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Ro Magnus Larsson wrote:Bart Trzynadlowsky, the creator of Supermodel emulator was talking with me and I asked him about both systems in the possibility to port M3 to Dreamcast, he 's saying to me this in his Youtube channel:
-I think PowerVR was indeed more powerful than Model 3, and certainly more flexible. Maybe there is some metric that Model 3 excelled at but unless someone shows me otherwise, the public specs (wherever they come from) indicate the Dreamcast's PowerVR exceeds Model 3 performance in vertex transforms and fill rates.
Would be nice to run a synthetic benchmark someday once I can more easily transfer my own custom Model 3 programs onto the boards.
In the 90's, graphics progress was extremely rapid. Every piece of 3D hardware was obsolete within months! The Pro-1000 occupied an entire motherboard-sized board. It was therefore not a true "GPU" because it consisted of multiple large custom chips. PowerVR was a single chip, if I remember correctly, and therefore a true GPU and an example of the powerful implications of Moore's Law.
(...) in the how the two system naturally want to manage assets. E.g., on Model 3, the renderer has access to a huge amount of VROM whereas meshes need to be explicitly loaded in from disk on Dreamcast.
-I would expect that Dreamcast's dynamic lighting capabilities were far better than Real3D. For example, how would one do lightmaps on Real3D? I presume something like it was possible on Dreamcast. I was thinking the other day whether Quake could be ported to Model 3. It could easily handle the geometry but what about the dynamic lights?
-The hot air ripples on the desert stage are interesting because they're so ridiculously cheap and easy to do on tile generator hardware, which has a per-line scroll mode. But if all you have are textured polygons or a frame buffer to draw to directly, the effect becomes much more complicated to pull off.
-I'd love to see a synthetic benchmark constructed for Model 3 and Dreamcast Smile It is within the realm of feasibility because I have gotten code running on Model 3. Just need a better mechanism to transfer it than burning EPROMs lol.
RAM and ROM: RAM and ROM re only one part of the issue. Model 3 games have access to all of their ROM immediately and the CPU (and graphics processor) can read from it directly. A big part of the porting effort is reorganizing the games so that they can be broken up into chunks that can be loaded infrequently from disc into Dreamcast RAM. For example, in a fighting game like VF3, you can read in the level geometry and opponent character model between stages. It might be trickier with something like Sega Rally 2 where on the Model 3, the replay at the end of the championship race can go through all the levels without any loading time (maybe the levels were small enough that this was true on Dreamcast too, I don’t know). But the bigger issue is that emulation has ~10x the overhead of a port. Supermodel doesn’t translate Model 3 code, it interprets each instruction one by one. It takes more than 10 instructions (ballpark estimate) for Supermodel to execute a single instruction of the emulated PowerPC CPU. On top of that, Model 3 graphics hardware works differently than PC 3D hardware or Dreamcast, so there is considerable overhead parsing and preparing the 3D vertex data for rendering and making sure the graphics hardware renders it in a way that matches Model 3 behavior.
When porting a game, the graphics code would be completely rewritten to work directly with the target system.
May 2022
RoMagnusLarsson wrote:Sega Model 3 (1996): Processor 66Mhz / Audio RAM 1Mb / Vídeo 8Mb RAM 66Mhz.
Sega Dreamcast (1999): Processor 200Mhz / Audio RAM 2Mb / Video RAM 8Mb 100Mhz
cloofoofoo wrote:The dreamcast can trade blows with step 1 and step 1.5. Step 2 and up completely outpaces the dreamcast.
cloofoofoo wrote:Lets look at step 1.5/1.0 games. Virtua fighter 3 tb is quite close to the model 3. Very small difference in polygon count while heavy difference in clothing physics. Overall not too bad.
cloofoofoo wrote:Step 2 - sega rally 2 runs half the framerate and massive reduction to geometry.
cloofoofoo wrote:just saying that model 3 freaking streams everything in final format from its rom to its gpu at will, at massive speeds gives it a huge huge advantage over the Dreamcast that probably leads to all these downgrade to cope with having to stuff the ram with assets AND having no built in tnl.
cloofoofoo wrote:Youre crazy to think dc can emulate it.
