Picture quality, color, textures, draw distance, and performance. This is already showing great performance with a much higher draw distance (and actually more geometry) than ps2 at this early stage. It's not even using the cpu yet.How so? Remember this is a technical discussion, so you need to identify the strengths and weaknesses and explain how DC would 'look better', qualifying your 'better' in terms of framerate, resolution, lighting, tech, whatever criteria you are comparing.
Anything less degrades the technical discussion to fanboy talk, and we don't want any of that!
Could Dreamcast et al handle this/that game/effect? *DC tech retrospective *spawn
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You can't claim that yet since as you can see in the video - apart maybe from image resolution - the draw distance and textures are not properly rendered and are still broken. Wait until the port is finalized.
Tell that to the devs. They said it's rendering fully into the distance, just the clipping needs to be fixed. They also said they more than likely will reduce the draw distance to ps2 levels to get more performance if they need it. Also, the levels in General have more geometry than ps2. I'm not making unverified claims.
Clipping is literally interpreted as selectively limiting rendering operations. The devs may have allowed the draw distance further, but since clipping isn't working properly, it clips out a huge amount of visual elements, making the higher draw distance at this point meaningless in terms of what it means for performance and presentation. Once all issues are resolved then the devs will be able to have a proper picture of performance and what they can push further or cut.
I'm gonna go by what the devs are telling me. Thanks for your input, though.
Bro you are interpreting devs based on what you want to hearI'm gonna go by what the devs are telling me. Thanks for your input, though.
davis.anthony
Veteran
I see the usual people are getting over excited and making foolish and wild claims.
The port is coming on leaps and bounds, but it's still no where near rendering everything correctly, which raises a few questions.
1. How performance is being saved because things aren't being rendered correctly.
2. How much memory is being saved because things aren't loaded correctly.
The port is now at a point where you start to look at fixing all the visual artifacts and rendering issues, and this is where you'll start start to see performance change as more things start to rendered correctly.
There might be a scenario where you have to reduce scene complexity, not because DC's GPU can't handle it, but because you don't have the RAM and need to sacrifice scene detail to claw back some RAM capacity.
The port is coming on leaps and bounds, but it's still no where near rendering everything correctly, which raises a few questions.
1. How performance is being saved because things aren't being rendered correctly.
2. How much memory is being saved because things aren't loaded correctly.
The port is now at a point where you start to look at fixing all the visual artifacts and rendering issues, and this is where you'll start start to see performance change as more things start to rendered correctly.
There might be a scenario where you have to reduce scene complexity, not because DC's GPU can't handle it, but because you don't have the RAM and need to sacrifice scene detail to claw back some RAM capacity.
My thinking is, if GTA3 is that much better on DC than PS2 from just porting an unoptimised PC version by some hobbiests, why didn't the DC eclipse PS2 in every way? There's a logical disconnect between what some are claiming is happening here and the entirety of that generation including the existence of this thread. If it's that easy because DC is that powerful to trump PS2, the thread should have been "Could PS2 et al handle this/that game/effect *PS2 retrospective".
If this GTA3 port ends up running better on DC than GTA3 ran on PS2, that'll raise serious questions about just how optimised GTA3 even was on PS2.
If this GTA3 port ends up running better on DC than GTA3 ran on PS2, that'll raise serious questions about just how optimised GTA3 even was on PS2.
The current issue with clipping isn't distance culling but near clipping of triangle strips isn't quite right, breaking up near strips is a hard issue right now. So in that issue he's not actually wrong. Distance culling was the first thing working by default. You can even set the draw distance by first menu since it retained the PC menu. From what they said the lods are actually higher quality at a further distance and the draw distance is by default higher than PS2. Now that they stripped the meshes they also just default pc quality which is most models are the same but basically the cars are higher polygon count. Look at the screen shot below , distance stuff isn't an issue and it always worked by default it's the near clipping and some of 3d math might need fixing. One is set lowest distance and the other default distance.
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Those questions have been answered already. Nothing is being omitted because they are sending ALL the needed scene verts , what your looking at is near clipping issues and transparency issues. Before stripping the models it was in a inefficient format that was pushing around 170k verts for the scene and they were forced to take the models into blender and bluntly chop off polygons. Basically ate all the vram and alot of the textures had to be reduced to 32x32 just to get the game to boot. After stripping the scenes push up to around 80k verts( ironically it's pushing more detail than Dreamcast did in its commercial lifetime) and are using the full detail PC models. Textures were uped to 64x64 with a higher color depth than the PS2 textures( they did a test and found thousands of PS2 textures are only 256 colors or 16 colors and 32x32).
All this and a lot of the built in fpu features for the CPU haven't been leveraged yet because the tnl code is still in c not customized to sh4 assembly.
