Could Dreamcast et al handle this/that fighter? *spawn

God damn! I didnt remember such a large difference in the textures and lighting

 

I would still say TTT>DOA2>SC

The TTT did crazy stuff with the effects and lighting which demonstrated the PS2 superior capabilities.
Each stage was a technical showpiece in its own right almost as if it was an effort to demonstrate the PS2's new rendering capabilities.
We got dense and animated grass, reflective water puddles, fabrics that reflected like their real counterparts, wood that reflected like convex wood, muddy surfaces that looked and reflected like mud, high detailed textures, multiple light sources (which I believe where higher than DOA2), metal reflections, advanced animated facials to the point that they even modeled the teeth, highly detailed polygon floors (not simply flat surfaces), animated backgrounds, dense snow particles etc. Even in some stages that had some lit torches, they emitted their own flickery light sources on to the character models

Really they went crazy with the visuals. Actually I find them so good that it stood out well throughout the test of time. The only fighting game on the PS2 that literally surpassed it was Soul Calibur 3. Not even T5 or T4 had the visual variety that was in TTT

 

Yes, TTT looks better than tekken 4 and tekken 5, imho, and the most complex fighting game on ps2 is Soul Calibur 3, that game took all the juice from the ps2.

Even though I still think Doa 2 looks better than TTT, even If it doesn't have all that advance rendering techniques.

 

I've never seen those games in action, I heard of them but I never played them so I don't know.

 

Wow, I don't remember DoA2 Hardcore looking that bad, nor did I know it looked worse on the PS2 than the DC version. Aside from the texturing, I can't fathom why the DC version should look better.

 

If i remember correctly, it was quoted in an old Tips & Tricks magazine that the DC version of DOA 2 had multi-sampling and cleaner textures over PS2. sadly i can't find the magazine that covered this, but i remember that it was quoted.

judging by some of the screens, i say though the ps2 version may have slightly more polygons for character faces. that's what i'm seeing anyways.

 

There was at least one game that used 2X Super Sample AA (Omicron?). Resolving the super sampling as you copied off the tile buffer should have meant that this didn't require any more memory for the frame buffer, just double the fill rate. Which at 30 fps with opaque geometry shouldn't have been much of a problem for the Dreamcast. Pity more games didn't use it.

Games usually just blended alternate scanlines to create the interlaced imaged. I think was referred to as a 'flicker filter'.

The Dreamcast rendered everything at 24-bit RGB into its tile buffer, iirc, and had a number of modes that could be used from there. Copy out at 24-bit, copy out dithering down to 16-bit (humongously better than native 16-bit), and blending down from 24-bit into interlaced 24-bit.

A full res 24-bit buffer took up too much space (needed for polys and textures), 16-bit dithered was common for VGA, and presumably most games used a variant of the interlaced flicker filtered output.

In a sense you could perhaps stretch to say that with 2X SSAA, the flicker filtered interlaced output was effectively using 4X SS AA.

Dreamcast could also use aniso filtering, by using a 2x2 supersample of the texels used to texture a pixel/fragment. Test Drive Le-mans showed that it could be used selectively, and also in fast, stable 30 fps game with a hell of lot of polygons and an enormous draw distance. The white line disappearing clearly hundreds of metres into the distance along the straights was pretty impressive at the time.

 

Maybe, it looks miles better than Mortal Combat Gold for the Dreamcast, but it was a quick and dirty port from the PSX/N64.(even though MCG on Dreamcast has higher polycount per character than SC LOL)



How can a model with 4.000 polys ( almost 1000 more than a SC model) look barely better than a psx model is beyond me.

Maybe as someone has stated before talking about shenmue, most Dreamcast games were made using psx era tools or just were merely "enghanced" psx ports.

@function Some interesting info, thanks.

I think Le Mans 24h is one of the most impressive games in the system and proves that it was capable of way more than what we saw in the Dreamcast lifespan..

 

I'm not an artist, but it looks like they may have been adding polygons to lower res models in order to make the per-vertex lighting work better. An upgrade (perhaps one that worked well with existing art) rather than making something specifically to take advantage of all those polygons, as DoA 2 did.

Highly detailed character models would have benefited enormously from careful use of bump mapping. It wouldn't even need to be applied to every surface. But effective use of bump mapping required asset creation tools that weren't in common use at the time, and also required skills that game artists had yet to develop.

 

Lack of skinning didin´t help either. On the pic you can see how every limb has a ´cap´ on their joints, leading to a bunch of wasted polys.

 

N64



DC



As I said it is incredible how close those models look in actual gameplay.

 

I'd like to post le mans polycount on the "how many polygons" thread but I don't know what to do, I started posting polycounts of older consoles because I thought it was interesting, not to start a debate about the capabilities of the Ps2, Dreamcast, gamecube or Xbox, but I don't want to get another warning from the mods ^^'

Are we only allowed to post polycount of recent games on that thread?

I just want to post it there, any other discussion regarding old consoles polycount, could continue in this thread.

 

There's definitely some overlap on these two threads...

 

Post them here! I'd like to see them, and as long as we don't turn it into a pissing contest the mods won't mind. You can always link to the post here in the other thread for people who might be interested.

Mod warning are simply their way of showing that they care.