Could Dreamcast et al handle this/that game/effect? *DC tech retrospective *spawn

[Shifty Geezer]

PS2 showed it superiority over DC after only 12 months (GT3, MGS2, DMC) all better looking titles than anything DC had at the time and we're all 60fps too.

Technically, that's not proof. Like a long distance runner, one is off the blocks and away to a strong lead, but that doesn't mean their rival can't catch up and overtake over time. Hypothetically you could have one console with x amount of power and an easy development platform that enables devs to use 80% of x from the first day, and another that has 2x amount of power but an awful development environment that sees devs struggle to get 20% of that 2x potential. The first console looks better in the first year, but the second one, if given the chance, might pull ahead if devs can tap the potential (or not if the potential is too theoretical).

But again, this is not WHICH CONSOLE WAS THE MOST POWERFUL. Please return to talking specific consoles running specific games. Subsequent OT posts will simply be removed.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Can someone answer my query about what medium the GTA port is being run from? Optical drive or HDD/some other faster storage?

 

[EsppiraK]

Can someone answer my query about what medium the GTA port is being run from? Optical drive or HDD/some other faster storage?

People has been testing in various media formats, me personally, from GDEMU, since the game is being in a very iteration stage and I don't want to burn dozens of disc for every new coomit/branch, but there are people that has tested it on a burned CD.

Anyway, the port is far for complete, and the final files layout for the disc hasn't been set in stone yet, as this is still in very early development the results of testing it on a CD right now tells you nothing.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Anyway, the port is far for complete, and the final files layout for the disc hasn't been set in stone yet, as this is still in very early development the results of testing it on a CD right now tells you nothing.

If it's running this well from CD, it tells you streaming isn't an issue. If it's not running well from a CD, that doesn't mean streaming will be an issue as it's not optimised.

One of the questions on the DC port of GTA was, "would the optical drive be sufficient?" I just wanted to know if we have an answer to that yet. It seems not, so we'll have to see how that goes, but it is thus still a consideration if a DC console could have produced a port of a PS2 game, even f the rendering turns out to have been possible.

 

[Nesh]

Technically, that's not proof. Like a long distance runner, one is off the blocks and away to a strong lead, but that doesn't mean their rival can't catch up and overtake over time. Hypothetically you could have one console with x amount of power and an easy development platform that enables devs to use 80% of x from the first day, and another that has 2x amount of power but an awful development environment that sees devs struggle to get 20% of that 2x potential. The first console looks better in the first year, but the second one, if given the chance, might pull ahead if devs can tap the potential (or not if the potential is too theoretical).

But again, this is not WHICH CONSOLE WAS THE MOST POWERFUL. Please return to talking specific consoles running specific games. Subsequent OT posts will simply be removed.

Considering that the DC was the one easier to develop compared to the PS2 (which we know for a fact dev tools were a disaster at launch in on top of a strange architecture) and the initial complaints that the PS2 was not living up to it's hype, I think it's safe to say that your example falls in line with reality and his examples serve well as a demonstration that the PS2 was more capable overall.

There was a whole lot of controversy regarding it's aliasing issues, launch games not looking better than DC games and DC ports sometimes looking worse on PS2. But in a year devs were coming up with results beyond what has been experienced before.

To be honest, even with PS2 clear performance advantage, I don't think the PS2 would have been capable at running faithfully all Dreamcast games if ported to it, like Sonic Adventure 1 or 2 (which were both 60fps). I remember being excited for Sonic Heroes. But when I bought it I was not as Impressed as I was with SA1 and SA2, and run at 30fps.

Whereas in the case of Jak and Daxter or Rachet and Clank, I doubt the Dreamcast would have been able to have a faithfully port if theoretically such a thing existed in an alternate universe

 

[function]

If it's running this well from CD, it tells you streaming isn't an issue. If it's not running well from a CD, that doesn't mean streaming will be an issue as it's not optimised.

One of the questions on the DC port of GTA was, "would the optical drive be sufficient?" I just wanted to know if we have an answer to that yet. It seems not, so we'll have to see how that goes, but it is thus still a consideration if a DC console could have produced a port of a PS2 game, even f the rendering turns out to have been possible.

