What game has the best graphics?

[cloofoofoo]

explain how to calculate the polygons and i will try to test it. i got the game running on my PC. it runs like shit but it does work. if i have to set shit up in NullDC tell me what needs to be done.

Hmm if it runs like shit it might be a prob.I no longer have this stuff but I remember what you need.You need the older version of null dc with the 3d plugin, dxripper and 3ds max 9.You try the dxripper with the newer version, it will extract all of what is on screen but it will comeout without depth,ironically the vert count stays intact.Then once youve captured the frame open it up using 3ds max 9 using the plug in that 3dripper installs for it(file format .3dr).Since its capturing games while running you will see how dreamcast clips what is not seen ofscreen or sometimes even the characters unseen parts(like shenmue 1 but not shenmue 2 odd enough.) Problem you say it runs like crap,then you will have a hard time converting as it seems to resource intensive then so is the importing to 3dsmax for some reason.


Then from what you extracted check what the program says the triangle count is for the entire scene u captured. Use that count and multiply with the frame rate the game runs so you captured scene that is at 10,000 trianges and the game runs at 60 fps 10,000x60=600,000.Games that work for the older emu are alot less than the current one.Also it seems you cant keep textures from other frames you captured except for one,have more and it seems to screw things up while loading them in 3ds max.Its rather tedious seeing how you only have a 30 day test version of 3ds max to on with.

Heres something I captured with code veronica its about 25,000 verts and 25,000 triangles.I no longer have 3ds max and deleted most of my other captures so this obj capture sux and Id reccomend to stick to .3dr.




Click to enlarge

[Gary_b]

i updated many things on my PC and the emulator is running a lot smoother. i got a new video card, sata hard drive and DVD burner, though the DVD burner doesn't help here lol. i plan to upgrade the P4 2.8GHz HT to a 3.0GHz HT soon just for the hell of it. anyway i took a few screen shots of the game.



click on the image for a larger view

[Neoblast]

Shenmue 2, period.

[TheCoolinator]

ClooFooFoo,

Have you found any other games that impressed you?

[Barrys_Bapz]

Crazy Taxi had a nice sunny theme to it



Dead or Alive 2



Don't worry the zombies are looking for brains, you're safe..

[Gary_b]

I will try to upload a screenshot sometime so you can check it out, and i really hope to find some free time so i can work on my new format and check out the dc's limits.

yeah some screen shots would be cool.


i would like to see the DC fully tapped out. some games push the hardware pretty good already. but like every other system the games would have looked even better later in the systems life, had the Dreamcast been supported longer, who knows what we would have seen?

[Anthony817]

Yeah, we could have had racers looking as good as GT4. Just look at how nice TD Le Mans looked, and that was like only 2 years after the hardware was made.

[50inchDLP]

Test drive lemans on VGA looks amazing.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwk5b204F-Q[/youtube]

[Anthony817]

Agreed 50, I need a VGA box dude damn haha.

[cloofoofoo]

regarding polygon counts...if you want decent image quality you need an 640x480x24bpp resolution which leaves us with roughly 6 megabytes for geometry and textures. Assuming you use all 6 of them for geometry (clearly not realistic), you end up with 3 megabytes for each of the 2 vertex buffers that reside in vram. The simplest useful vertex format for the powervr chipset needs 32 bytes per vertex, so we can afford roughly 90000 vertices because some space is also consumed for tile organization etc...so do the math....that's 30000 triangles. If you manage to transform and light them at 60 fps, you got 1.8 million triangles. That's about it, end of story, the vram can't hold more at this level of image quality. If you want more you need to lower the resolution or bits per pixel, or work with stripped frame buffers which consume almost no vram space but are very inefficient as far as render time is concerned and a bitch to get working properly. Naomi has double the amount of vram, so it can afford more polys

However, if you manage to organize triangles in triangle strips you can aford much greater "effective" polygon counts. I can easily take a 50000 triangle model that would need 150k vertices in vram and strip it down to 70k vertices with ZERO quality loss. So that gives me an "effective" mesh of 50k triangles, despite the fact that i store it in vram in a very efficient way. With one dynamic point light and one base texture i can do this in full 60 fps, getting an effective 3mpps. From what i have seen no dreamcast game comes close, but of course they need vram space for textures and have also game logic to execute. The highest poly counts i have seen are in DOA2, usually around 10k polygons for characters and backgrounds which is very good considering the quality of lighting and animation of the skinned characters. Lemans has a high poly car in the car selection screen, but in game it uses lower quality models, especially for distant cars. Nowhere near even DOA2's poly counts, but it still looks really nice, one of my favourites. Another good one is ecco, really phenomenal when it came out, i was truly amazed. Also nullDC's author once told me that the emulator sends roughly 25% more geometry because of the way it organizes data, so the numbers you see there are slightly higher than the real ones.

I would like to note that my results evaluate the shader for every vertex sent to the powervr. This is a limitation of my current format, and currently the sh4 maxes out at 80k vertices (almost 160k "effective" vertices) per frame at 60fps, that's 3+ times the amount of geometry of DOA2, and if we look at the "effective" numbers, well make it 6+. Of course i do not do the type of detailed animation they did, but it gives you an idea of the raw amount of geometry the dc can push. I have a new format in the works that will use indexed vertex arrays and will be way faster. This will make transformations and lighting for the sh4 much cheaper, but of course triangle counts can't go up since there is the vram space limitation. I will try to upload a screenshot sometime so you can check it out, and i really hope to find some free time so i can work on my new format and check out the dc's limits.

I hope i cleared some things up for you.

Ah thanks thats clears a few things up.I figured there a few things wrong with the polygon counts I had when I recently tried few days ago.For example dead or alive 2 models for characters were now 13,000 instead typical 8-9.5K,so what you said about being 25% bigger makes pefect sense.So if everything is 25% smaller though that rather depressing already
considering some of the amounts I captured like code veronica which where already a low 20-25K per frame at 30fps,ouch.