Last statement is moot because they no longer have to claw back ram , they are uped back up to the default detail which is higher than PS2 models , higher res textures , higher draw distance. Now it's just fixing the math to prevent all these distortions.
Probably, but it doesn't mean it didn't stress the ps2. That's probably just the best they could do at the time.
Btw here's what the guy who fixed the speed said about the DC port.
EsppiraK
Newcomer
From it is impossible for the game to run on the Dreamcast to the game was badly optimized for the PS2, keep the mental gymnastics people!!!
Btw, I am pretty sure the game will end up being "below" the PS2 version but it went from impossible to achieve to a playable version on a platform that it was supposed to be incapable of running it is a huge achievement.
Btw, I am pretty sure the game will end up being "below" the PS2 version but it went from impossible to achieve to a playable version on a platform that it was supposed to be incapable of running it is a huge achievement.
It's not mental gymnastic. How about attempting that reasoning with a reasoned argument? The existence of this thread is because over DCs short lifespan, it tended to not match PS2's visuals, and the question arises what untapped potential was there that the devs never used because the platform died too early. This thread is "DC was as capable of PS2 but never really got to shine."
Now we have a port of a PC version, ported by enthusiasts on homebrew tools, that people think is going to eclipse the same game created by the studio that made it.
How do you reconcile the two situations? Why would GTA3 look and run better on DC than PS2 when all the other titles didn't?
I think that's a logical question deserving of a technical consideration, and not silly fanboy handwaving. Given GTA3 was a pretty early title and PS2 wasn't the easiest platform to extract performance from, how well do we really think it was optimised? If we can prove it was well optimised, and the same game runs so much better on DC, then how come all the other games on DC didn't eclipse PS2?
Well that's not a simple question though. The biggest answer to that was remember how to get the best out of the PS2 you needed to leverage its vu0/1 coprocessors and built specifically for the game? Well the Dreamcast turns out isn't any different, if you do not cater to its fpu you will not get any significant performance out of it and if you don't sacrifice vram for vertices space you will not get high poly counts. What incentive was there to even bother ? Why not just let the compiler handle it and not waste time with assembly? On the Japanese side they had ninja/ Naomilib so the important things are managed for them. What chance is there to optimize, remember the jump in performance from ninja1 to the unused ninja2. Now we got skilled people that CARE to look for cache missed and count cycles per instructions on the sh4. There was no financial incentive in those years to bother with this on dc
The kos direct pvr API has been there always. Why was it never used? Because it's hard, especially for enthusiasts . Everything is up to you. You do one little wrong and you get no performance. It's a very thin wrapper for the hardware , opengl on the dc used to barely 11k verts per frame now with this project they are hitting 80k verts per frame?( Heck we got that Minecraft clone that eats all vram to push 140k verts per frame, a pipe dream during its commercial run)It's not magic , just like the rival consoles you HAVE to tailor every little thing to the machine.
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A simple answer might lie in the fact that GTA3 was never considered a graphical showcase on PS2, the size of the map and sense of freedom stood out, but go back and read again reviews such as the IGN one or eurogamer, you'll see they were not particularly impressed by the graphical aspect of the game, even if some few effects stood out.
But still, it's a great achievement to see it running in some form on DC at all.
But still, it's a great achievement to see it running in some form on DC at all.
davis.anthony
Veteran
You only have to look at the screen to see not everything is rendered and running properly.
The reduced amount of vehicles on the streets alone would be saving performance, and the pedestrians? Where are they? The city is dead and no where near as bustling with life as the PS2 version is, you think adding all that in to the DC game won't cause a performance drop? Please.
There's performance sucking things that aren't running on DC yet.
You mean cars like this? Or people like this? No, they are running. Problem is people only test a few minutes at time since the graphics still need fixing. Everything is in place , even uneeded things like the trash/littler system. The stuff is there not sure what the issue . And it's running nicely . You're just nitpicking and not even the right things. If anything they increased it compared to the earlier time of the port where they pretty much made it minimum because it was running single digits frame rate. Theres can actually be more than this on screen already.
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EsppiraK
Newcomer
Haven't you seen the latest video? Lol there are cars and fights against pedestrians...
No one is saying that it will surpass the PS2 version, lol no!
Now be honest, did you ever thought that it would run the way it does even in it's actual state? It is so hard to recognise how of an incredible achievement is this? And that an official port of the game was allways possible? I remember people saying here that it was impossible to run the game on this console....
I am not referring solely to the draw distance. Even if it draws some objects even further to the distance than the PS2, a lot of elements that should be on screen are still clipped out and absent. Without having all elements rendered on screen as it should, the true impact on performance is not clear.
EsppiraK
Newcomer
It could also be that rendering those objects wrongly concurs in a performance penalty, just saying...