Comparison of 6th generation game console hardware

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Team Andromeda

Boomerang menu screens run in High Res mode anyway

---

Ingame is low res.

Quote:

---

What about the title screens that run in High Res that seemed to use the VDP 2 for some effects like Soukyugurentai or Thunder Force V menu screens or intro . Sonic Jam looks to be using the High Res mode and some VDP 2 effects in its gallery section too. Also the VDP2 floors don't seem to be low res at all . And before you jump on my back, I'm just saying

---

VDP2 can do 4 normal/scrolling backgrounds, 2 rotating backgrounds, a back screen, a line screen, and a few other things. Normal backgrounds can be high res. Rotating cannot. Don't know about the line screen.

Quote:

---

Ingame is low res.

---

Well Yes.... other than Vatlva, True Pinball and the other Pinball games I don't think there was any games other than the 3D Fighters that used High Res mode in-game

Quote:

---

Normal backgrounds can be high res. Rotating cannot. Don't know about the line screen.

---

Well Souky and Thunder Force V title screens are High Res and they seem to use some VDP 2 effects; like the way Souky logo zooms in from the screen or the way the screen tilts when you expect menu's in Thunder Force V. Wwhat about the Gallery mode in Sonic Jam where you can zoom in and out of pictures and various scans/manuals and other VDP 2 like effects and that's all seems to be in High Res

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Team Andromeda

Well Yes.... other than Vatlva, True Pinball and the other Pinball games I don't think there was any games other than the 3D Fighters that used High Res mode in-game

---

Bomberman 8-player mode, Digital Dance Mix, Columns 97, Decathlete, pretty sure there were others too.

Quote:

---

Well Souky and Thunder Force V title screens are High Res and they seem to use some VDP 2 effects; like the way Souky logo zooms in from the screen or the way the screen tilts when you expect menu's in Thunder Force V. Wwhat about the Gallery mode in Sonic Jam where you can zoom in and out of pictures and various scans/manuals and other VDP 2 like effects and that's all seems to be in High Res

---

Normal backgrounds can be scaled, just not rotated.
They can use simple polygons too for such things.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by zyrobs

Bomberman 8-player mode, Digital Dance Mix, Columns 97, Decathlete, pretty sure there were others too.

---

Always forget about Saturn Bomberman, but I wouldn't really call DDM a game .

Quote:

---

Normal backgrounds can be scaled, just not rotated.
They can use simple polygons too for such things.

---

Aye and that would explain a lot tbh, but in some of the Saturn High Res title screens there seems to be various VDP 2 like effects for transparencies and swirly type effects

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Team Andromeda

Aye and that would explain a lot tbh, but in some of the Saturn High Res title screens there seems to be various VDP 2 like effects for transparencies and swirly type effects

---

Polygons can swirl as much as they want and they can still have background transparency enabled without problems. Thunderforce options menu did that, and I think the one in Resident Evil too.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by sheath

So, eh, is this 5th generation discussion going to be yet another official Sega-16 derail of this 6th generation thread? That is all fine and dandy, just don't expect anybody to remember or even know that these discussions have been had.

---

Heh, and it was THIS post that set that off too:
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthr...l=1#post611496

Hmm, you know what, I'm moving this whole thing over to the 5th gen thread:
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthr...l=1#post614965


And as is typical form for my posts doing this, I'll post a back link on the other end too, so anyone joining the discussion will know what's going on . . . or anyone reading this archived much later will be able to as well. ;)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by zyrobs

Polygons can swirl as much as they want and they can still have background transparency enabled without problems. Thunderforce options menu did that, and I think the one in Resident Evil too.

---

But the background in Thunder Force V and Winter Heat don't seem to be using any polygons at all and always though that unless you're using the VDP 2 (than the Saturn had issues with full screen transparent effects . In fact the swirly backroiund in Decathlete looks very much like the VDP2 effect used in RSG (which in that video you posted that go missing when you enter the special code)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by sheath

While looking for a case for what was to be my 90s game box I landed a Pentium III 500Mhz system with a Riva TNT AGP card. I just got it cleaned up and ran 3DMark 2000 with all non-crucial services off. I thought the results were somewhat interesting:

