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I'm fairly certain that consoles had a better cost to performance ratio well into their first few years. What I want to document over time is whether even top of the line PCs could even benchmark significantly better than a new console at launch, and what the difference looked like a year later. I know that PC games rarely if ever catered to the highest performing hardware, but benchmarks like 3DMark were always well ahead of the curve.Quote:
Originally Posted by Armoured Priest
We could just look at benchmarks from the time frame if that's your concern:Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/bench.htm
This one uses a 1GHz Celeron which is from 2001, though there were Pentium III's in 1999 that were clocked at 900MHz which would probably give similar or better performance.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...oo3,100-6.html
This is a review of the Voodoo 3 cards when they came out and how they compare to other cards on the market. Now the cards do have issues when he does test with AGP-Texturing, though again we're at resolutions well above what the Dreamcast is running at for those tests.
http://www.3dgw.com/hardware/benchmarks.php3
This one is a bit more enlightening for comparing to the Dreamcast. This one benchmarks Quake III with Geometery on High, texture detail on max and a few other settings. It's also using a 450 MHz Celeron, which was available in 1998. When we look at the frame rates we see that the Voodoo3's (and the other cards he uses in the test), are smoking the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast struggles to maintain 30fps at 640x480 on Quake III with lower geometry detail and running on a custom engine for the Dreamcast. At that same resolution all the other cards are approaching the 60fps mark with higher settings.
There's also this from October of 1999, 1 month after the Dreamcast launched in the US:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...vidia,134.html
This is a review for the first GeForce card. You can see when they get to Quake III it again just blows right past the Dreamcast port. At max settings at 640x480 it's running at around 80fps. The Voodoo 3's don't handle Quake III on max settings but when they have it on normal settings both cards again are running that game much better than the Dreamcast did. And I'm pretty sure this card is one that's supported by the original PC port of PSO. Voodoo's I know don't work for that game as by the time it was released 3dfx was pretty much dead and buried and support for their cards was being dropped.
I'll admit to guessing here (in the middle of doing some stuff in the background, so I may come back to it later to actually do research), but if feels like the PS4/XBone/WiiU generation is the first where the high end PCs are actually significantly more powerful, though again you're spending $1500+ to run multiple high end video cards with a crap ton of RAM and a high end CPU. I think someone did the comparison and to build a PC comparable (or slightly better) then the PS4 the total came to about $550-650 (give or take putting Windows or Linux in it, and a couple other hardware considerations).Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
this dude got close-ish with a $400, though i think he overestimates the PC performance he's going to be getting
found the original article I read
Well, compare Commodore 64 to, say, 5200 or ColecoVision. Atari ST and Amiga 1000 were both released in '85, same year that NES was released in the NYC test market (a year after 7800's Sunnyvale test market, though). There was also the Acorn Archimedes in UK, which used the original ARM style RISC processors, released in '87 and running through what also was then the "16-bit" gen of video game home consoles.Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
I'd say it ebbed and flowed a bit. Every once and again a console gen would happen where the consoles were a bit ahead of the curve (this now passing gen, for example, where PS3 and 360 both had CPUs and, in 360's case a GPU, slightly ahead of the consumer PC curve). Even going to 3DO, there was a console slightly ahead of the curve there too, I believe. Certainly with PS1.
DC wasn't ahead of the curve, but was comparable to higher end stuff with far less. I recall articles stating how the 480p rendering helped DC out a lot, along with the TBDR, making the on paper limited fillrate punch well above its weight.
By the US release dates the NES and Dreamcast were handily beaten specs wise, but not necessarily performance wise and especially not in all areas. I think it is only fair to consider hardware at its original launch, not its artificially delayed later regional launches. I don't know how the Atari ST compares to the NES or especially the Master System, but by 1986 we were looking at VGA and IBM PCs or Apple IIGs in North America. I'm not sure how they compared yet though, definitely potentially much higher in color but it seems like they might have been practically limited to 4-bit color on screen.Quote:
Originally Posted by spiffyone
3DO is considered somewhere in the range of top of the line 1993 PC tech last I checked. I think PS1 and Saturn were slightly ahead of 1994 PC tech and if I recall N64's proto-Glide renderer, or similar 3D accelerated effects, didn't hit PCs in 1996. In these systems' cases I haven't looked into comparable PC tech for each year yet, so as always I'm open to honest discussion. In the Dreamcast's case we discussed previously that it would take a 1999 PIII to challenge the Dreamcast's SH4 plus FPU for polygon counts pre-hardware T&L. So, two or three months after the Dreamcast's Japanese launch one could pay nearly double for a processor that put the potential polygon throughput over that of the Dreamcast. The PVR-DC's effective fillrate was well above anything available in late 1998, and I could argue that software stayed ahead of PCs for at least its first year graphically, especially 3D Fighters, 3D Adventure, and Racers like Crazy Taxi.
