Another excellent video, and an important piece of work to save for the future. The dreamcast was a great piece of kit and its a reminder that we all lost out when Sega stopped making console hardware. Once again Michael, we are in your debt for doing this. Those of us that genuinely value insightful information rich pieces like this, over idle speculation pieces based on the latest tweet, are very glad for your commitment to such pieces. Keep doing what you do, its genuinely appreciated and a very worthwhile endeavour.
Greatly appreciate your comment and it is warming to hear that my work is received as intended. Offering insight, reflection and enjoyment is my aim, thank you.
Huge respect for this fascinating insight to a bye gone area, of sega making incredible consoles. Interesting to geek out over the specs as well, wow Windows CE was a hog.
Imagination is still at it. They have an exceedingly competent ray-tracing hardware that batches rays during traversal to minimize cache misses (which is not done on PC AFAIK -- though I could be wrong), and also to accelerate BVH creation (which is not done on the PC). This allows it to run at rates similar to low end PC, which is significant for something that can be put into a mobile phone. They are ahead of the game and have been for over 12 years when they acquired Caustics. It's a SHAME that they have had vision, but not the business clout to have these technologies adopted across the industry.
I don’t think they’d particularly have great RT due to nvidia doing it first and it came out of nowhere. Not even AMD expected nvidia to release RT capable cards in 2018. It also explains why their 6000 series cards are far worse at RT compared to nvidia because they rushed it out the door to compete with nvidia. So unless Sega went with nvidia to make their APU it’s likely it would be just like the Xbox and PS5. Also it’s likely Microsoft would of never joined the console market and continued supporting sega
@@SeanLumly I know other companies were doing it in small areas before but it was never mainstream. None of the major vendors were doing it then and trying to implement it in a game would of been difficult without the dedicated hardware. I still doubt Sega would of added it
@@crestofhonor2349Nvidia don’t have good ray tracing hardware unless you pay $2000+ for it. Nvidia never came up with the idea of ray tracing either; the Direct X 12 ultimate API is what introduced the concept for modern games (at least insofar as it is commonly understood). Nvidia hyped up ray tracing as a feature of their RTX 2000 series cards even though it was never practical to use due to the performance impact. We have now had two further GPU generations from Nvidia and ray tracing is still only worthwhile with a 4090 or 4080, which cost over $1500+. It was a meme they introduced so they could gouge clueless consooomers right at the point where AMD became competitive in traditional rasterization performance, and y’all lapped it up. What Nvidia actually has is a decent (proprietary) middleware package that game devs can use to add hardware accelerated ray tracing to their games using the DX12 ultimate API that, like gameworks before it, results in games that are poorly optimized for non-Nvidia hardware. Their actual ray tracing hardware on chip (tensor cores) are not optimized for ray tracing. Tensor cores are better at hardware ray tracing than AMDs solutions but they’re not particularly good, and they’re not even on the same level as imagination is. Nvidia’s ray tracing implementation is a steam engine, Imagination’s is a Lamborghini. The only difference is scale.
That was a great trip down memory lane and an interesting analysis. I had a that time a Banshee I think. Later switched to PowerVR Kyro II. Never got into consoles until the PS4. Was always a PC gamer, but coming from the C64 and Amiga. I greatly appreciate your use of old video game music, always puts a smile on my face when I recognise a tune.
I couldn't afford a PC back in the late 90's, a few friends had their Win95 and later 98 machines. While my brothers and I were playing the Saturn for years and later the PS1. When I visited those friends and I saw how smooth games looked and played, it was basically at least a generation ahead+. The 9x era is one of the most fascinating to me. Our 32-bit consoles were loved and enjoyed for years and years, but with a PC, you had it all, the internet was very seductive already and with a PC, we could do so much more than gaming.
Sucks that it got dumped with PS1 ports basically like Res Evil, and Dino Crisis, Tomb Raider. Rather than a game specifically built for the DC hardware from the ground up. The last Revelation on DC purports to have 'volumetric fog.'
Fascinating stuff, having just read through the final issues of Sega Saturn Magazine that touched on this card and what the dc implementation could do it is great to have a deep dive on the subject. Thanks!
