How powerful is the Gamecube?

[Rob2600]

You appear to be a Nintendo fan boy who is intent on bashing the Xbox at any chance.

I didn't bash the Xbox at all. In a few posts in this thread, I wrote that in the hands of the best developers, the GameCube could produce around 22-26 million polygons/second (in-game), while the Xbox could produce around 30-35 million polygons/second (in-game). How is that bashing the Xbox?

The Gamecube has some great games and I think it was a great console. Having said that, it's not even close to the Xbox in graphics capability and it can't push the kind of detail or number of elements on screen that the Xbox can. ...

Resident Evil 4 on the Gamecube is great. Of course, like all Resident Evil games, your character moves relatively slowly and there aren't hundreds of enemies on screen at once. It's the perfect game for a capable but not necessarily technically spectacular console

Julian Eggebrecht at Factor 5 would probably disagree with you. The two Star Wars Rogue Squadron games on the GameCube featured plenty of fast-moving, detailed elements, plus fancy lighting effects. F-Zero GX, too.

I'm not saying the GameCube out-performed the Xbox. I'm just saying the GameCube came pretty close in the hands of the right developers.

the significantly faster processor...and higher end graphics card are what pushed the cost of the Xbox to $400 as opposed to $200.

As I wrote in an earlier post:

A 485 MHz PowerPC G3 CPU (very similar to the GameCube's Gekko CPU) and a 733 MHz Pentium III (very similar to the Xbox's CPU) have very close performance benchmarks. One CPU isn't significantly more powerful than the other. Don't fall for the megahertz myth.

Also, the Xbox had more RAM, but the GameCube had double the L2 cache (256 KB vs. 128 KB). So far, one console still isn't significantly more powerful than the other, but...

...The biggest difference between the Xbox and GameCube was the GPU. The Xbox's GPU was more powerful than the GameCube's in almost every way.


So overall, yes, the Xbox edged out the GC in terms of visuals, but the difference isn't quite as gigantic as you claim.

PS: Bojay, Rob is just making the point that the Xbox was graphically superior because it used much more advanced and expensive components. That Nintendo used a less powerful, less expensive architecture, and the result was pretty close to Microsoft's.

Exactly. I was just trying to figure out why the Xbox supposedly cost around $400 to manufacture, while the GameCube supposedly cost around $195. Questioning things and trying to figure something out isn't the same as bashing.