What I want to do with these video cards I just bought and let benchmarks tell me what my PIII 500Mhz system can actually push in the polygon, effects, and texture departments. I'm also hooking back in my old Asus A7v266C with Celeron 300A for comparisons prior to 1999. With the Celeron 300Mhz system I can test with my Matrox Mystique 8MB, S3 Trio 3D2X 8mb, Diamond Speedstar A55, STB 3DFX, SIS 6326 (2 of these), ATI Rage2C, NVidia Vanta LT 8mb, Viper V770 16mb, for PS1, Saturn and N64 comparisons. With the PIII 500Mhz system I can use the ATI Rage 128 16mb, ATI Rage 128 Ultra. ATI Rage Pro 128mb, Riva TNT, NVidia Vanta LT 8mb, NVidia Riva TNT2 64mb, Asus NVidia Riva TNT2, and Viper V770 16mb, for Dreamcast and PS2 comparisons. I also have an ATI Radeon 7500LE 64mb, PNY GF2 MX200 32mb, NVidia GeForce2MX 32mb, NVidia GeForce MX400 64mb, NVidia GeForce2 MX400 64mb, NVidia GeForce4 MX440, for Xbox and Gamecube comparisons. Some I haven't identify yet but I think these are all of the common ones worth comparing. I'll probably try to sell off the duplicates keeping only the one with the highest performance.
For the other 6th gen consoles, PS2 was a step back in every way except floating point performance at full bore. I recall the Xbox having a hybrid GeForce GPU that wasn't available in the same class on PC in late 2001, obviously the CPU was nothing special. Xbox 360's GPU was ahead of the curve, and the multithreaded triple core CPU might as well have been as well. Obviously the Wii, Wii U, PS4 and Xbone are all budget or last gen tech.
The Amiga was designed in 83 to be released as a console in 84. However, it got bought by CBM who repurposed it to be their home PC, then delayed the release until 85 because the idiots working on the DOS library were running behind schedule. Always makes me wonder what might have happened in the game console market had the Amiga actually come out in 84 as a game console.Quote:
Originally Posted by spiffyone
The Amiga as a console in 84, with exactly the same specs?. That would have been incredible, but wouldnt such console cost more that the Neo Geo on its day?. Still, it would be so far ahead of any console from that era, that it would be scary awesome :D.Quote:
Originally Posted by Chilly Willy
It would have been expensive, but probably not as expensive as the NG. The Amiga computer was pretty cheap, and that was with lots of ports a console doesn't need, a floppy drive, keyboard, etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by saturndual32
Commodore really had no idea what they were doing. Tramiel may have known a thing or two about computers, but he ultimately Commodore and Atari both. Video games int he 80s would have been very different if Jack had been a little less powerful.
I would say that in the '80s/early '90s, PCs had generally more CPU speed, greater resolution, and roughly equal number of colors compared to consoles at the time. Their weakness being that any animation, scrolling, or moving objects were horribly CPU intensive because of lack of hardware support. I would put the Apple IIGS and Atari ST also in this camp. The IIGS has a 320x200x4bit bitmapped screen, 4096 available colors, and 16x 16-color palettes which can be assigned on a per-scanline basis. The ST has a 320x200 screen with 4 bitplanes and 512 available colors, and if I understand correctly it has bitplane address pointers that can be messed with to produce scrolling/screen-split effects. EGA has 16 colors (RGBi) at 320x200, 640x200, and 640x350 (with 21KHz monitor and 128KB video RAM).Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
Comparing these systems with the NES and SMS is tough because of the different strengths. Some genres may favor the greater memory size, CPU speed, and resolution of the PC, and others may depend on the character-mapped display and large number of hardware sprites on the NES and SMS. Meanwhile, in some ways the Amiga has the best of both worlds, so I would call it the clear winner of the '85-'86 timeframe. Still, it occasionally suffered from poor ports... (eg. 1943 is an abomination, compared to the NES version which has flicker and slowdown but is a fun game)
When the PCE and MD came along I think they had a pretty strong position. Resolution, color depth, and CPU speeds were on par with the Amiga, and sprite capability was vastly better. (Compare TG16 R-Types with R-Type II Amiga port)
VGA came along in '88 and SVGA cards soon after, but a fast (and expensive) 386DX or 486 was needed for graphically impressive games to run at a decent speed, although they still did not generally hit 60fps. The fastest benchmark I ever got on an ISA bus video card was 5.3MB/S (using REP STOSD instruction), using a Trident 8900 in a Celeron 400 system with write gathering enabled. I think this is a theorettical max for an ISA slot at the standard 8MHz. The Trident card could not handle the ISA bus running at 10MHz or beyond without an additional waitstate. So a smooth 60fps could have been possible in some cases with a double-buffered screen mode, but single-buffered 320x200 mode 13h was usually used at the time for compatibility reasons. Plus 5.3MB/S was better than the norm (the 8086 which the ISA bus is based on can only access memory once per 4 cycles, not every 3, so who knows how many systems could handle the faster access time), and that number comes from doing a simple fill. I recall my TI Travelmate 4000 486 laptop only got 2MB/S doing the same benchmark, let alone doing a copy from system RAM to the VGA buffer. VLB cards had much higher bandwidth of course, I benchmarked a Trident 9440 in a 60MHz VLB slot at 50MB/S. But this level of performance came along after the 5th console generation had begun.
