By next year, budget PCs will do the trick. It isn't even, really, 'emulation' more like an extensive 'patching', some kinda directX with a shell around it. Anyway, unless x-box has moved over 10 million units by then, emulation is going to be a world of pain for M$. <hr></blockquote>
Nice point Matsu, I hadn't even considered this - I guess making your console easier to code for also makes it easier to hack.
<strong>I really don't like Xbox, we have one here at our dorm, only games we got are tricky DOA3, both games suck, tricky is really ****ing awesome on the gamecube, but the xbox controls are so hideous that it just ruins the game. at least for me.
<strong>...To compare to Microsoft's XBOX you have to realize that not only is the PPC better than the P3, but that GameCube comes with other performance enhancing features as well.
It has a lot of image processing functions in hardware: Fog, Subpixel Anti-aliasing, 8 Hardware Lights, Alpha Blending, Virtual Texture Design, Multi-texturing, Bump Mapping, Environment Mapping, MIP Mapping, Bilinear Filtering, Trilinear Filtering, Anisotropic Filtering, Real-time Hardware Texture Decompression (S3TC), Real-time Decompression of Display List, HW 3-line Deflickering filter.
The majority of the RAM in the system is 1T-SRAM and it's able to apply 4 filters/textures per pass.
GameCube was made for games from the ground up (unlike XBOX) and all of it's parts are more suited to the task.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Have you actually built games on these platforms? The XBox does all of what is on your list of "performance enhancing features", and a lot of other stuff that the GameCube can't do, and the GPU is programmable whereas the GameCube's is fixed function. Add 64 megs of RAM, a hard disk, and a full DVD drive to that and I have a hard time seeing why the GameCube is better (aside from pricing, marketing and available games). Nothing about the GameCube makes it "more suited to the task" that the XBox. The ~500 MHz G3 is roughly equivalent to the 733 MHz Celeron (which has full SSE), so that is hardly a clear advantage as well -- in fact x86 code is 20-30% smaller so in that sense the x86 is "better suited" to a constrained memory environment. And 16 megs of the GameCube's 40 megs of memory isn't usable by the PPC or graphics engine (only by the DMA engine and audio), making it a pain to use.
There are a couple of specific technical details that the GameCube and PS2 can do better than the XBox, but for most things the XBox wins. The best things about the GameCube are its small size, lower cost, Nintendo games, and Nintendo's experience in building & selling game machines. I hate Microsoft as much as the next Mac guy, but I have to admit that they have put together a technically impressive machine. The GameCube is a good little machine, and its easy to make it sing, but its capabilities are clearly more limited -- over time I think we'll see developers pushing the XBox much further than the GameCube & PS2 can go.
Well the Xbox may be 'superior' or whatever you want to call it, but the Gamecube is the better console, for a number of reasons.
1) The Gamecube isn't the size of a of a nuclear power station.
2) It has better games, like Starfox adventures, that has 100 HOURS of play in it.
3) All that technical jargon doesn't mean $hite when I have not seen one game on the Xbox that impresses me graphically, Rogue Leader II did. (And yes, I have seen the Xbox games in the flesh, as so to speak).
However, what we are asking here is: Is the gekko in the Gamecube faster than a G4?
The answer is no. The G4 manages many more tasks at the same time, running an OS, other bits of Hardware, etc.
Heh, just like to add, ALL of the Xboxes that were being set for the Japan release have been called back in. <img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />
although I wish it had some more....exciting...games, all the games I have for it(quite a few I might add) are fun, but they are easy and have little replay factor. I really want to get smash bros. melee and rogue leader, from what I hear they are totally awesome</strong><hr></blockquote>
FYI 007:Agent Under Fire is set to be released in a week or two. You can preorder at ea.com (as I did). Rogue Leader & SBM are very good (SBM is very fast moving, faster then the N64 version). Word of note: I found Waverace for the Cube very dissappointing. It looks great but I didn't find it nearly as fun as the N64 version (maybe it's just me?).
The Xbox may have some technical advantages over the NGC but I personally feel that many of it's games will be nothing more then quick PC ports (I mean if you were a developer for Windows games you'd probably think, sure we can just bang out a quick Xbox verison with only minor code tweeking), but the developers will probably give little attention to the different control style & other things that make games work on consoles. That and ... well, it's M$, <feels really silly while typing this is IE with word open in the background>personally I try to limit my usage of the products as much as possible </feels really silly while typing this is IE with word open in the background>.