Bear in mind that the GD ROMs that games were intended to come on had a double density section where the game was stored. Burned CD-ROMs can't have this, and so data transfers for a given location on the disk are at half speed, going down to less than half the speed of GD-ROM as you get to the inside edge of the CD-ROM (the GD-ROM game section didn't go all the way to the inner edge).

Capacity with a CD-ROM is also reduced from 1020MB to ~700MB, so not only is the data at half density, but the data on a CD-ROM is pushed further away from the outer edge of the disk, further degrading read speed.

The effect on access times (as the laser head moves to access another location) will also be somewhat affected on burned CD-ROMs as the physical distance between different pieces of data will be increased due to the lower density.

So whenever GTA3 on the DC is running off a burned CD-ROM it's doing so with one hand behind its back, and then some.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yep. However, we can actually access the data streaming rates if people want to investigate this, so we can still evaluate and extrapolate a probable ballpark performance. Ideally we can run this port and monitor drive usage, and a PS emulator and monitor drive usage, and get a comparison of transfer speeds if not seek times. Seek times would mostly affect pop-in and be solved by preloading (and duplicate data).

Alternatively we can just say, "well this isn't like the real thing which would be different, " and throw our hands up in the air, but then what exactly is the point of this thread then? I thought the fine here was trying to make predictions and then testing them and trying to figure out reality from the pieces.

 

[davis.anthony]

Haven't you seen the latest video? Lol there are cars and fights against pedestrians...

Yes I have, in the first minute there's only like 3 cars?

Same for pedestrians, didn't actually see a notable group until over a minute in to the video.

No one is saying that it will surpass the PS2 version, lol no!

Sonicfan is.

Now be honest, did you ever thought that it would run the way it does even in it's actual state?

Yes I expected it to run in it's broken state.

It is so hard to recognise how of an incredible achievement is this?

I have said that several times in this thread.

And that an official port of the game was allways possible?

I've always said that DC can some form of a 3D GTA game, just not a 1:1 port of the PS2 version.

I remember people saying here that it was impossible to run the game on this console....

When all the issues are fixed and every system is in place and running then people can talk.

 

[Davros]

Burned CD-ROMs can't have this, and so data transfers for a given location on the disk are at half speed,

But cd-roms did run at up to 72x speeds with the kenwood true-x 72x drive that split the laser into 7 beams to achieve a high read rate and if your using a virtual cd rom drive with an emulator you could have nvme ssd speeds

 

[davis.anthony]

CDROM speed hasn't been tested now everything is running faster.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1821310892287394302

Was also asked about the audio and stated that don't have the RAM available for it meaning cuts will need to be made to free up RAM.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1821371378269819173

https://twitter.com/x/status/1821752565949689882

More comments about RAM struggles - Cuts to scene and game complexity are going to be needed to get it to actually work and even then it still might never work properly.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1822551065885016223

He's mentioned that the game hits 20fps so still a way to go to reach 30fps that PS2 runs at.

 

[function]

Minimum system requirements for PC GTA3 were 96 MB ram and 16MB vram. That would likely be a very conservative guide with room for Windows bloat, drivers and other background programs, but still, in terms of memory the PS2 version would probably be a better starting point for the DC port than the PC version.

 

[davis.anthony]

Rockstar did say DC didn't have the memory for a 3rd person 3D GTA game on DC, and looking at these comments it's seem there's some truth to it.

 

[function]

That was just one very early opinion at Rockstar, the game's technical director evidently doesn't think that. Opinions on what could be done changed as software evolved, with more effective approaches to streaming being a big part of that.

3D GTA works very well on the PSP, with the same amount of memory available to games as the DC (the PSP also having a slower optical drive with poor access times).

The DC certainly had enough memory to do a 3D GTA game, just not perhaps with all detail of the PS2 version.

 

[davis.anthony]

3D GTA works very well on the PSP, with the same amount of memory available to games as the DC (the PSP also having a slower optical drive with poor access times).

Google indicates that 8MB of the 32MB is reserved, leaving PSP with 24MB and thus more RAM (and better texture compression than PS2) than DC.