Adding Japanese computers into the mix changes the landscape significantly. The X68 series and later the FM-towns pretty much rule everything until 3D-specialized hardware starts showing up. Before that, the MSX2 held its own against the 8-bit consoles, and I don't even know enough about the FM77, PC-88, or PC-98 to say where those fit in.
About the time DirectX 7 came along I think that consoles ceased having a performance advantage compared to any decent PC with a good GPU. (I personally haven't been buying game consoles anymore since my first Pentium III with a GeForce card, and also Sega had left the console biz around this time anyway). Although PCs without GPU or with substandard integrated graphics persisted for some time (mainly the laptop market). I'm not sure how bad the latest intel stuff is, but I know that the GMA4500MHD used in Core2 chipsets was lousy enough that some games run slower than they did on a Radeon 7500 from nearly a decade earlier.
Yeah I think the only thing to be mentioned here is that those systems had somewhat primitive 3D rendering. So if you wanted perspective-correct textures, sub-pixel accuracy, etc. then a high-end PC with software rendering would still offer an advantage. (although the fill rate wouldn't be great, Chris Hecker's article on the subject specified 4Mpixels/S for a Pentium 133). And I guess there was also some niche 3D hardware out there like what Sega based their Model 1/Model 2 boards on.Quote:
3DO is considered somewhere in the range of top of the line 1993 PC tech last I checked. I think PS1 and Saturn were slightly ahead of 1994 PC tech
I have a pretty good stack of old PC hardware which I have run benchmarks on (mostly 3dmark99 and 3dmark01). The results are in a rough format and with some details missing but I could post it if there is interest. Regarding the cards that you have listed, here is what I remember getting:Quote:
What I want to do with these video cards I just bought and let benchmarks tell me what my PIII 500Mhz system can actually push in the polygon, effects, and texture departments. I'm also hooking back in my old Asus A7v266C with Celeron 300A for comparisons prior to 1999. With the Celeron 300Mhz system I can test with my Matrox Mystique 8MB, S3 Trio 3D2X 8mb, Diamond Speedstar A55, STB 3DFX, SIS 6326 (2 of these), ATI Rage2C, NVidia Vanta LT 8mb, Viper V770 16mb, for PS1, Saturn and N64 comparisons. With the PIII 500Mhz system I can use the ATI Rage 128 16mb, ATI Rage 128 Ultra. ATI Rage Pro 128mb, Riva TNT, NVidia Vanta LT 8mb, NVidia Riva TNT2 64mb, Asus NVidia Riva TNT2, and Viper V770 16mb, for Dreamcast and PS2 comparisons. I also have an ATI Radeon 7500LE 64mb, PNY GF2 MX200 32mb, NVidia GeForce2MX 32mb, NVidia GeForce MX400 64mb, NVidia GeForce2 MX400 64mb, NVidia GeForce4 MX440, for Xbox and Gamecube comparisons. Some I haven't identify yet but I think these are all of the common ones worth comparing. I'll probably try to sell off the duplicates keeping only the one with the highest performance.
SIS 6326 - 1Mpolygons, 15Mtexels
ATI RAGE2c - (cheap crippled version of RAGE Pro, the latter of which got 1.2Mpolygons, 37-50Mtexels)
Diamond Viper V770 - (TNT2 Ultra, the die-shrunk, higher-clocked version of TNT)
TNT - 2.6Mpolygons, 100Mtexels
Rage 128 - 2Mpolygons, 100Mtexels
Radeon 7500 - 17Mpolygons, 220-600Mtexels
GeForce 2MX/MX400 - 13Mpolygons, 150-300Mtexels
I read that it was sold (by the design team that is) as potentially a console or a computer, but Jay Miner actually preferred that it be a full computer. Later he also pushed for them to include the Zorro expansion bus slot.Quote:
The Amiga was designed in 83 to be released as a console in 84. However, it got bought by CBM who repurposed it to be their home PC, then delayed the release until 85 because the idiots working on the DOS library were running behind schedule. Always makes me wonder what might have happened in the game console market had the Amiga actually come out in 84 as a game console.
