Tell me about polygoncount

[cthellis42]

You think Grand Prix Challenge looks poor? Seriously, chap, your expectations seem to strain just about everything. Do you drive around your neighborhood complaining about the way everything looks as well?

Meanwhile, unless Melbourne House is another developer reformed, they haven't DONE any work on Sega hardware. Their major titles seem to be MIB2: Alien Escape, GPC, and the upcoming Transformers: Armada. (Which also looks really good--especially considering the license would make you think "crap" offhand. )

Polys are NEVER everything, but the game looks sharp. Especially considering you have a "mere" 22 cars on track (and on screen) at the same time. You're obviously going to have to make SOME concessions, but GPC doesn't seem to make too many.

 

[Simon F]

Dreamcast- 5-6 million in game, 10 million in tech demo.

Rofl

Indeed the original poster was a little optimistic as there definitely is a hard limit in the polygon set-up of ~7MPols/s. You'd be very lucky to obtain that peak though.

Considering the original requirements were to support a sustained of 1MPols/s, I think CLX2 had adequate headroom.

Meanwhile, unless Melbourne House is another developer reformed, they haven't DONE any work on Sega hardware.

Err are you sure? I seem to recall that they were getting remarkably high poly throughput that was (art the time) only being limited by buffer space.

 

[Bowie]

Melbourne House worked on Test Drive Le Mans and Looney Toons Space Race on the Dreamcast.

 

[cthellis42]

Update on Melbourne House, the only other name I see them identified with is "Beam Software" and the only things from THEM I'm able to find that was developed for Sega (the Genesis) were two titles. (Oh wait, I also found them on Test Drive Le Mans elsewhere. Seemingly the name "Eutechnyx" is also involved. A sub-unit?)

Looney Toons I could find by looking individually. (Seriously, since need to cross-reference better. -_- This gets confuzzling.) Doesn't seem like a huge case log to deal with, and they pretty much seem to deliver quality where they've gone of late.

...was there a point to this, again? I mean, other than being curious what they were pushing on the Dreamcast, which I'm sure we all are.

 

[Bowie]

Melbourne House claimed Le Mans was running over 80000 polygons/frame at 60 fps, but it was dropped down to 30 fps to improve the graphics and get up to 20 cars on the track while still maintaining 5 million polygons/sec.

Eutechnyx developed the PSOne and PC versions of Test Drive Le mans. Melbourne House did the Dreamcast and PS2 versions.

 

[chaphack]

You think Grand Prix Challenge looks poor?

Cars are solidly built, nice and all. BUT every other thing else are very average looking. No better than a mid-rung PS2 racer. Even the rain effects look hmm hmm. TDLM, at times, have smoother richer looking backgrounds.

Granted that i did not fully explore the game. Just raced around the available tracks when you load the game for the first time. Of course raced around i did, more so for graphics scrutiny than trying to play the game! (how can you *not* after reading MH PR claims/interviews)

 

[chaphack]

Oh and i think TDLM had anistrophic filtering ON.

 

[Bowie]

The cars in TDLM had point sampled textures.

 

[Simon F]

The cars in TDLM had point sampled textures.

That's either a bug or an 'artistic' thing then. Bilinear is the same speed on DC (for all intents and purposes) as point sampling.

 

[Fox5]

Dreamcast- 5-6 million in game, 10 million in tech demo.

Rofl

Indeed the original poster was a little optimistic as there definitely is a hard limit in the polygon set-up of ~7MPols/s. You'd be very lucky to obtain that peak though.

Considering the original requirements were to support a sustained of 1MPols/s, I think CLX2 had adequate headroom.

Meanwhile, unless Melbourne House is another developer reformed, they haven't DONE any work on Sega hardware.

Err are you sure? I seem to recall that they were getting remarkably high poly throughput that was (art the time) only being limited by buffer space.

