What could have been...

[tsumake]

I just finished God of War, and it got me thinking about the dreamcast. God of War (and God of War II) are basically swan-song titles for the the ps2. You could say the FFXII and these games basically got the most out of the system.

I wonder....if the DC had somehow stuck it all these years (not in the backgrounds, mind you, as a real competitor), what developers could have found out about the hardware. Was the DC more powerful than the PS2 in any respect? Where there aspects about the DC that made it better than the PS2?

Do you think that Shenmue II is the most the DC could do? For example, could the DC do disc streaming like the other consoles?

I just have a feeling that if it had lasted in the market, the DC could have made had some very technically impressive games. Despite the age, Grandia II still looks quite well. I always liked the textures.

What do you guys think?

 

[Cloud121]

The only thing the Dreamcast actually is better than the PS2 at is VRAM. The PS2 only has 4MB VRAM, whereas the DC has 8MB VRAM.

Though the only advantage this really has is that it can hold more textures. The PS2 can push about 4x the polygons (3 Million vs 12 Million) of the Dreamcast.

 

[it290]

I think Shenmue II was probably pretty close to the limit. AM2 always got the most out of the hardware, and the extreme slowdown in some spots shows that they were really pushing it. It also looks better than a lot of PS2 games.

As far as more recent DC releases go, I think Under Defeat looks amazing for a Dreamcast game.

 

[dibz]

Tech specs are over-rated often anyway. A shit game on the PS2 is still a shit game if it can push 4x the polygons a good game on the DC can.

* Not that all PS2 games are shit, or all DC games are good -- I just don't think the idea of tech specs relating to the quality of games is a good one.

 

[tsumake]

I hear all of this talk about "disc-streaming." Is the dreamcast capable of streaming data off a gd-rom, a la "GTA San Andreas?"

 

[vbt]

For sure we would have better videos with new codecs. I can't find where I saw the real polygon limits of the DC by using the CPU to calculate more maybe it was on the Sega America site. I've found anyway this site :


http://www.segatech.com/technical/polygons/index.html


I guess there was still a way to use more the SH4 to calculate polygons and so to do more than the 3M of polygons.

 

[ExCyber]

I hear all of this talk about "disc-streaming." Is the dreamcast capable of streaming data off a gd-rom, a la "GTA San Andreas?"

I can't readily think of a game that does it, but it should be possible. Generally speaking it's not the console that stops that from happening, but rather the fact that there's a lot of design effort involved in making sure that your game engine, level designs, file formats, disc layout etc. are streaming-friendly, so it's easier to just opt for "Now Loading..."

 

[Quakester2000]

The PowerVR architecture was good in the fact that it didn't renders thing that weren't on screen unlike traditional rendering where everything is rendered even hidden structures and unseen polygons. Also the Dreamcast PowerVR2 had texture compression so it could fit about 50-100 meg of textures into its memory. Im not sure if the PS2 supportes hardware texture compression?

In the application in the sega dreamcast console, tiling was performed by a piece of hardware. This facilitated deferred rendering - only the visible pixels were texture-mapped, saving shading calculations and texture-bandwidth.