Could Dreamcast et al handle this/that game/effect? *DC tech retrospective *spawn

[Nesh]

Dreamcast most certainly streams, it has games were basically everything on screen was streamed in. ( Skies of Arcadia , Tokyo Xtreme racer 2, crazy taxi 1/2) . It seems he misunderstood that Dreamcast has to have all needed components to render the frame in vram( vertex buffer, textures for the frame ) . The actual assets in ram can be moved in out just as any other console( and that's done all the time in the console). vertex buffer stuff is even flexible , you could double buffer for better performance at the cost of scene x2 or just send it direct. Ninja2 actually has a hybrid approach that sends all opaque polygons directly to be rendered while transparent are double buffered.

The actual read speed that DC is very sensitive if the physical location of files. The closer to the edge of the disc the faster it gets for read speed and the reverse is true as well. I'll post a video at the end shared to me by the soul Calibur 2 guy( thanks accel99) how it looks a DC burned disc unoptimized vs optimized. The difference is staggering no exaggeration. It's the difference between a character taking 13 seconds to load vs 3 .

You're correct ps2 has some weird resolution textures at times very low and sometimes low color. Though some of the important stuff would be higher rez.

Born into poverty and crippled at times. Certain things sdk weren't working or were suboptimal at times. Crucial things might have bugs( dma?). And it only had from very late (dec) 98 to very early 2001 to fix things. It isn't a whole lot of time let alone even a whole lot of actual devving time. And like you said the more talented devs ignored it, you got art assets like let's say characters that polycount are on par with kratos from gow, Leon resident evil 4 (PS2) and other games , you wouldn't even know because you cant tell lol.

Unoptimized disc:

Optimized:

Considering that streaming from disk has been a thing since PS1 (Spyro, Crash, Soul Reaver for example), of course the DC could stream. It's not some special hardware feature added as an afterthought. The question is, is it fast enough? Was the PS2's capability overkill? Could the DC make a game like Jak and Daxter? Probably yes I d say. Would there be limitations and considerations? Maybe yes maybe not. Someone who knows better could enlighten us

 

[davis.anthony]

Some cutbacks sure, but the extent of that depends on what was being done with memory on PS2.

Enough cut backs to limit the game to first person on DC according to Rockstar.

All consoles that gen were built to stream data. Sega had actually been building devices with data streaming i mind since the M-CD add on.

DC's optical media wasn't really up to streaming with it's low transfer rate.

It's really not true to say that the DC was to "constantly keep everything in RAM". That's a bit of a strange thing to claim tbh.

Good thing I never made such a comment then.

I don't really agree with this. The SH4 on the DC didn't have any particular hardware to handle VQ compressed textures (as far as I've ever seen), but you fed the GPU the texture coords and it could decompress that format of textures on the GPU as it consumed them.

Sony's performance analyser showed best texture performance was with certain texture formats, so the VU1 would have needed to be updated to perform best with a better format.

SH4 is not the EE so it's comparison makes no sense.

Native support for a texture format (VQ or S3TC or the like) would have allowed higher quality textures to be in VRAM as the GPU was drawing whatever you were having it draw at the time.

Not according to comments made here 20 years ago by those developers I named as VU1 sending texture commands to the GIF would have still been the bottleneck.

 

[davis.anthony]

Considering that streaming from disk has been a thing since PS1 (Spyro, Crash, Soul Reaver for example), of course the DC could stream. It's not some special hardware feature added as an afterthought. The question is, is it fast enough? Was the PS2's capability overkill? Could the DC make a game like Jak and Daxter? Probably yes I d say. Would there be limitations and considerations? Maybe yes maybe not. Someone who knows better could enlighten us

Crazy Taxi is a perfect example of how poor DC's streaming can be.

The textures are poor, the building fronts are flat, repeating textures everywhere and a poor draw distance.

Not a good example to use to show DC's streaming ability.