Gabbyjay wrote:cloofoofoo wrote:The dreamcast can trade blows with step 1 and step 1.5. Step 2 and up completely outpaces the dreamcast.
I would agree with that assessment.
Although even Model 3 Step-1 has advantages over Dreamcast.
Dreamcast is newer technology-wise, so some of it's effects offer more flexibility (lighting, shadows, fog), it's got more transparency-levels, TC and the like. It uses triangles instead of Model 3's quads, which makes things a lot easier and less expensive.
Also, it's games ran at a slightly higher resolution (640x480 compared to M3's 496x384).
But Model 3 Step-1's ROM-architecture offers vastly more raw horsepower. Those were over $20.000 expensive beasts!
Also, when comparing (theoretical) polygon-performance, people should always consider that Model 3's specs on this always include shading, texturing, illumination, z-buffering, transparency, anti-aliasing and the like.
Dreamcast's numbers do not (disregarding z-buffering, of course) and are limited by available memory anyway, if you want to still have some space for VQ-compressed textures.
I especially like the anti-aliasing-part on Model 3.
No Dreamcast-game used real anti-aliasing, I know only of a handful using the partial 2xSSAA (which works only horizontally) and that's about it (don't confuse the flicker-fixer on interlace displays with AA). Model 3 has it's own edge-AA-solution, which works similar to MSAA.cloofoofoo wrote:Lets look at step 1.5/1.0 games. Virtua fighter 3 tb is quite close to the model 3. Very small difference in polygon count while heavy difference in clothing physics. Overall not too bad.
I have to agree.
VF3 on the DC does not deserve the bad reputation it had back then, you have to look closely to see the differences (textures suffered a bit, too, and there's more aliasing). You surely got the arcade-experience at home!
On the other hand, people often say VF3 on the DC was only a launch-title and could be better... true, but they ignore VF3 was a launch title for the much more complicated Model-3-architecture as well. Also, VF3 came two and a half years earlier in the arcades, a long time in the 3D-graphics-industry, so understanding of 3D-game engines in general and also the development of game engine assets and human resources moved on, too.
Still a questionable policy that one of Sega's top-arcade-hits did not enjoy top priority by porting them Sega-internally, but Genki did a very good job in the end nonetheless.cloofoofoo wrote:Step 2 - sega rally 2 runs half the framerate and massive reduction to geometry.
Or unstable 60fps depending on the version... textures suffered a lot as well, as did draw-distance.
SR2 on DC ran at WinCE which always introduced a little overhead, but could not match the arcade-version anyway, which ran at Step 2, which was vastly more powerful than earlier M3-revisions.
Still much, much closer to the arcade then SR1 was on the Saturn!
But while the Saturn-game was praised into the sky for being faithful to the arcade, SR2 on the DC was stomped on... I still don't get it.cloofoofoo wrote:just saying that model 3 freaking streams everything in final format from its rom to its gpu at will, at massive speeds gives it a huge huge advantage over the Dreamcast that probably leads to all these downgrade to cope with having to stuff the ram with assets AND having no built in tnl.
I agree. People often do not realize how different M3s hardware was to later setups. Just comparing the specs they know, disregarding the specs they don't understand and then treating both systems as if it were the same architecture just does not do it justice.cloofoofoo wrote:Youre crazy to think dc can emulate it.
Well, the thread opener asked if those games could be ported, which is a different situation of course.
We will never know how well that would work out and how real ports of those games would look on DC, unfortunately.
But Model 3-emulation on Dreamcast?
No way in hell... you would have measure the speed of the game in frames per year. : D
Gabbyjay wrote:Dont forget that DoA 2 was released in the year 2000 on the dreamcast, thats 4 years after VF3 in the arcades.
cloofoofoo wrote:Doa2 was shown off early 1999, meaning they were probably working on it since early 1998Gabbyjay wrote:Dont forget that DoA 2 was released in the year 2000 on the dreamcast, thats 4 years after VF3 in the arcades.
it shows that convertions could have been close to 1:1
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