Brilliant video, thank you Micheal. I’ve got a DC in the loft, a handful of official games…….. and a few that aren’t, including HL. Was shocked to see my sealed NTSC copy of Illbleed was worth so much nowadays… k’ching 👌
It's great to look back armed with hindsight.Those were the days when you might have to junk your entire PC with each "must play" game release, based on those all-important "required specs". Components you had just bought and installed might become obsolete and unsupported almost overnight. Winners and losers weren't cut and dried, and the supporters of competing CPUs and GPUs would battle it out across the forums to a level that made console wars seem tame.
It is not, this is the same Price bracket and the age of 98 only the slower TnT would have been available. In 1999 the full TnT2 Ultra was around £100 more and far in excess of the Neon250 price bracket.
Sega Dreamcast is the best system ever. It's great how there is a big modding community but sucks that it costs close to $800 to get one up to date with a DCHDMI + GDEMU + replaceable system battery. Sort of a status symbol these days.
Bought mine for 250 off aliexpress! Only thing it didn't have was the battery mod. I got hdmi, power supply, gdemu, and could have gotten even a new case and battery for a bit extra, but i wasn't paying attention, haha.
Hi NXG, any chance you could do a video about the 40fps patch in Horizon and Vrr. Also what do you think PS Studio's could do next to break the barrier of technology. Like higher visuals or better framerate etc..... would love to hear your thoughts
neon250 pc gpu was weaker,dreamcast gpu had 32x32 tile buffer the ,neon 250 only had 32x16 tile buffer so half the filrate and the riva tnt2m64 was even weaker than the neon250.
This is a very interesting topic as the neon 250 is a pretty obscure part that vanished rapidly from the shelves, and i always wondered how it performed vs the dreamcast gpu. Well,Apparently not that bad, at least in the games you tested so far? While we Probably haven't seen the full potential of dreamcast as development on it ended very soon, i also honestly don't think there was still much to squeeze, it had already trouble with (then) current engines like goldsrc, unreal 1 and idtech.
Go look at the beyond3d yes buthowmanypolygons asset dump for dcgames. On par with psp and low/mid ps2 games. The art looked shitty but it was high poly, more so than pcgames at the time including those engines you listed. Which arent even a good fit on dc due to low ram.
Tile based rendering always forced you to balance between space allocated for textures and geometry on the dreamcast, tests made on the hardware proved it was practically difficult to go much above 3 milion polygons/sec without greatly sacrificing texture quality. Regarding geometry, Dc was going to face a competition that even at it's weakest (playstation 2) was capable of rendering around 3 times it's maximum output. Polygons however are not the only part of the story, lighting, post process, physics, particles, animation, were all advancing fast, how far could dc have gone without a t&l unit? If it survived it was going to fight against the hands down much more powerful/advanced platforms like xbox/pc and gamecube. In theory the only sparring partner closer to it was the ps2, and even then, only in it's first year on the market was already showing games clearly a step above all that we ever saw on the dc like gta 3, gran turismo 3, metal gear solid 2, jak, and that awesome f1 racing game by melbourne house . Was the dc really going to produce output on the same level? I highly doubt it.
@@gohhosdf well if you even bothered to check what i told you , you would have seen the actual polygon counts used in the art assets for characters and stages. The solid proof, heck the recent pages even has mgs2 assets. Was the dreamcast gonna out preform ps2 ? No but early ps2 stuff like mgs2 or peace walker on psp was already on par or even a little below some games like shenmue 1(2 was massive upgrade with stages up to 200k triangles)and its complex. Ps2 is more powerful sure but let's not porting down wouldnt have been possible if you kept tnl reasonable, psp has show us that. They cutback on lighting and post process and chop texture size. Same thing would have been for dc IF money was right for the devs, which is the actual reason it didnt happen. Yes things are more than just polygolcount, look at crazy taxi psp it runs 30 fps because the drive is too slow to stream assets and music at the same time( despite on paper being around game speed as gdrom)
@@accel99 i know about that topic on b3d it's very interesting, i see that assets were not far or even inferior in real world scenarios in terms of density vs ps2 early titles, but at the end of the day it's the complessive ammount of triangles per second that is the ultimate metric, and informations available to me suggest that ps2 in it's best titles was drawing in the 200.000 range at 60 fps, also remember that because of multipass rendering , ps2 had to redraw geometry, as many times as the layers necessary, so even numbers that can be extrapolated from 3d software or emulators might not be reliable. But again that was an era when geometry was starting to be no longer the most impressive technical feature, pixel shaders, lighting, physics, particles and post processing were becoming more and more important, dreamcast games were doomed to be "flat" or less complex in comparison to competing hardwares of 2001 onwards., There just wasn't enough processing power available to fight on the same level for long. Just my 2 cents anyway, and i respect your pov
@@gohhosdf i agree it most of what you said. The only thing i disagree is fighting on the same level. It really doesnt have to, each console had expected differences ( like you dont expect ps2 and xbox versions of same game to have same lighting or normal maps or even mesh differences). Porting down is a real choice even some things go missing or framerate is halfed. Another thing alot of those after certain point( especially the latest ones) dc assets and ps2 / psp assets are not emulator numbers, they are extracted assets from the disc and seen through their native formats. Its as accurate as its gonna get.