FYI 007:Agent Under Fire is set to be released in a week or two. You can preorder at ea.com (as I did). Rogue Leader & SBM are very good (SBM is very fast moving, faster then the N64 version). Word of note: I found Waverace for the Cube very dissappointing. It looks great but I didn't find it nearly as fun as the N64 version (maybe it's just me?).
The Xbox may have some technical advantages over the NGC but I personally feel that many of it's games will be nothing more then quick PC ports (I mean if you were a developer for Windows games you'd probably think, sure we can just bang out a quick Xbox verison with only minor code tweeking), but the developers will probably give little attention to the different control style & other things that make games work on consoles. That and ... well, it's M$, <feels really silly while typing this is IE with word open in the background>personally I try to limit my usage of the products as much as possible </feels really silly while typing this is IE with word open in the background>.</strong><hr></blockquote>
yea waverace blue storm was a dissapointment, but that was cause I was expecting like a shite load more _NEW_ stages.
I did enjoy the n64 verison ALOT more(I remember trying sooo hard to do a triple backflip on the galcier stage...but to no avail
I played blue storm beating a few circuts and getting some good practice stuff but then I got bored with it
007:agent under fire you say? well I hope its like goldeneye and perfect dark, and not world is not enough or tommorrow never dies or whatever the **** last 007 game I played on n64 last that sucked
I love my gamecube...I beat THPS3 about 1000 times already...getting EVERYTHING with EVERYONE....and its still a fun game
THPS3 is about the only GC game I have that I can just pop in and play, but I just got cel damage and It looks promising...haven't played it too much yet.
pikmin was surprisingly good, I expected a boring as waste of time, but it was fun to throw little plant things and watch them kick big bugs asses...
super monkey ball has some GREAT multiplayer games, but the single player mode gets sooooo damn hard.
I really want to get SB:M now...yea I like console gaming
<strong>Well the Xbox may be 'superior' or whatever you want to call it, but the Gamecube is the better console, for a number of reasons.
1) The Gamecube isn't the size of a of a nuclear power station.
2) It has better games, like Starfox adventures, that has 100 HOURS of play in it.
3) All that technical jargon doesn't mean $hite when I have not seen one game on the Xbox that impresses me graphically, Rogue Leader II did. (And yes, I have seen the Xbox games in the flesh, as so to speak).
</strong><hr></blockquote>
No argument from me on any of these points, I was speaking only to the console's technical superiority. Not all of the XBox games will be PC ports, however -- EA being a case in point, 007 in particular (BTW: there are both XBox and GameCube versions). The XBox is a console and will get the console games from companies which are platform agnostic. The first ones will be essentially ports from the PS2, but over time the power of the XBox will be leveraged. The second generation titles are already starting to show up. Nintendo's big advantage is that they have some really good game studios that only do games for their hardware (so does Sony). Microsoft is lacking any really established console developers that are exclusively XBox.
They pulled the Japan shipments due to the DVD-scratching problem? Good, it would be worse if they did not do that given the problems they are having.
I have always thought the Gecko was a chip obscured in mystery. Good hard info on it is so scarce other than it being based around a the newer PPC750 design. Some sources say it just has a few extra registers and game-related instructions. Some say it puts out 10 GFLOPs (?!?!). Others say the die shares space with some additional hardware-effects modules. ...But there is nobody who has elaborated on exactly what these hardware modules are or how this incredible 10 GFLOPs is even possible on a 400-ish MHz CPU. One would think that with 10 GFLOPs capability the highlight would be on what exactly is sharing that die space with the G3 (cuz I have a good imagination, but not even I can imagine the G3 alone doing that, let alone 1 GFLOP). So that leads me to question, is this mystery hardware not that compelling to talk about? Can the Gecko even do 10 GFLOPs at all? What's with the smokescreen?
Programmer, while I have a great amount of respect for your technical knowledge, you're backing the wrong platform in this thread. Yes, I do hate MS, so I obviously am biased, but the XBox truly is a poor attempt at a console. Yes, it may have beefier specifications on paper, and it should since MS loses money on every unit! Yet, the system itself is flawed, prone to malfunctions; the content is horrible. Have you taken a look at the graphics on this pitiful system? MS will pull out, just as they have with WebTV, and the XBox will be a very expensive end piece - at least I'm betting that will be the case. Any Mac user who supports MS in their bid to monopolize yet another market should remember where their money is going.
