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6'th gen hardware wars: Game Cube vs Xbox OG vs PS2 vs Dreamcast

pawel86ck

Banned
Lets continue 6'th gen discussion here guys because we dont need offtopic discussion in PS5 thread, and it looks like some people really think GC was the most capable 6 gen console... so prepare for yet a other xbox vs GC war... but of course please talk about PS2 and DC as well here, basically speaking the whole 6'th gen 😀

Some interesting quotes from previous thread:

Gc could do anything Xbox can through its tev units
"Chozofication" suggest GC could do anything like xbox. GC hardware had no shaders, shadows buffers, 50% less RAM and no HDD for caching purposes, and yet some people suggest it could do everything like xbox.

GameCube was the best technically. While Xbox had faster clocks and more ram, it was bottlenecked by a slow front side bus and low memory bandwidth. Had Xbox been given eDRAM and a faster bus it would have been no contest.
GC was the best... because it had higher memory bandwidth?

The best looking Game Cube, xbox, DC, PS2 games below. Because it's hard to find true screenshots (games running on actual hardware), so I will use screenshots from emulators.

Star Wars Rogue Leader
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Metroid Prime 2
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Resident Evil 4
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Fox Adventures
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F-Zero GX

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PS2 Games

GT4
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God Of War 2
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Ghost Hunter
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NFS 6
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Dreamcast games

Quake 3
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Le Mans 24
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Xbox games

Conker
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Riddick
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Splinter Cell 3
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Crimson Skies
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PGR2
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Vorg

Banned
I still remember when I first bought an Xbox, after playing games on ps2. Booting up halo, brute force and conked, it really felt like an actual generation jump over the ps2 at the time. Crazy beast of a machine for its day.

And it kinda was a generational leap. I mean games like DOA3, Riddick, PD Orta, Doom 3, Half Life 2 just wouldn't be possible on any other machine. You have to remember people were buying new PC hardware just to play Doom 3 in 2004. It was the most technnically advanced game up till then and nothing (except maybe Riddick on Xbox) could even come close. Those lighting effects and textures were mind blowing for 2004. While the xbox port was downgraded (obviously), it was still a hugely impressive game. Looked amazing.
 

Armorian

Banned
Xbox was somewhat bottlenecked by RAM speed but it's hands down the best machine of that generation, PS/VS support was game changer.
 

BlackTron

Member
Xbox was a PC crammed in a box. GCN was a more efficiently designed gaming machine -it managed to do more with less.

Despite Xbox still easily being the strongest, it was extremely impressive how GCN games would often challenge Xbox titles for visuals.

I mean, fucking Rogue Squadron on launch day was ridiculous. Software wizards could make a game like that on GCN from the ground up (RIP Factor 5) but Xbox could get a port of a PC game that would bring GCN to its knees.
 

TGO

Hype Train conductor. Works harder than it steams.
GCN games were blurry, also playing mutliplats on the system seemed to reveal the system was operating on less colours.
But I hear the GCN had the same if not better colour system.
Anyone know why?
 

Dr.D00p

Member
Xbox was the most powerful in a brutish kind of way, Gamecube had the most elegant hardware that relied on a very fast custom memory configuration to almost close the gap with Xbox and PS2 was a mess but was popular, apparently.
 

pawel86ck

Banned
A thread back from 2002.
Xbox pushes 8 million polygons a second with textures and effects in the real world, GC pushes 14-20 million real world.
Rogue Leader 1+2 clearly dominating that gen with polycount. RE4 GC clearly had better geometry and more enemies than Riddick on screen as well and the ps2 port of RE4 was a joke.
Man that thread was made in 2002, the most impressive xbox games werent even out yet. Theoretically GC GPU could draw 20-30 million triangles/sec on Game Cube vs 116.5 million triangles/sec on xbox. I dont know if any xbox game pushed over 100 million polygons (probably not because memory bandwidth was indeed a bottleneck on xbox) but these were official calculations based on hardware specification. Below article in regards to that
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/71894-gamecube-vs-xbox-part-deux/13



RE4 was ported to PS2 with decent results. Yes I can see small downgrades in PS2 version, but still game looks very close to GC version. It's not like Splinter Cell 3, where xbox version looked like a totally different game.

