Strengths and weaknesses of GameCube relative to its peers *spawn

[phoenix_chipset]

I have a feeling there will never be another Neo Geo, power wise. It was ahead of its time. Heck, probably there will never be another X360, which was also ahead of its time. As for SNK, maybe it was a matter of decisions, they were a cult and while things have changed, they aren't forgotten because of their rich history.

On another note, I recently discovered that the largest Megadrive cartridges ever were 4MB (32Mb) in size, and the largest SNES cartridge ever was Tengai Makyou, 9MB (72Mb).

I would really only call 360 ahead of its time because of its universal shaders, otherwise there are many consoles more impressive for their time. An athlon 64 dual core would've handily beaten the Xenon cpu, (an interesting thought, perhaps we could've had perfect Xbox emulation) and it needed a bit more eDRAM.

But yeah, 360 was the last console that broke any real ground. IMO the gamecube is the most impressive console for its time.

 

[Cyan]

I would really only call 360 ahead of its time because of its universal shaders, otherwise there are many consoles more impressive for their time. An athlon 64 dual core would've handily beaten the Xenon cpu, (an interesting thought, perhaps we could've had perfect Xbox emulation) and it needed a bit more eDRAM.

But yeah, 360 was the last console that broke any real ground. IMO the gamecube is the most impressive console for its time.

the Gamecube was very impressive. Xbox was my 1st actual console, and it was more powerful, but the GC was very balanced and well designed to the point where I think games like F-Zero GX couldn't run on the Xbox at 60 fps -transparencias and stuff were not very Xbox friendly-.

The GameCube could process many many textures on a single polygon however, so there are definitely cases where the GameCube could do things faster than the Xbox. Overall, the GameCube and the XBox were fairly close

 

[phoenix_chipset]

the Gamecube was very impressive. Xbox was my 1st actual console, and it was more powerful, but the GC was very balanced and well designed to the point where I think games like F-Zero GX couldn't run on the Xbox at 60 fps -transparencias and stuff were not very Xbox friendly-.

The GameCube could process many many textures on a single polygon however, so there are definitely cases where the GameCube could do things faster than the Xbox. Overall, the GameCube and the XBox were fairly close

I don't really see anything the Xbox can do that the gamecube can't, while the gamecube can do things Xbox can't ; anything Xbox can do with programmable shaders gamecube can do through the tev system, and GC just had a better cpu and more memory bandwidth. Its gpu was also better at polygons. Xbox's biggest on paper advantage is the memory amount, but because of the gamecube's eDRAM in practice both consoles are *very* close in terms of usable memory. Plus those mini discs allowed for blazing fast loading, faster than Xbox even with its HDD.

They are fairly close. In terms of which console it was easier to extract performance from, the Xbox definitely wins that category.

The biggest reason GC impresses me the most is because it does all that at a fraction of the size and power usage of the Xbox. I wonder how Nintendo could've done against the 360 if they went all out power wise, not that I don't think it was the right move to drop out of the technical arms race, though the Wii could've been a bit stronger.

 

[phoenix_chipset]

actually no. You mentioned Pier Solar and I wasn't sure whether you pointed that out in relation to which was the SNES or the Megadrive largest cartridge yet. I can recall the name of that game from recent times but wasn't sure if it came out for the Megadrive or the SNES, although I remember it described as a Megadrive game.


yes, GameCube has a great CPU, and fast memory. Tha's a plus compared to the Xbox. From its 32 megs of memory, 8 of them werre in "auxillary" memory which is not as fast (traditionally used for disc-caching and audio iirc), so memory wise the Xbox had the advantage. The GCN also had the spectacular TEV unit which can do some incredible multi-texture effects.

I had both the Xbox (2004, Halo 2 launch date) and the GC (months later) and couldn't be happier at the time, playing F-Zero on the GC and other great Nintendo games, and some Xbox exclusive games that are amongst my favourite on any console to date, like PGR2.

The additional memory though and the GPU, made the Xbox slightly more capable in my eyes.

When Doom3 and HalfLife2 showed up on the Xbox people did see people really flexing its power.