If Sega included 32 MBs of Ram, and 12-16 on the GPU, the Half Life port probably would have performed superior. Dreamcast processors were excellent, but it was constrained by memory, and bandwidth. PS2 had similar GPU memory limitations but the main ram could be use to store textures. I think I read in a magazine back in the day the way PS2 swapped textures in and out of memory performed like there was 32MBs of texture memory. Biggest limiting factor of the PS2 was size of the textures mostly being 128X128 with 8bit color depth. Back to the Dreamcast. Sega should have raised the price to $300 to include additional ram, 2nd CPU which was in discussion, and include a DVD drive. The DC at lunch only cost $171 to make and by the time shipping, and stores took their cut Sega made about $1.6 per console. Bumping up to $250 would have allowed for a DVD drive which I believe cost $56 to make on it's own around the year 2000 at a small $4 lost.
2nd issue with the DC was Sega themselves. They operated like two separate companies sharing a meager $2 billion budget. $1 billion of that was given to them or donated I think in 98. So they wastes millions developing two separate consoles, sometimes in secret of one another when you take into account the Saturn and Mars (32X) projects. Peter Moore did an interview where said he almost came to blows with one of Sonic creators when he said Sega's popularity was dying (He was right). Sega had to pay 3DFX millions for their failed collaboration with Blackbelt while SOJ worked on Katana. It was a complete mess with SOJ having no respect for SOA creating consoles without their knowledge. Those talented development teams would have worked together, I honestly don't think we would be having this conversation.
Half Life was more a PC game and a rather overrated and over hyped game at that. It was Sega of America's 90s management staff who betrayed the Sega MegaDrive Genesis fanbase and betrayed the Sega Saturn fanbase aka the late teens and 20 year olds who went out to purchase the Sega Saturn when it retailed for $400 dollars in 1995. Tom Kalinske betrayed the entire Sega parent company by insisting that the Genesis should get a 32 bit processor and later with Joe Miller by turning that mess into an add on under their requests and selling point or salesman pitch of scamming the U.S.A. based Genesis install base if 18 million which only Tom Kalinske and Joe Miller could have made up especially when the Japanese managers didn't believe in supporting a failing platform like the Sega MegaDrive or Genesis especially if it's not doing well in Japan. That was the problem starting in mid 1993 with Tom Kalinske trying to get his way and getting it then denying his involvement with an American writer writing a Sega book from the Sega of America perspective which is what those books are since Japanese consultation was kept to a minimum along with blaming Nintendo and Sony when neither did anything to damage the Sega brand that wasn't done by Tom Kalinske's greedy decisions. In fact there was no reason to make a Sega next generation hardware with the Saturn doing well in Japan it was the job of Sega of America to repair retailer and consumer relations and they refused to do so... which in turn leads into the bad decision to make next gen which was led by Sega of America's 90s management staff acting like they were the parent company... Sega Enterprises LTD Japan is the parent company, the founder company with CSK who put the financial backing to reformat "Sega" back in the late 1970s and early 80s and unfortunately they trusted Tom Kalinske way too much as a likable guy... I'm sure if you had him at a subsidiary branch he'd try to take over your company too unless you audit him which unfortunately Sega Enterprises LTD Japan was somehow failing to do during 1992, 1993 and 1994... if they had they would have discovered the financial losses in unsold game cartridges and SegaCD games and would have put their foot down and denied the 32X from disrupting the development of the Sega Saturn. Sega of America's management staff went after 3DFX and wrote contract documents that 3DFX management understood as some fully approved contract, when documents leaked that 3DFX was involved was when Sega Enterprises LTD Japan found out and quickly corrected the problem of insubordination on Sega of America's (a subsidiary branch) 90s management part... But too late they went with Videologic Power VR2 offer since they wanted to have arcade game maker representation (3DFX did too which is how they got with Atari Games but because of that expensive venture it was Atari Games that went kaput leading to Midway Games buying them out in 1997) None of the stuff you wrote makes sense as "ways to save Dreamcast" because once Dreamcast became the project, Sega of America's management staff still found ways to high Jack and put their influence into it which is why the modem became standard, Dreamcast became more of a budget next gen hardware because some hair brained Sega of America manager wanted attention with low prices (this is the marketing subsidiary branch trying to control the engineering headquarters) and the removal of two face buttons from the NiGHTs into Dreams analogue pad into the horror of the Dreamcast pad which hurt the image of the console along with that useless modem being included.
