Console that fared best vs PC's available at launch

You guys surely know that the true answer to the thread's question is the Commodore Amiga.

 

But counting in that the bus for the VRAM is exclusive to the GPU (7800GTX). Whilst on the PS3 it has to be shared for other non-graphics related stuff. Not to mention twice the amount of ROP's.

I would put it as the PC HW not being utilized as much, as time has passed and games come with better graphics such a system has stand the test without problems. And SLi works very good and did work good back then to which makes me think you are remembering the 6xxx series SLi introduction problems!

 

Wasn't a console, and by the time the console version was released, Amiga was sadly way behind the times.

 

I was talking about the 7800GTX 512MB, not the standard version. If anything the standard version may be a little slower than RSX, at least when you cosider the memory bandwidth to XDR.

However the 512MB is a different story. I'm certainly not saying its vastly superior to RSX, just thats its faster by a noticable degree.

It has a 10% more clock speed in the core, twice as many ROPs (thus more than double the fill rate), a dedicated pool of 512MB just for graphics and more memory bandwidth than PS3 has to share between both RSX and Cell.

The X1800 was quite a bit more capable than the original 7800GTX (which I believe is probably a closer analogy to RSX than the GTX 512MB) and the X1900 is faster again. In fact your looking at a 25-50% speed advantage of the X1900 over a vanilla 7800GTX depending on how modern the game is (the advantage is greater in newer games).

Anyway, HD2600XT + 25% is roughly in 7800GTX territory. In fact its probably pushing 7900GTX territory and in some modern games even more.

That, plus the fact that on paper Xenos is almost exactly 125% the raw performance of the HD2600 (not taking into account any architectural improvements ATI may have introduced) makes it a pretty reasonable assumption in my view.

I think saying it rarely works well is a bit unfair. At higher resolutions, even back then SLI scaled quite well on the big name games. I see your point about it being a bit of a cheat but at the end of the day it was an option that PC gamers could use and in so doing they could play games that were available on both systems at much higher settings than the 360 was capable of (Oblivions a good example).

Looking at just the one GPU then I agree Xenos was probably roughly on a par with a single 7800GTX 512MB. Each obviously has very different strengths through.

 

I remember that someone from ATI said that the Xenos was better than the X1800XT at 720p when asked by email about that comparison:

"That's actually difficult to answer. At lower resolutions say 640x480 or
HDTV then the xbox is most likely faster due to it's slightly higher
shader power and high framebuffer bandwidth. But at higher resolutions
1600x1200 it could possible go to the X1K. They both have similar
performance. In the end it comes down to the type of application.

And +1 vote for the dreamcast by the way. The first time I played SoulCalibur on it I just couldn't believe it, no other console wowed me as much right from the start.

 

The Amiga was a Personal Computer but he's surclasse PS One, so Ps One can't be the console who beat PC…

 

In terms of hardware I'd put PS2 ahead of PS1. The latter only had a few months(6?) before accelerators were available for PC that outclassed it in every way. For the former, it took 18months to get to the same point (and one could still argue about it).
Add the Hi-Def capable MPEG2 decoder, 1st HDTV capable and DVD drive console and I think it's no contest.

I agree about putting DC before both, especially since sw ramped up that much better early on.

When was that? Wiki claims 1985 (which obviously isn't the year you had in mind).

 

I know, just posted it for kicks

It was to be a console originally though, and when it came out it was SO superior to all else...

In terms of games, only by the time there were 486's around did the PC start to show things that the Amiga couldn't match, especially in terms of 2D games.
Some of the blame has to go to a lack of "optimization-mentality" by PC programmers at the time, and perhaps the fact that there were so many undocumented features and capabilities in both CPU's and VGA chips, though. The PC had had the processor power to compete with the Amiga for some time already, and it took guys like John Carmack and a lot of brilliant demoscene programmers to push the Intel architectures. As an example, let's just remember two great games of that era, Pinball Dreams and the sequel, Pinball Fantasies, both of which were brilliant on the Amiga. The first game ran in standard VGA 320x200x8 resolution on the PC, was very unoptimized and I saw it struggle in a 486SX (the version without the 487 co-processor) at 25 MHz if I recall correctly. The following game was ported by extremely talented demosceners, used some variant of the Michael Abrash-popularized Mode X, and I saw it run flawlessly with great music (even through the PC's speaker) in a 286.

