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How powerful was the GameCube compared to the PS2 and XBOX ?

The GCN was marketed has having loading time as quick as cartridge iirc, something to do with the huge buffer and fast speed of the optical drive. I remember Luigi's mansion was shown to sell that point during E3 2001.
 
Indeed. Its 1.4gb capacity just wasn't enough. Fortunately for Nintendo, it wasn't a problem considering all their first party titles didn't have voice acting. For third party, the story was kind of different.
 

Ocaso

Member
Luigi's Mansion used it in some very rare cases (almost unnoticably) and Super Smash Bros. Melee used it mostly on trophies.
I'm pretty sure that Resident Evil 0, 4 and REmake made use of it as well. Also of course Metroid Prime 1 and 2 and Starfox Adventures.

Metroid Prime 1 did not use bump mapping, and I'm pretty sure the sequel didn't either. For whatever reason, this technique was so extremely rare on the GC that one might easily assume the console was incapable of the effect.
 

zoukka

Member
The gamecube suffered from lower quality music, textures and removal of content because the disk was a bottleneck.

The textures in RE4 were better on Gamecube than on PS2 and the content was mainly cut in FMV videos. You had gigantic game worlds on Gamecube too.
 

bigace33

Member
You guys are going to make me fire up the Gamecube today and play some Viewtifull Joe. I know Gamecube was more powerful, but the PS2 had some games where the scale just absolutely destroys anything found on Gamecube. God of War 2 comes to mind. Are there any Gamecube games with that kind of scale? I need to build up my Cube library some more.
 

Coen

Member
I love my little purple box of joy. There's something about the Nintendo of that era that's gone today.
 

Christine

Member
Some doors in Prime 1 were a glitched mess though (at least on the PAL version). I had some doors that would open in almost no time. The very same doors would sometimes need several seconds to open up, which went so far as me getting killed by enemies because that fucking door didn't open up :(

Still love the game <3

Heh, that must be the way they fixed the stream failure crashes in the original NTSC release.
 

Sweeper17

Neo Member
the gc was only small cause the power supply was separate. PS2 and Xbox where built in but GC and PS2 did insane lighting effects even better than what modern systems do today.
 

Ocaso

Member
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY0-v2pRQrU

I dunno man, this game was ahead of its time imo. Looked equal to doom 3, which at the time was the benchmark

It wasn't the only Xbox game to look far ahead of its time. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory looked amazing on release, as did Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, which, by the way, seamlessly streamed its gigantic environments not unlike Wind Waker and the Metroid Prime games. I think it should be clear the Xbox was the more powerful console last generation.
 
To the point that an actual book about the industry recently stated it as fact.

Which is ridiculous, considering the differences between the Resident Evil 4 versions.

People also claim the PS1 was more powerful than the N64.

This is why I think specs talk is pointless. Even if the Wii U was a super mega beast, people will believe the 720 will have Avatar graphics and the PS4 would be jacking off into the Matrix and shit.
 

WrikaWrek

Banned
Res 4 was amazing and for me shows the power of the Gamecube. Fairly beyond what the PS2 could manage.

Xbox was just ahead of the pack, by a considerable margin. Games like Splinter Cell Chaos Theory for example just showed it. The other consoles couldn't do the same.
 
the gc was only small cause the power supply was separate. PS2 and Xbox where built in but GC and PS2 did insane lighting effects even better than what modern systems do today.

tfTC9.gif
 

jono51

Banned
Xbox>GC>PS2. Pretty much common knowledge at this point. Looking at late Xbox/GC games it makes me wonder what they would have achieved had that been a longer gen like this one.
 

hatchx

Banned
Gamecube only had 1.5GB capacity on the disk, so that definitely effected a lot of ports.


I don't think it's as simple an answer as people make it sound. I bet porting MGS3 to Gamecube would have seen some downgrading.
 
Xbox>GC>PS2. Pretty much common knowledge at this point. Looking at late Xbox/GC games it makes me wonder what they would have achieved had that been a longer gen like this one.

It's a little hard to say. Late titles like Double Agent and Kingdom Under Fire didn't look that much better as sequels.
 
I still remember when I bought a GC and saw this:

rogueleader_screen009.jpg


Alongside with Rogue Leader 3 no game on the GC came close in all his life, and this was a launch title!
 

Culex

Banned
Xbox>GC>PS2. Pretty much common knowledge at this point. Looking at late Xbox/GC games it makes me wonder what they would have achieved had that been a longer gen like this one.

Yea, makes you wonder what 3DO and Dreamcast would have done, had those systems survived.