When it comes to rogue leader, I have play it and game looked good next to other GC games. But I dont see nothing there that couldnt be done on xbox and in fact wikipedia mention Rogue Leader port on xbox was 50% completed and would look even better than GC version.

After Rogue Squadron III, Factor 5 worked on releasing a Rogue Squadron trilogy with higher graphics and gameplay improvements for the Xbox console. It was cancelled when management in LucasArts changed in 2003 even though the game was 50 percent complete at the time.

And now some more screenshots : 🙂

Doom 3 (xbox)
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Half Life 2 (xbox)
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Far Cry Instincts (xbox)
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Ralli Sport 2

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Xbox & GCN had fantastic visuals compared to the PS2 but Sony's console had a legendary library of games. But being a kid who could only afford one console, I was bitter about REmake, MSG TTS and Halo being console exclusives.
 

deriks

4-Time GIF/Meme God
Better programing always will be the key

Need for Speed Underground has no lag and it's faster on the Game Cube than the others, thou it looked washed up. Kinda of same thing with Batman, but not that much because the PS2 has more vivid colors.

On the other side, True Crime: Streets of L.A. runs like shit on the GC.

Putting the GC aside, Midnight Club 3 on the PS2 looks a N64 game with motion bluer sometimes, while the Xbox is the real deal.
 

Fox Mulder

Member
The Xbox felt like a different generation to the ps2 at times. Third party games would look way better, Xbox live felt fresh, and the built in HDD had benefits like video highlights in nfl2k.

The ps2 had an insane unrivaled library though.
 
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thelastword

Banned
It was also ugly (subjective), with better storage solution Nintendo could copete better with MS/Sony.
It had this lunchbox aesthetic, but quite portable I guess...…..Still Nintendo has never been on the cutting edge relative to the other two in terms of plug and play (USB, HDD bays, Serial Ports, Optical Out)....GC just had the basics and through proprietary hardware, ensured no-one pirated their games.....

GC had a very good GPU, audio and storage was not as good as PS2 obviously, each had their strength, but then PS2 came out at least a year before both GC and XBOX.....
 

V4skunk

Banned
You are the one who started this offtop by posting really strange claims in regards to GC. According to you GC was the fastest 6 gen console:
-better at pushing polygons.
-according to you memory bandwidth on GC was more important and lets ignore Xbox had 50% more RAM and HDD on top of that for caching purposes
-you even claim GC GPU could emulate all DX8 effects without hardware for that with the same performance as xbox hardware



Man that thread was made in 2002, the most impressive xbox games werent even out yet (although IMO halo 1 looked better than any GC game during entire generation) and I honestly don't know how some people judge how many polys a game is displaying. If xbox would render just 8 million polygon max and GC 30 million, then GC games would look much better compared to xbox but it wasnt like that. Theoretically GC GPU could draw 20-30 million triangles/sec on Game Cube vs 116.5 million triangles/sec on xbox. I dont know if any xbox game pushed over 100 million polygons (probably not because memory bandwidth was indeed a bottleneck on xbox) but these were official calculations based on hardware specification. Below article in regards to that
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/71894-gamecube-vs-xbox-part-deux/13



RE4port on PS2 was a joke because it shows even PS2 could run it with decent results? Yes I can see small downgrades in PS2 version, but still game looks very close to GC version. It's not like Splinter Cell 3, where xbox version looked like a totally different game.

When it comes to rogue leader, I have play it and game looked good next to other GC games. It's the only game on GC that use so many graphics effects at once. Bump mapping was frequently used there, water reflections was there and even ships models had self shadows. But the thing is rogue leader was a space shooter, game will small levels and limited scenery (levels were sometime just 2D space background) so no wonder guys from "Factor 5" (rogue leader developer) were able to push polygon counts on ships models and use so many effects like in no other GC game because they werent RAM limited.

But I dont see nothing there that couldnt be done on xbox and in fact wikipedia mention Rogue Leader port on xbox was 50% completed and would look better than GC version.


