How powerful was the Dreamcast?
- Thread starter Fox5
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Megadrive1988
Veteran
Dreamcast was better than Voodoo2 and even Voodoo2 SLI
it had about the performance of Voodoo3 but with superior features.
TNT2 non ultra was comparable to Dreamcast.
GeForce256 could beat Dreamcast.
Dreamcast cannot hang with the current consoles performance-wise (pixel fill, geometry) but Dreamcast's image quality is as good or better than the current consoles. texture-wise, the current consoles barely match Dreamcast and rarely surpass it.
it had about the performance of Voodoo3 but with superior features.
TNT2 non ultra was comparable to Dreamcast.
GeForce256 could beat Dreamcast.
Dreamcast cannot hang with the current consoles performance-wise (pixel fill, geometry) but Dreamcast's image quality is as good or better than the current consoles. texture-wise, the current consoles barely match Dreamcast and rarely surpass it.
if we are comparing the Systemand not just the GFX chip, I'd say around geforce level (not quite, but hte blending modes and DOT3 are pretty nice).
come on, Xbox titles pretty much walk all over DC in terms of texture resolution AND variety.
GC matches them pretty well then again there memory capacities are kinda similar.
and the PS2 is the only one where this doesn't apply.
come on, Xbox titles pretty much walk all over DC in terms of texture resolution AND variety.
GC matches them pretty well then again there memory capacities are kinda similar.
and the PS2 is the only one where this doesn't apply.
Shogmaster
Regular
It would have been better if your poll had:
Voodoo1
Voodoo2
TNT
TNT2
GF1
Anyways, I'd say DC is around 700Mhz classic Athlon for T and L with a 8MB TNT2 Vanta.
Voodoo1
Voodoo2
TNT
TNT2
GF1
Anyways, I'd say DC is around 700Mhz classic Athlon for T and L with a 8MB TNT2 Vanta.
Megadrive1988 said:
Wasn't voodoo2 sli just about equal to voodoo3? Also, how could a tnt2 non ultra be comparable to dreamcast, yet the dreamcast was about as fast as a voodoo3, yet a voodoo3(assuming we're not talking the 2000 version) was about as fast as a tnt 2 ultra....and are we talking 32 bit color or not?
I don't think dc's cpu was that powerful.....(it did about 350 mips I believe)
And why do you say a tnt2 vanta? I don't know the specs of a tnt 2 vanta, but it might actually be as low as the dc's raw specs. If we were talking raw specs, aren't the matrox g200 and the voodoo banshee about equivilent to the dc's graphics chip, with the actual performance falling somewhere inbetween those and a g400max or vanilla tnt2?(depending on the game and settings, I'm just going on the benchmarks I see for the neon250 though, but the neon250 seems to have accomplished more than the dreamcast's chip could do, it could run quake 3 at a full 60 fps, the dc I believe was an unstable 30 fps)
Simon F said:
I'm totally...unsure
it's a raw "guesstimation" (the days of the PII are far away).
At best let's say a PIII 500.(I'm talking about peak perf...sure, not about "real world perf" because the SH4 could not sustain 1.4GFlops either)
P2 only has the standard x86 FPU which is single-issue in the P2 I believe, so 400MOPs at 400MHz. P3 has SSE that can do 4 ops per instruction if I'm not mistaken, but I believe it only issues instructions every 2 cycles in the P3, so at 500MHz it would do 1GOPS peak. It'd probably still beat the SH4 in realworld situations though since the back-end of the chip is superior.
Shogmaster
Regular
wazoo said:
I'd say that's close to my estimate since that P3 500 would be with SSE SIMD. Maybe I should have said 800~900Mhz Classic Athlon (which lacks SSE) instead of 700Mhz though....
Shogmaster said:
Athlon has better FPU + 3DNow, which despite the stupid name is a better SIMD implementation than SSE according to many...
Couple that with the overall better CPU architecture and I would say you'd get away with a SLOWER Athlon compared to P3.
Shogmaster
Regular
Guden Oden said:Shogmaster said:
Athlon has better FPU + 3DNow, which despite the stupid name is a better SIMD implementation than SSE according to many...
Couple that with the overall better CPU architecture and I would say you'd get away with a SLOWER Athlon compared to P3.
I forgot that the classic Athlon had 3DNow! Good point. Infact, didn't 3DNow debut on K6III or something? So long ago, it's all a blur for me.
k6-2
when the dreamcast specs were announced, sega stated trhat the sh-4 was twice as fast as a pII400 in floating point. the pIII500 sounds right to me once you factor in sse and the superior int. performance of the pIII
well, that depends if you consider the ps2 current. the xbox generaly looks better than dc, the ps2 generaly looks jaggier but rounder with more polys and better lighting (about equal to dc overall), and the gc generaly looks like the xbox with bilinear filtering and lower color depth than xbox (better than dc).
c:
Athlon's were very fast in x87 FPU code at their time. In fact, I've seen regular C code on Athlon perform within 90% of hand-optimized 3dnow stuff(and that was in code that favoured SIMD), so the SSE argument has little relevance there.ShogMaster said:
Anyway, as far as raw transforms go, SH4 comparing to a 600-700mhz P3 sounds about right. Problem is that in regular code you could easily see it perform slower then a 200mhz P2(it had similar issues with small caches as R59k in PS2), so that comparison isn't really saying everything.
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