Strengths and weaknesses of GameCube relative to its peers *spawn

This ps2 centric game certainly didnt look worse on xbox, ps2 had larger sparks, xbox better reflections?
Black, which was using the same engine was both graphically and sound wise better.

So where DC and Xbox, and ps2.

 

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/11/19/hybridxfb/

According to dolphin the GPU (gamecube and wii) only writes to the "embedded frame buffer" when rendering. Rogue Leader and rebel strike render menus (and some videos I guess) in vertical tiles in order to use 3xMSAA, but I don't think any other games do that.

Actually I got an answer from jmc himself. He said other than a few simplistic wii games, rogue leader/rebel strike are the only games that render in tiles like that.

 

I have the game on both, while i cant do direct side-by-side comparisons since i dont have two identical tv's but switching between source inputs, its kinda hard to tell any difference at first glance, the xbox versions sure doesnt look worse or has less effects, if any the xbox version seems to look somewhat better.

If even that, the xbox probally would give a different result in a game like ZOE2, not worse just different perhaps, with all else better. Im not downplaying the PS2, just that even now the xbox feels like a much more powerfull system. The PS2 was the console that gen to have though, by large. Playing it on a large new tv isnt fun though, the first SSX looks very bad on it, using a RGB component cable, going to get some components for the PS2's, with openps2loader one can alter output modes, hope that will help

 

It's mainly Burnout Revenge. I don't own the game any more. But the differences have been discussed in detail on this board before. Of the top of my head what I remember the Xbox version had better textures and sharper image quality. The PS2 had superior post processing effects, more particle effects, lighting and motion blur. These effects arguably played a big part of conveying the look and sheer velocity of Burnout Revenge. The light sparks and motion trails for example made the crashes more spectacular imho. Which makes sense as the game was designed to take advantage of the PS2's strengths.

 

Even how much I love Aura For Laura, I dont think even it showed what the machine can do. If I remember right this was from IGI developers, I might not remember right though
The pixelation and morph effects are really awesome. Not much of PS2 demos available...

 

No it doesnt, they are comparable, if one is better its the xbox version looking somewhat better.

Here another tech demo showing the powa of PS2

 

Yes its OG xbox too, i own the game on both consoles, theres virtually no difference, the xbox version might look somewhat better, but that could be subjective, its hard to compare switching input sources instead of side-by-side. Black, supposedly running on the same engine, looks and sounds better on xbox, its one of the best looking ps2 games with particles that are really crazy, this PS2 oriented game runs better on xbox. This tells me Xbox must be more powerfull in about every single way, and then some.

 

Xbox didn't really have GC beat in bandwidth. At least not the kind needed to fill the screen with particles. Gamecube's Flipper had eDram with 18GB/s, and 2.6GB/s to main memory. Xbox had unified memory with 6GB/s, but about 1GB was reserved for the CPU and the other 5 was split with the rest of the system. So there's theoretically twice the bandwidth to system memory but the bandwidth intensive tasks would be handled by eDram on GC, where there's over 3x the bandwidth on Gamecube. Fillrate is about 50% higher on Xbox, and about double if you are using multitexturing, so assuming you have the bandwidth you take less of a hit from overdraw and other fillrate sapping effects.

Actually, unless I'm remembering things wrong, Gamecube would have a performance penalty when multitexturing, so the effective fillrate differential would be even greater.

 

It isn't bandwidth or eDram size holding back Gamecube, it's fill rate. It has the lowest fillrate of it's generation. Also, GC can do 8 texture layers per per pass, but it only has 1 texture unit per pipe. Like I said I don't remember all of the facts, but at best there would be zero performance penalty, and you'd be at 1/2 of Xbox's multitexture performance. But I'm not sure that's the case. I seam to remember something about the way GC handles textures allowed it to apply multiple textures in a single rendering pass but it still required multiple clock cycles to do it, where single texture pixels were rendered in a single cycle.

For reference Xbox has 4 pixel pipelines (just like GC) but each pipeline has 2 texture units on XB where GC only has 1. That means that Xbox can apply 2 textures to all 4 pixels in a clock cycle, so it's texel fillrate is double it's pixel fillrate. Gamecube's texel and pixel fillrate are the same. So logically if you are drawing 2 textures, it should take twice as long as 1.

 

Enough to keep Gamecube competitive.

 

I've always wondered if the GC could of done Burnout 3 and Burnout revenge at 480p60. Burnout 2 on it was just as good looking as burnout 2 on Xbox.