Strengths and weaknesses of GameCube relative to its peers *spawn

I think the later Burnout games ran better and more consistently on PS2 than on the Xbox. There were also effects completely missing from the Xbox builds of the games. So there were areas outside of shaders where PS2 had real tangible advantages.

This ps2 centric game certainly didnt look worse on xbox, ps2 had larger sparks, xbox better reflections?
Black, which was using the same engine was both graphically and sound wise better.

They were clearly in the same console generation graphically.

So where DC and Xbox, and ps2.
 
They were clearly in the same console generation graphically. The differences were were more like the difference between Mega Drive, SNES and 16bit Amigas/Home computers - whereby each platform had its own unique strengths based on its architecture but they were also clearly within the same generation. Altough the home consoles with their dedicated hardware had smoother scrolling and were more capable of 60fps rendering than the home computers.

The shader tech in the Xbox was honestly in its infancy and developers were still learning how to make best use of shaders.

I think the later Burnout games ran better and more consistently on PS2 than on the Xbox. There were also effects completely missing from the Xbox builds of the games. So there were areas outside of shaders where PS2 had real tangible advantages.

I only have the Xbox version of Burnout 3 but from what I can tell on YT the only difference is higher res textures on Xbox, possibly higher quality blur?

I don't think ps2 could do anything better besides particles and geo based water deformation.
 
Gddr3 could be used for whatever graphics tasks, except apparently the framebuffer but i'm still not convined on that with no hard evidence. It doesn't have to work the same as gc i mean, xbox one x runs xbox one games with no edram. As it stands this is all guesswork including my end of it.

I suppose i'll have to research this when I have time.

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/11/19/hybridxfb/

According to dolphin the GPU (gamecube and wii) only writes to the "embedded frame buffer" when rendering. Rogue Leader and rebel strike render menus (and some videos I guess) in vertical tiles in order to use 3xMSAA, but I don't think any other games do that.

Actually I got an answer from jmc himself. He said other than a few simplistic wii games, rogue leader/rebel strike are the only games that render in tiles like that.
 
I only have the Xbox version of Burnout 3 but from what I can tell on YT the only difference is higher res textures on Xbox, possibly higher quality blur?

I have the game on both, while i cant do direct side-by-side comparisons since i dont have two identical tv's but switching between source inputs, its kinda hard to tell any difference at first glance, the xbox versions sure doesnt look worse or has less effects, if any the xbox version seems to look somewhat better.

I don't think ps2 could do anything better besides particles and geo based water deformation.

If even that, the xbox probally would give a different result in a game like ZOE2, not worse just different perhaps, with all else better. Im not downplaying the PS2, just that even now the xbox feels like a much more powerfull system. The PS2 was the console that gen to have though, by large. Playing it on a large new tv isnt fun though, the first SSX looks very bad on it, using a RGB component cable, going to get some components for the PS2's, with openps2loader one can alter output modes, hope that will help :p
 
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/11/19/hybridxfb/

According to dolphin the GPU (gamecube and wii) only writes to the "embedded frame buffer" when rendering. Rogue Leader and rebel strike render menus (and some videos I guess) in vertical tiles in order to use 3xMSAA, but I don't think any other games do that.

Actually I got an answer from jmc himself. He said other than a few simplistic wii games, rogue leader/rebel strike are the only games that render in tiles like that.
I see well that solves that then. Cheers!
 
I have the game on both, while i cant do direct side-by-side comparisons since i dont have two identical tv's but switching between source inputs, its kinda hard to tell any difference at first glance, the xbox versions sure doesnt look worse or has less effects, if any the xbox version seems to look somewhat better.



If even that, the xbox probally would give a different result in a game like ZOE2, not worse just different perhaps, with all else better. Im not downplaying the PS2, just that even now the xbox feels like a much more powerfull system. The PS2 was the console that gen to have though, by large. Playing it on a large new tv isnt fun though, the first SSX looks very bad on it, using a RGB component cable, going to get some components for the PS2's, with openps2loader one can alter output modes, hope that will help :p
Looking at it again Burnout 3 seems to have a different particle system on Xbox, it may or may not be more taxing but I think it looks less cartoony on Xbox personally. Certainly The Ps2 absolutely crushes xbox in bandwidth, with Wii in second place though I don't know how close it is to Ps2, how you stack all of its different pools and such.

