Quote:Original post by Zahlman
Hahaha. Console power exceeding PC power? Tell me, what was in the Genesis for example? And what computers were current at the time? (And yeah, Genesis still had some great games for its time <3)

let's take the SNES, which was released '90. maybe you should ckeck out what PC games were like back then, the console blew pretty much every PC away. the gfx effects like mode 7 or transparancy and the reasonable color depth blew away PC 16 color crap.
the PSX was released in '94 - the first voodoo cards came '96.

not to talk of the sales, PC games didn't start to sell well until somewhen in the early 90s, before and now (yes, now!) big money is made on consoles.

Quote:Original post by Zahlman

Quote:
- The GPU of the Wii is identical to the GC’s but it is on average 1.5X faster.

WTF? How can it be 'faster' and 'identical' at the same time?

i guess it's the same chip with higher clock speed?!

Quote:Original post by Zahlman
Hahaha. Console power exceeding PC power? Tell me, what was in the Genesis for example? And what computers were current at the time? (And yeah, Genesis still had some great games for its time <3)

June 1988, Intel i80386, 32-bit, 16 MHz, 2.5 MIPS (integer only, floats needed expensive coprocessor)
October 1988, Sega Megadrive/Genesis, 16-bit, Motorola 68000, 7.67 MHz, 3.58 MHz Z80 for 8-bit compatibility mode, proprietary video coprocessor (VDP), Yamaha YM2612 audio coprocessor


I can't find any MIPS specs on the 68000, but back then it was considered a vastly superior chip to the 386. Couple this with the game-tailored video and audio coprocessors which PC's had yet to get, the Genesis wins hands down.


PC games didn't come anywhere close to consoles until 1993, when Doom came out. That's the point when people started thinking of using PC's as a mass game market.

Quote:Original post by lethalhamster
Woah... I saw the UK£ 150 and thought 'Wow! That's cheap!'. But when I went to Google I became very disapointed, UK£ 150 = 278.89500 US$. $280 seems like a lot of money for that. Sure, it's about half the price of a PS3 but who said that's still cheap. Way to expensive for me. I was hoping for about $200 or so.

They'll probably set a different price point for the US. $250 or less, I'd expect.

Quote:Original post by Mithrandir

Quote:Original post by Zahlman
Hahaha. Console power exceeding PC power? Tell me, what was in the Genesis for example? And what computers were current at the time? (And yeah, Genesis still had some great games for its time <3)

June 1988, Intel i80386, 32-bit, 16 MHz, 2.5 MIPS (integer only, floats needed expensive coprocessor)
October 1988, Sega Megadrive/Genesis, 16-bit, Motorola 68000, 7.67 MHz, 3.58 MHz Z80 for 8-bit compatibility mode, proprietary video coprocessor (VDP), Yamaha YM2612 audio coprocessor


I can't find any MIPS specs on the 68000, but back then it was considered a vastly superior chip to the 386. Couple this with the game-tailored video and audio coprocessors which PC's had yet to get, the Genesis wins hands down.

Although the 68K series was considered superior to X86 for some time, the Genesis used a plain vanilla ~8 MHz 68000 which is arguably not as powerful as a 16 MHz 386. The 68K did not have an FPU, either.

But you're essentially right, the Genesis was a superior gaming machine when it was released and stayed so for some years. PCs had the advantage of more RAM, arguably better number crunching capability, and perhaps higher resolution (640x480 vs. 320x224) but they lacked color resolution and the bandwidth and processing power necessary to render games.

Old-school 2D video game and arcade systems had dedicated tile and sprite hardware which took care of drawing, priorities, scrolling, and had some amount of flexibility to allow for interesting effects (by providing line and frame interrupts, for example.) You upload sprites and tiles and then simply provide the video processor with coordinates and a pointer to the image and it handles the drawing with correct priorities. Backgrounds are rendered out of tiles according to pointers in a name table. Scrolling is done automatically by supplying horizontal and vertical scroll values.

On a PC, you're given a frame buffer that you have to render to yourself. A puny 8 MHz 68K can't handle this and PCs had a hard time as well. It was a trade-off between performance and flexibility.

Arcade 3D hardware into the late 90's was better than PC 3D accelerators for the same reason. The Voodoo may have revolutionized the PC graphics industry but was rather quaint by arcade standards. IIRC, Voodoo was basically a textured polygon rasterizer whereas arcade hardware from the early 90's onward rendered entire models and performed the necessary viewspace transformations and lighting calculations automatically.

I developed a Sega Model 3 emulator using OpenGL and it was difficult to efficiently map the rendering process of the Model 3 to an architecture like OpenGL. Model 3 worked by having the PowerPC main processor send scene graph data to the GPU which referenced models (meshes) directly in ROM consisting of a collection of polygons with a variety of per-polygon attributes (which required all sorts of state changes for each polygon.) The developer who has since continued with the project, Ville, eventually worked around the problem by making use of vertex shader programs for T&L and pixel shaders for implementing the Model 3's rather nuanced texturing system. And this is hardware designed in 1995! Hardware T&L on PCs was a huge deal in what, 2000 or later?



None of this matters now, however, because economies of scale finally took hold and cutting edge PCs are indeed superior to consoles and arcades. :)