There have been a couple 1080p res games released this gen thus far, with easy reference available in this thread here:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241
Console that fared best vs PC's available at launch
- Thread starter Butta
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There have been a couple 1080p res games released this gen thus far, with easy reference available in this thread here:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241
RancidLunchmeat
Veteran
I don't think there's any real question that the 360 fared the best against the best of what PCs had to offer at launch.
Its questionable even if PCs could match what the 360 offered for a 6 month or so time frame.
Of course, the 360 was also hampered (in terms of this discussion) by HUGE gains in GPU tech almost immediately after its launch. By the time the PS3 launched, it not only suffered from subpar GPU performance but Intel's Core2Duos totally realigned CPU performance as well.
I'd say the 360 was the only console that actually launched with a combined power advantage over it's PC counterparts but that advantage was removed well before the 360 actually hit 'mainstream' or fully saturated the supply chain.
Then again, I think that early launch and power advantage is the exact reason why the 360 has established the position it has. Conversely, it's also the reason why the PS3 hasn't been able to obtain the same foothold. When the PS3 launched, PC components were clearly superior and readily available.
Its questionable even if PCs could match what the 360 offered for a 6 month or so time frame.
Of course, the 360 was also hampered (in terms of this discussion) by HUGE gains in GPU tech almost immediately after its launch. By the time the PS3 launched, it not only suffered from subpar GPU performance but Intel's Core2Duos totally realigned CPU performance as well.
I'd say the 360 was the only console that actually launched with a combined power advantage over it's PC counterparts but that advantage was removed well before the 360 actually hit 'mainstream' or fully saturated the supply chain.
Then again, I think that early launch and power advantage is the exact reason why the 360 has established the position it has. Conversely, it's also the reason why the PS3 hasn't been able to obtain the same foothold. When the PS3 launched, PC components were clearly superior and readily available.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
That really irritated me that PS3, dispite being a supposed technological wonder, was behind PCs in graphics performance at launch, unlike PS1 and PS2 in the previous 2 generations which where ahead of PCs at the times of their launch.
grandmaster
Veteran
Well Ridge Racer 7 manages visuals like this and this with a 60fps update to boot. It's still my favourite 1080p title on the current generation - somewhat lacking in texture detail and a bit low in its poly counts but the overall combination of resolution, framerate and special effects makes it a lovely technical showcase for PS3. Not bad for a launch game. Maybe if 1080p became more of a standard others may be inspired to pick up the baton from Namco and improve on what this game achieved.
Betanumerical
Veteran
aaronspink
Veteran
I think I would probably go insane in about 2 minutes having to deal with that level of craptics. Seriously, OMG, jaggy city. As I said, this gen the developers are definitely better off at 720P and some AA if they can't get AA at 1080P.
problem is that as soon as you push any sort of shaders or decent textures, or AA you pretty much run out of memory for 1080p.
Aaron Spink
speaking for myself inc.
I dunno, the DC should significantly outperform the Voodoo 2 even at this.
My Voodoo 2 was 93mhz, with 93 mp fill rate, 16 bit colour with 12MB Vram.
The DC was 100 mhz with 100 mp fill rate, 32-bit internal colour that looked enormously better than a Voodoo 2 even when dithered down to 16-bit, and it could draw more than twice the number of polygons per second. Taking into account texture compression, it should also have a higher variety of better looking textures despite having less video memory.
So that's fill rate, polygons and textures in the DCs favour, as well as a 32-bit post-transform store for geometry (while the Voodoo 2s used a 16-bit Z-buffer). Its a wash in favour of the DC's GPU - the only possible exceptions I can think of might be resolution (my Voodoo 2 struggled with 1024 x 768, but it did it) and multi-textured fill rate.
The CPU was actually an enormous strength if you look back to when the DC was made, it's what allowed it to calculate so many polygons for its time. The DC was beating in-game what my Pentium 2 400 couldn't even match in 3Dmark's "high poly" test!
That was actually 16MB (plus another 2MB audio), so not low at all for the time - in fact it was pretty impressive by console standards in 1998. To put it in perspective the DC had 6.5X the memory of the N64 which was released two years earlier, while the Xbox three years later had about 2.3X as much. The GC only had more memory if you include its tremendously slow A-Ram.
I suppose this shows that at 40MB for an early 2000 console the PS2 was a bit of a RAM beast too. Of course, main memory is one area where PCs always have dominated consoles.
IIRC the high-poly 3DMark99 test consisted of 88k polygons per frame (helicopter flight/fight), aside from other stuff rendered. I think there was in that version a test to with a flying dragon (medieval city), that one was over 140k polys per frame aside from other stuff and number of HW lights used.
I thought that, typically, PS2 games were running at 640x240 per field when in 60Hz mode. On DC (apart from early ones that didn't use compressed textures), the 60Hz games were rendered at 640x480 per field and then either a 1:2:1 or 1:1 filter was used to downsample to field resolution. I could be wrong though as it has been a long time.