 

[Cloofoofoo]

Enough cut backs to limit the game to first person on DC according to Rockstar.



DC's optical media wasn't really up to streaming with it's low transfer rate.



Good thing I never made such a comment then.


Sony's performance analyser showed best texture performance was with certain texture formats, so the VU1 would have needed to be updated to perform best with a better format.

SH4 is not the EE so it's comparison makes no sense.



Not according to comments made here 20 years ago by those developers I named as VU1 sending texture commands to the GIF would have still been the bottleneck.

I like how you have clung to 1 of the versions of the prototypes of gt3 . What about the other prototypes made by dma and claims from former producer of dma or perhaps technical director of rockstar? Because you are sure to know more than them on this subject? They claimed to have full cities with car deformation running on dc to simple character demos , Godzilla like creatures destroying full scale . All these very different versions of gta 3 protos some third person some not all focused on open world streaming. Some of the teams of dma/rockstar having difficulty making it work on DC and some had no difficulty. All depending on the team skills , all this happened in a span of a months it seems. It's very possible that account of gta3 was one of the teams that couldn't get it done.

Gta3 prototype 1 for Dreamcast( this team couldn't get third person to work and recommend isometric view):

A 3D open world was something the Grand Theft Auto II team had been struggling to get working at the time, and Rockstar was increasingly putting pressure on the company and its development partners to get it done. For example, speaking to the author of this article back in 2021, the Rockstar co-founder Jamie King told us the team had even contacted Rockstar Toronto to prove the technology, with the Dreamcast once again being the platform of choice.


As he recalls, "We had Kevin Hoare who ran Rockstar Toronto really trying to use a Dreamcast devkit to get GTA into 3D and he was like, ‘The best we can do is kind of like isometric’. And that’s why they ended up doing The Warriors. But the PlayStation 2 came out and then DMA were like, ‘Okay, now we can get this into 3D.’"

Dreamcast gta3 prototype 2( tech demo with car deformations,in a large city ):

Despite others having difficulty getting a Grand Theft Auto-esque cityscape to work in 3D, the small group inside DMA had made some encouraging progress in this regard but were reluctant to cause "a bloodbath" by pouring cold water on the efforts of the GTA 2 team. So, instead, it started spitballing ideas for other city-based projects.


“It had essentially grown out of a combination of Body Harvest's open-world roaming mechanics and Space Station Silicon Valley's final level with a city full of vehicles,” Alan Jack tells us. “They had built a tech demo on a Dreamcast dev kit that demonstrated cars whizzing around in 3D, with beautiful lights and full deformation on the car bodies. I remember that Gary basically didn't want to kill their creativity, [so he] gathered a few of us office loose ends together and said ‘Let's make something that is 3D, uses this city prototype, and is on the Dreamcast’”.

Gta3 dc proto 3( turning city demo to Godzilla demo):

From here, DMA's founder Dave Jones suggested to the team that they transform the project from a generic city-based tech demo into a game modelled after the Godzilla license, with Jones assuring the team he could eventually get the rights. So, with a potential project beginning to take shape, Penn and the Silicon Valley team started working on designs. "I remember Gary being rightly excited about the Dreamcast's analogue controller triggers," says Jack. "He had proposed a system whereby one trigger would control the neck and the other the jaw, which created this little core challenge of carefully picking things up (people/eggs/boxes) and not properly crushing them. We had a few sketched gameplay systems where you had to rescue/defend eggs, or you could pick people up and carry them as hostages."

Penn comments, "It controlled quite nicely. You stomped around, you’d eat people and grow, and then you'd destroy even more things. And the idea was as you ate and destroyed, you’d grow and you’d eat and destroy some more. They had got the guts of that working on Dreamcast."

