A copy/paste.
First off, lets point out that Nintendo is being very conservative in it's 6 to 12 million polygons/seconds rating, as the developer Factor 5 who is developing Star Wars: Rogue Squadron is already doing 12 million polygons/second, and the developer claims they are only using 50 percent of Gamecube's power. Factor 5 indicated they could get 20 million polygons/second per second with all effects. Effects stands for texture layers, and not polygonal lighting.
Two videos of Star Wars: Rogue Squadron running on Gamecube at cube.ign.com available here.
Here is information on Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, and the Gamecube as provided by Julian Eggebrecht (President) of Factor 5, and was originally presented on the forum at this german video game site: Maniac Online.
• Both videos run in real-time and only use 50% of the hardware.
• The X-Wing model is the original model used by Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), for special effects in the Stars Wars film and includes ILM's textures and shaders. The X-Wing alone is comprised of 30,000 polygons and the pilot has 4000 polygons!
• Both demos run at a constant 60 fps, double buffered, true color, and with full screen anti-aliasing and deflickering.
• The surface of the second Death Star from the film was rebuilt accurately at 1:1 ratio. The simple shapes on the Death Star surface have up to 300 polygons. Every element has a 512x512 true color texture. You can see 25 of them in the demo. There are 70 Tie Fighters and X-Wings onscreen. So, there are like 200,000 polygons at 60 fps with up to 8 light sources along with gloss, dirt, and bump maps. (Note: that number and type of light source can have a huge effect on the polygon rate)
• Texturing allows all these effects: (alpha, bump mapping, gloss mapping, specular highlights, etc.) in the same cycle. It can do 8 layers in a single pass. (It has been previously reported that Julian said single "cycle", but that is not possible since Flipper has 4 pipelines with one texel unit per pipeline)
• The 2 MB frame buffer is a render buffer - when a frame is done, it is then sent to main memory. When being sent to main memory anti-aliasing and deflickering is done.
• The 1 MB texture cache is automatically filled during rendering, as the T&L engine triggers the swap. Textures that are used often can be "locked" into the cache.
• A-Memory is for audio but can also be used as a buffer for other items that don't need the speed of main RAM.
• The 2 MB on-chip frame buffer contains only the data for the current frame being rendered, and the z-buffer. Double/triple buffer is stored in main RAM, because the video DAC gets the image data directly from main RAM. To render an image, polygonal data is sent to the T&L unit, which loads/swaps textures in automatically into the texture cache. Textures are decompressed during rendering, so uncompressed textures never take up memory.
Specs are one thing, but it was the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron videos that Nintendo showed proves it has quite an amazing new console. This one game looks outstanding, and it is still very early in development.
A side note on Factor 5 is that they will be providing the sound tools for Gamecube development. The software is called MusyX and you can find details on it here.