Gamecube actually had 40 mbs of main memory, 24 of the 1T-SRAM and 16 of that slower audio memory. Plus the 3mb eDRAM. When used properly I don't think Xbox's memory amount gave it an advantage. But that's just it, not that many devs got the most out of the cube, that's why Xbox a lot of the time had better versions of multiplats, so point for Xbox there. That's clearly why Nintendo added a 64mb pool of faster memory on Wii, so even if devs didn't properly use the 1T-SRAM and the edram, they'd still have a nice chunk to easily work with.

Xbox had quite a few gems, the 6th gen was the best. It really pains me that we don't have proper Xbox emulation For my money nothing looks technically better than Panzer dragoon orta at least in terms of 60fps games, beautiful art too.

 

[dogen]

I don't really see anything the Xbox can do that the gamecube can't

Burnout 3

 

[Nesh]

Burnout 3

Why not?
The PS2 could do it.

 

[dogen]

Why not?
The PS2 could do it.

Because the PS2 actually had the processing power on the CPU side to do it (~6 GFLops in it's dedicated vector units vs the gamecube's 1.9 I think).

More detail here.

http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showth...mcast-Graphics&p=645458&viewfull=1#post645458

http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showth...mcast-Graphics&p=645473&viewfull=1#post645473

 

[Cyan]

Burnout 3

That game was incredible at the time, I mean the Burnout 3: Takedown version -didn't play any other Burnout after or before on the original Xbox- which I purchased in early 2005. It was so fast, it seemed an F-Zero with sports car, I was totally addicted to it. And I am sure it ran at a super stable 60 fps framerate all the way through, it never stuttered.

Another game I'd add to the list of being unable to run on GC is Doom 3 -which was already painful to make it work on the Xbox, according to Carmack- because of pixel shaders and memory requirements and maybe Half Life 2.

 

[Karamazov]

 

[Cyan]

haha, that's the one, the Takedown version. I was surprised at the amount of particles the Xbox version managed to run then. Those were good days to have an Xbox, you felt like no other console could run certain graphics. The tarmac texture looked very high resolution to me at the time, and at 60 fps.

I wonder if the PS2 version had more particles though, 'cos of edram. Watching video I remember more or less the same amount of particles in the Xbox version, if not more. The game was sheer spectacle.

 

[Karamazov]

i remember the ps2 version doing some things better, but i don't remember what, and the xbox doing other things better.

 

[Nesh]

haha, that's the one, the Takedown version. I was surprised at the amount of particles the Xbox version managed to run then. Those were good days to have an Xbox, you felt like no other console could run certain graphics. The tarmac texture looked very high resolution to me at the time, and at 60 fps.

I wonder if the PS2 version had more particles though, 'cos of edram. Watching video I remember more or less the same amount of particles in the Xbox version, if not more. The game was sheer spectacle.

The two versions were extremely close.
It looked outstanding and it pushed the visuals better than anyone would ever expect on from that era. Especially for a PS2 game it was unbelievable. Truly ahead of its time.

 

[phoenix_chipset]

Half life 2 on Xbox dips to less than 15fps at points, (Digital foundry video) and doom 3 doesn't have near the polygon counts as some gamecube games (in fact it's just low poly period), and has very low resolution textures. Neither of those games are representative of Xbox's capability, there are more impressive games on the platform, let alone the cube. I remember reading that Carmack statement, he took a quick look at the gamecube and didn't have basic understandings of its tool set. (TEV) Nah, gamecube was just the superior machine. Metroid prime runs at a blistering 60fps and looks better than both, though it may not have the physics of half life or the complex lighting of Doom.

Here's a blog post that I like discussing the gamecube and Xbox. http://www.purevideogames.net/blog/?p=479

As for the Ps2's cpu,a lot of that power has to go towards graphics, pushing polygons and all sorts of tasks and it isn't directly comparable to a general purpose cpu. Same thing with Cell, if you look at the numbers it seems to be 6x more powerful than 360's chip, but the consoles ran games of very similar complexity. Once again that's because the Cell has to process a ton of graphics tasks, otherwise the system would lag behind the 360 with its superior graphics chip. Not to mention that for both of those Sony consoles, the theoretical capabilities are much higher than the consoles can produce in practice, while Nintendo posted highly conservative numbers for the cube.

