M2 was it more powerful than...

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M2 was it more powerful than...

Post by 3DOKid » Wed Jul 18, 2007 11:42 am

So was the M2 more powerful than the DC and PS2, or was 3DO too early again?

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Post by NikeX » Wed Jul 18, 2007 12:43 pm

Do you mean only M2 or the later MX? M2 history is interpersed with myth and cancelled deals - which is very tragic. M2 had a new design for the graphics engine and an enhanced audio DSP. The Bulldog team (later Cagent) developed the MX chip. The MX had a high performance and a new RISC style DSP. Nintendo liked it and almost bought it for their console but the couldn't reach a deal with the Owner of Cagent: Samsung. Sega was interested in buying the M2 chip for their next console. But when the Bulldog team got the first prototype chips from the fab, they were missing a layer of metal. Some engineer at the fab left a line out of a script. This killed all the on-RAM including the graphics texture RAM. So the demos Bulldog showed Sega did not have any textures and ran very slow. The next chip worked fine but it was too late. This may be a reason for the "M2 was not not so powerful" you hear today. M2 would have been nearly Dreamcast.
We should not forget the hype of 3DO M1 (which was one of the reasons, why the first 3DO console failed) and the M2 pre-hype. 3DO was underestimated and over-hyped. A bad situation. Too many people were praising 3DO and to be unique a reporter had to critisize 3DO. I've got my information from fromer Bulldog (1993) guys, who are very cool.

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Post by bonefish » Wed Jul 18, 2007 4:16 pm

The M2 was more powerful than...


many kiosks.

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Post by T2KFreeker » Wed Jul 18, 2007 7:40 pm

Looking at what the system was going to do and seeing some of the early stuff that was running at E3 that year, I was really excited. I worked at Game Dude a long time ago and a dude that worked there would periodically ask me to go to E3 with him after I quit for personal reasons. I'll tell you this much, that racing game, I can't remember the title now, was awesome as Hell. What we saw of D2 was amazing as well. Even though there were uneducated assclowns at the show bragging about how the N64 and Playstation could "Easily" handle what the system was doing. We all knew they were full of shit and it really pissed me off something wicked when Matsushita cancelled the system.
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Post by NikeX » Fri Jul 20, 2007 10:53 am

Do you mean IMSA racing?
The graphic libarary that 3DO provided, which was divided into the pipeline and the framework, was hideously slow. The good graphics engine, which was used for IMSA, was written by someone else. The developers licensed the car physics engine from games like Hard Driving. For IMSA itself (which ended up very close to shippable) a former M2 developer developed a 2-d shooting game which had 3 full-screen scrolling images of background and clouds plus hundreds
of sprites running at 60 fps. This was very impressive in the day.
M2 was quite fastm except for business reasons it would have clobbered
both of PSX, N64, Dreamcast.

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Post by T2KFreeker » Fri Jul 20, 2007 6:57 pm

NikeX wrote:Do you mean IMSA racing?
The graphic libarary that 3DO provided, which was divided into the pipeline and the framework, was hideously slow. The good graphics engine, which was used for IMSA, was written by someone else. The developers licensed the car physics engine from games like Hard Driving. For IMSA itself (which ended up very close to shippable) a former M2 developer developed a 2-d shooting game which had 3 full-screen scrolling images of background and clouds plus hundreds
of sprites running at 60 fps. This was very impressive in the day.
M2 was quite fastm except for business reasons it would have clobbered
both of PSX, N64, Dreamcast.
Yeah, that is probably the game. I was impressed. Then again, I am a Jaguar fan also, so that may turn you all off. :lol:
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Re: M2 was it more powerful than...

Post by Windows Killer » Wed Jul 25, 2007 7:04 pm

3DOKid wrote:So was the M2 more powerful than the DC and PS2, or was 3DO too early again?
The M2 would have been more powerful than the N64, but the DC was way more powerful (3 times, afaik). But I think you can't really compare it by the hardware specs. Only by the games, so we can't really compare it at all.
I'll tell you this much, that racing game, I can't remember the title now, was awesome as Hell.
True, IMSA racing is quite impressive. Though it lacks environment details, but very smooth frame rate and round wheels, hehe. ;)

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Post by parallaxscroll » Sun Feb 17, 2008 7:41 am

I followed M2's development as close as I could, and even though I'm an outsider....I'm not a developer, I have no inside info on M2 or anything 3DO.... I do remember alot of things that I read over the years.