Oh well, enough of this slight OT, my mind was just wandering through all the memories, sorry.

 

Just to not sell the CD32 (for those who don't know this was the CD-ROM-based console version of the Amiga released in late 1993) short, it was actually very technically capable for a console of it's time, though it may indeed not have matched up so well to a typical PC by then. The problem was that Commodore was too far gone by that point to make anything of it. I actually own one, and used a CD32+SX32 expansion unit as my home computer for a few years.

 

In my opinion, I'd say Xbox 360 competed the worst against existing PCs at the top end, though it came out at a point where PC tech wasn't developing as rapidly and thus remains pretty good longer.

I'd say:
NES beat PC at the time it came out (1983), and the Ataris may have done the same.
Genesis and SNES both were better than the PC in some ways, and worse in others.

I think Playstation beat PC.
N64 beat the average PC (any pc without a 3d accelerator, basically all at the time)
Dreamcast, for all its hardware specs, I never saw a game that looked better than what I saw on a voodoo2 sli.
Xbox was a bit superior to PCs at the time, but one of the fastest to be surpassed.

Seriously? Well I'd imagine those with software rendering could at least match a PSX. I thought we were still dealing with 486s at the time the PS1 came out.

 

Pentium 60/66 came out in '93. In '95 the P133 was around. The PS1 got surpassed pretty quick. Quake for them was reduced in various ways, for example. N64 Quake was probably the best, but even it had lots of concessions for the 4MB RAM in the machine. Obviously ports were, as usual, not the most interesting software for the consoles however.

Now, I didn't have a Pentium-class PC until 1997. AMD 5x86 160 MHz here, which is just a high-clock 486. I was in high school and no way to afford a Pentium machine. They were very expensive. No competition, really. AMD K5, Cyrix 6x86, and WinChip were pretty bad.

 

As I said earlier in the thread the pentium 100 preceded the release of the PS1 even in Japan. So while the ps1 was perhaps outperforming pc's on a graphics level, it wasn't really close to the cpu performance of high end pc's.

 

K5 I remember being a decent competitor for the Pentium.
Now Pentium-Pro...well AMD always seemed to be a generation behind with competitive chips from then until the athlon.
I'd say a 100Mhz or great Pentium would have a good chance of matching the PSX using only software rendering though. A 200mhz Pentium Pro destroyed a PSX in software rendering. (I think a 200mhz pentium pro could handle quake 2 rather faithfully, something the PSX couldn't do)

 

wasn't the psone released in december of 94 ? And wasn't released world wide untill sept of 95 ? So wouldn't it be fair to compared it to 94/95 computers instead of just 94. 95 gave us the nv1 . IT also gave us the pentium pro up to 200mhz . There were some good looking games that ran on the p and p pro chips .

THe ps2 released in 2000 and well you could get a 700mhz p3 and I think a 1ghz athlon if i remember right. You were also able to get a radeon and geforce 2 ultra .

That would let u play games like unreal 2 , half life , quake 3 all at higher than ps2 resolutions .

I think the ps1 faired better than the ps2 .


THe 360 I also don't believe lasted very long in terms of graphics. You can actually play call of duty 4 on a x1800 xt at 720p and stay at close to 60 fps

You also have to factor in that the 360 came out in december world wide. In january we had the x1900xt . Thats only really a month or two diffrence (depending on when the x1900s were actually avalible to purchase at a store. ) I really don't see a athlon 64 x2 4000+ and a x1800-x1900 having much trouble running cod4 at 720p .

