I'm not an expert but as far as I'm aware, Dreamcast did introduce new lighting tech; it was just less powerful than PS2 due to releasing over a year earlier, and didn't stick around long enough to benefit from a lot of the technical advances made during that generation.

I'm not an expert but as far as I'm aware, Dreamcast did introduce new lighting tech; it was just less powerful than PS2 due to releasing over a year earlier, and didn't stick around long enough to benefit from a lot of the technical advances made during that generation.

DC could not do as many polygons as PS2 but it had a more efficient CPU and had a lot more Vram. 8mb which is more than any console in that generation. So a lot of the same games that were on DC ported to PS2 look worse like Grandia II. Ecco the Dolphin. Blurrier and more jaggies. DC had a nice clean look compared to a lot of PS2 games.

It depends on the era. Mid to late PS2 then yeah. Zone of the Enders was originally made with Dreamcast in mind. If you only go by the first 2 years of PS2. PS2 there are very few games on PS2 that look better. FFX is the main one but I never was impressed with MGS2. It had that ugly green hazy look and blurrier textures. I just hated it. Shenmue II was pretty impressive. Ikaruga is still a looker to this day. Le Mans was a fantastic-looking game of the era. Headhunter looked good. Sonic Adventure 2 looked good on DC and Gamecube. DOA2 looked leaner and had better colors on DC. Once we get to 2003 and beyond when devs have a better handle on PS2 hardware yeah very little if anything on DC would compare.

DC was an easy system to develop for and PS2 wasn't. The last official Dreamcast game licensed by SEGA was released in 2007. Most if not all DC games released in Japan after 2002 were shmups. Psyvariar 2 might be technically the most impressive shmup released on DC post-2002. Releasing in 2004 on both PS2 and DC. Games like Radirgy in 2005 (also ported to Gamecube) and Karous in 2007 (the last official DC game) were not pushing the hardware any. I'd say the last game you can make a case for DC with any real graphical showcase for Dreamcast would be Mobile Suit Gundam: Federation vs. Zeon which also came to PS2 in 2002. The DC version is cleaner-looking but to be fair to PS2. That game is a NAOMI game which is the arcade hardware Dreamcast is based on.

on SEGA fan forums you can see them taking PS2 and DC games in emulators down to the wireframes to see how many tri's PS2 and DC games used. Started off comparing games both systems shared then just became a curiosity. And no, no one is claiming DC had more raw power. It didn't. It was 2 years older than PS2. It just could do some things better but that was the case for every console that gen. Gamecube had some advantages over Xbox. I believe Gamecube had some restrictions making Burnout 3 difficult to port so it wasn't.


For me in 1999 seeing Shenmue vs even a PC game like Half Life which was intensive then. Blew Half-Life out of the water. Soul Calibur the original arcade game was based on PS1 hardware. The game was remade for DC and holy fuck the same year as Ocarina of Time we had Sonic Adventure which was true next-gen visuals at the time. The Whale sequence blew me away.

When PS2 came out PS1 was long in the tooth. When DC came out to have games looking like it did while PS1 and N64 were peaking was a massive leap. PS2 would churn out some lookers in time but at launch. Nothing on that machine had a clear advantage over DC.

I'm not an expert but as far as I'm aware, Dreamcast did introduce new lighting tech; it was just less powerful than PS2 due to releasing over a year earlier, and didn't stick around long enough to benefit from a lot of the technical advances made during that generation.

I mean it has to be gen 4 to gen 5, whether you look at Sega Genesis to Sega Saturn or SNES to N64, both were massive leaps. Even disregarding the leap from mainly 2D games to mainly 3D games, the 3D leap was truly significant.

Here is Virtua Racing on Genesis, one of the few 3D games in gen 4, and below it Sega Rally on the Saturn:

Likewise here is a 3D leap from SNES to N64:

Dreamcasts graphics processor wasn't a full "GPU".