Burnout 3 didn't come to the gamecube for one reason, sales. Gamecube got a lot of first in series games, only to miss out on later games in a lot of instances. But Burnout 3 is a very impressive game. As was Black, another game that missed the cube.

All 6th gen consoles had some advantage over another technically, really. The PS2 had monstrous fillrate, the Xbox had programmable shaders and a gpu that in some ways outperformed the cube, Dreamcast had much better image quality than PS2 etc. etc. Overall it's GC > Xbox > Ps2 > DC, but everything after the dreamcast had some extremely impressive games at one point or another.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Burnout 3 didn't come to the gamecube for one reason, sales.

That assertion ignores the previous posted evidence of a supposed Burnout 3 dev explaining they just couldn't get it to work on GC. Do you consider that initial evidence a fake? If so, based on what grounds?

 

[Globalisateur]

That assertion ignores the previous posted evidence of a supposed Burnout 3 dev explaining they just couldn't get it to work on GC. Do you consider that initial evidence a fake? If so, based on what grounds?

Maybe because of the lower main memory of GC (24MB) compared to PS2 (32MB) and Xbox (64MB) ?

 

[function]

Half life 2 on Xbox dips to less than 15fps at points, (Digital foundry video) and doom 3 doesn't have near the polygon counts as some gamecube games (in fact it's just low poly period), and has very low resolution textures. Neither of those games are representative of Xbox's capability, there are more impressive games on the platform, let alone the cube. I remember reading that Carmack statement, he took a quick look at the gamecube and didn't have basic understandings of its tool set. (TEV) Nah, gamecube was just the superior machine. Metroid prime runs at a blistering 60fps and looks better than both, though it may not have the physics of half life or the complex lighting of Doom.

Here's a blog post that I like discussing the gamecube and Xbox. http://www.purevideogames.net/blog/?p=479

What the hell does Carmack know, lets instead look to a garbage blog post full of falsehoods.

Xbox was a vastly more capable (and expensive) machine. Where GC beats Xbox is in bang for buck. MS took a bath on the Xbox, GC likely didn't lose Nintendo much - or any - money.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Maybe because of the lower main memory of GC (24MB) compared to PS2 (32MB) and Xbox (64MB) ?

The post says lack of processing power. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the author but phoenix_chipset speaks so authoritatively that I presume (s)he has suitable inside info on the development of Burnout 3 with which to debunk the post.

 

[function]

The post says lack of processing power. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the author but phoenix_chipset speaks so authoritatively that I presume (s)he has suitable inside info on the development of Burnout 3 with which to debunk the post.

IIRC one of the resident devs (might have been ERP) who had worked on both platforms was adamant that the PS2 was more powerful than GC, particularly with regards to vertex processing ability. This was based on hands-on low level efforts to get a game engine up to speed.

The GC's RAM limitations were no doubt an issue too.

 

[phoenix_chipset]

What the hell does Carmack know, lets instead look to a garbage blog post full of falsehoods.

Xbox was a vastly more capable (and expensive) machine. Where GC beats Xbox is in bang for buck. MS took a bath on the Xbox, GC likely didn't lose Nintendo much - or any - money.

All right, what's false about it? Vastly lol, get out of here.

I didn't claim carmack was stupid, I said if he said the gamecube couldn't run doom 3 because of a lack of programmable shaders that obviously means he thought gamecube couldn't do bump mapping and the like.

 

[phoenix_chipset]

The post says lack of processing power. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the author but phoenix_chipset speaks so authoritatively that I presume (s)he has suitable inside info on the development of Burnout 3 with which to debunk the post.

Do you think the PS2 is more powerful than Gamecube?

IIRC one of the resident devs (might have been ERP) who had worked on both platforms was adamant that the PS2 was more powerful than GC, particularly with regards to vertex processing ability. This was based on hands-on low level efforts to get a game engine up to speed.

The GC's RAM limitations were no doubt an issue too.

Gamecube has games such as rouge squadron with higher poly counts than Xbox games, so to say the ps2 was a more capable poly pusher makes no sense.