Console that fared best vs PC's available at launch

[Neb]

Nah it didn't match PC games of that time at all. FreeSpace 1, JD: DF2, Star Wars flight game etc did look by far better in all categories. Then there where lots of other games that was in another league graphically with a Voodoo powered PC or better. It was such things as bilinear/trilinear filtering for textures, higher resolution etc aswell as more punch in the graphics department.

I remember having to enable framerate limiter for many PC/PSone games since animation was synced to framerate and the fps went so high the games ran in 'turbo mode'!

I remember when I built my P166MHz MMX with 64MB ram and a Voodoo2 8MB/Matrox Mystique220 2MB system. It was able to emulate Psone games fluid and noticably better looking at higher res/filtering. Games like MGS, techdemos ran like 'butter in the frying pan'! Although the plug was pulled for the 'Bleem' emulator. :smile:

 

[swaaye]

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.

TNT2 can't do EMBM. I think you're thinking of Matrox G400.

[Xbox] 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.

Not without major concessions made to the level design. FarCry on PC is basically a different game than the console versions. Doom3 was pretty good, but yea they fought a tough battle with the 64MB RAM and it showed. I've only played a bit of HL2 for Xbox, but what I saw was pretty good. Load time was pretty bad though.

 

[swaaye]

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)

K5 was very delayed. Initially there was the "SSA/5" which is a broken K5, basically, and doesn't use a PR rating because it is clock-for-clock as fast as a Pentium (on integer arithmetic). The real K5, with higher PR than clock speed, came out in late '96 and competed with Pentium 166 and 200. If K5 had been able to scale up to 200 MHz real clock, it would've been a Pentium beater. However, this is just for integer stuff because the floating point was really bad. They were essentially 486s when it came to the FPU. Pentium MMX, with its doubled L1 cache, cleaned up on K5 across the board.

PPro rocked, absolutely. Except for a few games that used 8- and 16-bit code, such as Duke 3D believe it or not. PPro was made for 32-bit code. Pentium MMX stomped all over it if it had to deal with a mixture of older coding.

 

[zifnab]

No love for the 3DO?

 

[swaaye]

No love for the 3DO?

Not for $700, no.

 

[AzBat]

No love for the 3DO?

I do. I'd put it ahead of the PS1 myself. I was never really impressed with it, but then again I was playing with the 3DO(specifically 3DO Blaster) and 3D accelerators around the time it came to the US.

Tommy McClain

 

[MulciberXP]

...

 

[I.S.T.]

Nah it didn't match PC games of that time at all. FreeSpace 1, JD: DF2, Star Wars flight game etc did look by far better in all categories. Then there where lots of other games that was in another league graphically with a Voodoo powered PC or better. It was such things as bilinear/trilinear filtering for textures, higher resolution etc aswell as more punch in the graphics department.

I remember having to enable framerate limiter for many PC/PSone games since animation was synced to framerate and the fps went so high the games ran in 'turbo mode'!

I remember when I built my P166MHz MMX with 64MB ram and a Voodoo2 8MB/Matrox Mystique220 2MB system. It was able to emulate Psone games fluid and noticably better looking at higher res/filtering. Games like MGS, techdemos ran like 'butter in the frying pan'! Although the plug was pulled for the 'Bleem' emulator. :smile:

You ran a 3d accelerated game in dec 1994?

 

[MulciberXP]

...

 

[swaaye]

Mini Timeline (of the most important decade ever, basically! )

1993 - P66, 486DX2 66, 3DO
1994 - P90, Am486DX2 80, iDX4 75, Matrox Impression Plus, Sega 32X
1995 - P133, PPro 200, Am486DX4, Am5x86, K5 SSA/5, Cx5x86, NVIDIA NV1, 3D Blaster VLB, Matrox Millennium, PS1, Saturn, Virtual Boy!
1996 - P200, iDX4 100, 6x86, K5 (real one), Voodoo, Mystique, Rage, PowerVR PCX1, ViRGE, Verite V1000, Nintendo 64
1997 - PII 300, K6, PMMX 233, Voodoo Rush (big whoop), RIVA 128, PowerVR PCX2
1998 - PII 450, K6-2, Voodoo2, TNT, G200, Rage Pro, Savage 3D, Verite V2200
1999 - PIII 1000, Athlon 1000, K6-III, TNT2, GeForce 256, G400, Voodoo3, Rage 128, Savage 4, Dreamcast
2000 - Athlon 1.4, P4 1.5, GeForce 2, Radeon, Voodoo5, Savage 2000, PS2
2001 - AXP 1900+, P4 2.0, GeForce 3, Radeon 8500, Kyro 2, Xbox, Gamecube
2002 - AXP 2800+, P4 3.06, Radeon 9700, GeForce FX 5800
2003 - A64 3200+, P4 HT 3.2, Radeon 9800, GeForce FX 5950

Just meant to help refocus wavering mental energies. Somewhat. Helped me!