To nearly get back on topic, has anyone given any thought to the idea that the GameCube's processor is perhaps closely related to the Sahara G3? Sahara supposedly contains SIMD instructions as well. The GameCube maybe an indication of the future for the G3 in Apple machines.
<strong>I have always thought the Gecko was a chip obscured in mystery. Good hard info on it is so scarce other than it being based around a the newer PPC750 design. Some sources say it just has a few extra registers and game-related instructions. Some say it puts out 10 GFLOPs (?!?!). Others say the die shares space with some additional hardware-effects modules. ...But there is nobody who has elaborated on exactly what these hardware modules are or how this incredible 10 GFLOPs is even possible on a 400-ish MHz CPU. One would think that with 10 GFLOPs capability the highlight would be on what exactly is sharing that die space with the G3 (cuz I have a good imagination, but not even I can imagine the G3 alone doing that, let alone 1 GFLOP). So that leads me to question, is this mystery hardware not that compelling to talk about? Can the Gecko even do 10 GFLOPs at all? What's with the smokescreen?</strong><hr></blockquote>
GameCube can achieve 10.5 gigaflops, but that is a measurement of the processor, geometry engine, and hardware lighting combined. Specialized processors like graphics chips do more instructions per second than main processors, but are limited in the functions that they can do. The main processor puts out 1.125 gigaflops as compared to 3.7 gigaflops for a single 500MHz G4. It is an impressive processor that blows XBOX away, but not the G4.
The Gamecube Gekko processor IS capable of reaching 10 GigFLOPS, its a function like the altivec in the G4s, but its also to do with the processors cache.
When its pushed, the Gamecube can go up to TEN times faster than on its normal mode. All what programmers have to do is take advantage of this, but this will most likely come into play when the third generation of games come to Gamecube.
My question is, when can programmers actually take advantage of the vector processing unit that makes the Gecko CPU so fast? According to Carmack of Id software, games do not get a very significant performance boost from vector processing units like Altivec (which is far superior to the Gecko's unit) because not all of the code can be optimized for such vector processing.
I'm skeptical, to say the least. So far the G4 has only show promise for multimedia oriented tasks with simple, repetitive calculations. It's not clear if a game would benefit from such technology.
From what I understand, the cache is also a very important part in the speed boost. Also the SIMD unit was built for games, so maybe the guy you mentioned was thinking like it was altivec??? Which, as we know, altivec cannot speed up games, if the Quake 3 engine was rebuilt for it, you would only get a 15% - 20% boost.
<strong>Programmer, while I have a great amount of respect for your technical knowledge, you're backing the wrong platform in this thread. Yes, I do hate MS, so I obviously am biased, but the XBox truly is a poor attempt at a console. Yes, it may have beefier specifications on paper, and it should since MS loses money on every unit! Yet, the system itself is flawed, prone to malfunctions; the content is horrible. Have you taken a look at the graphics on this pitiful system? MS will pull out, just as they have with WebTV, and the XBox will be a very expensive end piece - at least I'm betting that will be the case. Any Mac user who supports MS in their bid to monopolize yet another market should remember where their money is going.
To nearly get back on topic, has anyone given any thought to the idea that the GameCube's processor is perhaps closely related to the Sahara G3? Sahara supposedly contains SIMD instructions as well. The GameCube maybe an indication of the future for the G3 in Apple machines.
[ 03-09-2002: Message edited by: Big Mac ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
First of all, my "backing" of the XBox platform is not an emotional one, nor one based on its market position, reliability, usability, or supply of decent titles. It is purely based on the fact that the XBox console's hardware is more capable and faster than the PS2 and GameCube.
I can't believe the amount of misinformation being spewed in this forum about the GameCube -- people clearly read things written by people who don't know what they are talking about, and who have an emotional attachment to a particular platform similar to the kind of loyalty Mac users typically exhibit. This leads to exaggerating the performance of your favourite console and ignoring the realities of the console you aren't familiar with.
I don't own any of these consoles, and I don't really care which one "wins" in the market. I do know a great deal about the technical realities of each system (based on first hand knowledge of each), and I am just trying to inject a little reality into this discussion. Hating Microsoft or nVidia doesn't diminish their technical acheivement any more than it makes the Athlon or P4 any slower.