3DMark Result: 1866 3D marks
CPU Speed: 152 CPU 3D marks
Game 1 - Helicopter - Low Detail: 36.9 FPS
Game 1 - Helicopter - Medium Detail: 26.6 FPS
Game 1 - Helicopter - High Detail: 13.6 FPS
Game 2 - Adventure - Low Detail: 33.6 FPS
Game 2 - Adventure - Medium Detail: 26.9 FPS
Game 2 - Adventure - High Detail: 18.0 FPS
Fill Rate (Single-Texturing): 140.8 MTexels/s
Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing): 144.6 MTexels/s
High Polygon Count (1 Light): 2557 KTriangles/s
High Polygon Count (4 Lights): 2248 KTriangles/s
High Polygon Count (8 Lights): 1934 KTriangles/s
8MB Texture Rendering Speed: 60.1 FPS
16MB Texture Rendering Speed: 59.9 FPS
32MB Texture Rendering Speed: 59.3 FPS
64MB Texture Rendering Speed: 43.9 FPS
Bump Mapping (Emboss, 3-pass): 59.9 FPS
Bump Mapping (Emboss, 2-pass): 60.1 FPS
Bump Mapping (Emboss, 1-pass): 60.1 FPS
Bump Mapping (Environment): Not supported FPS


I guess not much of that makes sense, but the 2.5 million polygons per second with one light is an interesting return in comparison to the Dreamcast. This is the last generation Nvidia card before hardware transform and lighting was added with the Riva TNT 2 cards, I think. I'm not sure how the MTexels/s rating compares to the Mega Pixel speeds TVC was talking about above either.

---

I feel the urge to revisit this. This 500 Mhz Pentium III with a 100 Mhz Riva TNT with 256MB PC100 RAM and 16MB SDR SDRAM benchmarks under peak first year Dreamcast/Naomi software by a fair margin. The Dreamcast's 200Mhz SH4+FPU and 100Mhz "underpowered" GPU with 16MB SDRAM and 8MB VRAM consistently ran software above what PCs were doing at the time and that fascinating to me. From what I have seen this '99 PC has a very steady framerate, but games released within the Dreamcast's lifetime may or may not look better on either platform at the same resolution and framerate. I still need to do some video comparisons using this '99 gaming PC and the Dreamcast as counterpoints. I'm just trying to convince myself such an effort would be worthwhile, installing games in Windows 98 can be an all day affair.

In my experience, game consoles all the way up to the second "HD" generation happening today were always six months to a year ahead of much more expensive consumer PC hardware. The Dreamcast is no exception, the PS2 and PS3 were, the N64 had worse textures than PS1, Saturn or especially Matrox optimized PC games, and of course the Nintendo Wii, WiiU, PS4 and Xbox One have been established as old tech in a new package or smaller package and not much price benefit.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by sheath

In my experience, game consoles all the way up to the second "HD" generation happening today were always six months to a year ahead of much more expensive consumer PC hardware. The Dreamcast is no exception, the PS2 and PS3 were, the N64 had worse textures than PS1, Saturn or especially Matrox optimized PC games, and of course the Nintendo Wii, WiiU, PS4 and Xbox One have been established as old tech in a new package or smaller package and not much price benefit.

---

In Europe, the Sega Master System was extremely outdated when compared to the Amiga 500 released just a month after it in 1987.
In US, I think the Apple IIGS had major advantages over the SMS despite being released just 3 months after. The SMS soundchip is a bad joke compared to what the Apple IIGS could pull off.
In Japan, both PC Engine and Mega Drive are really limited and underpowered when compared to the X68000 hardware of 1987.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Barone

In Europe, the Sega Master System was extremely outdated when compared to the Amiga 500 released just a month after it in 1987.
In US, I think the Apple IIGS had major advantages over the SMS despite being released just 3 months after. The SMS soundchip is a bad joke compared to what the Apple IIGS could pull off.
In Japan, both PC Engine and Mega Drive are really limited and underpowered when compared to the X68000 hardware of 1987.

---

Yeah I had no idea about European and Japanese computers, so thank for the info. I wonder how Apple and PC tech fared at the launch of the TG16, Genesis, SNES, 3DO and Saturn/PS1 in the US. Or even earlier the NES and Master System, though obviously both had either severe color limitations or sound limitations by comparison. I don't remember much more than beeps and boops on any computer I had access to in the 80s though.

I think that, for a number of reasons, PC developers take more time to begin to explore the potential of the top of the line hardware.
I also think that US got the short end of the stick in terms of PCs which were capable for gaming back then. Even the Apple IIGS didn't have hardware support for sprites, so even with resolution and color advantages you'll usually have lower frame rates when compared to the most advanced consoles of the time.
It wasn't a problem for the Amiga 500 or the X68000 though... But, then again, the Amiga 500 library suffered A LOT with half-assed Atari ST (which didn't have hardware support for sprites) ports.
The X68000 is, by far, the most impressive thing you could have at home for games at the time IMO. But also very very expensive.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by sheath

I feel the urge to revisit this. This 500 Mhz Pentium III with a 100 Mhz Riva TNT with 256MB PC100 RAM and 16MB SDR SDRAM benchmarks under peak first year Dreamcast/Naomi software by a fair margin. The Dreamcast's 200Mhz SH4+FPU and 100Mhz "underpowered" GPU with 16MB SDRAM and 8MB VRAM consistently ran software above what PCs were doing at the time and that fascinating to me. From what I have seen this '99 PC has a very steady framerate, but games released within the Dreamcast's lifetime may or may not look better on either platform at the same resolution and framerate. I still need to do some video comparisons using this '99 gaming PC and the Dreamcast as counterpoints. I'm just trying to convince myself such an effort would be worthwhile, installing games in Windows 98 can be an all day affair.