 

[AlphaWolf]

1977 TRS-80
1979 Intellivision
1980 Commodore Vic-20
1981 IBM PC
1982 Commodore 64, ColecoVision
1983 NES (Japan)
1985 Amiga 1000, NES (rest of world)

 

[Neb]

You ran a 3d accelerated game in dec 1994?

Nope but then read to what I am replying to and what timeline it concerns!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Mini Timeline (of the most important decade ever, basically! )

Very much needed!
And regards the topic, which platform competed best at launch we only need consider these dates...

1993 - P66, 486DX2 66, 3DO
1994 - P90, Am486DX2 80, iDX4 75, Matrox Impression Plus, Sega 32X
1995 - P133, PPro 200, Am486DX4, Am5x86, K5 SSA/5, Cx5x86, NVIDIA NV1, 3D Blaster VLB, Matrox Millennium, PS1, Saturn, Virtual Boy!
1996 - P200, iDX4 100, 6x86, K5 (real one), Voodoo, Mystique, Rage, PowerVR PCX1, ViRGE, Verite V1000, Nintendo 64
1999 - PIII 1000, Athlon 1000, K6-III, TNT2, GeForce 256, G400, Voodoo3, Rage 128, Savage 4, Dreamcast
2000 - Athlon 1.4, P4 1.5, GeForce 2, Radeon, Voodoo5, Savage 2000, PS2
2001 - AXP 1900+, P4 2.0, GeForce 3, Radeon 8500, Kyro 2, Xbox, Gamecube

 

[function]

Those seem to be the US dates, which changes technology comparisons an awful lot.

A number of the consoles we're talking about (particularly the PS1 and Dreamcast) appeared nearly a year earlier in Japan than they did in the US. The N64 didn't arrive in Europe until 1997, by which time it paled compared to readily available PC stuff.

A year is a long time in graphics technology (and in software too of course).

 

[AzBat]

Those seem to be the US dates, which changes technology comparisons an awful lot.

But wasn't the new PC technology coming out in the US first to begin with?

Tommy McClain

 

[Heinrich4]

Swaaye im partially agree with your list, but talking about technnology S1 comes to japan market in december/4/1994 and DC in november/27/1998

 

[Fox5]

Those seem to be the US dates, which changes technology comparisons an awful lot.

A number of the consoles we're talking about (particularly the PS1 and Dreamcast) appeared nearly a year earlier in Japan than they did in the US. The N64 didn't arrive in Europe until 1997, by which time it paled compared to readily available PC stuff.

A year is a long time in graphics technology (and in software too of course).

How relevant are the Japanese release dates though? If the systems launched with 30,000 units in Japan, but weren't available in significant quantity until the US release date, well in that case one might be able to make an argument for PC hardware that happens to be in existence but not readily available, such as pre-release engineering samples.

 

[Neb]

How relevant are the Japanese release dates though? If the systems launched with 30,000 units in Japan, but weren't available in significant quantity until the US release date, well in that case one might be able to make an argument for PC hardware that happens to be in existence but not readily available, such as pre-release engineering samples.

Good point.

 

[Heinrich4]

How relevant are the Japanese release dates though? If the systems launched with 30,000 units in Japan, but weren't available in significant quantity until the US release date, well in that case one might be able to make an argument for PC hardware that happens to be in existence but not readily available, such as pre-release engineering samples.

But something like 100000 psone are sold in day one only in japan in 12/4/1994 and to 09/02/1995 something like 20/30000 per week. This is not enough to count? * And DC sold 120000 console at day one **.



* Near 1.4 million psone sold in december/94 to september/95 before USA launch.

http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?con...=X360&reg3=All&start=34672&end=34945&weekly=1

http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?con...eg2=All&cons3=&reg3=All&start=34672&end=34945


** 1.1 million DC sold between 11/28/1998 to 09/04/1999(before USA launch in 09/09/1999)
http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?con...=X360&reg3=All&start=36128&end=36408&weekly=1

(ps2 sold 980000 console day one in japan in 03/04/2000)

 

[pjbliverpool]

So which consoles faired the worst then?

Wii is the obvious example but since that wasn't aiming at the high end in the first place its a little unfair to bring it up. May as well talk about handhelds and those dodgy $10 "consoles" you buy on market stalls with "500 games built in!"

I think its a toss up between Gamecube and PS3. Probably Gamecube with its sub GF3 level GPU (at a time when the Ti500 was a available) and its very slow CPU.