As for the 10.5 GFlops on GameCube claim, this must be refering to the GameCube system as a whole, including both the G3 variant and the graphics engine (which are seperate chips). That modified G3 (the Gekko) is theoretically capable of ~1 GFlops at its ~485 MHz clock rate unless you start measuring some fairly weird things as floating point operations. The graphics engine must therefore make up the remaining claim of 9.5 GFlops, but if you bother to go and look at nVidia's claimed GFlops you will find it much higher than this. 9.5 is actually a fairly low claim for a graphics chip -- even for the 1 GHz G4 Motorola claims about 8 GFlops. Note that these numbers are usually highly theoretical "peak" rates which aren't achieved in practice. The GameCube folks also tend not to talk about the other important number for a graphics chip: fill rate. This is because the GameCube's theoretical fill rates are considerably lower than XBox, and even more so compared to PS2. In practice though the GameCube manages to hold its own in this department.
As for Carmack's statement that AltiVec doesn't help... that means it doesn't help the Quake engine. Quake touches a lot of memory and doesn't do very heavy math on any of it, which means that most Macintosh G4s will already be limited by their memory and AltiVec can't do a lot to help with that. In contrast the GameCube's CPU is less than 500 MHz and coupled with very fast RAM, so memory is much less of a bottleneck. This means it can help a little that the Gekko can do paired floating point operations, but in practice you'll probably only see a very slight framerate improvement.
<strong>My question is, when can programmers actually take advantage of the vector processing unit that makes the Gecko CPU so fast? According to Carmack of Id software, games do not get a very significant performance boost from vector processing units like Altivec (which is far superior to the Gecko's unit) because not all of the code can be optimized for such vector processing.
I'm skeptical, to say the least. So far the G4 has only show promise for multimedia oriented tasks with simple, repetitive calculations. It's not clear if a game would benefit from such technology.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Why does everybody take it as gospel that the Quake engine is some marvel of technology, or that it is ideally suited to whatever platform it is ported to? The engine is now fairly old, and it was written & optimized to run quickly on PCs without vector units (pre-SSE, pre-3DNow). Vector unit support was added afterwards, but its the kind of technology that really should be designed in from the beginning so that data and calculations are organized to take advantage of it. The Quake engine was built to go as fast as possible on the machines of the time which means they specifically did not try to do four to eight times as many calculations on each piece of data as their target machines could support, that would have killed their framerate. Since a vector unit speeds up calculations, not memory access, it should be clear that it can't increase the number of frames per second because frames per second is largely a function of how long it takes to touch all of the data that needs to be changed in a frame. If a game did four times as much calculation with each frame, then the vector unit could help. (note that this is a simplification to get my point across)
Vector units are like new graphics technologies -- they take a while to be adopted in the game community. Consider things like 3D hardware acceleration, multi-texturing, vertex shaders, etc. At first there are just one or two games that use these features, and probably not to their fullest. Slowly more games arrive as the developers have a chance to work it into their games. Eventually the developers are not only using the features, they are figuring out how to best use them. Some developers never figure it out, some hardware features just aren't useful in some games, and sometimes hardware features just aren't common enough in the market to justify supporting them. This last one is relevant to AltiVec -- until a large number of consumer level G4s are in the market it simply isn't worth optimizing for it, except as a technology demonstrator. Apple can add AltiVec optimizations to OpenGL and other parts of the OS, but 3rd party widespread use of it and (more importantly) deliberate design for it just isn't going to happen. On a console like the GameCube where every machine has the same capabilities and millions of units will be sold, then it makes a lot more sense to spend the time to use all the capabilities. Even there, however, it takes time to learn how to maximize the machine's potential and that usually means only the second generation games really exploit the hardware.
<strong>This article was written by a goof, obviously.
How can you compare a modified G3, built especially for the gamecube, with a G4, built especially for a desktop?
The Gamecube has a totally different architecture - different graphics card, built in lighting effects and a sole purpose: to play games.
(And at that, it's VERY good (own one).
How ludicrous.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Its not a ludicrous comparison. With a high-end nVidia geForce4 board a G4 Mac is a more capable game machine than the GameCube. The geForce4 is pretty much the same chip as in the XBox and it has all the GameCube capabilities and more. The main difference is that since the GameCube is a dedicated game machine more people will buy games for it so game developers will spend more time on the games they make for it. This doesn't invalidate a technical comparison, however.