Dude it is fact the GC outperforms the Xbox on polycount, the GC cpu is far superior to the Intel Celeron in Xbox. Celeron were cheap ass cpu's very similar to an i3 today when i9's are available.
Games like Rogue Leader, F-Zero GX, MP2 and RE4 are clearly running more complex geometry than Riddick or Halo.
The fact is that the GC cpu was so efficient it was used in Wii, the Wiiu cpu is literally 3 GC CPUs duck taped together.
Keep arguing kid ill bring up even more forum topics from 2003 and 2004 to destroy you with the facts.
Of that gen Rogue Leader was the pinnacle in how many polys were being pushed in real time, hundreds of ships on screen at one time...14-20 million polys a second.
 

ethomaz

Banned
Xbox > GC > PS2

The power difference basically shows the time the hardware was in the market launched.
 

Nikana

Go Go Neo Rangers!
I always tried to get multi plats on gcube if possible. I remember some of the games running like crap on ps2.
 
I was a dumb kid at the time and never really noticed much difference between the different consoles (though I never really saw much of XBox). I will say though that the PS2 Slim is one of the greatest console designs of all time. It's so nice and compact, I love it.
 

V4skunk

Banned
I was going to say there are Nintendo fanboys rewriting history but seems they already have in this thread.
No you children are trying to claim the xbox with its shitty Celeron cpu and normal map shiny walls out performed the GC when this is far from the truth. Rogue Squadron a launch GC game out performed the most demanding xbox game in polycount by a huge margin.
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D

Deleted member 740922

Unconfirmed Member
The original Xbox was a wondrous thing at the time. I hope the new Xbox is the same - physically huge and imposing, screaming "POWER!"

No room in your home setup for it? Tough shit.
 

Birdo

Banned
I don't know why but a lot of PS2 games had a muddy smear to them (A type of AA maybe?).

But I remember OG Xbox games looking crisper and sharper. Especially the GTA games.
 
Dude it is fact the GC outperforms the Xbox on polycount, the GC cpu is far superior to the Intel Celeron in Xbox. Celeron were cheap ass cpu's very similar to an i3 today when i9's are available.
Games like Rogue Leader, F-Zero GX, MP2 and RE4 are clearly running more complex geometry than Riddick or Halo.
The fact is that the GC cpu was so efficient it was used in Wii, the Wiiu cpu is literally 3 GC CPUs duck taped together.
Keep arguing kid ill bring up even more forum topics from 2003 and 2004 to destroy you with the facts.
Of that gen Rogue Leader was the pinnacle in how many polys were being pushed in real time, hundreds of ships on screen at one time...14-20 million polys a second.
The Celeron in the Xbox was actually faster than the PPC CPU in the GameCube, the only reason it could have been deemed worse is due to heat inefficiency and die size relative. It was a more powerful CPU however.

The problem with the Rogue Leader "polygon" argument is it related to specific game instances such as when space at the Death Star. If you venture to say Hoth in the game this argument evaporates and that's because it's rendering a geometric intensive landscape and the poly count tanks. There may have been an obscene amount of polys on screen at some given points in time when in space however there were low levels of geometry at play. Many flat planes and empty voids and the surface of the Death Star while having polygonal density had almost no geometry to speak of.

I don't know why but a lot of PS2 games had a muddy smear to them (A type of AA maybe?).

But I remember OG Xbox games looking crisper and sharper. Especially the GTA games.
It was a type of motion blur the system was prone to using, and the GTA games were enhanced on Xbox with some better models and effects.
 
I don't know why but a lot of PS2 games had a muddy smear to them (A type of AA maybe?).

But I remember OG Xbox games looking crisper and sharper. Especially the GTA games.

PS2/Xbox/GC rarely, if ever used any real form of AA. PS2 has a muddy Component output and rarely rendered games in true 640*480. So you got a slightly lower resolution coupled with a muddy output.
Scart output made a big difference but then not really used in the USA.

PS2s only real strength was speed at geometry transformations. To pull off most of its special effects it had to run games at 60fps. My guess is this is how we got higher resolution textures near the end of its life cycle. Basically just add small texture information during each pass until you essentially had a higher resolution version at the end of the cycle.

