PS2 vs Dreamcast Graphics

[KitsuneNight]

in 20 years the ps 2 will still be remembered for being the first console with a dvd
for helping breaking dvd's inthe mainstream
for selling 150 million units
and for having a huge library

people are still remembering the nes and sms and megadrive after all

[retrospiel]

Some PS2 games run in odd resolutions like 320x480 or 640x240 it seems. Dreamcast games run in 640x480 (except for those NeoGeo and CPS2/3 ports of course).

[zyrobs]

PS2 vs DC is like the Saturn vs Playstation just with the roles reversed.

[Team Andromeda]

Textures and AA are where the DC was in front of the PS2, but sorry for all out polygons and graphics the PS2 did stuff the DC could only dream of matching . GOD OF WAR 1 and II, Metal Gear Soild 2, Silent Hill 3 and GT 3/4 are way in front of the anything the DC could hope to produce

[Gogogadget]

That's...debatable.

It is, except for the bit where the PS2 controller has 10 buttons whilst the Dreamcast has only 4 face buttons + 2 analog triggers, and only 1 analog stick where as when the PS2 took off games requiring more than one analog stick became commonplace.

The Dreamcast is a good console, but it died before it's generation really took off and the other consoles have far too many games for me to even put the Dreamcast anywhere near the other consoles libraries.

[Team Andromeda]

It does when it comes to texturing and how it can handle it's memory. PS2 has more Memory that's unified, but it can't do any kind of texture compression. Textures have to be stored uncompressed in RAM. Dreamcast has 8MB of dedicated VRAM and it can do texture compression. So Dreamcast can use it's memory more effectively in this aspect. If you have say 20MB of textures you can easily compress that down to say 5MB on the Dreamcast where as on the PS2 it takes of 20MB of your unified 32MB. So on the PS2 you reach a point where you need to reduce the amount of stuff you have in your game so you have more room for textures, or reduce your texture quality

The thing is and what you overlook is the PS2 huge bandwidth with was simply insane and huge for the time .

A good example of how the PS2's Memory set up really limited a game is Phantasy Star Universe. In some aspects this game took a few steps backwards compared to the original PSO on the Dreamcast.

Its not really a good example . Sonic Team were in a bit of mess in those days and some of their coding on both the PS2 and XBox was below par

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Textures and AA are where the DC was in front of the PS2, but sorry for all out polygons and graphics the PS2 did stuff the DC could only dream of matching . GOD OF WAR 1 and II, Metal Gear Soild 2, Silent Hill 3 and GT 3/4 are way in front of the anything the DC could hope to produce

I think we discussed this before but Gran Turismo 4 is right on the edge of the amount of Polygons the Dreamcast can do. It supposedly does 4 Million Polygons per second which at 60fps would be around 66k per frame. Considering that the cars average 4000 polygons and there are 6 of them on the track at a time that would be about 24k Polygons for the cars which would leave about 40k more for the scenery. So polygon wise it probably wouldn't be impossible to get something like GT4 running on the Dreamcast.

The thing is and what you overlook is the PS2 huge bandwidth with was simply insane and huge for the time .

The bandwidth does help, though the lack of texture compression does still hurt it. Think of it like this. We have 20MB of textures on both systems. On Dreamcast this wont fit into VRAM, but that's not an issue as we can compress them down to 5MB and it fits happily in VRAM. On PS2 we can't compress it, but 20MB will fit in our 32MB of RAM. Now when the GPUs have to read this from RAM I believe is where the bandwidth comes into play (Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here.) If I remember correctly the bandwidth on the Dreamcast is 800 MB/s and on the PS2 it's 1.2 GB/s. Now if we want to see how many times per second we can move that texture data over we'd divide 800 by 5 for the Dreamcast, and 1200 by 20 for the PS2. The end result is on the Dreamcast we can move those same textures 160 times to the GPU in a second, where as on the PS2 we can only do it 60 times.

I remember reading this years ago here:

http://www.segatech.com/technical/consolecompare/

Now how accurate this is I don't really know. Though if it is accurate that does give a very interesting comparison between the two. If the PS2 had Texture compression this argument wouldn't even exist. It's probably why so many Dreamcast games have better textures than their PS2 counterparts.

Its not really a good example . Sonic Team were in a bit of mess in those days and some of their coding on both the PS2 and XBox was below par

Sonic Team had made at least 4 or 5 PS2 games by the time Phantasy Star Universe was released. So I'd say they had their shit together by that point. It's pretty clear that the issues with PSU's design were caused by the PS2's limitations. On the Japanese PC version when they dropped PS2 support suddenly all those limitations went a way and we started getting more variety in textures for the new areas, more enemies per block, blocks became larger, etc.