That said, I haven't read the article in question but based on the comments in this thread it does sound like the author was out to lunch.
Edit: the author is out to lunch. The G4 chip doesn't cost $2500 -- that is the cost of an entire desktop machine which has far greater capabilities than the GameCube (large memory, hard disks, multi-function DVD drives, large dislays, keyboard, mouse, expansion slots, FireWire, USB, etc). Even the standard geForce4MX that ships with most G4's is in the same league as the GameCube in terms of 3D performance. This guy obviously didn't give this article any serious thought, but then what do you expect from TheInquirer?
The last games I played on my Mac were Myth II and Quake3. I haven't played either of those for a while. On the other hand, I play Super Smash Bros or Rouge Squandron almost every day. As far as I'm concerned, Mac gaming is dead. But I don't really care. Consoles are were its at. Of course, by consoles I mean "Nintendo consoles." I really have no desire to play the XBox or PS2. There just aren't enough (or any) compelling games on them. The Cube will only get better once Mario and Zelda are released.
Comments
By next year, budget PCs will do the trick. It isn't even, really, 'emulation' more like an extensive 'patching', some kinda directX with a shell around it. Anyway, unless x-box has moved over 10 million units by then, emulation is going to be a world of pain for M$. <hr></blockquote>
Nice point Matsu, I hadn't even considered this - I guess making your console easier to code for also makes it easier to hack.
I will be buying my GC come May 3.
[ 03-08-2002: Message edited by: DaveLee ]</p>
<strong>I really don't like Xbox, we have one here at our dorm, only games we got are tricky DOA3, both games suck, tricky is really ****ing awesome on the gamecube, but the xbox controls are so hideous that it just ruins the game. at least for me.
.</strong><hr></blockquote>
HALO! what are you waiting for?
<strong>...To compare to Microsoft's XBOX you have to realize that not only is the PPC better than the P3, but that GameCube comes with other performance enhancing features as well.
It has a lot of image processing functions in hardware: Fog, Subpixel Anti-aliasing, 8 Hardware Lights, Alpha Blending, Virtual Texture Design, Multi-texturing, Bump Mapping, Environment Mapping, MIP Mapping, Bilinear Filtering, Trilinear Filtering, Anisotropic Filtering, Real-time Hardware Texture Decompression (S3TC), Real-time Decompression of Display List, HW 3-line Deflickering filter.
The majority of the RAM in the system is 1T-SRAM and it's able to apply 4 filters/textures per pass.
GameCube was made for games from the ground up (unlike XBOX) and all of it's parts are more suited to the task.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Have you actually built games on these platforms? The XBox does all of what is on your list of "performance enhancing features", and a lot of other stuff that the GameCube can't do, and the GPU is programmable whereas the GameCube's is fixed function. Add 64 megs of RAM, a hard disk, and a full DVD drive to that and I have a hard time seeing why the GameCube is better (aside from pricing, marketing and available games). Nothing about the GameCube makes it "more suited to the task" that the XBox. The ~500 MHz G3 is roughly equivalent to the 733 MHz Celeron (which has full SSE), so that is hardly a clear advantage as well -- in fact x86 code is 20-30% smaller so in that sense the x86 is "better suited" to a constrained memory environment. And 16 megs of the GameCube's 40 megs of memory isn't usable by the PPC or graphics engine (only by the DMA engine and audio), making it a pain to use.
There are a couple of specific technical details that the GameCube and PS2 can do better than the XBox, but for most things the XBox wins. The best things about the GameCube are its small size, lower cost, Nintendo games, and Nintendo's experience in building & selling game machines. I hate Microsoft as much as the next Mac guy, but I have to admit that they have put together a technically impressive machine. The GameCube is a good little machine, and its easy to make it sing, but its capabilities are clearly more limited -- over time I think we'll see developers pushing the XBox much further than the GameCube & PS2 can go.
1) The Gamecube isn't the size of a of a nuclear power station.
2) It has better games, like Starfox adventures, that has 100 HOURS of play in it.
3) All that technical jargon doesn't mean $hite when I have not seen one game on the Xbox that impresses me graphically, Rogue Leader II did. (And yes, I have seen the Xbox games in the flesh, as so to speak).
However, what we are asking here is: Is the gekko in the Gamecube faster than a G4?
The answer is no. The G4 manages many more tasks at the same time, running an OS, other bits of Hardware, etc.
Heh, just like to add, ALL of the Xboxes that were being set for the Japan release have been called back in.
<strong>
although I wish it had some more....exciting...games, all the games I have for it(quite a few I might add) are fun, but they are easy and have little replay factor. I really want to get smash bros. melee and rogue leader, from what I hear they are totally awesome</strong><hr></blockquote>
FYI 007:Agent Under Fire is set to be released in a week or two. You can preorder at ea.com (as I did). Rogue Leader & SBM are very good (SBM is very fast moving, faster then the N64 version). Word of note: I found Waverace for the Cube very dissappointing. It looks great but I didn't find it nearly as fun as the N64 version (maybe it's just me?).
The Xbox may have some technical advantages over the NGC but I personally feel that many of it's games will be nothing more then quick PC ports (I mean if you were a developer for Windows games you'd probably think, sure we can just bang out a quick Xbox verison with only minor code tweeking), but the developers will probably give little attention to the different control style & other things that make games work on consoles. That and ... well, it's M$, <feels really silly while typing this is IE with word open in the background>personally I try to limit my usage of the products as much as possible </feels really silly while typing this is IE with word open in the background>.
<strong>
FYI 007:Agent Under Fire is set to be released in a week or two. You can preorder at ea.com (as I did). Rogue Leader & SBM are very good (SBM is very fast moving, faster then the N64 version). Word of note: I found Waverace for the Cube very dissappointing. It looks great but I didn't find it nearly as fun as the N64 version (maybe it's just me?).
The Xbox may have some technical advantages over the NGC but I personally feel that many of it's games will be nothing more then quick PC ports (I mean if you were a developer for Windows games you'd probably think, sure we can just bang out a quick Xbox verison with only minor code tweeking), but the developers will probably give little attention to the different control style & other things that make games work on consoles. That and ... well, it's M$, <feels really silly while typing this is IE with word open in the background>personally I try to limit my usage of the products as much as possible </feels really silly while typing this is IE with word open in the background>.</strong><hr></blockquote>
yea waverace blue storm was a dissapointment, but that was cause I was expecting like a shite load more _NEW_ stages.
I did enjoy the n64 verison ALOT more(I remember trying sooo hard to do a triple backflip on the galcier stage...but to no avail
I played blue storm beating a few circuts and getting some good practice stuff but then I got bored with it
007:agent under fire you say? well I hope its like goldeneye and perfect dark, and not world is not enough or tommorrow never dies or whatever the **** last 007 game I played on n64 last that sucked
I love my gamecube...I beat THPS3 about 1000 times already...getting EVERYTHING with EVERYONE....and its still a fun game
THPS3 is about the only GC game I have that I can just pop in and play, but I just got cel damage and It looks promising...haven't played it too much yet.
pikmin was surprisingly good, I expected a boring as waste of time, but it was fun to throw little plant things and watch them kick big bugs asses...
super monkey ball has some GREAT multiplayer games, but the single player mode gets sooooo damn hard.
I really want to get SB:M now...yea I like console gaming
<strong>Well the Xbox may be 'superior' or whatever you want to call it, but the Gamecube is the better console, for a number of reasons.
1) The Gamecube isn't the size of a of a nuclear power station.
2) It has better games, like Starfox adventures, that has 100 HOURS of play in it.
3) All that technical jargon doesn't mean $hite when I have not seen one game on the Xbox that impresses me graphically, Rogue Leader II did. (And yes, I have seen the Xbox games in the flesh, as so to speak).
</strong><hr></blockquote>
No argument from me on any of these points, I was speaking only to the console's technical superiority. Not all of the XBox games will be PC ports, however -- EA being a case in point, 007 in particular (BTW: there are both XBox and GameCube versions). The XBox is a console and will get the console games from companies which are platform agnostic. The first ones will be essentially ports from the PS2, but over time the power of the XBox will be leveraged. The second generation titles are already starting to show up. Nintendo's big advantage is that they have some really good game studios that only do games for their hardware (so does Sony). Microsoft is lacking any really established console developers that are exclusively XBox.
They pulled the Japan shipments due to the DVD-scratching problem? Good, it would be worse if they did not do that given the problems they are having.
To nearly get back on topic, has anyone given any thought to the idea that the GameCube's processor is perhaps closely related to the Sahara G3? Sahara supposedly contains SIMD instructions as well. The GameCube maybe an indication of the future for the G3 in Apple machines.