But I don't really know, I'm just guessing.
 
It was a type of motion blur the system was prone to using, and the GTA games were enhanced on Xbox with some better models and effects.

This is also true. Some Ps2 games usually had better motion blur too. I remember Vice City having a pretty nice set of upgrades on Xbox.
 

JordanN

Banned
I never understood why people say Gamecube was more powerful than Xbox.

Did people forget the Wii was a Gamecube with 50% more power? And yet the games were still very last gen looking.

Xbox had programmable shaders and could output a few games at 720p.
 
I never understood why people say Gamecube was more powerful than Xbox.

Did people forget the Wii was a Gamecube with 50% more power? And yet the games were still very last gen looking.

Xbox had programmable shaders and could output a few games at 720p.
720p Xbox games.

  • 25 To Life
  • Amped 2
  • Crash Nitro Kart
  • Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure
  • ESPN NBA Basketball
  • Evil Dead: Regeneration
  • FIFA 06 Soccer
  • FIFA 07 Soccer
  • FIFA Street
  • FIFA Street 2
  • Freedom Fighters
  • The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction
  • Justice League Heroes
  • Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
  • Mortal Kombat: Armageddon
  • MVP Baseball 2004
  • MVP Baseball 2005
  • MVP 06: NCAA Baseball
  • NBA 2K3
  • NBA Ballers
  • NBA Live 06
  • NBA Live 07
  • Ricochet Lost Worlds
  • Scarface: The World Is Yours
  • Sega GT Online
  • The Sims 2
  • The Sims Bustin' Out
  • Soul Calibur II
  • Steel Battalion: Line of Contact
  • Street Hoops
  • Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
  • Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4
  • Tony Hawk's Underground
  • Tony Hawk's Underground 2
  • Total Overdose: A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico
  • True Crime: Streets of LA
  • The Urbz: Sims in the City
  • Virtual Pool: Tournament Edition
  • The Warriors
  • World Series Baseball 2K3
  • X-Men Legends
  • X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse
1080i Xbox games

  • Atari Anthology
  • Double S.T.E.A.L The Second Clash
  • Dragon's Lair 3D: Return to the Lair
  • Enter the Matrix
  • MX Unleashed
  • MX vs. ATV Unleashed
  • Syberia
 

stranno

Member
XBOX was a Direct3D 8.1 console, while Playstation 2 and Gamecube are more Direct3D 6-7 in terms of technology. Playstation 2 had a really fast fillrate and Gamecube's TEV was really capable though.

Its hard to tell what console has the best versions, since Playstation 2 was usually the base system and it was quite hard to replicate GS's effects on other platforms, Playstation 2 has tons of games where the shading/lightning works much better than XBOX or Gamecube, Crash Bandicoot games for example.

Not to mention the bugs introduced in XBOX/Gamecube ports. Final Fight: Streetwise, for example, looks a bit better on XBOX, but Guy's Dojo is MUCH more difficult because fire extinguisher works like crap on XBOX, timing seems totally broken.

And if you count PC, well, just check Bully. The Playstation 2 game looks great, the Scholarship Edition is horrible in terms of lightning and colours. Not that extreme but pretty much the same with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
 
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Since you made the effort I'll just reiterate, the Xbox is definitely the more modern architecture in terms of the gpu, and yes it has 50% higher clocks.

The issue is in memory bandwidth and fsb speed. Im not sure i actually ssaid cube was more powerful? Just that I consider it the better machine.

We are talking 17gb/s bandwidth for the framebuffer, and texture/effects layers on cube, combined with its 2.6gb/s main memory bandwidth.

For a machine with 50% higher clocks (Xbox) to only have 6.4gb/s bandwidth, it is an issue. Furthermore its front side bus is also a bottleneck ; ideally xbox would have a 233mhz bus for its gpu, but it is only at 133mhz. Both cube and wii have optimally fast fsb speeds.

In general Xbox games have higher res textures, and newer effects like normal maps and stencil shadows, but the latter come with a high performance and geometry cost.