[Team Andromeda]

I think we discussed this before but Gran Turismo 4 is right on the edge of the amount of Polygons the Dreamcast can do. It supposedly does 4 Million Polygons per second which at 60fps would be around 66k per frame. Considering that the cars average 4000 polygons and there are 6 of them on the track at a time that would be about 24k Polygons for the cars which would leave about 40k more for the scenery. So polygon wise it probably wouldn't be impossible to get something like GT4 running on the Dreamcast.

It way and above anything what the DC could do and you can just compare GT 4 or 3 to F355, Sega GT and MSR and see that GT 4/3 is streets ahead of those titles

[Black_Tiger]

I think we discussed this before but Gran Turismo 4 is right on the edge of the amount of Polygons the Dreamcast can do. It supposedly does 4 Million Polygons per second which at 60fps would be around 66k per frame. Considering that the cars average 4000 polygons and there are 6 of them on the track at a time that would be about 24k Polygons for the cars which would leave about 40k more for the scenery. So polygon wise it probably wouldn't be impossible to get something like GT4 running on the Dreamcast.

Look at how good Le Mans 24 Hours looked on Dreamcast four years earlier.

[Barone]

It is, except for the bit where the PS2 controller has 10 buttons whilst the Dreamcast has only 4 face buttons + 2 analog triggers, and only 1 analog stick where as when the PS2 took off games requiring more than one analog stick became commonplace.

The Dreamcast is a good console, but it died before it's generation really took off and the other consoles have far too many games for me to even put the Dreamcast anywhere near the other consoles libraries.

This. +1.

Look at how good Le Mans 24 Hours looked on Dreamcast four years earlier.

Yep.
I don't have the percentages but I think we could say that the Dreamcast games of its first two years had, overall, higher frame rate than the PS2's first two years games.
Also, games like Rayman 2 are 60 fps on the DC and not 60 fps on the PS2. Just saying...

[TrekkiesUnite118]

It way and above anything what the DC could do and you can just compare GT 4 or 3 to F355, Sega GT and MSR and see that GT 4/3 is streets ahead of those titles

Yeah, that has nothing to do with the fact that those games are years older .

[Yharnamresident]

Why aren't you guys hatin on the PS2 for only having 48 audio channels? you're supposed to surpass the competition in every aspect!!

[Yharnamresident]

PS2 weaknesses:
-tough to program for
-no texture compression, overall texture capabilities are weak
-don't got 64 audio channels like the competition

Dreamcast weaknesses:
-low storage space, 1.2 GBs ain't enough for sh!t
-main RAM should've been bumped up to 24 MBs. Kinda ironic considering they were originally planning to give the Dreamcast only 8MBs main RAM, oh god that would've went sour
-controller was deprecated even at launch

[Bottino]

The Dreamcast is a good console, but it died before it's generation really took off and the other consoles have far too many games for me to even put the Dreamcast anywhere near the other consoles libraries.

Are there really that many consoles that have a library so much better than the Dreamcast?

IMO the Dreamcast produced in 3 years a library that's better than the N64, X-Box and Game Cube combined. Maybe that's just the fanboy in me speaking, but Sony fanboys are everywhere, so...

It way and above anything what the DC could do and you can just compare GT 4 or 3 to F355, Sega GT and MSR and see that GT 4/3 is streets ahead of those titles

.

Are you comparing a 2005 release with games from 2000?

[sheath]

What I like about the Dreamcast, and other "failed" Sega consoles, is the library of completely unique games. The graphics being generally smoother than PS2 games is just another perk. Also, analog sticks beats four bumper/shoulder buttons any day of the week for most games. By the time the PS2 "took off" with actual software that needed Dual Analog sticks, it was for games with shoddy AI cameras that forced the player to play Actor and Director. FPS wasn't the PS2's strong suit for YEARS remember, and pressure sensitive face buttons are a complete joke.

If the PS2 hadn't lasted ten freaking years it would be remembered as a DVD player first, a PS1 second and a PS2 player third. Also, there are dedicated threads for this discussion all over the forum already. The PS2's supposed polygon performance advantage has already been discussed in the Dreamcast appreciation thread and the 6th Generation thread.

-edit-

Some video comparisons:






Sword of the Berserk:


Draconus Cult of the Wyrm: