Dreamcast upgrade

[jvd]

hmmm good catch on your part. My mistake.

The Kyro II came out after the GF3. If it had come out at the same time as the GF2, Radeon, and Voodoo 5, (that other non T&L card) it really could have shaken up the market. As it was, when it hit the market it was a midrange performer, and not enough to really grab headlines like a flagship product would. People were too busy concentrating on the GF3 and the upcoming successor to the Radeon. If you'll recall much of the Hubbub over the Kyro II at the time wasn't just that it was in many instances competitive and sometimes better than a GF2, but also because nVidia sent out a presentation slandering it. It struck many people as odd that nvidia would spend so many resources to discredit something that didn't even threaten their high margin products.

 

[Fox5]

Dreamcast was expandable but *NOT* upgradable. you could not do CPU, graphics processor or memory upgrades to Dreamcast, as far as I know. There were no actual Dreamcast upgrades planned either. not even real rumblings of a DC upgrade. only false rumor, speculation, and a desire for one by Sega fans.

The Saturn however, *was* upgradable, and at least one, if not more than one, upgrade (3D) was developed for Saturn, but never released. that is in addition to the various memory upgrades Saturn did recieve for various games.


anything by NEC for a 'DC upgrade' that could run rings around the GeForce256 was stuff of fantasy. While the Dreamcast was an awsome, awesome console, running rings around the TNT, Voodoo2, Voodoo3, and perhaps rivaling the TNT2, the DC could not match the GeForce256, especially with DDR. even with PowerVR2DC's advantages over traditional architectures. PowerVR2 was only originally ment to rival Voodoo2, (not GeForce) though PowerVR2 ended up surpassing duel Voodoo2's in SLI, and in many areas, the Voodoo3 also.

like Deadmeat said, there was a Dreamcast2 in development. Sega President Shoichiro Irimajiri stepped down sometime around late 1999 or early 2000 to over see R&D on Dreamcast's sucessor, which I assume was already underway in early-mid 1999.

Just wanted to pick out that quote about the dc outperforming voodoo 2 and 3, but only rivaling tnt 2....well I think all the voodoo 3s were faster than the original tnt 2, and the high end ones were on par with the tnt 2 ultra. And I'd imagine a voodoo 2 sli would have offered competitive performance to the original tnt 2. Also, didn't the dreamcast get free 32 bit color at a time when pc video cards incurred heavy performance hits? So did it outperform them in 32 bit color(a mode which the tnt 2's would lose 50% of their performance and the voodoo 2 and 3s couldn't do, though you could compare it to a voodoo 4) and 16 bit as well, or just 32 bit?