How powerful is the Gamecube?

[Bojay1997]

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?



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.



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.




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.

No, no you weren't. If that had been your intention, you would have said something like, the Gamecube was a good deal for a system that offered better graphics performance than the PS2 for a 30% lower launch cost and looked pretty good for a system half the price of the Xbox. Instead, you claimed that a $200 system had indistinguishable performance from a $400 system which in the same sentence you admit had 50% better performance specs just in the graphics processor.

A G3 running at 450 is not even close to a Pentium III running at 733 on all of the important measures including floating point performance. You may be confusing a G3 with a G4 which would offer very similar or in some cases better performance on all the critical measures at 450 MHz or higher. Similarly, having a 256 KB cache is not going to overcome an advantage of 16 more megs of RAM, especially with some of the advances NVidia built into the GPU. I have spent many hours working on complex motion graphics and editing projects on both PCs and Macs over the years and I have a good handle on what a Power PC G3 and G4 can do versus a Pentium. The performance boost on the Pentium III over the G3 is something on the order of 50% better.

The GPU on the Xbox can theoretically perform at 80 Gigaflops while the Cubes is about a tenth of that. Heck, the Nividia in the Xbox runs at 233 Mhz while the ATI runs at about 162 MHz. I believe the Gamecube only offers 24 bit color while the Xbox offers full 32 bit. Similarly, the textured fillrate of the Xbox is about 1800 Megatexels/sec while the Cube is only a third of that. I realize this might be minutae, but you can see the difference in Xbox games pretty clearly when you compare them to the same game on the Cube which is a little hard to do because other than sports and some million selling games, there wasn't exactly a ton of cross-over on the two libraries

The Rogue Squadron games were good, but I don't think anyone would accuse them of having the most stunning visuals on the Gamecube. The games played lots of fog and distance tricks to make it look like a lot more was going on than actually was and I recall tons of pop-up which you wouldn't see in a game of the same type like Crimson Skies on the Xbox. Frankly, the fact that you couldn't play large-scale multiplayer was a huge disappointment in Rogue Squadron. I would pit the Xbox version of Battlefront against those games anyday. Don't even get me started on Fight Night or most of the EA sports titles which looked amazing on the Xbox and really flat and mediocre on both the GC and PS2.

You already know why the Xbox was more expensive based on the text of your earlier post. It had a hard drive, networking and a processor and graphics unit that were on the bleeding edge of technology at the time. If you want more info about the actual development and cost of the Xbox, I would suggest you pick up the book Opening the Xbox.