Back then when Sega of America's 90s staff interfered with the Sega Saturn and successfully got it killed (it did not die if the subsidiary branch wrecked it's launch timing in other words for an established subsidiary branch, they should have been preparing to launch the Sega Saturn in North America as test market as early as December 1994, not make some cool story about price and a whole year wait... even Nintendo of America learned not to do that again with the N64 and Sony with PS2 yet SoA intentionally delayed the DC launch as well as cut the price, creating further losses per units sold in North America and by relation the PAL regions, again despite two or three biased fanboy written books, it was SoA management who held gate keeper authority) they pushed the idea that "Sega next gen was gonna be a cookie cutter N64 and PS1 but without a ROM Cartridge port and gave it a really stupid name in "Dreamcast" that has nothing to do with the Japanese "Sega" brand... 1997 constant spec leaks, 3DFX lawsuit leak scandal and settlement all caused by SoA, 1998 in November, the Japanese DC launch but oh wait SoA knows better than the entire industry so Bernie Stolar goes on a spending spree in millions, buying devs, making deals, releases a couple of peanuts for SS owners in 1998 then brags about a launch almost an entire year later and to think that some of us dull Sega fans as adults became so foolish to blame Sony... meanwhile Sony cannot be sitting pretty because they have to respond and they planned for a year 2000 launch... so "Sega" (of America subsidiary branch) had from November 1998 to March 2000 and October 2000 for the PS2 to launch... newsflash, SoA influenced a premature next gen jump with cut down hardware... why would any long term twenty plus year old gamer trust SoA? (btw UK and Europe get affected with SoA taking lead decisions) it was never about a DVD movie player, it was being treated like children.. oh wait look up GDC 99 and Bernie Stolar brings some twelve year old kid and he utters the word "target audience" that means he like the president before him were crapping on the late teens and twenty plus gamers who ended up sticking with Sony or Nintendo or unfortunately PC. I had and still have the leaked Half Life DC game... and Soldier of Fortune... the DC hardware could do better with devs willing to custom code for it... instead they used Windows CE lmao... to think Sega Rally 2 was sacrificed with WinCE to claim easiest to dev for... the only way to "fix the Dreamcast" was if certain SoA staff had been fired, Stolar and Moore never hired, Sega Saturn properly launched and supported, no 32X and no Dreamcast... That way it would have been PS1, SS and N64 battling it out in the year 2000 when Microsoft announces Xbox and then Sony, Sega and Nintendo make next gen hardware for 2002 that sends Xbox to the same place the 3DO and Atari Jaguar went.
Another excellent video, and an important piece of work to save for the future. The dreamcast was a great piece of kit and its a reminder that we all lost out when Sega stopped making console hardware. Once again Michael, we are in your debt for doing this. Those of us that genuinely value insightful information rich pieces like this, over idle speculation pieces based on the latest tweet, are very glad for your commitment to such pieces.
Keep doing what you do, its genuinely appreciated and a very worthwhile endeavour.
Greatly appreciate your comment and it is warming to hear that my work is received as intended. Offering insight, reflection and enjoyment is my aim, thank you.
What an exceptional game Half Life was when it came out. One of the few I played non-stop until completion.
Love your long-form videos, always great to enjoy with a can of beer :)
Huge respect for this fascinating insight to a bye gone area, of sega making incredible consoles. Interesting to geek out over the specs as well, wow Windows CE was a hog.
Imagination is still at it. They have an exceedingly competent ray-tracing hardware that batches rays during traversal to minimize cache misses (which is not done on PC AFAIK -- though I could be wrong), and also to accelerate BVH creation (which is not done on the PC). This allows it to run at rates similar to low end PC, which is significant for something that can be put into a mobile phone. They are ahead of the game and have been for over 12 years when they acquired Caustics.
It's a SHAME that they have had vision, but not the business clout to have these technologies adopted across the industry.
I don’t think they’d particularly have great RT due to nvidia doing it first and it came out of nowhere. Not even AMD expected nvidia to release RT capable cards in 2018. It also explains why their 6000 series cards are far worse at RT compared to nvidia because they rushed it out the door to compete with nvidia. So unless Sega went with nvidia to make their APU it’s likely it would be just like the Xbox and PS5. Also it’s likely Microsoft would of never joined the console market and continued supporting sega
@@crestofhonor2349 Imagination was doing RT back in 2010. On mobile.
@@SeanLumly I know other companies were doing it in small areas before but it was never mainstream. None of the major vendors were doing it then and trying to implement it in a game would of been difficult without the dedicated hardware. I still doubt Sega would of added it
@@crestofhonor2349Nvidia don’t have good ray tracing hardware unless you pay $2000+ for it. Nvidia never came up with the idea of ray tracing either; the Direct X 12 ultimate API is what introduced the concept for modern games (at least insofar as it is commonly understood). Nvidia hyped up ray tracing as a feature of their RTX 2000 series cards even though it was never practical to use due to the performance impact. We have now had two further GPU generations from Nvidia and ray tracing is still only worthwhile with a 4090 or 4080, which cost over $1500+. It was a meme they introduced so they could gouge clueless consooomers right at the point where AMD became competitive in traditional rasterization performance, and y’all lapped it up.
What Nvidia actually has is a decent (proprietary) middleware package that game devs can use to add hardware accelerated ray tracing to their games using the DX12 ultimate API that, like gameworks before it, results in games that are poorly optimized for non-Nvidia hardware. Their actual ray tracing hardware on chip (tensor cores) are not optimized for ray tracing. Tensor cores are better at hardware ray tracing than AMDs solutions but they’re not particularly good, and they’re not even on the same level as imagination is. Nvidia’s ray tracing implementation is a steam engine, Imagination’s is a Lamborghini. The only difference is scale.
Nice use of the Mortal Kombat soundtrack!
15:01
We need that as an animated wallpaper
That was a great trip down memory lane and an interesting analysis. I had a that time a Banshee I think. Later switched to PowerVR Kyro II. Never got into consoles until the PS4. Was always a PC gamer, but coming from the C64 and Amiga. I greatly appreciate your use of old video game music, always puts a smile on my face when I recognise a tune.
I couldn't afford a PC back in the late 90's, a few friends had their Win95 and later 98 machines. While my brothers and I were playing the Saturn for years and later the PS1.
When I visited those friends and I saw how smooth games looked and played, it was basically at least a generation ahead+. The 9x era is one of the most fascinating to me.
Our 32-bit consoles were loved and enjoyed for years and years, but with a PC, you had it all, the internet was very seductive already and with a PC, we could do so much more than gaming.
GD-Rom.
Goddamn, what a disc.
Sucks that it got dumped with PS1 ports basically like Res Evil, and Dino Crisis, Tomb Raider. Rather than a game specifically built for the DC hardware from the ground up. The last Revelation on DC purports to have 'volumetric fog.'
Fascinating stuff, having just read through the final issues of Sega Saturn Magazine that touched on this card and what the dc implementation could do it is great to have a deep dive on the subject. Thanks!
Brilliant video, thank you Micheal. I’ve got a DC in the loft, a handful of official games…….. and a few that aren’t, including HL. Was shocked to see my sealed NTSC copy of Illbleed was worth so much nowadays… k’ching 👌
"Damn you Beckham"
-NXG
Lime of the month 😂 no lie man, you're like my friendly gaming uncle techlord
Dude very cool vid. I loved my dream cast what a beast 😍. To bad it died so quickly
It's great to look back armed with hindsight.Those were the days when you might have to junk your entire PC with each "must play" game release, based on those all-important "required specs". Components you had just bought and installed might become obsolete and unsupported almost overnight. Winners and losers weren't cut and dried, and the supporters of competing CPUs and GPUs would battle it out across the forums to a level that made console wars seem tame.
Just FYI the TNT2 M64 was the slowest of the TNT2 line. It's the worst one to pick for this comparison.
It is not, this is the same Price bracket and the age of 98 only the slower TnT would have been available. In 1999 the full TnT2 Ultra was around £100 more and far in excess of the Neon250 price bracket.
That DC port was not optimized
Sega Dreamcast is the best system ever. It's great how there is a big modding community but sucks that it costs close to $800 to get one up to date with a DCHDMI + GDEMU + replaceable system battery. Sort of a status symbol these days.
Bought mine for 250 off aliexpress! Only thing it didn't have was the battery mod. I got hdmi, power supply, gdemu, and could have gotten even a new case and battery for a bit extra, but i wasn't paying attention, haha.
Hi NXG, any chance you could do a video about the 40fps patch in Horizon and Vrr.
Also what do you think PS Studio's could do next to break the barrier of technology. Like higher visuals or better framerate etc..... would love to hear your thoughts
neon250 pc gpu was weaker,dreamcast gpu had 32x32 tile buffer the ,neon 250 only had 32x16 tile buffer so half the filrate and the riva tnt2m64 was even weaker than the neon250.
Why do I keep seeing the Dreamcast Spiral in BLUE??? It was R3ed when I had one.... I'm guessing it was blue outside of North America?? .... weird
It was blue in Europe because a company already had a similar orange logo.
This is a very interesting topic as the neon 250 is a pretty obscure part that vanished rapidly from the shelves, and i always wondered how it performed vs the dreamcast gpu. Well,Apparently not that bad, at least in the games you tested so far? While we Probably haven't seen the full potential of dreamcast as development on it ended very soon, i also honestly don't think there was still much to squeeze, it had already trouble with (then) current engines like goldsrc, unreal 1 and idtech.
Go look at the beyond3d yes buthowmanypolygons asset dump for dcgames. On par with psp and low/mid ps2 games. The art looked shitty but it was high poly, more so than pcgames at the time including those engines you listed. Which arent even a good fit on dc due to low ram.
Tile based rendering always forced you to balance between space allocated for textures and geometry on the dreamcast, tests made on the hardware proved it was practically difficult to go much above 3 milion polygons/sec without greatly sacrificing texture quality. Regarding geometry, Dc was going to face a competition that even at it's weakest (playstation 2) was capable of rendering around 3 times it's maximum output. Polygons however are not the only part of the story, lighting, post process, physics, particles, animation, were all advancing fast, how far could dc have gone without a t&l unit? If it survived it was going to fight against the hands down much more powerful/advanced platforms like xbox/pc and gamecube. In theory the only sparring partner closer to it was the ps2, and even then, only in it's first year on the market was already showing games clearly a step above all that we ever saw on the dc like gta 3, gran turismo 3, metal gear solid 2, jak, and that awesome f1 racing game by melbourne house . Was the dc really going to produce output on the same level? I highly doubt it.
@@gohhosdf well if you even bothered to check what i told you , you would have seen the actual polygon counts used in the art assets for characters and stages. The solid proof, heck the recent pages even has mgs2 assets. Was the dreamcast gonna out preform ps2 ? No but early ps2 stuff like mgs2 or peace walker on psp was already on par or even a little below some games like shenmue 1(2 was massive upgrade with stages up to 200k triangles)and its complex. Ps2 is more powerful sure but let's not porting down wouldnt have been possible if you kept tnl reasonable, psp has show us that. They cutback on lighting and post process and chop texture size. Same thing would have been for dc IF money was right for the devs, which is the actual reason it didnt happen. Yes things are more than just polygolcount, look at crazy taxi psp it runs 30 fps because the drive is too slow to stream assets and music at the same time( despite on paper being around game speed as gdrom)
@@accel99 i know about that topic on b3d it's very interesting, i see that assets were not far or even inferior in real world scenarios in terms of density vs ps2 early titles, but at the end of the day it's the complessive ammount of triangles per second that is the ultimate metric, and informations available to me suggest that ps2 in it's best titles was drawing in the 200.000 range at 60 fps, also remember that because of multipass rendering , ps2 had to redraw geometry, as many times as the layers necessary, so even numbers that can be extrapolated from 3d software or emulators might not be reliable. But again that was an era when geometry was starting to be no longer the most impressive technical feature, pixel shaders, lighting, physics, particles and post processing were becoming more and more important, dreamcast games were doomed to be "flat" or less complex in comparison to competing hardwares of 2001 onwards., There just wasn't enough processing power available to fight on the same level for long. Just my 2 cents anyway, and i respect your pov
@@gohhosdf i agree it most of what you said. The only thing i disagree is fighting on the same level. It really doesnt have to, each console had expected differences ( like you dont expect ps2 and xbox versions of same game to have same lighting or normal maps or even mesh differences). Porting down is a real choice even some things go missing or framerate is halfed.
Another thing alot of those after certain point( especially the latest ones) dc assets and ps2 / psp assets are not emulator numbers, they are extracted assets from the disc and seen through their native formats. Its as accurate as its gonna get.
If Sega included 32 MBs of Ram, and 12-16 on the GPU, the Half Life port probably would have performed superior. Dreamcast processors were excellent, but it was constrained by memory, and bandwidth. PS2 had similar GPU memory limitations but the main ram could be use to store textures. I think I read in a magazine back in the day the way PS2 swapped textures in and out of memory performed like there was 32MBs of texture memory. Biggest limiting factor of the PS2 was size of the textures mostly being 128X128 with 8bit color depth. Back to the Dreamcast. Sega should have raised the price to $300 to include additional ram, 2nd CPU which was in discussion, and include a DVD drive. The DC at lunch only cost $171 to make and by the time shipping, and stores took their cut Sega made about $1.6 per console. Bumping up to $250 would have allowed for a DVD drive which I believe cost $56 to make on it's own around the year 2000 at a small $4 lost.
2nd issue with the DC was Sega themselves. They operated like two separate companies sharing a meager $2 billion budget. $1 billion of that was given to them or donated I think in 98. So they wastes millions developing two separate consoles, sometimes in secret of one another when you take into account the Saturn and Mars (32X) projects. Peter Moore did an interview where said he almost came to blows with one of Sonic creators when he said Sega's popularity was dying (He was right). Sega had to pay 3DFX millions for their failed collaboration with Blackbelt while SOJ worked on Katana. It was a complete mess with SOJ having no respect for SOA creating consoles without their knowledge. Those talented development teams would have worked together, I honestly don't think we would be having this conversation.
You're are clueless
Half Life was more a PC game and a rather overrated and over hyped game at that.
It was Sega of America's 90s management staff who betrayed the Sega MegaDrive Genesis fanbase and betrayed the Sega Saturn fanbase aka the late teens and 20 year olds who went out to purchase the Sega Saturn when it retailed for $400 dollars in 1995.
Tom Kalinske betrayed the entire Sega parent company by insisting that the Genesis should get a 32 bit processor and later with Joe Miller by turning that mess into an add on under their requests and selling point or salesman pitch of scamming the U.S.A. based Genesis install base if 18 million which only Tom Kalinske and Joe Miller could have made up especially when the Japanese managers didn't believe in supporting a failing platform like the Sega MegaDrive or Genesis especially if it's not doing well in Japan.
That was the problem starting in mid 1993 with Tom Kalinske trying to get his way and getting it then denying his involvement with an American writer writing a Sega book from the Sega of America perspective which is what those books are since Japanese consultation was kept to a minimum along with blaming Nintendo and Sony when neither did anything to damage the Sega brand that wasn't done by Tom Kalinske's greedy decisions.
In fact there was no reason to make a Sega next generation hardware with the Saturn doing well in Japan it was the job of Sega of America to repair retailer and consumer relations and they refused to do so... which in turn leads into the bad decision to make next gen which was led by Sega of America's 90s management staff acting like they were the parent company...
