But it turned out my memory was correct, in fact in 480p (in xbox classic era I was only playing 480i on CRT) these xbox games looked even more impressive then I have remembered and I have posted many screenshots because I like to show what I'm talking about. Because of that I have played the best looking xbox and GC games after so many years just to refresh my memory and see if you are indeed right. Your opinion was surprising to me but I was willing to change my mind if only GC games would indeed look as good as you suggested. You have also said GC compared to xbox was a monster when it comes to polygons. TEV in GC and DX8 features in xbox arnt equivalent. There's no way GC hardware would emulate everything with good performance results and that's why developers rarely tried to emulate similar effects like on xbox. In order to emulate these shadows in splinter cell games shaders can be used but with very big performance penalty. For example after geforce 5 Nvidia has no longer supported shadow buffer technology in their GPU and it was a problem in certain games. The Xbox was the beast, it definitely looked like a next generation console, i've heard that during the early x360 days, many nicknamed it the Xbox 1.5 due to games not representing a huge leap when compared to its predecessor, it was amazing that it could run games like Doom 3 and Half Life 2, even if they ran on lower quality, that was not expected on the other consoles.Ĭlick to expand.GC had no shadow buffer technology, no pixel and vertex shaders so how you can expect TEV unit alone to emulate everything. Sadly its small data size was considered a hinder, because they also had to compress textures and videos. Funny enough, the minidisc had made the the reader's laser job easier, since it would have to travel way less compared to the normal DVD, and therefore the loadings were quick.
The Gamecube was powerful, but got ousted pretty quickly by the Xbox on that, nonethless, gave impressive games that on the PS2 had to be scaled down even on the polycount, such as RE4 and Killer 7, RE4 IMO looking back, was kinda like a preview of the next generation on the console. The PS2 while was the weakest by far compared to the GC and Xbox, had a very fast texture fillrate, I think it was considered the fastest fill rate by a long margin, but was the least good to program. The Dreamcast was a well ahead in his time, but contrary to some, its actually weaker than the PS2 (this all started because Yu Suzuki said that Shenmue II was not viable on PS2 but rather on Xbox), however, its considered one of the easiest to program, with lots of homebrew games to prove it.