Im simply making the case that cubes exclusives look better as they generally have higher poly counts and better/more effects (such as water in sms, wave race, alpha effects like fog in re4). And nothing short of booting up emulators in wire frame mode, game by game can prove what has higher poly counts, but I'm 100% convinced of my statements.
 

JordanN

Banned
XBOX was a Direct3D 8.1 console, while Playstation 2 and Gamecube are more Direct3D 6-7 in terms of technology. Playstation 2 had a really fast fillrate and Gamecube's TEV was really capable though.
Direct3D was Microsoft's propriety, but you could still recreate the same effects on other systems if you tried.

For example, PS2 could do normal bump mapping in games like Enter the Matrix, but correct me if wrong, to achieve that on PS2 used up a lot of memory bandwidth, so the textures were very low res.

Same thing when it came to doing "fur" like in Conker's Bad Fur Day. PS2 used the shell/fur technique for Shadow of the Colossus and Gamecube had it with Star Fox Adventures.
 
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ROMhack

Member
Xbox was my favourite at the time. Just a beast.

An underrated feature was the ability to play music from the HDD during games. I know Midtown Madness 3 had that but unsure about others.
 
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I never understood why people say Gamecube was more powerful than Xbox.

Did people forget the Wii was a Gamecube with 50% more power? And yet the games were still very last gen looking.

Xbox had programmable shaders and could output a few games at 720p.
Wii is 100% the better machine than Xbox in what they can do per clock. It has more memory, and now its main pool is 6.4gb/s just like Xbox in addition to the advantage cube already had - another pool of 2.6gb/s PLUS the edrams 17gb/s. and its front side bus is 110mhz faster.

720p or not, games like mario galaxy, klonoa, silent hill or prime 3 show wiis visual chops.
 
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zenspider

Member
XBOX was a Direct3D 8.1 console, while Playstation 2 and Gamecube are more Direct3D 6-7 in terms of technology. Playstation 2 had a really fast fillrate and Gamecube's TEV was really capable though.

Its hard to tell what console has the best versions, since Playstation 2 was usually the base system and it was quite hard to replicate GS's effects on other platforms, Playstation 2 has tons of games where the shading/lightning works much better than XBOX or Gamecube, Crash Bandicoot games for example.

And if you count PC, well, just check Bully. The Playstation 2 game looks great, the Scholarship Edition is horrible in terms of lightning and colours. Not that extreme but pretty much the same with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Direct 3D is not a platform agnostic SDK. It doesn't really makes sense to compare them apples to apples by version number against different chipsets that ran OpenGL.
 

JordanN

Banned
Wii is 100% the better machine than Xbox in what they can do per clock. It has more memory, and now its main pool is 6.4gb/s just like Xbox in addition to the advantage cube already had, and it's front side bus is 110mhz faster.

720p or not, games like mario galaxy, klonoa, silent hill or prime 3 show wiis visual chops.
There was something about Wii games that still looked hideous to me compared to the best Xbox games.

And I'm not being bias. I do have a Gamecube and Wii. The Nintendo 3DS even had better visuals than Wii, but with a slower CPU*.

*The launch 3DS which had a 266mhz Arm CPU. Nintendo released the new 3DS which had a cpu clocked at 800mhz. Pretty much matching or eclipsing Wii at that point.
 

JordanN

Banned
Not really. ARM architecture is quite different.
If the CPU was comparable to an iPhone (which I believe many developers said it was), then it would have been more powerful than the Wii/Gamecube''s 1999 architecture.
 
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There was something about Wii games that still looked hideous to me compared to the best Xbox games.

And I'm not being bias. I do have a Gamecube and Wii. The Nintendo 3DS even had better visuals than Wii, but with a slower CPU*.

*The launch 3DS which had a 266mhz Arm CPU. Nintendo released the new 3DS which had a cpu clocked at 800mhz. Pretty much matching or eclipsing Wii at that point.
I mean, to each their own, but I laid out the specs difference.

New 3ds *might* have a better CPU than wii but the gpu is still worse than cube or Xbox and even the ps2 in some cases. 3ds is a dreamcast - ps2 level machine. The original 3ds CPU was too weak to even have ice climbers in smash lol.

Something tells me Wii still has the better CPU than new3ds but i have to do more research.
 
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