Yeah, it is the CPU focus that I have been trying to figure out. Generally without hardware support for 2D backgrounds and sprites/objects some games if not most will suffer in animation scrolling speed or some other area without very experienced programmers at the helm. Still, if one game proves that a PC available the same year as a console's launch was technically more capable that is all it takes. I usually hesitate comparing console launch games to games that had years to master the hardware, but if same year or earlier PC tech can handle that game it is at least an interesting comparison.Quote:
Originally Posted by bakemono
Great point on the genres. PC style Adventure games and later Real Time Strategy games probably always favored the original over any comparable Console versions. This alone might be why some PC fans think it is crazy to even discuss this. I am, as always, tending to consider the Action games first and other genres second. Not that I mean to, but I also tend to find these games the most technically impressive.Quote:
Originally Posted by bakemono
I think I have seen Amiga compared favorably to the PCE and MD, particularly for being able to display three actual background layers simultaneously. Also, the colors and capability for MOD players seems to leave the PCE or MD behind if I am not mistaken by too many exaggerated comments on the topic. From what I have seen of the Amiga 1000 I would be shocked to see a version of R-Type not surpass the PCE/TG16 game.Quote:
Originally Posted by bakemono
Can somebody post a comparative list of sprite capabilities, and colors per object limitations for the Amiga 1000? I will keep rooting around online but I doubt anybody is going to post this kind of information.
I only had Macs at the time, and my parents were too self involved to even give me a programming language compiler. What few games I managed to find played very poorly on the Mac compared to whatever consoles I had access to at the time. That is, aside from a bunch of clone Atari games we had at the start, those were better than 2600 but this was sometime in the late 80s.Quote:
Originally Posted by bakemono
I couldn't find enough data on the PC-88-98 to compare. Hardcore Gaming 101 has an interesting but relatively vague article. Here again we have some specs better and some worse than consoles if we can find them. Apparently though, early MD games were actually being developed on PC98s (Yuzo Koshiro mentioned this for his MD music compositions), which clearly shows the advantage in overall hardware prowess. The X68000 clearly obliterates the PC-Engine, Megadrive and Super Famicom graphically and audio wise. For this comparison I am not interested in comparing space, convenience or price, so the X68k blasts the 16-bit consoles right out, technically speaking.Quote:
Originally Posted by bakemono
I was working for a PC build company in 1997 and early 98. My first PC was a Cyrix 686 133Mhz with a Matrox Mystique. I was still focused on Action titles back then, and I found this system quite a bit more capable than the PS1 in the color area, but some Saturn games including Mech Warrior 2 and especially Virtua Fighter 2 or Gun Griffon blew it out of the water. Today I know that all of these games are using the Saturn's completely 2D VDP2 for the grounds and that is why they look higher color. I also know that PC/Sony fans completly dismiss 2D of any kind as a valid comparison in 3D games.Quote:
Originally Posted by bakemono
So the Saturn obviously sucks even when it is blending warped 2D at 60FPS and higher resolutions (still not sure about the colors though), PS1 rules even when it is dithering the entire screen to allow for lighting and suffering from texture warping and polygon break up. N64 gets a free pass for having the only "true 3D" polygons of the generation, nothing else matters including fuzzy/repetitive textures orlower framerate/resolution.
By late 1995 I am certain that PCs had advantages at least in the CPU and audio department. It is by late 1994 that I can't seem to nail down.Quote:
Originally Posted by bakemono
Which benchmarks did you use for these figures? I'm waiting for a PCI ATA 133 adapter to come in and then I can test all of these cards too. Also, do you have a best practice for swapping video cards? I remember crashing Win98SE by upgrading once, I am very worried that I won't be able to swap these cards today without reinstalling the OS.Quote:
Originally Posted by bakemono
I have never had any problems swapping around GFX cards. I have even nvidia and Ati drivers installed at the same time lol.
What process do you use though? Do you use Windows uninstaller, safe mode, or some combination of safe mode and a third party uninstaller? I also can't seem to swap motherboards and repair the same Windows installation successfully, so any advice would be much appreciated.Quote:
Originally Posted by TmEE
I was thinking, just to test the cards so I can rate the seller, that I would just use Hiren's Boot CD and call the card good if it gets into a GUI without problems.
When it comes to uninstalls I use the Add/Remove programs, very rarely I go after registry to clean up possible leftovers in startup.
9x is normally very very flexible as far as hardware changes go. My laptop install had no problems running on a PIII or my C2D machine, and none of those machines bare any resemblence to each other... just long initial boot, once drivers are there all goes like it has been like that since beginning.
I have frequently wondered whether using self build ASUS parts was causing me all of these headaches. I can say with pre-XP systems that I had to reinstall Windows at least once a year, and typically ended up doing so after a graphics card upgrade. The proprietary machines seem to be a bit more stable, but also more limited in upgradeability.