What game has the best graphics?

[cloofoofoo]

PSO has a graphic and model detail that goes near the best that a dreamcast can offer, this is why in pso ver.2 certain things were removed or changed to make the game more friendly online, however even so slowdowns occur.

Soul calibur has some really basic backgrounds and fields but the char is heavily detailed

Sonic adventure doesn't have a uber model quality because the game is quite big, so they made things space friendly

UT, doesn't have much detail and chars don't look that great, the reason the game may become slow is because of certain mutators and because the game has a insane draw distance.
The draw distance is usefull in this game, i can't really consider as a relevant graphical quality, PSO doesn't need it and that makes the game faster wich gives some flexibility regarding what can be displayed on screen.

Ecco is really good, it's a big game, certain things are really detailed, it uses a low draw distance so what's on screen is really good and i mean it, there are lot's of details, textures and models that fit perfectly, finding something less detailed that is relevant is really hard.

Soul calibur characters arent that detailed,with their weapons they are like 4000 triangles at max,thats pretty low for a fighting game.Like project justice where the character models are around 2000-3000 triangles.
Only fighting game with high polygon count characters with dead or alive 2 which run from 8,500-10,000 triangles.Pso iam not sure because I havent extracted frames from it in a long time.But its not as high as you think,and to top it off the game is locked at 30fps with somewhat low pps.

[Gary_b]

even with low polys soul calibur looks amazing on a VGA box. idk why it looks so nice?

[cloofoofoo]

i found some information on this subject. according to it Test Drive Lemans pushed 5 million per second. i stated 7 earlier . in any case it is still quoted as having the highest polygon per second for any Dreamcast game and the game with the 2nd highest PPS is Dead Or Alive 2 at 3 million per second.

they also say that resident evil 4 was pushing 5 million, so having any game run at this PPS on the Dreamcast is one hell of an achievement for being what is said to be inferior hardware.

One thing to keep in mind is that relatively few Dreamcast titles
broke the 1 million mark in its short lifecycle. Games known to have
done so are VF3tb (1 million pps) Sonic Adventure 2, F355 and DOA 2 (3
million pps) and Test Drive: Le Mans (5 million pps). The average
title, ported from the PC, PS1 and N64 were lower than 800k from what
I've seen, including the well reputed Soul Calibur.

source
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive ... 00230.html

I remember asking someone about that 5 milliom pps lemans.He called bullshit on that by saying the dreamcast maxes out at 4.1 million pps at 60 fps(this wasnt the first time I heard that,the cubic vr dev also mentions something like that).He summed it up by saying 5 mpps or higher at 30 fps on the dreamcast is somewhat impossible due to the fact it may not have enough memory for the vertex buffers.
I decided to see if this was true by ripping out frames when the game was at its most crammed on screen and the highest i could get was around 40,000 tri on screen.40,000 times 30 fps= 1200000 triangles per second.Most games on the dreamcast that run at 30fps on dreamcast(including shemue) I noticed run at max 40,000-50,000 triangles per frame.

Only game to push beyon 1million pps was trigger heart running at around 45000-50000 at 60fps so thats around 2.4 million to 3 million triangles per seconf.And when I extracted that data trigger heart wasnt even clipped the offscreen like most dc games do,so I captured up to 70,000 triangles.

[Gary_b]

idk man but i can say this, if DOA 2 runs at 3 mill then test drive has to run at a more. it just has a lot more going on and it looks a hell of lot better imo. btw did you do your test in full rain with all the cars? was it just you racing down the strip?


here is more useful information from that thread i posted earlier. sorry cloofoofoo, but i think this guy knows his shit. i will see if i can dig up some evidence that these claims are false just to prove or disprove this.
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive ... 00193.html

[Gary_b]

iThe system's processor is a 200 MHz SH-4 with an on-die 128-bit vector graphics engine, 360 MIPS and 1.4 GFLOPS (single precision), using the vector graphics engine. The graphics hardware is a PowerVR2 CLX2 chipset, capable of 7.0 million polygons/second peak performance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast

Dreamcast:
CPU: 128 bit risc cpu @200mhz
Graphics: PowerVR2 CLX2, 6.7 Mio polygons/second peak performance
Memory:
Main RAM: 16 MB 64 Bit 100 MHz,
Video RAM: 8 MB 4x16 Bit 100 Mhz,
Sound RAM: 2 MB 16 Bit 66 MHz

http://www.yougamers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3075

# CPU: SH-4 RISC|RISC CPU with 128 Bit FPU functions for 3D graphics computations (operating frequency: 200 MHz, 360 MIPS, 1.4 GFLOPS)
# Graphics Engine: PowerVR2 CLX2, 7.0 Mil polygons/second peak

http://indiedreams.wikia.com/wiki/Sega_Dreamcast

everything i read seems to suggest that the Dreamcast can indeed reach 5 million PPS. it may not be easy to achieve but why wouldn't it be able to? anyway i don't feel like digging up anymore system specs. i will try to find more proof of Test drives poly counts.