It relies on the CPU's (Albeit heavily overhauled and custom) floating point unit to feed to geometry data, not to different from the PS1. - But it's going to be perspective correct due to using 128, 64bit and 32bit floating point operations.

The GPU uses a tiled based deferred renderer which is extremely popular in the mobile space today due to it's bandwidth and power savings, it's also more efficient at culling and preventing over-draw, so it can do more rendering with less work.

What the Dreamcast lacked that would be a signature hardware feature later on in the generation, which was hardware TnL or also known as "Transform, clipping, and lighting".
The Original Xbox had super-seeded that with it's programmable pixel shaders that got standardised with the Xbox 360 and Playstation, so did the Gamecube with TEV... And of course the PC.

Which meant that if it wasn't for the Playstation 2 relying on its vector co-processor for TnL, the Dreamcast would have been at a distinct disadvantage for ports. (If it lasted the entire generation.)
Sometimes being first can be a disadvantage.

The Dreamcast did support light volume generation, parallel light source, point source, environmental lights, illumination for circular and non-circular sections and deferred rendering... Deferred rendering is the interesting one as that is what EA leveraged with Frosbite in a big way with Battlefield 3.
The Original Xbox had a couple of games that used Ray Traced lighting, such as shrek and conker which had single light ray bounce...

The hardware feature set of the Dreamcast probably was better aligned to the Nintendo 64 rather than other 6th gen consoles from a feature set perspective (Which was leagues ahead of the Saturn and PS1), obviously performance was a generational leap ahead which allowed some of those techniques to truly shine and catch up to the PC.

I think the biggest shame is that we didn't get a full generation with the Dreamcast, I would have loved to have seen what PowerVR could have done in the later half of the console generation... Same with the Original Xbox, we didn't really get to see those pixel shaders in their full leveraged glory as many games got shifted to the Xbox 360 fairly quickly. (Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero etc')

Dreamcasts graphics processor wasn't a full "GPU".

It relies on the CPU's (Albeit heavily overhauled and custom) floating point unit to feed to geometry data, not to different from the PS1. - But it's going to be perspective correct due to using 128, 64bit and 32bit floating point operations.

The GPU uses a tiled based deferred renderer which is extremely popular in the mobile space today due to it's bandwidth and power savings, it's also more efficient at culling and preventing over-draw, so it can do more rendering with less work.

What the Dreamcast lacked that would be a signature hardware feature later on in the generation, which was hardware TnL or also known as "Transform, clipping, and lighting".
The Original Xbox had super-seeded that with it's programmable pixel shaders that got standardised with the Xbox 360 and Playstation, so did the Gamecube with TEV... And of course the PC.

Which meant that if it wasn't for the Playstation 2 relying on its vector co-processor for TnL, the Dreamcast would have been at a distinct disadvantage for ports. (If it lasted the entire generation.)
Sometimes being first can be a disadvantage.

The Dreamcast did support light volume generation, parallel light source, point source, environmental lights, illumination for circular and non-circular sections and deferred rendering... Deferred rendering is the interesting one as that is what EA leveraged with Frosbite in a big way with Battlefield 3.
The Original Xbox had a couple of games that used Ray Traced lighting, such as shrek and conker which had single light ray bounce...

The hardware feature set of the Dreamcast probably was better aligned to the Nintendo 64 rather than other 6th gen consoles from a feature set perspective (Which was leagues ahead of the Saturn and PS1), obviously performance was a generational leap ahead which allowed some of those techniques to truly shine and catch up to the PC.

I think the biggest shame is that we didn't get a full generation with the Dreamcast, I would have loved to have seen what PowerVR could have done in the later half of the console generation... Same with the Original Xbox, we didn't really get to see those pixel shaders in their full leveraged glory as many games got shifted to the Xbox 360 fairly quickly. (Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero etc')

100% agreed that's why ps2 looked like generation ahead of dreamcast. The graphics and lighting is something that really desperated itself from dreamcast which reminded of a super n64 while ps2 looked like cgi back then.