Console that fared best vs PC's available at launch
- Thread starter Butta
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Dreamcast, followed by PS1, followed by Xbox1.
PS2 had theoretical abilities well in advance of whatever a PC could do at the time, however it wasn't until nearly two years later where games and SDKs were made available to actually utilize the tech, so I don't count it.
A good case could be made for the NeoGeo as well.
PS2 had theoretical abilities well in advance of whatever a PC could do at the time, however it wasn't until nearly two years later where games and SDKs were made available to actually utilize the tech, so I don't count it.
A good case could be made for the NeoGeo as well.
Dreamcast was definitely superior to PC for a good while, I don't know about PS1 because I never owned one but what little I did see looked terrible compared to the PC games I was playing at the time, and PS2 always looked terrible to me for some reason. Xbox 1 was pretty damn good as its Geforce 3 series GPU was also top of the line at the time on PC but the really low memory limited devs and the PC quickly took off. 360 was on par for a month or so, and PS3 was already behind the curve the day it came out, same month as the 8800GTX.
Dreamcast has an earlier version of PowerVR Kyro in it. Kyro was a competitor to GeForce 2 and Radeon during 2001. It was decent but lacked HW T&L, meaning it was at a disadvantage for the few games starting to use that. In 1999, Dreamcast would've had to compare to GeForce 256, Voodoo5, Rage 128, and Matrox G400. I doubt that it was really that much superior, especially compared to GeForce 256. But it would've had the typical advantage of SD consoles: rendering at only 640x480. It's easier to make a game pretty and fast when you have lots of fillrate to burn afforded by a low resolution.
I stand by N64 as being the most impressive compared to PCs. I had a 486 at the time. The best PCs didn't have much in the way of 3D acceleration until Voodoo arrived. Granted, it showed up later in 1996 like N64, but it was very expensive and had little market penetration. Games didn't receive proper 3D acceleration treatment for a year or two, simply because 3D cards were anything but mainstream. Waverace, Pilotwings 64 and Mario 64 were certainly better than anything on PC in '96. At least I thought so.
PS1 was a hardware-assisted software renderer, IMO. Similar to the "3D graphics" Saturn tried to do.
I couldn't stand the fugly graphics either put out when they weren't just outputting pre-rendered backdrops.
I stand by N64 as being the most impressive compared to PCs. I had a 486 at the time. The best PCs didn't have much in the way of 3D acceleration until Voodoo arrived. Granted, it showed up later in 1996 like N64, but it was very expensive and had little market penetration. Games didn't receive proper 3D acceleration treatment for a year or two, simply because 3D cards were anything but mainstream. Waverace, Pilotwings 64 and Mario 64 were certainly better than anything on PC in '96. At least I thought so.
PS1 was a hardware-assisted software renderer, IMO. Similar to the "3D graphics" Saturn tried to do.
I couldn't stand the fugly graphics either put out when they weren't just outputting pre-rendered backdrops.
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But with only one game on the PS2 that was actually "HD", i fail to see how you can make a convincing argument based on that alone, aspecially when you try to pin point the PS2 as the winner.
Certainly, the X360 and PS3 are closer today in regards to the PC with the ability to do 1080p native, which is a resolution thats higher than what people run on your average gaming PC.
Yeah, I find it quite amusing that by the next gen of consoles, the average console game will actually be running at a higher resolution than the average PC game. And likely with equal AA/AF.
Interestingly though that might turn out to be an advantage for the PC since the slower GPU's will be able to run console games at full fidelity by simply running at lower (but still reasonable) resolution.
In a way the age old situation will be reversed. If next gen consoles are expected to run all games at 1080p/4xAA/8xAF then its possible that GPU's released this year (GT200/R700) will be able to handle them maxxed out just fine as long as they keep resolution to say 720p and limit AA/AF.
You could get up to 1024x1024 on single PCX1/2 back then.