[Gary_b]

This is not only a problem of the graphics card, but the wholey unoptimized main CPUs (Athlon, Intel) that are just chips that have brute force instructions power and not 3D geometry in mind. See the fact hat Dreamcast can hit 5 million polygons a second on screen with full textures, lighting, and particles (Test Drive LeMans). Dreamcast can do pretty good not because of the PowerVR it uses, but because of the SH4 Risc processor. It's a powerhouse.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/archive ... -5074.html


here's a thread at pcvsconsole.com that talks about the DC and PS2. he says that test drive lemans is like GT3 and 4. idk about that but its interesting anyway.
http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=14680


this one says 4.5 million. though he doesn't say that it was Test drive he does mention it later. look in the graphics section.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/dreamca ... 21277.html


i have searched high and low and i have not found anything that proves test drive lemans runs at any PPS rate. i have found a lot of information and claims that it runs at around 5 million PPS. on a side note i dont see anything saying it runs at around 1 million like you have found in your test. idk what you did to get that number or what others did to get 5? one thing is for sure 3 to 4 million PPS difference is a large amount!

[Dihnekis]

I think the best looking games are Shenmue, DOA 2, and Soul Calibur. If I had to pick one, I would pick Soul Calibur. Looks absolutely beautiful even compared to modern games. Rez and PSO look damn good too... but not as mind blowing.

[cloofoofoo]

idk man but i can say this, if DOA 2 runs at 3 mill then test drive has to run at a more. it just has a lot more going on and it looks a hell of lot better imo. btw did you do your test in full rain with all the cars? was it just you racing down the strip?


here is more useful information from that thread i posted earlier. sorry cloofoofoo, but i think this guy knows his shit. i will see if i can dig up some evidence that these claims are false just to prove or disprove this.
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive ... 00193.html

Doa2 does not run at 3mpps.From what I extrected the highest I ever got was 30,000-35,000 at 60 fps which is like 2.1 mpps.Remeber than sega tech link you found? Go read it again, it says theoretically the sh4 goes up to 7 million pps but the dreamcast might not have the memory to store that amount.

throughput is 7 million polygons per second, but in Dreamcast, geometry data storage becomes the limiting factor before pixel engine throughput.

Let see, if the Dreamcast can render more polygons then it can store, and I will use 6 mpps as an example:

6,000,000 (polygons) / 60 (frames per second) = 100,000 polygons per scene
100,000 x 40 Bytes (size of polygon) = ~4 MB

Since the Dreamcast only has 8 MB of video memory, that is a lot of memory!

8 MB - 1.2 MB (640x480x16-bits double buffered frame buffer) - 4 MB (polygon data) = 2.8 MB

Only 2.8 MB left for textures, and even with VQ compression that is not very much. At 3 mpps per second, there is 5.8 MB available for textures, and that is much better. Just shows you, that there is not much point in creating a game engine on the DC that does more than 3 million polygons per second. Anyway 90 percent of the developers out there cannot even get over a million polygons per second on the Dreamcast.

So it seems the frame buffer takes a huge chunk and not to mention you have to take in consideration the textures.It could be that this lack of memory stopped the dreamcast from going above 2.5/3 million polygon per second in a real game situation.And i notice that what the article says it true almost no one,not even sega themselves went above 1 million.Thats Why I found it hard to believe trigger heart a 3rd party game is pushing way over 2million polygon in the first stage of the game only(then the rest of the game seems to be running close to 2 million but stays a little under.)I think this is all do people not taking a big budget and time to cater to dc hardware like they did for the ps2.

Thought iam curious, if the dreamcast can run 3 million pps at 60 fps which is 50,000 per frame does it mean it can do 3 million pps at 30 frames at 100,000 per frame? Could you imagine what potentially good graphics it can produce if it can.

[Gary_b]

i cant prove the number no matter what i do. its interesting that you get 1/5th of the PPS as others though. idk what you are doing to get them or what they did to get their numbers? i wonder if the developer released those numbers at some point?

[cloofoofoo]

Sorry to double post heres the guy developing cubicvr for the dreamcast, a statement that might prove you right.

Code: Select all

t's using the KGLX (PVR OpenGL) library from Kallistios coupled with the compiled normal & dynamic lighting arrays from CubicVR's SH4 Optimized lighting. Currently only point lights are supported but there is no limit on the number of lights. The PowerVR in the Dreamcast can only transform 3Million polys/sec but has no lighting engine .. However the SH4 can actually transform 5Million/sec which makes it ideal for lighting -- but it can only be utilized efficiently through SH4 Assembly code. 

Notice how basically says you have to make it for the ground up for the dc by using assembly.

then there was this anonymous guy who sound like he knew what he was talking about:

've done some homebrew for the DC. I can get the DC to max out at about 4.1 million polygons per frame with ~30% CPU idle time left over. At that point, the PVR can't go any faster.

My test was drawing lit, transformed, textured, anisotropicly filtered tori at 60 FPS. Lighting was a dot, clamp to >0.0, and ambient add. There were 144 tori, each was a single triangle strip containing 480 vertices, or 478 polygons. All of these tori were rotating around in front of the camera. You could probably get a higher polygons-sent-to-TA number if you were sending polygons that are off screen or something, and can be culled by the PVR.

Le Mans definitely does not do 5 million polygons per second. My 4.1 million at 60 FPS uses up almost all of the DC's VRAM for vertex buffers and frame buffers. Le Mans runs at 30 FPS. Doing 4.1 at 30 FPS would require twice as large vertex buffers, since you send twice as many polygons per frame, but that's not possible because there's no VRAM left for larger vertex buffers. 5 million is even less likely to have been done. I know of a few complicated tricks to reduce how large of a vertex buffer is required, but I doubt they've ever been used.

So you maybe be right but is there anyway to really check without some one actually making a benchmark for light textured polygons at 60fps and 30fps made specifically for the dc?

I know none of this cant be proven but its fun to speculate what could have been.Sorry if it seems I was serious.