M2 was in no way anywhere near as powerful as Dreamcast.

However, it was 2 to 3 times more powerful than Nintendo 64 and MUCH more powerful than Saturn or PS1.

The Dreamcast was at bare minimum, 3 to 4 times more powerful than M2. That estimation came from Warp's Kenji Eno (D2 developer). At the time he said that, Dreamcast was new (mid 1998), had not been released yet, and the true performance of DC's PowerVR2DC graphics chip
was not known.

It's absolute fact that DC's SH-4 and PowerVR2DC combined power is much greater than that of the M2's twin 602 CPUs and BDA chips. M2 had 8 MB RAM for the console configuration, and IIRC maybe 16 MB for the arcade and industrial kiosk configs. Dreamcast had 26 MB RAM in its console config and around 56 MB RAM in its NAOMI arcade config.


The conservative spec for Dreamcast's performance was 3 million textured polyons/sec with lighting and every graphic rendering feature/effect turned on.

M2's performance with everything turned on was at MOST half a million polygons/sec. That means that Warp's statement of Dreamcast being 3-4 times more powerful would be wrong / or conservative itself.

M2 could supposedly push 700,000 textured polys/sec *without* effects, without lighting or gouraud shading, and over 1 million flat-shaded polys/sec.

Dreamcast's PowerVR2DC chip turned out to be significantly more powerful than Sega's conservative 3M polys/sec figure. Upto 7 million polygons/sec with all features could be rendered, but things like memory bandwidth and geometry storage data limits that to 5-6M polys/sec.

http://www.segatech.com/technical/polygons/index.html

The more stuff that's done on the non-graphics side like physics/A.I./ and other gameplay stuff, the fewer polygons get rendered, but most developers agreed (including Yu Suzuki) Dreamcast's poly performance was well over 3M, at least 4 million.

That's still a HUGE amount of performance compared to M2. Given that M2's in-game textured poly performance was likely 300,000 to 500,000 depending on the number of features turned on, it means Dreamcast is roughly TEN times more powerful, more or less.

Even if I am "half right" and we half DC's said polygon performance
(or double M2's), 5x more performance means that M2 is still not close to DC.

Of course I am talking about graphics, and the CPU side of things like MIPs and FLOPs would be a different comparison. Maybe that's where things are more like 3x in favor of Dreamcast ? Trying to remember, M2 CPUs could push... 70 MIPs each? DC's SH-4 could do 360 MIPS.
Floating point:
DC's SH-4: 1400 MFLOPs or 1.4 GFLOPs
M2's 602: 132 MFLOPs each = 264 MFLOPs.


Still, M2 was the most powerful console (and consumer) 3D hardware of its generation (the Saturn, PS1, N64 gen). The N64 could only manage 160,000 textured polys with all features on. PS1 could do only 180,000 textured polys with only gouraud shading & lighting, and no extra features at all, not even Z-buffering. The M2 was certainly the best home hardware of the day. Even the powerful 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics PC card of 1996 (which dominated PC graphics during 1997) was less powerful than M2, because realworld performance of Voodoo1 was only roughly 250,000 textured polys/sec with features on with the fastest CPUs. The M2 could push at least 300,000 such polys/sec (remember EVERY feature on, in game) maybe somewhat more.



The MX hardware, I know somewhat less about it. I don't know if it was finished. In 1996 its performance was said to be double that of M2, with at least 1 million textured polys/sec with features on. In early 1998, a Next Generation Online article about the Nintendo/CagNet/Samsung MX deal said that MX performance was upto 4 million small triangles/sec. peak:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.game ... ode=source
The MX chipset was a dramatically enhanced version of the M2 chipset sold to Panasonic and Matsushita, now capable of a 100 million pixel per second fillrate and utilizing two PowerPC 602 chips at its core.
(CagEnt's executives also boasted of a four million triangle per second peak draw rate, though the quality of those tiny triangles would of course have been limited).