No. Kyro was a 3rd generation PowerVR device while Dreamcast's CLX2 was a second generation device. You perhaps were thinking of the PC chip (can't recall the code name) that was in the Neon graphics cards. Having said that CLX2 had some features that were dropped for the PC market because none of the competitors had them and thus PC games were never coded to support them.
Quite frankly, I think that was generally a lot of hot air. Games were nearly always fill rate limited and there was generally plenty of spare cycles in the CPU.
Betanumerical
Veteran
AF is practically free on computers for some reason (I have never had to turn AF off, ever, i run 16x all the time) and the 8800Ultra/ultramegaxxx6000 models they make have practically (3/2/10fps drop) free 2xAA and 4xAA*, that includes resolutions such as 1920x1600 on games such as HL2, NFS:MW and Prey, for some reason the fear FPS cuts in half must be a driver problem. I see no reason why current gen stuff cant run next gen games at 1600x1200 4xAA / 16xAF for a while to come, thats forgetting that high high end systems usually have two video cards.
*http://www.thetechlounge.com/article/416-8/ASUS+8800GTX+768MB/
It would really interesting to see how a high end GPU (3750 / 8800GTX) stands up to the consoles when the same depth of programming gets involved and you really get the best out of it.
When I said "next gen consoles", I was refering to Xbox3/PS4. Obviously there are many PC GPU's available today which should be able to handle any game released on any of the current gen consoles for the rest of their lives.
Betanumerical
Veteran
So was I.
PS3/360 is our current generation yeah?. It all really depends on how much graphics advance between know and then.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
Dreamcast has an earlier version of PowerVR Kyro in it. Kyro was a competitor to GeForce 2 and Radeon during 2001. It was decent but lacked HW T&L, meaning it was at a disadvantage for the few games starting to use that. In 1999, Dreamcast would've had to compare to GeForce 256, Voodoo5, Rage 128, and Matrox G400. I doubt that it was really that much superior, especially compared to GeForce 256. But it would've had the typical advantage of SD consoles: rendering at only 640x480. It's easier to make a game pretty and fast when you have lots of fillrate to burn afforded by a low resolution.
I stand by N64 as being the most impressive compared to PCs. I had a 486 at the time. The best PCs didn't have much in the way of 3D acceleration until Voodoo arrived. Granted, it showed up later in 1996 like N64, but it was very expensive and had little market penetration. Games didn't receive proper 3D acceleration treatment for a year or two, simply because 3D cards were anything but mainstream. Waverace, Pilotwings 64 and Mario 64 were certainly better than anything on PC in '96. At least I thought so.
PS1 was a hardware-assisted software renderer, IMO. Similar to the "3D graphics" Saturn tried to do.
N64 was only ahead of PCs in 1996 because the vast majority of PCs were far below N64 capabilities. The PC did have Rendition Verite and 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics in 1996 though, so the PC could match what N64 did if 3D-accelerated games took advantage of what those highend 3D cards could do.
Because of its late timing, N64 did not have the kind of advantage over PCs that PS1 did in 1994-1995 and that Dreamcast did in 1998-1999.
The PS1 was far ahead of PCs because in 1994-1995 there were no 3D cards for PC that were any good. The "best" 3D cards of 1995 were probably the Creative 3D Blaster (used a cutdown GLiNT chip) and the Diamond Edge 3D (used NV1). PC games hardly benefited from these cards. So PS1 games like Ridge Racer, Tekken, Air/Ace Combat, etc were far ahead of what was on the PC until 1996.
As for Dreamcast's PowerVR, as Simon already mentioned, it used PowerVR2DC / CLX2 which was a custom variant of Series 2. Not at all related to Series 3/KYRO which had 2 pixel pipelines. Series 2 chips had 1 pipeline. The PowerVR2DC / CLX2 had 32x32 tiles / tile capability, while the PC version of Series 2, known as PMX1 / PowerVR250 used in the Neon250 card, had 32x16 tiles / tile capability. IIRC. Anyway, in late 1998, the best PC cards were Voodoo2 and original TNT and these were no match for Dreamcast. In early to mid 1999, PCs got Voodoo3 and TNT2. These were almost a match for Dreamcast in raw performance (TNT2 especially) but the PowerVR2DC/ CLX2 still had some advantages. The PC clearly surpassed Dreamcast when the NV10/GeForce256 arrived in late 1999, although few games took advantage of it. Starting from late 1998, Dreamcast had about a year to 1.5 years of games that surpassed most games on most PCs.