Ps2 is easily my least favorite system from that gen, don't much care for it tbh. Ps1 in the 5th gen as well... then Ps3 in 7th gen. Yeah i'm not much of a sony fan :p But Ps4 is my favorite 8th gen machine including Wii U, don't have a switch yet though.

You probably need some sort of quality hdmi scaler for ps2. I actually bought a retrotink2 hdmi scaler for my N64 and I feed it using S-video, and it looks pretty nice. Wii I just use straight up component and it looks ok.
 
I only have the Xbox version of Burnout 3 but from what I can tell on YT the only difference is higher res textures on Xbox, possibly higher quality blur?

I don't think ps2 could do anything better besides particles and geo based water deformation.
It's mainly Burnout Revenge. I don't own the game any more. But the differences have been discussed in detail on this board before. Of the top of my head what I remember the Xbox version had better textures and sharper image quality. The PS2 had superior post processing effects, more particle effects, lighting and motion blur. These effects arguably played a big part of conveying the look and sheer velocity of Burnout Revenge. The light sparks and motion trails for example made the crashes more spectacular imho. Which makes sense as the game was designed to take advantage of the PS2's strengths.
 
It's mainly Burnout Revenge. I don't own the game any more. But the differences have been discussed in detail on this board before. Of the top of my head what I remember the Xbox version had better textures and sharper image quality. The PS2 had superior post processing effects, more particle effects, lighting and motion blur. These effects arguably played a big part of conveying the look and sheer velocity of Burnout Revenge. The light sparks and motion trails for example made the crashes more spectacular imho. Which makes sense as the game was designed to take advantage of the PS2's strengths.
Oh yeah, revenge looks best on Ps2. Even on 360 it looks crap, they just turned the bloom and post processing dials up to 11.
 
OG xbox was like a half or a gen ahead of ps2. Too bad there werent many tech demos on xb, like this one on ps2.


Even how much I love Aura For Laura, I dont think even it showed what the machine can do. If I remember right this was from IGI developers, I might not remember right though :p
The pixelation and morph effects are really awesome. Not much of PS2 demos available...
 
Yes its OG xbox too, i own the game on both consoles, theres virtually no difference, the xbox version might look somewhat better, but that could be subjective, its hard to compare switching input sources instead of side-by-side. Black, supposedly running on the same engine, looks and sounds better on xbox, its one of the best looking ps2 games with particles that are really crazy, this PS2 oriented game runs better on xbox. This tells me Xbox must be more powerfull in about every single way, and then some.
 
Yes its OG xbox too, i own the game on both consoles, theres virtually no difference, the xbox version might look somewhat better, but that could be subjective, its hard to compare switching input sources instead of side-by-side. Black, supposedly running on the same engine, looks and sounds better on xbox, its one of the best looking ps2 games with particles that are really crazy, this PS2 oriented game runs better on xbox. This tells me Xbox must be more powerfull in about every single way, and then some.

Pretty much, although black doesn't get as crazy with particles as some other ps2 games, xbox still gets beat there. And also the kind of water deformation seen in baldurs gate but, every other win goes to xbox.

Particles in black were crazy enough to where it might not run on gamecube though, shoot down a hallway in black and you literally can't see because of all the dust. That was the one area xbox had gc beat in bandwidth. In cube games you either had more limited amounts of particles, or less transparent ones.
 
Pretty much, although black doesn't get as crazy with particles as some other ps2 games, xbox still gets beat there. And also the kind of water deformation seen in baldurs gate but, every other win goes to xbox.

Particles in black were crazy enough to where it might not run on gamecube though, shoot down a hallway in black and you literally can't see because of all the dust. That was the one area xbox had gc beat in bandwidth. In cube games you either had more limited amounts of particles, or less transparent ones.
Xbox didn't really have GC beat in bandwidth. At least not the kind needed to fill the screen with particles. Gamecube's Flipper had eDram with 18GB/s, and 2.6GB/s to main memory. Xbox had unified memory with 6GB/s, but about 1GB was reserved for the CPU and the other 5 was split with the rest of the system. So there's theoretically twice the bandwidth to system memory but the bandwidth intensive tasks would be handled by eDram on GC, where there's over 3x the bandwidth on Gamecube. Fillrate is about 50% higher on Xbox, and about double if you are using multitexturing, so assuming you have the bandwidth you take less of a hit from overdraw and other fillrate sapping effects.

