Dreamcast-Talk.com

How good was the DC at handling particles? I know this may not be the best question to ask since it relies heavily on the particle system developed for a game. But I wasn't sure if anyone had information on special techniques used to make particles run especially well. I know that the PS2 for example had a Vector Processing Unit, which when taken full advantage of, could provide excellent particle effects without the main processor taking too much of a hit at all. Looking at the dreamcast though it appears as though any particle system would have to be run through the main Hitachi Processor which would be taxing for any complicated effects in a 3D game.

Can you remind us of some Dreamcast games that have notable particle effects?

Not the same thing, but there were a bunch of dreamcast games that had fake reflections. For instance, the windows and windshields of your car in Tokyo Xtreme Racer would appear to be reflecting the street lights but it was most likely a simple repeating texture rather than an actual reflection of the environment. The dreamcast was still sort of the infancy of 3d texture mapped graphics where developers had to put a lot of effort into managing the limited system resources just to make realistic or advanced looking models and environments, and various tricks were employed to simulate effects that would otherwise consume too many resources (e.g., like the fake reflections), so I'd be surprised if there was anything noteworthy about the dreamcast's innate capability to do particle effects.

Anything with translucency is usually going to invoke a performance hit on PowerVR. There are punch-through textures (think of them like having a key value to mask off pixels) that can get almost as good performance as opaque polygons with the obvious downside of no gradients for the blending.

Shadow Man is a game that I know had the particles reduced during one part of the intro cutscene on Dreamcast for the water being kicked up by a boat's motor, due to there being too many to render at a decent pace.

In short: nothing special so far as handling particles is concerned.

Check out Expendable. 3D graphics capabilities were advancing at a breakneck pace around the time of the Dreamcast's launch. PC GPUs were on something like a 6 month release schedule. Crazy times. But back to Expendable, I remember an interview with the dev stating that they were really trying to push the lighting and particle effects to the max to see what new hardware could do.

I think Rayman 2 had alot of cool particles effects.

Illbleed had some AMAZING particle effects for the time. Like when you or an emey uses the flame thrower, it just looks pretty damn great... I just didnt really expect it from a Dreamcast game. Graphics overall in that game are way underrated...

Crazy Taxy (sparks, they react to environment)
Ecco the Dolphin (bubbles)
Deal or alive (water splashes)
Shenmue ( the snow and rain are actually particles not a cardboard and the behave like that)

And others I can't remember right now

Inferno in SoulCalibur had firey particles flying out of him.

I recall a few reviews bringing up impressive particle effects in Under Defeat.

I think Ikaruga on dreamcast is another one. Unless they used some programming tricks to simulate or fake particles.