Haha, nevermind, i see this conversation is getting nowhere with you. People could show you anything running on DC and you'd still say it's impossible, so
Could Dreamcast et al handle this/that game/effect? *DC tech retrospective *spawn
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davis.anthony
Veteran
Haha, nevermind, i see this conversation is getting nowhere with you. People could show you anything running on DC and you'd still say it's impossible, so
You are the problem, using the collision from one stage in a user imported stage, does not reflect the memory and processing load of the collision in said user imported stage.
That is just a fact that you either don't understand or choosing to ignore.
I didn't say anything about being unplayable. The PC original was ugly as fuck though and was totally missing the atmosphere.
And what figures are we talking about btw?
EsppiraK
Newcomer
That video is not running on real hardware but I can guarantee you that it runs at 60 FPS on real hardware, and yes it has cut down geometry, specially trees and house interiors that wouldn't be seen anyways, but it is meant as a background for a fighting game, not a 30 fps over the shoulder shooter, also aims for 60 FPS on a less powerful console.
I am very proud of it by the way because it is not a a copy paste endeavour, tons of ours have been put in to it....
I absolutely love everything you're doing! Don't mind the haters, keep on showing us the true power of DC!
davis.anthony
Veteran
No one in this thread has discredit your effort or work.
What I would suggest, is that you ask people to stop using your work as a means to hype DC's abilities above what they are.
Comments like the one above for example do not help, and only divert away from the actual hours you put in.
You are being transparent and it shows that your work isnt treated for what it is. For example in this case you made it clear that the environment is missing a huge amount of geometry and elements.
It serves as an interesting experiment but thats a far cry from using it as an example that it could run Resident Evil 4. Ofcourse, any game can be changed enough, optimized and have enough downgrades to run on slower hardware.
But we dont know to what extend for a DC version. Running some of the meshes with textures on the DC barely says much when it comes to conclusions regarding DC's abilities to run PS2 games at a satisfactory enough level.
EsppiraK
Newcomer
The ps2 version of RE 4 has literally halved geometry everywhere compared to the GameCube version, so at least it shows that it could have produced something that resembles the original game, I mean yes the DC is less capable that both of them but it is not a good measurement or fair to dismiss what could have been achieved just because the original mesh has been trimmed since the original engine does it in real time...
Also the original game uses lods and popping that my stage is missing since I loaded the whole stage, the game on GameCube nor PS2 or renders the whole environment at once..
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You'd put animation, physics routines, AI in main memory as with PS2, and sound would go in the sound memory (both PS2 and DC had 2MB iirc).
The point I'm trying to make is that the size of the advantage the PS2 had in terms of main ram changes depending upon what you're putting in there. If you were trying to match the DC at its own game using CLUTs PS2 might even conceivably have no advantage (e.g. Crazy Taxi, F355 challenge, perhaps DoA2 in some areas) though this would obviously be a poor way to judge the PS2.
It's basically never fair to say "PS2 has twice as much ram" and leave it at that. PS2 is storing some stuff in main ram that DC stores in ram elsewhere, and PS2 will normally be using quite a bit more memory to do it (at least at comparable quality).
Later on there were PS2 games that sometimes used some fancy techniques to get something like the DC's VQ texture compression, but this wasn't common and wasn't as fast on PS2 as just using a single CLUT. Looking at GTA3 it doesn't seem like they weren't doing anything fancy like that though. Texture detail was not a massive strong point of GTA3, but they'll have been using the memory somewhere else no doubt, which again no doubt would have required compromises for DC (though OTOH it may have had better textures).
And yeah, DC needed a chunk of GPU memory to store the polygons (primitive list and vertex data?) for the scene that you want to do hidden surface removal on and then draw. The more polygons you wanted to draw per frame, the more you needed to reserve, and if you exceeded that, you could crash. Very power and BW efficient way to do it, and very very fast at hidden surface removal, but as always there's no free lunch. This isn't memory you could use for anything else besides textures, frame buffers, and maybe some kind of render to texture or accumulation buffer like effects. It's wasn't memory the CPU could use directly.
In some ways the PowerVR2DC was held back by the budget Sega had for the rest of the system.It really was a phenomenal GPU by 1998 standards, and according to SimonF it could probably have been made to clock higher.
Sure. We agree. Just like you I didnt conclude whether the DC could have a playable version. I also made the point that we cant use it as a measurement whether it could or not and to what extend.
But there is this tendency to take your experiments by some and treat them as a measurement.
davis.anthony
Veteran
Looking at some of the very old comments by Deano C, ErP and others the general view wass that PS2 wasn't actually VRAM limited, and that giving it better texture compression wouldn't have made any real difference as textures were actually VU1 limited, not physical memory limited.