5-6 million I think was said both for Test Drive Le Mans, and Shenmue 2, but I dunno. And the 10 million came from the official dreamcast magazine, somewhere they had stated the dreamcast(or the hardware it was based on) was capable of that in some tech demo. I'm not sure if it was just an example they used or the actual test, but they mentioned a crowded city with many buildings obscuring the view...meh, they were probably talking about shenmue and just stretched the numbers quite a bit.

 

[Megadrive1988]

I thought I read that DC's SH-4 CPU was capable of transforming 10 million polys/verts. then this number jumped to 20 million, although that might be incorrect. that's up from the original 5 million that SH-4 was first said to be able to process.

keep in mind, these are not polygons rendered / displayed by the PowerVR2DC / CLX, just the transform figures for the CPU, much like PS2 EE's 66 million.


as for actual polygons pushed to the screen, I heard DC's upper limit was 7 million. obviously that is peak. real in game figures were something like 4-5 million. but only 2-3 million in the average DC game, as DC was never really pushed to its limit given its short life.

Indeed it is not bad. the original figure for Dural/Katana was 1.5 million polygons in 1997. Sega's official figure was "over 3 million" in 1998-1999.

 

[marconelly!]

yeay, GPC it is. test played it. 18mpps though.. well, lets just say, from GPC, i learnt that polys are not everything..and PR figures are hmm hmmm..and at times their previous work on a Sega hardware looks better..

Oh well, it was a rather average looking game, I agree. I guess their artists didn't really utilized that engine.

 

[cthellis42]

There was a useful paper listed in another thread with a lot of relavant stats. All things considered, it has some parts that can crunch faster, but the output seems to be 6 million.

From inside:
Recent tests by Sega, using the company's graphics libraries proved that Dreamcast uses 100% of the CPU and rendering engine's ability and delivers 6 million textured and lit polygons per second.

An earlier section states:
Overall rendering engine throughput is 7 million polygons per second, but in Dreamcast, geometry data storage becomes the limiting factor before pixel engine throughput.

It would seem around there. Lazy8 might know differently (or Simon if he's peering around), but those seem to summarize things for the DC.

 

[PC-Engine]

There was a useful paper listed in another thread with a lot of relavant stats. All things considered, it has some parts that can crunch faster, but the output seems to be 6 million.

From inside:
Recent tests by Sega, using the company's graphics libraries proved that Dreamcast uses 100% of the CPU and rendering engine's ability and delivers 6 million textured and lit polygons per second.

An earlier section states:
Overall rendering engine throughput is 7 million polygons per second, but in Dreamcast, geometry data storage becomes the limiting factor before pixel engine throughput.

It would seem around there. Lazy8 might know differently (or Simon if he's peering around), but those seem to summarize things for the DC.

Simon F. already addressed this with his buffer space comment....

So to summarize:

1. SH-4 can transform 10 million polys/sec without doing other things like AI etc.

2. CLX has a peak triangle setup of 7 million polys/sec.

3. you will only see 6 million polys/sec max because that's how much RAM you have to hold those vertices.

 

[V3]

Talking about Melbourne House,

I like their GP500. I think that is their best game.

GP500 is a better game than their more recent efforts (Le Mans and GPC). GP500 also a better game than MotoGP.

 

[zurich]

Talking about Melbourne House,

I like their GP500. I think that is their best game.

GP500 is a better game than their more recent efforts (Le Mans and GPC). GP500 also a better game than MotoGP.

Namco PS2 MotoGP or Climax Xbox MotoGP? Haven't played Namco's, but the Xbox MotoGP 1/2 was/is brilliant.

 

[V3]

Both. Namco MotoGP sucks. Climax MotoGP is not bad, but they should give MotoGP license to Melbourne House.

 

[cthellis42]

Wasn't GP500 developed by MicroProse?

 

[PC-Engine]

Wasn't GP500 developed by MicroProse?

I thought it was Epyx? Or was that Cinemaware?

 

[cthellis42]

Well IGN and Mobygames seem to think so, and they certainly know better than I. Hehe...

Then again, bigger labels tend to absorb others. Mythos disappearing from mention with X-COM and such. Melbourne did indeed do GP500.

...I guess it would help more if I'd played it. Heh.