Cloofoofoo
Regular
Yeah... It really wasn't but don't start with that. It's just gonna derail the whole topic. Just don't.
Could Dreamcast et al handle this/that game/effect? *DC tech retrospective *spawn
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Yeah... It really wasn't but don't start with that. It's just gonna derail the whole topic. Just don't.
That's pretty cool, considering a burned CD-ROM is only going to be about 1/2 the density and sustained read speed of a GD-ROM. The all important access times (as the laser head relocates) will be likely be more similar than that though.
It's working on 16megs now, so no need!
It's never about need lol
I believe it could easily. My 1997 PC could run this when I tried the demo in 1999. The Dreamcast was significantly more powerful than my PC.
Huge progress. Amazing
davis.anthony
Veteran
Wouldn't the same game then if they didn;t use Voxels.
It would be like porting Turok over to DC and not having any Dinosaurs.
A very semantic debate I'm not keen on, but if you change the renderer, the game, if not the workload, is still potentially the same. It depends what you are looking for in determining if a game is 'the same' or not. If NMS swaps to a voxel renderer, and game experience will still be the same, but the aesthetic would be different.
As a tech discussion, assuming the game was originally a DC game and was ported, what would the rendering implementation be on DC? Would they have used a voxel renderer or not? Or does the scope make it seem like it could never have been a DC game in the first place? Or do we think the scope was extended when they decided to go PC instead?
I dont remember what CPU I had back then. But I am sure it was weaker than what the DC had
Very likely
davis.anthony
Veteran
I thought given the GTA3 port to DC this video would be of interest to everyone.
Cloofoofoo
Regular
Yeah that's real hardware to boot. Basically they switch to direct render( its lower level access ) and the speed up was massive compared to before drawing method and then they triangle stripped the models which reduced vram footprint and it's Dreamcast preferred format. All this and they still haven't optimized the 3d math stuff for the Dreamcast specific CPU/fpu features yet.
I dunno at this rate they might end up a solid 30 fps version . Which is crazy since it pushed a ton of vertices. What's pretty crazy the distance is the default PC version and you can change it from the options.
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REAL HARDWARE AT 16MB! At this stage,
Parts of this are running well over 30 fps. Granted, other areas will be a lot heavier and some CPU loading features may not be up and running yet. But still very impressive gains for a PC backport to a dead system using open source homebrew tools even if it doesn't get much further than this (though hopefully it does!)
I think this is going to have to make some folks re-asses the capabilities of the DC. Well, either that or suddenly start trying to downplay GTA3 after decades of bigging it up.
Turns out GTA3's technical director, who said he thought the DC could have done GTA3, was probably right.
After seeing this, his statement was absolutely right! Hell, if they'd done this at the time, i think DC would have looked and performed better than ps2!Parts of this are running well over 30 fps. Granted, other areas will be a lot heavier and some CPU loading features may not be up and running yet. But still very impressive gains for a PC backport to a dead system using open source homebrew tools even if it doesn't get much further than this (though hopefully it does!)
I think this is going to have to make some folks re-asses the capabilities of the DC. Well, either that or suddenly start trying to downplay GTA3 after decades of bigging it up.
Turns out GTA3's technical director, who said he thought the DC could have done GTA3, was probably right.
And i guarantee they will start downplaying it. It's already started with certain people moving the goal post to vice city/ san andreas, lol
Well that's a big ask! I've thought since the topic of GTA3 came up that the biggest issue for DC would probably ultimately be on the CPU side. The SH4 was a little beast, but the PS2 and Xbox could both offload a good chunk of work to vector processors while the SH4 had to shoulder the whole game.
I don't think the SH4 properly supported multiprocessor configurations, which would have allowed dual SH4's to use the same memory area without the Saturn's master/slave drawbacks.
It's a bit off topic, but I sometimes like to ponder what the DC could have been with a $250 or $300 launch price and a global launch starting summer 1999 in Japan and rolling out globally up to Christmas. More memory, higher clocks all round, much more polished launch titles and no launch supply shortages in Japan would have been the bare minimum. Launching in Japan in 1998 probably didn't get Sega very much, but it probably did mean that some capabilities were a bit lower for the US and EU than they needed to be.
How so? Remember this is a technical discussion, so you need to identify the strengths and weaknesses and explain how DC would 'look better', qualifying your 'better' in terms of framerate, resolution, lighting, tech, whatever criteria you are comparing.
Anything less degrades the technical discussion to fanboy talk, and we don't want any of that!