Actually, unless I'm remembering things wrong, Gamecube would have a performance penalty when multitexturing, so the effective fillrate differential would be even greater.
 
GameCube was at least as good as Xbox in multitexturing with its 8 texture layers per pass. But it had the bandwidth to pull these effects off better than Xbox.

Was Xbox 4 or 8 layers per pass? Edit : it's 8 so they're even in performance penalty per layer.

But with regards to particles, it was my understanding that the eDRAM was too small for massive amounts of particles, and thus relying on the main memory put it at a disadvantage compared to Xbox. Certainly, the games show this. Particles on GC are either fewer, more blocky or have a dithered look like RE4.

I'm pretty sure this is the case since on Wii with it's gddr3 you have great particles like in silent Hill or mp3.
 
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The fact that the eDRAM is split in GameCube, one part for the framebuffer and one for textures is interesting. It may be eDRAM but it has more specific functions than ps2's which you could do whatever you wanted with.
 
GameCube was at least as good as Xbox in multitexturing with its 8 texture layers per pass. But it had the bandwidth to pull these effects off better than Xbox.

Was Xbox 4 or 8 layers per pass? Edit : it's 8 so they're even in performance penalty per layer.

But with regards to particles, it was my understanding that the eDRAM was too small for massive amounts of particles, and thus relying on the main memory put it at a disadvantage compared to Xbox. Certainly, the games show this. Particles on GC are either fewer, more blocky or have a dithered look like RE4.

I'm pretty sure this is the case since on Wii with it's gddr3 you have great particles like in silent Hill or mp3.
It isn't bandwidth or eDram size holding back Gamecube, it's fill rate. It has the lowest fillrate of it's generation. Also, GC can do 8 texture layers per per pass, but it only has 1 texture unit per pipe. Like I said I don't remember all of the facts, but at best there would be zero performance penalty, and you'd be at 1/2 of Xbox's multitexture performance. But I'm not sure that's the case. I seam to remember something about the way GC handles textures allowed it to apply multiple textures in a single rendering pass but it still required multiple clock cycles to do it, where single texture pixels were rendered in a single cycle.

For reference Xbox has 4 pixel pipelines (just like GC) but each pipeline has 2 texture units on XB where GC only has 1. That means that Xbox can apply 2 textures to all 4 pixels in a clock cycle, so it's texel fillrate is double it's pixel fillrate. Gamecube's texel and pixel fillrate are the same. So logically if you are drawing 2 textures, it should take twice as long as 1.
 
It isn't bandwidth or eDram size holding back Gamecube, it's fill rate. It has the lowest fillrate of it's generation. Also, GC can do 8 texture layers per per pass, but it only has 1 texture unit per pipe. Like I said I don't remember all of the facts, but at best there would be zero performance penalty, and you'd be at 1/2 of Xbox's multitexture performance. But I'm not sure that's the case. I seam to remember something about the way GC handles textures allowed it to apply multiple textures in a single rendering pass but it still required multiple clock cycles to do it, where single texture pixels were rendered in a single cycle.

For reference Xbox has 4 pixel pipelines (just like GC) but each pipeline has 2 texture units on XB where GC only has 1. That means that Xbox can apply 2 textures to all 4 pixels in a clock cycle, so it's texel fillrate is double it's pixel fillrate. Gamecube's texel and pixel fillrate are the same. So logically if you are drawing 2 textures, it should take twice as long as 1.

Hey dreamcast is 6th gen too!

But that makes more sense, ps2 has the highest fillrate to go along with its high bandwidth. So then the main thing the lower fillrate affects gc relative to the other 2 are particles. ln practice xbox does not have near its theoretical performance though due to bandwidth and fsb speed. To what degree it's bottlenecked though I don't know.
 
I've always wondered if the GC could of done Burnout 3 and Burnout revenge at 480p60. Burnout 2 on it was just as good looking as burnout 2 on Xbox.
 
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