Gta3 dc proto 4:

Development of Grand Theft Auto III continued on Dreamcast, but exactly how long this version of the game was worked on or how far these experiments depends on the source. In 2023, Aaron Garbut, the current co-studio head at Rockstar North, told Game Informer about the Dreamcast tech demo:


"When we finished our first game at DMA Design, we had some time to prototype and come up with ideas. We also got access to a couple of Dreamcast devkits. Over several weeks, we managed to create a number of blocks of a city with docks, retail areas, and brownstones. We were playing, really, but we added characters walking the streets and cars driving around."

Cancelled for commercial reasons not technical:

The Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij, meanwhile, provided a slightly more conservative account of events on Twitter yesterday, claiming that development on Grand Theft Auto III for the Dreamcast continued for roughly four months, with the team producing a simple demo featuring "a basic character walking around". As he writes, "We started developing gta3 on the DC but then switched to PS2 when it became clear the DC was not commercially viable. It was a shame. We were all into Phantasy Star Online at the time. He continues, "If I'd have to guess I'd say we used the DC for about 4 months before switching to ps2. It wasn't for technical reasons. It looked like the DC could have handled gta3. It was for commercial reasons."

 

[Sonicfan]

I like how you have clung to 1 of the versions of the prototypes of gt3 . What about the other prototypes made by dma and claims from former producer of dma or perhaps technical director of rockstar? Because you are sure to know more than them on this subject? They claimed to have full cities with car deformation running on dc to simple character demos , Godzilla like creatures destroying full scale . All these very different versions of gta 3 protos some third person some not all focused on open world streaming. Some of the teams of dma/rockstar having difficulty making it work on DC and some had no difficulty. All depending on the team skills , all this happened in a span of a months it seems. It's very possible that account of gta3 was one of the teams that couldn't get it done.

Gta3 prototype 1 for Dreamcast( this team couldn't get third person to work and recommend isometric view):


Dreamcast gta3 prototype 2( tech demo with car deformations,in a large city ):


Gta3 dc proto 3( turning city demo to Godzilla demo):



Gta3 dc proto 4:


Cancelled for commercial reasons not technical:

Exactly. The dev said recently that it was plenty powerful enough, lol. And crazy taxi is 60fps, so ofcourse it will have a bit more simple buldings and such (not like gta3 has much more detailed levels as is) cutting down the fps to 30 or less like the ps2 would allow plenty of time for more details and less pop in. Crazy taxi on ps2 has just as much pop in, btw. If it was actually simply a hardware limitation, the ps2 would have less.

 

[EsppiraK]

Exactly. The dev said recently that it was plenty powerful enough, lol. And crazy taxi is 60fps, so ofcourse it will have a bit more simple buldings and such (not like gta3 has much more detailed levels as is) cutting down the fps to 30 or less like the ps2 would allow plenty of time for more details and less pop in. Crazy taxi on ps2 has just as much pop in, btw. If it was actually simply a hardware limitation, the ps2 would have less.

Crazy taxy 3 exclusive for the way more powerful Xbox also has tons of popping and the game can slow down even, specially in water segments, so not everything has to do with the capabilities of the console but the limitations of the engine too.

 

[Sonicfan]

Crazy taxy 3 exclusive for the way more powerful Xbox also has tons of popping and the game can slow down even, specially in water segments, so not everything has to do with the capabilities of the console but the limitations of the engine too.

1000% agree.

 

[Nesh]

I like how you have clung to 1 of the versions of the prototypes of gt3 . What about the other prototypes made by dma and claims from former producer of dma or perhaps technical director of rockstar? Because you are sure to know more than them on this subject? They claimed to have full cities with car deformation running on dc to simple character demos , Godzilla like creatures destroying full scale . All these very different versions of gta 3 protos some third person some not all focused on open world streaming. Some of the teams of dma/rockstar having difficulty making it work on DC and some had no difficulty. All depending on the team skills , all this happened in a span of a months it seems. It's very possible that account of gta3 was one of the teams that couldn't get it done.