[ 03-09-2002: Message edited by: Big Mac ]</p>
<strong>I have always thought the Gecko was a chip obscured in mystery. Good hard info on it is so scarce other than it being based around a the newer PPC750 design. Some sources say it just has a few extra registers and game-related instructions. Some say it puts out 10 GFLOPs (?!?!). Others say the die shares space with some additional hardware-effects modules. ...But there is nobody who has elaborated on exactly what these hardware modules are or how this incredible 10 GFLOPs is even possible on a 400-ish MHz CPU. One would think that with 10 GFLOPs capability the highlight would be on what exactly is sharing that die space with the G3 (cuz I have a good imagination, but not even I can imagine the G3 alone doing that, let alone 1 GFLOP). So that leads me to question, is this mystery hardware not that compelling to talk about? Can the Gecko even do 10 GFLOPs at all? What's with the smokescreen?</strong><hr></blockquote>
GameCube can achieve 10.5 gigaflops, but that is a measurement of the processor, geometry engine, and hardware lighting combined. Specialized processors like graphics chips do more instructions per second than main processors, but are limited in the functions that they can do. The main processor puts out 1.125 gigaflops as compared to 3.7 gigaflops for a single 500MHz G4. It is an impressive processor that blows XBOX away, but not the G4.
When its pushed, the Gamecube can go up to TEN times faster than on its normal mode. All what programmers have to do is take advantage of this, but this will most likely come into play when the third generation of games come to Gamecube.
I'm skeptical, to say the least. So far the G4 has only show promise for multimedia oriented tasks with simple, repetitive calculations. It's not clear if a game would benefit from such technology.
How can you compare a modified G3, built especially for the gamecube, with a G4, built especially for a desktop?
The Gamecube has a totally different architecture - different graphics card, built in lighting effects and a sole purpose: to play games.
(And at that, it's VERY good (own one).
How ludicrous.
<strong>Programmer, while I have a great amount of respect for your technical knowledge, you're backing the wrong platform in this thread. Yes, I do hate MS, so I obviously am biased, but the XBox truly is a poor attempt at a console. Yes, it may have beefier specifications on paper, and it should since MS loses money on every unit! Yet, the system itself is flawed, prone to malfunctions; the content is horrible. Have you taken a look at the graphics on this pitiful system? MS will pull out, just as they have with WebTV, and the XBox will be a very expensive end piece - at least I'm betting that will be the case. Any Mac user who supports MS in their bid to monopolize yet another market should remember where their money is going.
To nearly get back on topic, has anyone given any thought to the idea that the GameCube's processor is perhaps closely related to the Sahara G3? Sahara supposedly contains SIMD instructions as well. The GameCube maybe an indication of the future for the G3 in Apple machines.
[ 03-09-2002: Message edited by: Big Mac ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
First of all, my "backing" of the XBox platform is not an emotional one, nor one based on its market position, reliability, usability, or supply of decent titles. It is purely based on the fact that the XBox console's hardware is more capable and faster than the PS2 and GameCube.
I can't believe the amount of misinformation being spewed in this forum about the GameCube -- people clearly read things written by people who don't know what they are talking about, and who have an emotional attachment to a particular platform similar to the kind of loyalty Mac users typically exhibit. This leads to exaggerating the performance of your favourite console and ignoring the realities of the console you aren't familiar with.
I don't own any of these consoles, and I don't really care which one "wins" in the market. I do know a great deal about the technical realities of each system (based on first hand knowledge of each), and I am just trying to inject a little reality into this discussion. Hating Microsoft or nVidia doesn't diminish their technical acheivement any more than it makes the Athlon or P4 any slower.
As for the 10.5 GFlops on GameCube claim, this must be refering to the GameCube system as a whole, including both the G3 variant and the graphics engine (which are seperate chips). That modified G3 (the Gekko) is theoretically capable of ~1 GFlops at its ~485 MHz clock rate unless you start measuring some fairly weird things as floating point operations. The graphics engine must therefore make up the remaining claim of 9.5 GFlops, but if you bother to go and look at nVidia's claimed GFlops you will find it much higher than this. 9.5 is actually a fairly low claim for a graphics chip -- even for the 1 GHz G4 Motorola claims about 8 GFlops. Note that these numbers are usually highly theoretical "peak" rates which aren't achieved in practice. The GameCube folks also tend not to talk about the other important number for a graphics chip: fill rate. This is because the GameCube's theoretical fill rates are considerably lower than XBox, and even more so compared to PS2. In practice though the GameCube manages to hold its own in this department.