The GC had it's quality games, that's for sure. Resident Evil Remake made good use of the GC's streaming, too.
 

chaosblade

Unconfirmed Member
Xbox>GC>PS2. Pretty much common knowledge at this point. Looking at late Xbox/GC games it makes me wonder what they would have achieved had that been a longer gen like this one.

The Gamecube was pretty much getting B and C team ports by the end of it's life wasn't it, with only a few exceptional titles here and there. Xbox, who knows, it was getting slightly better support, but still seemed pretty limited by what devs were doing with the PS2.

Besides, the Wii is more or less another generation worth of support for the GCN. It's a little more powerful, but it doesn't really make a difference since a number of GCN games aren't far below the best looking Wii games.

And the GCN was a pretty cool piece of tech. 3D support, digital audio, what else didn't Nintendo take advantage of? Hopefully the WiiU is reminiscent of the GCN's efficiency.
 

Theonik

Member
Doesn't seem that cool to me then :/
The cool part is that he linked to a cable mod to get toslink out of the NGC. ;)
But yeah I had heard of it before and still find it annoying the Nintendo didn't enable that feature. Hell Nintendo didn't even release the component cables in the wild and only through their own outlets so a lot of people never really saw what NGC could really do. (and the way the component cables have a video DAC in them makes it impossible to get fake cables so they will only get more rare)
 

BubTheZombie

Neo Member
First reply nails it again. xbox>GC>>PS2. (GC was about 2 ps2's and xbox about 3 iirc).

Just wanted to add that the xbox was the only machine kicking it with real time dolby digital 5.1 too. Ah, I remember buying my xbox1 at midnight on launch day, connecting it up to the projector and 5.1 Hifi and putting in Halo. It was like a thousand points of light all converging at once.

Great times.
 
Flipper (Gamecube GPU) has more raw power than the Xbox GPU (12,8GFlop/s vs 10,6GFlop/s) but has much less fillrate (650MPixel/s and 650MTexel/s vs 933MPixel/s and 1866MTexel/s), much less memory (24MB 1T-RAM vs 64MB DDR1), much less memory bandwidth (2,6GB/s vs 6,4GB/s) and much less advanced fearureset (DirectX-7 level features vs DirectX-8a). Gekko (Gamecube CPU) lacked the normal SIMD extention of the regular Power PC 750 making it very weak compared to the already weak Celeron in the Xbox. Besides decent fillrate the PS2 was weak in everything else and wasn't much better than the Dreamcast.
 

beril

Member
While the xbox was obviously more powerful I always felt that a lot of the games relied a bit too much on half baked tech that the machine, and the developers weren't really able to handle properly. So a lot of games had low res flickering shadows, ugly exaggerated normalmaps with lots of specular and unsteady framerates, while gamecube games generally felt much more balanced technically; it didn't do all that fancy stuff, but everything it could do it did really well. Admittedly I haven't played all that many games on xbox
 

Rad Agast

Member
I never owned a GC myself but I played it plenty of times at other people homes. I remember that the graphics looked really sharp and all the games were color full. I played RE4, Mario Sunshine, F Zero and all those looked amazing.

So how powerful was the GC in terms of its specs. Some games looked even better then most Wii games.

The GC was the best designed console last gen in my opinion (Spec, size, price). F-Zero was/is one of my favourite racers.
 

CamHostage

Member
The PS2 port was incredible if only for the fact that they managed to port RE4 in less than a year to a less powerful system and it was recognizably RE4 at that. Once you started to see all the compromises they had to make for it to run...it gets a lot less impressive, but the feat was still noteworthy just for the time they had to do it in.

Not to bring too much of the "buh-buh-buh-PS2!!!" pride to this thread, but you also have to take into account the difference in architecture. If RE4 had been made for PS2, it would have been done differently than the Gamecube game was. When you look at the battleship level in the Separate Ways section (which I think had some effects not seen in the main game in addition to its sprawling design) seems to show the power of this version of the engine when put to the test.

All three platforms were incredible in their day, and each had their unique strengths that, when capitalized upon by dedicated developers, proved the amazing possibilities that the given architecture design allowed. For all the talk of the CELL processor, modern machines just don't define themselves like these three consoles did. I'm not sure we'll see a day again where that level of custom care and careful compromise make such a difference.
 

Shion

Member
How does the Dreamcast factor into this? I'd say it's definitely above the PS2.

Dreamcast was less powerful than the PS2, but still, I always wondered how a Dreamcast exclusive could look in 2004-05. When I see a game as beautiful as Shenmue II just 2.5 years into Dreamcast's life, it just makes me wonder what the console could be able to achieve if it had a normal life span.
 
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