The dreamcast like ps1 also faired well . It came out in 98/99 . The p3s were in the 500 mhz range I beleive and we didn't yet have the radeon , we had the geforce 1 however . So thats a toss up. I think you'd be able to play unreal on that also at 640x480 . Not sure though.


I really think the consoles did better prior to the 3d add in card market. IF you look the dreamcast was the last one that did decently and that was at the cusp of the 3d market taking off.

Now its just to hard for these consoles. The geforce 7x and radeon x1x000 had 512 megs for themselves while the consoles had to share them . The only saving grace for the consoles is that many people want to play at insane resolutions . But i'm sure if I took a top of the line 2005 or first few months of 2006 computer and hooked it up to a 720p high def tv it could easily give me a better experiance than the 360 in any games on both platforms.

In the future its going to be even harder.

THe ps4 and xbox 360 may come out in 2011/12 but multi gpu set ups are back with a vengance. We already have quad gpu set ups today. In 2011 or 12 we may have 8 gpu set ups or greater. I really don't see how the consoles will keep up with that . Even if they have a cutting edge gpu the pc will have at least 2 of them on the high end card of the day. If the gx2 and the x2 work out its not hard to imagine ati and nvidia including 4 gpus in their top of the line cards in the next 4 years .

THe problem as allways is cost. There will allways be a console market as long as the boxes are cheaper than a gaming pc . And pc nuts will keep investing in bigger monitors with higher resolutions . 30 inch monitors are upon us and I'm sure that in 2012 a 30 inch monitor will reach price parity with a 2008 The next gen consoles will be able to target 1080p and if its like this generation not all games will even hit that reslution anyone.

 

I think the console devs are getting around the RAM limitations pretty well. Of course it somewhat limits what they can do theoretically with let's say a game like Crysis, but even still it's amazing what some devs will pull off. For me I can't wait to see how the Shadow of the Colossus sequel that's supposedly in development will look, especially if it's going for the same vast open world the original did, because it was in my full fledge honest opinion the most impressive technical achievement on the PS2.

 

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TNT2 was running Expendable with environment mapped bump map which looked much better than the DC version, both came out at about the same time. I say Xbox 1 was on par with most decent PC at the time when it came out, I cant think of any games with more shaders than Halo 1 at the time. It can still handle most big pc titles like Doom 3, HL2, Farcry at the end of its life even though they are running at very very low graphic setting. Still much better than PS2 or GC which probably cant even run those games. I think ATi was showing the Ruby demo with their 1800XT and on the 360, the 360 can barely even run it at a steady 30 fps @ 720p where the 1800XT ran it at a higher resolution with better frame rate. As for the most outdated hardware at available launch is got to be Wii. It cant even run Farcry as good as a the xbox but I think everyone already know....

 

It might be worth noting that both Xbox and Dreamcast suffered as being the subject of ports (from lesser systems and from PC), which probably limited what they were able to do, and in many ways showed them as inferior due to the loss of memory. The dreamcast never really got a significant dreamcast only presence (even sega largely borrowed from its Model 2 era stuff), and the Xbox didn't get strong attention until near the end of its life.

 

I'll also vote for Dreamcast...
But the only problem was that you could play backed-up games without any modifications

And then once GTA3 came out on ps2 it was all down hill from there...

But I still had a great time playing Marvel Vs Capcom 2 with my Arcade stick

 

I think my vote would go to psone. With the help of Ridge Racer I feel it really did define a new generation of 3D gaming. Ok so it wasn't too long before the pc managed to catch up and then overtake it but what I also liked about the psone was that even 3 to 4 years on it was more than capable of holding it's own. A game that springs to mind is Colony Wars. Ok so as a game it wasn't too great but being a fan of space games like Wing Commander I thought it was graphically very strong, rivalling if not beating anything on the pc at that time.