. That was one of the benefits of the mini-DVDs.

It really depends on the kind of game being made.

Let's assume for a second that the devs have mastered both consoles. (Xbox and Gamecube)

If you wanted to make a game with large areas and heavy use of normal mapping, the Xbox would be the better choice because of its larger RAM, hard drive streaming, and programmable pixel shaders. Halo 1 & 2, and Chronicles of Riddick are prime examples of this.

If you wanted to make a game that pushes lots of polygons and effects at once, like the Rogue Squadron games, the Gamecube would work better because it's GPU is better suited to handling that kind of thing.

And with this summary, this multi-page thread appears to have run its course...

or has it?

Then why does it seem the average GC game is rather low poly? Hell, it's obvious a lot of PS2 exclusives push more polygons than your average Gamecube game.

Read the bolded again.

This is the "developer effort" effect/argument. Like how a lot of Wii games look worse than Rogue Squadron.

Last gen the Gamecube was the console that developers put in the least amount of effort. It had low market share (although similar to Xbox) and was the harder to develop for (X-box vs Gamecube, PS2 was probably the hardest but also had the largest market share by a huge margin). On X-box, most developers could just port over PC code with ease (and therefore cheaply) and still get the game looking half-decent. Gamecube required more work and optimisation than developers were willing to put in. It also made no financial sense to put in effort for such low market share. Only a few developers truly pushed the console for this reason, but when they did, the effects was incredibly impressive.

I can't think of a 3rd party exclusive (from last gen) with more effort put into it than Resident Evil 4. While there were less 3rd parties working on Gamecube, I wouldn't say their efforts were comparable to the Wii. Not even close. The multiplats weren't too shabby either, though I do remember a few rare instances when a 3rd party just didn't give a shit about the GC and delivered an inferior product to the PS2, but for the most part I'd say the GC was treated fairly well by 3rd parties.

Hey Guys, I just read an interesting discussion between two Wii scene hackers DRS (that is trying to port Doom 3 - PC Version for the Wii) and Tueidj (the hacker behind Devolution, a GNC emulator for the Wii).

They wrote some truly educational posts about the Wii (that we all know that has a very similar architecture to the NGC) including this one:

"Porting the XBox version would be a lot easier I guess. It's already suited to 64MB of RAM and low end GPU/CPU. However, a complete team was assigned to do that, not one or two homebrew coders."

source.

And that matches with what he's saying. Since the GC was treated fairly well, let's assume as well as the xbox (though with moneyhats we know that isn't the case but let's assume), the effort to output ratio being lower on the cube (due to difficulty to optimize games) made results much less obvious than for the xbox.

After an extensive research over the internet on this topic i can conclude that

Sega DC is half generation behind, is not in the same league, even though it aimed in the right direction with the online, the pad etc.


Sonys PS2 is a polygon pusher, but nothing more, EVERYTHING had to be made by hand and in parallel (a pain in the ass lol ), it didnt have hw effects like GC, or shader 1.1 like Xbox , and had ridiculous bottlenecks in the texture department.
Never maxed out because of the amount of hard work required to do so, still, due to its unprecedent success it was the lead platform and was treated like a goddess, achieving great results.

Xbox was the most powerful on paper, but was heavily hampered by the crappy Celeron Cpu, the mem pool was slow also, with high latency, and everything being unified didnt help either, it made things worse. Xbox was a big, slow, powerful monster.

Nintendo had the most balanced hw overall, but different limiting factors like less main memory, lower fill rate, small disc storage capacity and little comercial success, kept GC far from being the game changer it could ve. Many described it as over engineered in the Memory subsystem part.

ive also read how the FSB limited a lot the CPU performance of the Xbox, and how PS2 had by far the lowest mem bandwith
GCs Flipper could in theory make 8 texture layer passes per clock but in reality it was limited to four like Xbox because it only had 4 pipelines, so that part was overengineered