Gta3 prototype 1 for Dreamcast( this team couldn't get third person to work and recommend isometric view):


Dreamcast gta3 prototype 2( tech demo with car deformations,in a large city ):


Gta3 dc proto 3( turning city demo to Godzilla demo):



Gta3 dc proto 4:


Cancelled for commercial reasons not technical:

Those quotes are interesting but they don't shed much light to it's state in 4 months. I mean, the DC could certainly do cities. PS1 had Driver and it was like GTA but always in a car and I think that was also ported to the DC? The question is, how far could they go with a breathing living city compared to the final product. GTA3 is uglier than Crazy Taxi for sure (both the PS2 and the DC version). To be honest visually GTA3 was always an ugly game to me. It's the scope and it's dynamic elements were what made the game a success and it is those aspects that probably taxed the system the most in terms of processing and memory and I have no clue if the PS2's streaming capabilities were overkill or if the DC's was more than enough. I never considered GTA3 a particularly impressive game that pushed the PS2. But I wonder if there was actually something else outside of its visuals. I am sure a version was possible on the DC with better textures and resolution. Not sure about the dynamic elements and the scope.

 

[davis.anthony]

I'll make this simple as some people can't accept reality.

1. DC likely did have a 3D version of GTA running as a tech demo, but, there has been thousands of tech demos made over the decades that were way and above what the actual shipping game ends up technically being.
2. DC could do GTA3, it just couldn't do the PS2 version of GTA3 to the same quality that PS2 does it, why? Because DC isn't as powerful as PS2, that is just a fact.
3. Just because 'X' game does this and 'X' game does that, doesn't mean that DC can do the PS2 version of GTA3.

It was a nice console with some great game, but technically, it was massively outclassed by PS2 and nothing will change that.

I'll accept an argument DC could do a 3D version of GTA, I won't accept DC can do the PS2 version of GTA3 exactly as it was.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

People are way too confrontational in this thread. That console war ended decades ago. Let go of your emotional attachments and just engage in the "what if?" discussion for fun.

 

[davis.anthony]

The Game Informer Article hints as to why it was ultimately ended up on PS2...

We just wanted to build a world that was as alive and open as we could make it and give players the toolset and flexibility to explore and play in that world. We built narrative and game flow structures to push them on a path and give them direction, but fundamentally it was openness and player freedom we were excited by. The challenge we were trying to solve – and are still working on – is fundamentally, how do we build a place that's interesting to exist in and give the player enough toys and systems to interact with and mess about? There are clear technical challenges with that – building a diverse, large urban world, and ensuring that it would stream in so that we could build in the variation and scale we wanted. The fact that we wanted it to feel alive and to feel as much as possible like the player existed in it – rather than at the center of it – meant we needed to have the world active even when the player was on a mission or causing chaos. We needed systems that were as solid as possible, and that could also scale in complexity. Fundamentally, we designed what we thought we wanted to play ourselves, and then we figured out how the hell to make it.

By design the 3D GTA games are massively systems driven and GTA3 was no different, the aim was to have a world that felt alive.

And that is where DC and it's SH-4 CPU massively fall short when compared to PS2's Emotion Engine and its ability to handle and process a world that feels 'alive' - PS2 just simply has a lot more CPU performance to handle more complex open world systems.

 

[function]

On the topic of the SH4+FPU compared to the Pentium III. My Test Results with the PIII 800 and 3DMARK 2000 and 2001 show the peak polygon throughput with one light at less than 3million polys per second. If anything I'd say this puts the PIII 800 plus Direct X / Windows overhead fairly close to a "real world" Dreamcast peak as shown in only a few games. This is still far short of the 3.5mpps spec given by Sega or the 5mpps spec given by Melbourne House for TD Le Mans. At 533mhz the PIII "only" peaks at around 2-2.2mpps in 3DMARK.
View attachment 11601

I tried to install the Neon 250 in my Athlon XP or Pentium 4 systems to see if the "Pixel Perfect" bios and drivers from 2000 do anything different, but both have a newer AGP port with an extra divider in them, making my Neon 250 physically incompatible with systems newer than the ASUS P3B-F.