I am going to believe/guess that meant flat-shaded polygons/sec similar to M2's 1M+ flat shaded poly performance. Making MX roughly 3-4 times stronger than M2, but still short of Dreamcast performance. However, there was a little known article by Intelligent Gamer magazine from 1996 that mentioned the *possible* use of on-chip graphics RAM with a version of the MX, pushing the performance to unbelievably high levels for the time, an unheard of 20 million polygons/sec. That was however, just a possible senario for MX, as it was still in development at the time. I don't know if there was any truth to that report, or if the embedded VRAM ever got implemented into the design. I am guessing it did not. Otherwise, Nintendo or someone would've wanted it really bad to use in a console. the first shipping console to use embedded RAM (eDRAM) for incredible performance was of course, the PlayStation2 with its Graphics Synthesizer chip that has 4 MB eDRAM.

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Post by Vance » Mon Feb 25, 2008 5:34 am

The theoretical M2 and the finished product were so nebulous, sadly. I was there when Trip Hawkins demoed the possibly fake racing game. Looked great... but nobody ever got a chance to try it out like he did, so there was no proof we had seen actual gameplay.

The screens we saw from D2 and others... definitely not Dreamcast quality. Of course, from early dev shots, who knows what the potential of the system really was. But from the LOOK of the thing, I'd say it was a meeting point between the PS1 and the DC.

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Post by parallaxscroll » Mon Feb 25, 2008 5:51 pm

Vance wrote:The theoretical M2 and the finished product were so nebulous, sadly. I was there when Trip Hawkins demoed the possibly fake racing game. Looked great... but nobody ever got a chance to try it out like he did, so there was no proof we had seen actual gameplay.
Which racing game?

the futuristic one from 1995
Image

or IMSA Racing from 1997
Image



the first one was totally prerendered CGI, not realtime.

the 2nd one was an actual game, and that screen seems to be realtime replay.

The screens we saw from D2 and others... definitely not Dreamcast quality. Of course, from early dev shots, who knows what the potential of the system really was. But from the LOOK of the thing, I'd say it was a meeting point between the PS1 and the DC.
Definitally, M2 was halfway between PS1 and Dreamcast, that I agree with, from everything I've seen realtime on M2.

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Post by 3DOKid » Mon Feb 25, 2008 7:48 pm

I prefered the look of the pre-rendered one.

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Post by Vance » Thu Feb 28, 2008 6:17 am

While 1995 doesn't gel and I don't remember that exact screen, it was indeed a future-themed racer and I suck with remembering dates past this last August. I never saw a close-up of the video, rather we were at an expo when Trip Hawkins "demoed" the thing. It started up on the big screen, we all went "CG" in unison, and Trip took the controller and ostensibly started playing the game. It was pretty convincing, but the graphics looked way too damn good for the time.

So yeah, guess that answers that.

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Post by parallaxscroll » Sun Mar 02, 2008 4:14 am

If Trip was playing this game demo that looked too good to be true, it was either some kind of trick, or, it was realtime on some highend SGI workstation or even higher-end SGI visualization system, not on the M2 chipset.

Imagine you're at a press event where Nintendo is hyping the Nintendo64, what it can do, but they have GameCube set up behind the scenes to trick everyone into thinking N64 looks really good.

(It is pretty well understood that GCN can produce at least 50 times more complex graphics than N64. The GCN is actually more or less, 100 times more powerful (N64: 160,000 polys vs 12,000,000 ~ 20,000,000), but lets go with 50x because that's not debatable. That leaves GCN with 8,000,000 polys vs N64's 160,000 )

Anyway, Nintendo hypes N64 by showing realtime demos running on GCN, and playing those in front of you, but saying they were for N64.

It was basicly same thing with M2, only they weren't using an M3 to hype M2, they used workstations. What they showed in 1995 could have indeed been realtime, but realtime on far more powerful hardware, on SGI workstations with 10x, 50x or 100x (or whatever) times the power of what M2 would really have.

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