FWIW I dug up an old Tomb Raider PCX2 image. Ahh the nostalgia.
Even with these "minimal overdraw" games you still had to clear the Z and frame buffers. That comes for "free" on PowerVR.
There is some limitation in the TA (tiling engine) in CLX2 which limited its resolution to something lower than what the rest of the system could support but, if a programmer is keen they could, in theory, bypass the TA and write their own tile lists.
Even ignoring SLI/XFire, a PC equiped with an X1900XTX should have Xenos easily beat in the GPU department. Wasn't that launched about 3 months after the 360?
N64
The N64 was probably well outclassed at launch by PCs. UltraHLE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrahle was able to emulate it in 1999 using a Pentium 2 class processor running on a Voodoo Banshee. A good gaming PC in 1996 was something like a Pentium MMX w/ Voodoo graphics. If we interpolate the overhead of emulation as something like a factor of 3 or 4 for dynamic recompilation of the CPU and shoehorning the rendering on to a different architecture the, I'd say the P5 MMX w/ a Voodoo 1 would easily be on top.
The N64 was probably well outclassed at launch by PCs. UltraHLE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrahle was able to emulate it in 1999 using a Pentium 2 class processor running on a Voodoo Banshee. A good gaming PC in 1996 was something like a Pentium MMX w/ Voodoo graphics. If we interpolate the overhead of emulation as something like a factor of 3 or 4 for dynamic recompilation of the CPU and shoehorning the rendering on to a different architecture the, I'd say the P5 MMX w/ a Voodoo 1 would easily be on top.
In his case he has kind of a point though. UltraHLE was a high level emulation that concentrated on "translating" the N64 C library calls. It used Glide as an API. N64 roms ran fine on a P 200Mhz MMX + Vodoo 1. So early 1997 hardware was able to run it fairly decently (just barely after 1/2 years after the release of the N64).
Last time I used it it ran quite a few. Although I have long since moved on to the even better Project64.
I remember running Mario64 on my old Voodoo Banshee actually! I can't remember what CPU I had, possibly a K5 at that point but it ran very slowly.
UltraHLE had quite an impressive compatibility list for a first try.
In ran a significant portion of the major games out at the game, including Mario 64, Zelda 64 (visual issues), Goldeneye (performance issues on slower cpus) and I think most of the first party titles.
It really only got tripped up by games that started using new opcodes instead of the initial nintendo and rare offered ones. Additionally, as programming shifted away from libraries and went more low level (for special shader like effects) it had difficulties. Still, a 500mhz athlon with a voodoo 2 could run just about any game ultrahle could run at full speed.
Even more impressive was Bleem I'd say. Without a 3d card, a Pentium MMX could run an even larger amount of PSX games playably. (with sound issues quite often, but still metal gear solid being playable on a pc shortly after its launch wasn't bad)
In ran a significant portion of the major games out at the game, including Mario 64, Zelda 64 (visual issues), Goldeneye (performance issues on slower cpus) and I think most of the first party titles.
It really only got tripped up by games that started using new opcodes instead of the initial nintendo and rare offered ones. Additionally, as programming shifted away from libraries and went more low level (for special shader like effects) it had difficulties. Still, a 500mhz athlon with a voodoo 2 could run just about any game ultrahle could run at full speed.
Even more impressive was Bleem I'd say. Without a 3d card, a Pentium MMX could run an even larger amount of PSX games playably. (with sound issues quite often, but still metal gear solid being playable on a pc shortly after its launch wasn't bad)
Proper emulation forms a lower bound on what the performance of a PC has to be to match the console. A poorly coded emulator would bring a Penryn to its knees, so in this case, a Penryn would be established as some kind of coarse lower bound for the equivalence hardware. The question here is what the best coded emulator would require. Without any special interpolation, for the N64, this lower bound would be a pentium II w/ a voodoo. But there is significant overhead and I'd say that UltraHLE proves that it's quite a bit less than the PC of the N64's heyday.
Well, N64 "emulation" is more N64 approximation right now. The majority of the library doesn't run correctly. There are maybe 10 games that work really well, and the rest range from not working or working with noticeable bugs. So you have to try the games out on 3 different emulators and try different plugins to see if you can get things right. Surreal64 on modded Xbox actually includes Project64, 1964, and UltraHLE to choose from and it still won't run anywhere close to all of the games.
I haven't used Nintendo's Virtual Console on Wii yet, but it seems to do the job well. Apparently it just uses the ROMs from the carts with various tweaks. I'm sure it's HLE. I'm just not that interested in buying the games again.
I haven't used Nintendo's Virtual Console on Wii yet, but it seems to do the job well. Apparently it just uses the ROMs from the carts with various tweaks. I'm sure it's HLE. I'm just not that interested in buying the games again.
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