On the topic of GTA III. The original discs I have are two CD-ROMS, nothing over 600MB and the actual install folder isn't much more than a CD as well. Which means that *something* must stream off of the optical drive on the original PC version.
View attachment 11602
View attachment 11603

Finally, GTA III has never impressed me in anything about its scope, single load city size, objects on screen or especially texture detail. After playing Shenmue 1 + 2, Crazy Taxy *2* and Super Runabout I never saw any reason why GTA III could not be made to run, with better image quality on the Dreamcast. Given the poor resources given by 3rd parties to most Dreamcast titles, I'd expect it to have performance issues and more pop in sure, but it'd be playable with better up front image quality. I've seen plenty of analyses showing that with VQ textures the Dreamcast effectively has more than 32MB of RAM available besides.

GTA II can be made to run on an 8MB mobile processor, it really is_not that impressive of an engine. But I am 1000% certain the legend of it's minimum system requirements mystically being the PS2 will persist.

Great post. I ran the same 3D Mark benchmark on my Voodoo 2 + PII 400 back in the day. I got around 1.5 mpps. Only the PII 450 was a faster CPU on PC at the time the DC launched in 1998.

Interesting to know about GTA3 install. So the game could have fit on DC as is on one GD Rom, perhaps with some headroom for duplicating key assets to aid in seek times.

It's the same install as the video posted above, all the audio is working. But yeah, I guess audio could be all that's left on the disk. But the game is not over 1GB in it's original form.

That last line in my prior post should read GTA III can run on an 8MB mobile graphics chip. It doesn't look like I can edit posts.

Yeah, so ram isn't going to stop the DC running GTA. And we already know the Neon 250 could run the game well, and that the DC's GPU was more powerful.

BTW, I think the ability to edit posts comes after you've hit a certain number of posts, I think it's designed to stop bad faith posters committing dickery! It's great that you're providing original data to add to the conversation, and I hope you'll stick around!

Dreamcast most certainly streams, it has games were basically everything on screen was streamed in. ( Skies of Arcadia , Tokyo Xtreme racer 2, crazy taxi 1/2) . It seems he misunderstood that Dreamcast has to have all needed components to render the frame in vram( vertex buffer, textures for the frame ) . The actual assets in ram can be moved in out just as any other console( and that's done all the time in the console). vertex buffer stuff is even flexible , you could double buffer for better performance at the cost of scene x2 or just send it direct. Ninja2 actually has a hybrid approach that sends all opaque polygons directly to be rendered while transparent are double buffered.

The actual read speed that DC is very sensitive if the physical location of files. The closer to the edge of the disc the faster it gets for read speed and the reverse is true as well. I'll post a video at the end shared to me by the soul Calibur 2 guy( thanks accel99) how it looks a DC burned disc unoptimized vs optimized. The difference is staggering no exaggeration. It's the difference between a character taking 13 seconds to load vs 3 .

You're correct ps2 has some weird resolution textures at times very low and sometimes low color. Though some of the important stuff would be higher rez.

Born into poverty and crippled at times. Certain things sdk weren't working or were suboptimal at times. Crucial things might have bugs( dma?). And it only had from very late (dec) 98 to very early 2001 to fix things. It isn't a whole lot of time let alone even a whole lot of actual devving time. And like you said the more talented devs ignored it, you got art assets like let's say characters that polycount are on par with kratos from gow, Leon resident evil 4 (PS2) and other games , you wouldn't even know because you cant tell lol.

Unoptimized disc:

Optimized:

Blimey, the optimised CD is really close to the GD-Rom, despite only having about half the linear read rate.

Regarding sensitivity to physical disk layout, I remember PSO original streaming in characters as they joined (and instances where multiple people were) very quickly, where as PSO v2 took a long time, with disk seek times of 0.5 ~ 1 second that I could actually hear from the drive in the DC next to me. It was painfully slow.