As for Carmack's statement that AltiVec doesn't help... that means it doesn't help the Quake engine. Quake touches a lot of memory and doesn't do very heavy math on any of it, which means that most Macintosh G4s will already be limited by their memory and AltiVec can't do a lot to help with that. In contrast the GameCube's CPU is less than 500 MHz and coupled with very fast RAM, so memory is much less of a bottleneck. This means it can help a little that the Gekko can do paired floating point operations, but in practice you'll probably only see a very slight framerate improvement.
<strong>My question is, when can programmers actually take advantage of the vector processing unit that makes the Gecko CPU so fast? According to Carmack of Id software, games do not get a very significant performance boost from vector processing units like Altivec (which is far superior to the Gecko's unit) because not all of the code can be optimized for such vector processing.
I'm skeptical, to say the least. So far the G4 has only show promise for multimedia oriented tasks with simple, repetitive calculations. It's not clear if a game would benefit from such technology.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Why does everybody take it as gospel that the Quake engine is some marvel of technology, or that it is ideally suited to whatever platform it is ported to? The engine is now fairly old, and it was written & optimized to run quickly on PCs without vector units (pre-SSE, pre-3DNow). Vector unit support was added afterwards, but its the kind of technology that really should be designed in from the beginning so that data and calculations are organized to take advantage of it. The Quake engine was built to go as fast as possible on the machines of the time which means they specifically did not try to do four to eight times as many calculations on each piece of data as their target machines could support, that would have killed their framerate. Since a vector unit speeds up calculations, not memory access, it should be clear that it can't increase the number of frames per second because frames per second is largely a function of how long it takes to touch all of the data that needs to be changed in a frame. If a game did four times as much calculation with each frame, then the vector unit could help. (note that this is a simplification to get my point across)
Vector units are like new graphics technologies -- they take a while to be adopted in the game community. Consider things like 3D hardware acceleration, multi-texturing, vertex shaders, etc. At first there are just one or two games that use these features, and probably not to their fullest. Slowly more games arrive as the developers have a chance to work it into their games. Eventually the developers are not only using the features, they are figuring out how to best use them. Some developers never figure it out, some hardware features just aren't useful in some games, and sometimes hardware features just aren't common enough in the market to justify supporting them. This last one is relevant to AltiVec -- until a large number of consumer level G4s are in the market it simply isn't worth optimizing for it, except as a technology demonstrator. Apple can add AltiVec optimizations to OpenGL and other parts of the OS, but 3rd party widespread use of it and (more importantly) deliberate design for it just isn't going to happen. On a console like the GameCube where every machine has the same capabilities and millions of units will be sold, then it makes a lot more sense to spend the time to use all the capabilities. Even there, however, it takes time to learn how to maximize the machine's potential and that usually means only the second generation games really exploit the hardware.
<strong>This article was written by a goof, obviously.
How can you compare a modified G3, built especially for the gamecube, with a G4, built especially for a desktop?
The Gamecube has a totally different architecture - different graphics card, built in lighting effects and a sole purpose: to play games.
(And at that, it's VERY good (own one).
How ludicrous.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Its not a ludicrous comparison. With a high-end nVidia geForce4 board a G4 Mac is a more capable game machine than the GameCube. The geForce4 is pretty much the same chip as in the XBox and it has all the GameCube capabilities and more. The main difference is that since the GameCube is a dedicated game machine more people will buy games for it so game developers will spend more time on the games they make for it. This doesn't invalidate a technical comparison, however.
That said, I haven't read the article in question but based on the comments in this thread it does sound like the author was out to lunch.
Edit: the author is out to lunch. The G4 chip doesn't cost $2500 -- that is the cost of an entire desktop machine which has far greater capabilities than the GameCube (large memory, hard disks, multi-function DVD drives, large dislays, keyboard, mouse, expansion slots, FireWire, USB, etc). Even the standard geForce4MX that ships with most G4's is in the same league as the GameCube in terms of 3D performance. This guy obviously didn't give this article any serious thought, but then what do you expect from TheInquirer?
[ 03-09-2002: Message edited by: Programmer ]</p>
I don't think it could render 12 million fully rendered polygons per second, with lighting effects, bump mapping etc.