When you're talking about such small RAM amounts an extra 50% is a major upgrade.

 

[Cloofoofoo]

CDROM speed hasn't been tested now everything is running faster.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1821310892287394302

Was also asked about the audio and stated that don't have the RAM available for it meaning cuts will need to be made to free up RAM.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1821371378269819173

https://twitter.com/x/status/1821752565949689882

More comments about RAM struggles - Cuts to scene and game complexity are going to be needed to get it to actually work and even then it still might never work properly.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1822551065885016223

He's mentioned that the game hits 20fps so still a way to go to reach 30fps that PS2 runs at.

Yup , they are worried once they work on the audio portion any work buffer they have to make in main ram would push it over the edge. That's why they are looking to see what format they choose and if it can stay resident in audio ram instead meanwhile leaving the sh4 alone and using the aica. This is why they haven't chosen a format yet.they seem to be wanting something Dreamcast native though.

Another thing the graphics overhaul hasn't taken place due to the person in charge being busy. So 20 fps before reworking the graphics / internal math behind it is looking promising. The 20 fps was just compiler optimization and switch to direct render.

20 fps isn't too far away considering the PS2 version basically lives sub 30 fps , averaging mid twenties. This is still at the pc draw distance default people just for chuckles lowered the draw distance and it goes above 35 fps. So it's definitely gonna be interesting after the graphic rewrite.

 

[Cloofoofoo]

Google indicates that 8MB of the 32MB is reserved, leaving PSP with 24MB and thus more RAM (and better texture compression than PS2) than DC.

When you're talking about such small RAM amounts an extra 50% is a major upgrade.

Yeah no. 26 ram. 24 main and still 2 vram. Meaning that main ram has to hold audio plus graphics and any buffers and such. For the Dreamcast the program and assets also live in main ram but textures can be directed loaded into vram no need to have duplicates in main ram. You also have the audio ram to use for audio related scratch pad / buffers so it evens out more than you think. There's also the fact psp gta games were less detailed than 3 or even their own PS2 counter parts. Heck PSP uses even smaller textures than PS2 .Yet here we are trying to load a reverse engineered engine meant for modern PC unto the Dreamcast.the PSP disc drive is surprisingly slow despite being rated slightly higher than the gdrom. It's more in line with how the DC reads burnt discs.

 

[davis.anthony]

20 fps isn't too far away considering the PS2 version basically lives sub 30 fps

No it doesn't, it's variable (especially with lots of particles on screen) but holds 30fps very well and it's biggest problem is uneven frame pacing more than the actual frame rate.

The frame pacing can get so bad at times that it feels like it's running at 15fps despite actually being 30fps.

And that 20fps on DC isn't locked, it's runs below that, so is far away from what PS2 was doing.

 

[davis.anthony]

For the Dreamcast the program and assets also live in main ram but textures can be directed loaded into vram no need to have duplicates in main ram.

They're kept in main RAM in this GTA3 DC port.

A game as large as GTA3 where the player can drive at pretty decent speeds, will likely need to cache textures in main RAM, even on DC to minimize pop-in from optical streaming.

 

[Cloofoofoo]

No it doesn't, it's variable (especially with lots of particles on screen) but holds 30fps very well and it's biggest problem is uneven frame pacing more than the actual frame rate.

And that 20fps on DC isn't locked, it's runs below that, so is far away from what PS2 was doing.

Except that video is bs. Here's digital foundry Real analysis of the actual frame rate. Falls below 25 fps all the time on PS2. That's the truth. Like I said we aren't doing too bad considering it's still early days and it hasn't hit the replacement of all the graphics code yet l.

 

[davis.anthony]

Except that video is bs. Here's digital foundry Real analysis of the actual frame rate. Falls below 25 fps all the time on PS2. That's the truth. Like I said we aren't doing too bad considering it's still early days and it hasn't hit the replacement of all the graphics code yet l.

That DF shows otherwise and actually proves that PS2 actually does a great job of sticking to 30fps in GTA3 with it spending most of the time between 28-30fps.

Some very brief drops to 25fps at one point but it was very brief.

And GTFO trying to use GTA:VC to prove PS2's performance for GTA3.