It sounded like the additional data for PSO v2 had simply been dumped into the disk area behind the original data - and into where the filler/useless data had been. DC was well past having been terminated when PSO v2 released, so I always assumed they'd just forgone access analysis and layout optimisation to get the game out the door as fast and cheaply as possible.

 

[function]

The Game Informer Article hints as to why it was ultimately ended up on PS2...

We just wanted to build a world that was as alive and open as we could make it and give players the toolset and flexibility to explore and play in that world. We built narrative and game flow structures to push them on a path and give them direction, but fundamentally it was openness and player freedom we were excited by. The challenge we were trying to solve – and are still working on – is fundamentally, how do we build a place that's interesting to exist in and give the player enough toys and systems to interact with and mess about? There are clear technical challenges with that – building a diverse, large urban world, and ensuring that it would stream in so that we could build in the variation and scale we wanted. The fact that we wanted it to feel alive and to feel as much as possible like the player existed in it – rather than at the center of it – meant we needed to have the world active even when the player was on a mission or causing chaos. We needed systems that were as solid as possible, and that could also scale in complexity. Fundamentally, we designed what we thought we wanted to play ourselves, and then we figured out how the hell to make it.

But that doesn't mention the DC at all....? Do you have a link to the original article? Does the person making the statement above go on to talk about the DC not being able to do this, so that's why they went with PS2?

Because we have GTA3's actual technical director on record as saying:

"It wasn't for technical reasons. It looked like the DC could have handled gta3. It was for commercial reasons."

He's not hinting, he's stating. No doubt the PS2 could do a better version of GTA3 overall, but then again the GC version of Resident Evil 4 was better than the PS2 version, but the PS2 version was still pretty damn good (I finished the PS2 version first).

 

[davis.anthony]

But that doesn't mention the DC at all....? Do you have a link to the original article? Does the person making the statement above go on to talk about the DC not being able to do this, so that's why they went with PS2?

Article is linked above and is an interview from someone who worked on the game back then.

Because we have GTA3's actual technical director on record as saying:

"It wasn't for technical reasons. It looked like the DC could have handled gta3. It was for commercial reasons."

It likely wasn't for technical reasons at the time but with what they wanted to achieve in terms of game systems if would have only been a matter of time before the system they wanted would likely have to be cut out.

He's not hinting, he's stating.

A few months isn't enough time to do a proper evaluation as the systems and targets for the game world likely we not even finalised.

It looks like the tech demo's were only a proof of concept to determine if the game could work being in 3D and didn't contain all, if any of the systems in the game such as the crowd ai, day/night cycle, physics, weather......start adding those systems in and then see how DC's CPU handles things.

Most people have acknowledged that DC couldn't handle the PS2 version of GTA3, but could have handled a 3D version of GTA in some form or another, and others (not you) seem to refuse to use common sense and logic and accept that.

The title of this thread is: "Could Dreamcast et al handle this/that game/effect?"

And in this case it's........ "No it can't handle the PS2 version of GTA3, but could handle some form of a 3D GTA game"

If people want to start talking about which of GTA3's systems could be removed from the PS2 version to help the DC's CPU, that could be a pretty cool conversation.

 

[function]

Article is linked above and is an interview from someone who worked on the game back then.

I couldn't find the link. Do they mention the DC?

It likely wasn't for technical reasons at the time but with what they wanted to achieve in terms of game systems if would have only been a matter of time before the system they wanted would likely have to be cut out.

Well that's your opinion - as my opinion is mine - but nothing we have metrics on or what the tech director of the generations defining game says the game couldn't have made it's way through mostly intact.

A few months isn't enough time to do a proper evaluation as the systems and targets for the game world likely we not even finalised.

You, yourself, claimed that an (extremely) early version of the prototyping stage proved that the DC couldn't do 3rd person. That's completely wrong. And it's been disproven (with sources) above.