In my experience, game consoles all the way up to the second "HD" generation happening today were always six months to a year ahead of much more expensive consumer PC hardware. The Dreamcast is no exception, the PS2 and PS3 were, the N64 had worse textures than PS1, Saturn or especially Matrox optimized PC games, and of course the Nintendo Wii, WiiU, PS4 and Xbox One have been established as old tech in a new package or smaller package and not much price benefit.

---

Your build doesn't really represent the best that PCs could do at that time though. I'm pretty sure a Voodoo 3 would be better than a Riva TNT and that was released in early 1999. A Voodoo 2 or Voodoo Banshee might even be better than a Riva TNT. Plus if I remember correctly you could link multiple Voodoo cards together to get even better performance. By 1999 there were 900MHz Pentium 3's available, and there were definitely ones higher than 500MHz available before that.

Here's the original Unreal running on a Pentium 3 at 650MHz with a Voodoo 2:



I'd say that's a pretty fair comparison of what a 1998 PC could do compared to the Dreamcast in 1998. And if we are going off the 1999 US release we have this:



And that's not taking into consideration what Macs were doing with PowerPC CPUs at the time, which were more efficient than Intel's CPUs. Here's a bunch of games running on a PowerMac G3 clocked at 300MHz from the same time with an ATi Rage 128 Pro:



It looks to be running Unreal Tournament just fine, and probably better than the Dreamcast. For the Saturn and PS1, again I'd say a 1994 PC would probably be capable of more as far as CPU grunt and RAM are concerned. The lack of dedicated 3D Video hardware would be an issue though. But again, a 1994 PC would run games like DOOM better than the PS1 and Saturn did. This isn't to mention that by 1993 the first Pentiums were coming out.

Here is Quake running on a Pentium based Laptop which as a 133MHz Pentium that was released around the same time as the Saturn in the US:



So no, I don't think it's fair to say that those consoles were 6 months a head of PC hardware either. Then we have the 16-bit era. Here the argument holds a bit more water, as most PCs at the time didn't have the dedicated 2D Hardware for sprites and backgrounds that consoles had. Though they did have VGA graphics and external MIDI devices like the Roland MT-32 which made them have more colors and better sound than the Genesis and PC-Engine in 1987/1988.

Here's Monkey Island running on a 286 PC with a Roland MT-32:



Now he does say he bought his PC in 1990, the hardware that's in it isn't anything special for that time. I have an IBM PS/2 Model 50 from 1987 with similar specs that I can get an add-on card for to use an MT-32 and expand the RAM which would give similar results.

And if we really want to have fun here we can be a bit more vague in our definition of PC to include things like the Sharp X68000 which put all 3 16-bit era consoles to shame.



So really no, consoles have not historically been ahead of PC hardware when they've released. This argument really only works for 16-bit era systems and earlier, and even then there's compelling arguments that can be made to say otherwise. Now, if you wanted to make the argument that consoles gave more performance per cost then yeah, that's a very solid argument you can make and does historically hold up. There was really no PC you could build for $200 in 1999 that would match the Dreamcast, or to mach the $400 360 in 2005, or the $400 Saturn in 1995. You can even make a good argument for it now with the PS4.

Well, I just bought a lot of 25 AGP cards, hopefully that will eventually maybe possibly conceptually make the dissembling stop.

Yeah, the Sharp x68000 better have been more powerful, thing cost the equivalent of $3000 when it came out (which expands your argument for cost to performance ratio.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by sheath

Well, I just bought a lot of 25 AGP cards, hopefully that will eventually maybe possibly conceptually make the dissembling stop.

---

I'm trying to figure out how pointing out your argument is flawed with historical evidence is deceiving people, but I just can't seem to find an explanation.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Armoured Priest

Yeah, the Sharp x68000 better have been more powerful, thing cost the equivalent of $3000 when it came out (which expands your argument for cost to performance ratio.

---

Yeah, for cost to performance the argument that consoles are better in that regard is a solid one and it still stands today to a certain degree. What's really sad is that IBM PCs at the time were in a similar price range and were arguably less powerful, at least as far as gaming was concerned.