Which makes sense looking at how PS2 works and remembering the old performance analyser results.
Games like Ghost Hunter really did show what it could actually do, amazing textures, loads of post processing effects, shadow casting flashlight, 480p and all at 60fps.
Which makes sense looking at how PS2 works and remembering the old performance analyser results.
Games like Ghost Hunter really did show what it could actually do, amazing textures, loads of post processing effects, shadow casting flashlight, 480p and all at 60fps.
davis.anthony
Veteran
Which in GTA3's case would/could have resulted in pretty large cut backs.
PS2 didn't work like DC in terms of how it used it's memory, PS2 was built for streaming data constantly rather then keeping everything in RAM/EDRAM.
PS2's DVD drive could fill it's 32MB of RAM in less than 6 seconds which helped push it's streaming nature.
With DC's 1.8MB/s streaming rate from it's GD-ROM drive you're not going to streaming a fat lot and would be forced to store way more in RAM.
That's due to a limitation with VU1 which only really worked efficiently with certain methods of compression.
That's why adding more modern compression support to the GS wouldn't have really done anything as VU1 would have needed to have been updated/redesigned to perform well with better solutions.
What it lacks in texture detail, it makes up for it with a decent amount of texture variety in my opinion.
And PS2 was held back by lacks of tools and piss poor technical manuals.
and water caustics
davis.anthony
Veteran
And the chain physics were amazing.
EsppiraK
Newcomer
The game is fantastic one of my favourite on the ps2 and very underrated, but it didn't run at 60 FPS, it was capped at 30 and had severe slowdowns.
Playing it on emulator with uncapped framerate is a joy btw.
Some cutbacks sure, but the extent of that depends on what was being done with memory on PS2.
All consoles that gen were built to stream data. Sega had actually been building devices with data streaming i mind since the M-CD add on.
It's really not true to say that the DC was to "constantly keep everything in RAM". That's a bit of a strange thing to claim tbh.
It's an over simplification to say that "you're not going to streaming a fat lot and would be forced to store way more in RAM".
"Storing more" isn't your only option. You can stream the same amount but over a longer time (potentially with more fade/pop in or pauses if you go too fast); you can stream less by going lower quality or fewer unique assets; you can stream less by using more highly compressed assets/data; or you can store more.
But storing more rapidly become problematic in a game with unpredictable movement leading to unpredictable access demand from the optical drive. Storing and/or loading some data in a more compressed format would be useful (VQ textures are naturally small), or fading higher res textures in later, or temporarily having less NPC or vehicle variety in while you load more in.
But the real problem for streaming from optical where you have unpredictable accesses is access time. Both CD and DVD are pretty terrible in outright terms, often equally terrible tested across the full radius of the readable disk, though with a practical advantage for DVD where higher densitty sotrage allows for faster head seek times. GD-Rom was realtively good in this regard, but I'd guess PS2's DVD is still better. But it's still this that's going to more important than peak linear read speeds.
Access times more than linear read is what made cheap USB drives and cheap USB HDDs so much better than DVD for running Rage off on the X360.
I don't really agree with this. The SH4 on the DC didn't have any particular hardware to handle VQ compressed textures (as far as I've ever seen), but you fed the GPU the texture coords and it could decompress that format of textures on the GPU as it consumed them.
Native support for a texture format (VQ or S3TC or the like) would have allowed higher quality textures to be in VRAM as the GPU was drawing whatever you were having it draw at the time.
Not sure I agree, I see a lot of very low colour, low resolution, highly tiled textures on screen. But if you're right, that would make a good argument for PS2 using a good chunk of memory for textures ... which makes the case for a strong (if still cut back) DC port of the game.
At first sure. What didn't hold it back was Sony's resources, developer support, development man hours, years developed for and generations of software developed for it, and PS2 certainly wasn't stuck with 1999 assets and art creation tools for the whole of it's life.
DC was effectively dead by Jan 2001. Nothing beats that in terms of being held back. Having crutches as a child beats being born into poverty, being largely ignored, and then being uethanised as a toddler.
That's why this conversation is so interesting for some of us. Because by and large we know what the PS2, GC, and Xbox could do. We don't know just how far DC games could have progressed - but evidently it's "quite a lot", even if it's not as far as some people wish it could.
sheathx013
Newcomer
On the topic of the SH4+FPU compared to the Pentium III. My Test Results with the PIII 800 and 3DMARK 2000 and 2001 show the peak polygon throughput with one light at less than 3million polys per second. If anything I'd say this puts the PIII 800 plus Direct X / Windows overhead fairly close to a "real world" Dreamcast peak as shown in only a few games. This is still far short of the 3.5mpps spec given by Sega or the 5mpps spec given by Melbourne House for TD Le Mans. At 533mhz the PIII "only" peaks at around 2-2.2mpps in 3DMARK.
