Some question about Xbox/GC hardware

[ERP]

where the heck is ERP?

Staying out of the way..... I don't see anything productive coming from this discussion.

On the internet you rarely change peoples minds, people disreguard any opinion that run in opposition to their own and jump on any that reinforces there position.

Just remember my internet opinions just like everyone elses are worth exactly what you paid to get them.

 

[Dural]

.

where the heck is ERP? why doesn't he just
clarify what kind of benchmark did he ran?
1 texture with simple transform and no lights?
yup,xbox is faster doing really simple stuff

how well does ERP knows about and take
advantage of gamecube feature and capability?
did ERP optimize the benchmark for gamecube?
or just a quick and dirty port to gamecube?

how about those benchmarks that shows
gamecube faster than xbox?
how about them benchmarks?

Have you actually read what ERP has said in multiple threads? If I were him I'd be sick of having to tell the GC fanboys that Xbox is faster. Get over it, in nearly every real world test Xbox is faster. Why is that so hard to believe?

The Xbox is substantially faster than the GC. That combined with the size of our datasets would have meant substantial asset rework on the GC version.
In the end they would have looked similar, but the Xbox version would have been superior.

Obviously the game was targeted at Xbox. The Game cube port was built as a feasability excercise, so that we could offer publishers two sku's instead of just one to make the product more attractive.

We were scheduled to finish work on the Xbox version around the end of August (it would have shipped for Xmas). Had we found a publisher soon enough we could have completed the GC version shortly afterwards.
In terms of cost, I'd rather not comment since I'm not certain about the figures that were thrown around.

In terms of what was and wasn't done, most of the car graphics were in game though not all cars had their performance characteristics set up. None of the upgrade paths for the cars were complete. The championship progress (similar in a lot of ways to WDC) was incomplete. Arcade mode and time attack worked, although no time had been put into balancing the races. There was a basic network play mode that supported 6 player Lan, and it should have scaled pretty well to internet play.
Graphically most of the major work was done, there were a few things we wanted to add, Headlight projections on the road, an additional diffuse shadow under the car, and reflective wet roads.

We would have reduced the complexity of the assets in order to keep the GC version running at 60 rather than dropping the frame rate to 30fps, the XBox datasets were too large to fit in the GC's memory anyway. Probably we'd have used our 12000 poly LOD cars and scaled back the backgrounds to make them fit.
There was some question as to whether the GC could run the full physics model for all the cars, although vectorising the ground collision code would probably have addressed the CPU performance issues that were present in the quick port.

If your looking for a performance comparison, as I stated above there is a large performance disparity between the two graphics chips, I'd rather not start a flame war by putting hard numbers on it.
Again as I've mentioned here before, it's debatable how much of a visual difference that disparity will give you.

And here were the specs for the Xbox version of the game;

This info is from the Xbox version.

Cars were 25000 polys (highest LOD), 4 textures/poly.
Base texture
Reflection map
a texture used to compute a fresnel term
Shadow map
Specular highlight (This was encoded in the alpha channel of the reflection map)

Most of the backgrounds were 2 or in some cases 3 textures/poly
I've measured peak in game polygon counts as high as 30M/sec.

 

[Ooh-videogames]

Now I'm a GC owner and been a follower of Nintendo since the NES, but I will not question ERP's honesty on what he says about the technical difference between the GC and the Xbox, neither will I question Factor 5's and there's one simple reason I've never developed a game. Everything I've read on the net has said that the Xbox is more powerful than the GC and I don't have any reason to not believe it.

Now to my questions.

The reason the Xbox GPU has 2 TU per pipe is because most games today use more than one texture, this takes stress off the Cpu. So if the GC can do 8 textures in one pass does this somewhat reduces the need to have multiple TU per pipe. Only difference I see is the Xbox textures being some what sharper? Now correct me if I'm wrong.

There's been some talk about the 1mb framebuffer and how it limits the GC from having a resolution higher than 640 x 240 but isn't there a way around it through coding or would it be to much for the CPU to handle in software?

 

[zidane1strife]

"Get over it, in nearly every real world test Xbox is faster. ".... hmmm.... heheh....