Sega Enterprises LTD Japan is the parent company, the founder company with CSK who put the financial backing to reformat "Sega" back in the late 1970s and early 80s and unfortunately they trusted Tom Kalinske way too much as a likable guy... I'm sure if you had him at a subsidiary branch he'd try to take over your company too unless you audit him which unfortunately Sega Enterprises LTD Japan was somehow failing to do during 1992, 1993 and 1994... if they had they would have discovered the financial losses in unsold game cartridges and SegaCD games and would have put their foot down and denied the 32X from disrupting the development of the Sega Saturn.
Sega of America's management staff went after 3DFX and wrote contract documents that 3DFX management understood as some fully approved contract, when documents leaked that 3DFX was involved was when Sega Enterprises LTD Japan found out and quickly corrected the problem of insubordination on Sega of America's (a subsidiary branch) 90s management part...
But too late they went with Videologic Power VR2 offer since they wanted to have arcade game maker representation (3DFX did too which is how they got with Atari Games but because of that expensive venture it was Atari Games that went kaput leading to Midway Games buying them out in 1997)
None of the stuff you wrote makes sense as "ways to save Dreamcast" because once Dreamcast became the project, Sega of America's management staff still found ways to high Jack and put their influence into it which is why the modem became standard, Dreamcast became more of a budget next gen hardware because some hair brained Sega of America manager wanted attention with low prices (this is the marketing subsidiary branch trying to control the engineering headquarters) and the removal of two face buttons from the NiGHTs into Dreams analogue pad into the horror of the Dreamcast pad which hurt the image of the console along with that useless modem being included.
Back then when Sega of America's 90s staff interfered with the Sega Saturn and successfully got it killed (it did not die if the subsidiary branch wrecked it's launch timing in other words for an established subsidiary branch, they should have been preparing to launch the Sega Saturn in North America as test market as early as December 1994, not make some cool story about price and a whole year wait... even Nintendo of America learned not to do that again with the N64 and Sony with PS2 yet SoA intentionally delayed the DC launch as well as cut the price, creating further losses per units sold in North America and by relation the PAL regions, again despite two or three biased fanboy written books, it was SoA management who held gate keeper authority) they pushed the idea that "Sega next gen was gonna be a cookie cutter N64 and PS1 but without a ROM Cartridge port and gave it a really stupid name in "Dreamcast" that has nothing to do with the Japanese "Sega" brand...
1997 constant spec leaks, 3DFX lawsuit leak scandal and settlement all caused by SoA, 1998 in November, the Japanese DC launch but oh wait SoA knows better than the entire industry so Bernie Stolar goes on a spending spree in millions, buying devs, making deals, releases a couple of peanuts for SS owners in 1998 then brags about a launch almost an entire year later and to think that some of us dull Sega fans as adults became so foolish to blame Sony... meanwhile Sony cannot be sitting pretty because they have to respond and they planned for a year 2000 launch... so "Sega" (of America subsidiary branch) had from November 1998 to March 2000 and October 2000 for the PS2 to launch...
newsflash, SoA influenced a premature next gen jump with cut down hardware... why would any long term twenty plus year old gamer trust SoA? (btw UK and Europe get affected with SoA taking lead decisions) it was never about a DVD movie player, it was being treated like children.. oh wait look up GDC 99 and Bernie Stolar brings some twelve year old kid and he utters the word "target audience" that means he like the president before him were crapping on the late teens and twenty plus gamers who ended up sticking with Sony or Nintendo or unfortunately PC.
I had and still have the leaked Half Life DC game... and Soldier of Fortune... the DC hardware could do better with devs willing to custom code for it... instead they used Windows CE lmao... to think Sega Rally 2 was sacrificed with WinCE to claim easiest to dev for... the only way to "fix the Dreamcast" was if certain SoA staff had been fired, Stolar and Moore never hired, Sega Saturn properly launched and supported, no 32X and no Dreamcast...
That way it would have been PS1, SS and N64 battling it out in the year 2000 when Microsoft announces Xbox and then Sony, Sega and Nintendo make next gen hardware for 2002 that sends Xbox to the same place the 3DO and Atari Jaguar went.
Terrible console, that controller. What was Sega thinking of. That controller is so bad.
Dreamcast sucked and deserved to flop badly
Terrible comment.
"Well, that is, like, just your opinion man!" 😉
@@NXGamer True. But ther must be millions of others that think same, as Dreamcast failed to sell, period
Nothing wrong with the DC’s controller, have you got weird abnormal hands or something?
@@NXGamer “The Dude abides”