But the statement you made above is not unreasonable, even though the game's actual technical director in retrospect says it is, so I don't think it's productive to take this further.

It looks like the tech demo's were only a proof of concept to determine if the game could work being in 3D and didn't contain all, if any of the systems in the game such as the crowd ai, day/night cycle, physics, weather......start adding those systems in and then see how DC's CPU handles things.

Most people have acknowledged that DC couldn't handle the PS2 version of GTA3, but could have handled a 3D version of GTA in some form or another, and others (not you) seem to refuse to use common sense and logic and accept that.

The title of this thread is: "Could Dreamcast et al handle this/that game/effect?"

And in this case it's........ "No it can't handle the PS2 version of GTA3, but could handle some form of a 3D GTA game"

If people want to start talking about which of GTA3's systems could be removed from the PS2 version to help the DC's CPU, that could be a pretty cool conversation.

This is reasonable. I think memory, especially GPU (POWERVR2DC 4 lyfe), and probably streaming (latency being key, not peak linear read rates) are probably all within bounds. But my personal opinion is that while transform and lighting on the CPU would be no problem for the DC, the overall load including streaming decompression and running various scripts for world actors might have been challenging, especially when done concurrently.

 

[Karamazov]

at the time of release, GTA3 was not a graphical marvel. It was the sense of "freedom" and "open world" that stood out.
Even Shenmue had more detailed characters and better world detail. The scale wasn't just the same.

 

[davis.anthony]

Some interesting Tweets

https://twitter.com/x/status/1783484201171321148

https://twitter.com/x/status/1784014468009111600

https://twitter.com/x/status/1783588232032063843

https://twitter.com/x/status/1784244637055475835

https://twitter.com/x/status/1750274347745394785

https://x.com/ObbeVermeij/status/1783521979925966987?t=-_eg-P1aP731xKwndOCAJQ&s=19

So DC wasn't properly tested to see what it could it actually do, it didn't even have a proper map.

And some of his comments tell me that the CPU wouldn't have been up to running the GTA3 we actually got on PS2.

 

[Nesh]

Because we have GTA3's actual technical director on record as saying:

"It wasn't for technical reasons. It looked like the DC could have handled gta3. It was for commercial reasons."

He's not hinting, he's stating. No doubt the PS2 could do a better version of GTA3 overall, but then again the GC version of Resident Evil 4 was better than the PS2 version, but the PS2 version was still pretty damn good (I finished the PS2 version first).

That quote seems to be coming from the game's early development before it was finalized. They probably would have designed a version that was better suited around DCs capabilities, or they might have discovered other bottlenecks down the line that might have led them to abandon it for technical reasons eventually.

So far it looks like steaming was the biggest challenge. Rendering is super doable on DC. The other question that needs to be answered is if it had the power for the dynamic world and physics

 

[EsppiraK]

I'll make this simple as some people can't accept reality.

1. DC likely did have a 3D version of GTA running as a tech demo, but, there has been thousands of tech demos made over the decades that were way and above what the actual shipping game ends up technically being.
2. DC could do GTA3, it just couldn't do the PS2 version of GTA3 to the same quality that PS2 does it, why? Because DC isn't as powerful as PS2, that is just a fact.
3. Just because 'X' game does this and 'X' game does that, doesn't mean that DC can do the PS2 version of GTA3.

It was a nice console with some great game, but technically, it was massively outclassed by PS2 and nothing will change that.

I'll accept an argument DC could do a 3D version of GTA, I won't accept DC can do the PS2 version of GTA3 exactly as it was.

No one is saying that it would do a version exactly as the ps2 version, I think everyone agree or should, with that. The accumulative blur effect alone would have killed performance on the Dreamcast. But the fact that some early prototypes were first person shouldn't be taken as a fact of anything let alone performance.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Important plot point:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1784244637055475835

You have different opinions from different developer. One saying something about what they expected doesn't make it true, or not.

And what's up with that formatting Tweet?