I tried to install the Neon 250 in my Athlon XP or Pentium 4 systems to see if the "Pixel Perfect" bios and drivers from 2000 do anything different, but both have a newer AGP port with an extra divider in them, making my Neon 250 physically incompatible with systems newer than the ASUS P3B-F.
On the topic of GTA III. The original discs I have are two CD-ROMS, nothing over 600MB and the actual install folder isn't much more than a CD as well. Which means that *something* must stream off of the optical drive on the original PC version.
Finally, GTA III has never impressed me in anything about its scope, single load city size, objects on screen or especially texture detail. After playing Shenmue 1 + 2, Crazy Taxy *2* and Super Runabout I never saw any reason why GTA III could not be made to run, with better image quality on the Dreamcast. Given the poor resources given by 3rd parties to most Dreamcast titles, I'd expect it to have performance issues and more pop in sure, but it'd be playable with better up front image quality. I've seen plenty of analyses showing that with VQ textures the Dreamcast effectively has more than 32MB of RAM available besides.
GTA II can be made to run on an 8MB mobile processor, it really is_not that impressive of an engine. But I am 1000% certain the legend of it's minimum system requirements mystically being the PS2 will persist.
I tried to install the Neon 250 in my Athlon XP or Pentium 4 systems to see if the "Pixel Perfect" bios and drivers from 2000 do anything different, but both have a newer AGP port with an extra divider in them, making my Neon 250 physically incompatible with systems newer than the ASUS P3B-F.
On the topic of GTA III. The original discs I have are two CD-ROMS, nothing over 600MB and the actual install folder isn't much more than a CD as well. Which means that *something* must stream off of the optical drive on the original PC version.
Finally, GTA III has never impressed me in anything about its scope, single load city size, objects on screen or especially texture detail. After playing Shenmue 1 + 2, Crazy Taxy *2* and Super Runabout I never saw any reason why GTA III could not be made to run, with better image quality on the Dreamcast. Given the poor resources given by 3rd parties to most Dreamcast titles, I'd expect it to have performance issues and more pop in sure, but it'd be playable with better up front image quality. I've seen plenty of analyses showing that with VQ textures the Dreamcast effectively has more than 32MB of RAM available besides.
GTA II can be made to run on an 8MB mobile processor, it really is_not that impressive of an engine. But I am 1000% certain the legend of it's minimum system requirements mystically being the PS2 will persist.
Redbook Audio ?
your using iso's that afaik dont support cd audio you should use Bin/Cue
sheathx013
Newcomer
It's the same install as the video posted above, all the audio is working. But yeah, I guess audio could be all that's left on the disk. But the game is not over 1GB in it's original form.
That last line in my prior post should read GTA III can run on an 8MB mobile graphics chip. It doesn't look like I can edit posts.
That last line in my prior post should read GTA III can run on an 8MB mobile graphics chip. It doesn't look like I can edit posts.
Cloofoofoo
Regular
Dreamcast most certainly streams, it has games were basically everything on screen was streamed in. ( Skies of Arcadia , Tokyo Xtreme racer 2, crazy taxi 1/2) . It seems he misunderstood that Dreamcast has to have all needed components to render the frame in vram( vertex buffer, textures for the frame ) . The actual assets in ram can be moved in out just as any other console( and that's done all the time in the console). vertex buffer stuff is even flexible , you could double buffer for better performance at the cost of scene x2 or just send it direct. Ninja2 actually has a hybrid approach that sends all opaque polygons directly to be rendered while transparent are double buffered.
The actual read speed that DC is very sensitive if the physical location of files. The closer to the edge of the disc the faster it gets for read speed and the reverse is true as well. I'll post a video at the end shared to me by the soul Calibur 2 guy( thanks accel99) how it looks a DC burned disc unoptimized vs optimized. The difference is staggering no exaggeration. It's the difference between a character taking 13 seconds to load vs 3 .
You're correct ps2 has some weird resolution textures at times very low and sometimes low color. Though some of the important stuff would be higher rez.
Born into poverty and crippled at times. Certain things sdk weren't working or were suboptimal at times. Crucial things might have bugs( dma?). And it only had from very late (dec) 98 to very early 2001 to fix things. It isn't a whole lot of time let alone even a whole lot of actual devving time. And like you said the more talented devs ignored it, you got art assets like let's say characters that polycount are on par with kratos from gow, Leon resident evil 4 (PS2) and other games , you wouldn't even know because you cant tell lol.
Unoptimized disc:
Optimized:
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