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Megadrive1988
Veteran
Someone mentioned that a case could be made for NEO-GEO.
I agree. A case could be made for each of the systems from that era including the TurboGrafx, Genesis and SNES. For scrolling games, the PC was no match for these consoles in the late 80s/early 90s.
I agree. A case could be made for each of the systems from that era including the TurboGrafx, Genesis and SNES. For scrolling games, the PC was no match for these consoles in the late 80s/early 90s.
Isn't that a tautology?
We got a Pentium PC in 1995, and it wasn't near top of the line, either...all the parts in it could be found in 1994, so you can compare it to a PS1 at launch. I specifically remember Tomb Raider looking far better on my PC than it did on the PS1. It also had Descent and Terminal Velocity, which both looked pretty good compared to launch titles on the PS1...especially since my PC had the incredible ability to draw straight lines.
So what? A PC didn't need a 3D card to match the point-sampled, uncorrected texture mapping of the PS1. It just needed a reasonably fast Pentium and a decent amount of RAM.
I'd really say the Dreamcast's performance depended too much on the type of game. Have a game with minimal overdraw, such as a flight sim, and you have worse performance than a voodoo 2. Have a game with a ton of overdraw (say a high poly, short distance corridor shooter) and you'd potentially be looking at performance well beyond a voodoo 3 and approaching a geforce.
Dreamcast was at least in range of the top end 1998/1999 cards however, I'd say its cpu and amount of memory were greater limitations in the types of games it could do than anything else. I don't care how good the FPU was, I can't see anything SH-4 based running at 200mhz holding a candle to a 500mhz athlon, and I think memory was divided into 8MB system (pretty low) and 8MB video (really high even compared to ps2 and gamecube, and one of the rare instances where a console had as much graphics memory as a high end graphics card at the time).
aaronspink
Veteran
Um, most 360 and PS3 games are closer to 480P than 1080P. By that definition, any computer capable of using a hardware upscaler (most video cards) support 1080P as well!
Aaron Spink
speaking for myself inc.
I think the MDK2 creators said the Dreamcast is roughly equivalent to a 500 mhz P3 with a TNT2. Also, the Dreamcast has 16 MB main memory.
For the record, there are homebrew demos that run the DC, in 2D frame buffer mode, outputting a 800*608 (not a typo) image. The highest render resolution I know of used in a commercial game is 640*480 with 2x horizontal super sampling (1280*480) in Omikron. This has been done in homebrew, but no one's managed anything higher than 480 vertical with 3D. (But some of the internal structures suggest 2048*2048 might be possible somehow.)
I thought I remembered a thread on another forum discussing that. A 3x horizontal scale and a 540 vertical resolution that was interlaced to 1080i.
aaronspink
Veteran
AFAIK, there still hasn't been a game release that does 1080 native resolution and I doubt there will be this generation simple because the memory constraints in the consoles don't allow it. Even with 512MB on PC graphics adapters, the HD frames really put the squeeze on available memory.
Also keep in mind, 960x1080 or 960x540 with AA and AF probably ends up giving better quality for the consoles this gen anyways. Certainly on my PC I can't stand playing without AA even at 1920x1200 to the point that I'll trade of some graphics feature to get a reasonable frame rate with AA enabled.
Next gen consoles WILL likely support native 1080P and actually be used in games to generate native 1080P but in reality they'll just be catching up to the PCs.
The current generation consoles do have some nice features, but in comparison to past consoles relative to PCs they are behind in the graphics department. A lot of this has to do with cost reductions and volume in the PC side (which at this point pretty much dwarf the combined Wii/PS3/XB360 market).
Aaron Spink
speaking for myself inc.
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