screenshots of unreleased RAVE RACER for PowerVR (PC) cards

[gameoverDude]

A Dreamcast version of Rave Racer would've likely looked leagues better than the arcade, with almost a Soul Calibur sized jump in graphics. It wouldn't have hurt Namco to bring out a graphically improved Rave Racer for DC, while adding two or three bonus tracks.

[parallaxscroll]

A Dreamcast version of Rave Racer would've likely looked leagues better than the arcade, with almost a Soul Calibur sized jump in graphics. It wouldn't have hurt Namco to bring out a graphically improved Rave Racer for DC, while adding two or three bonus tracks.

I absolutely agree, gameoverDude.

The first-gen PowerVR, the PCX-1 and even the PCX-2 revision (still PowerVR1, not PowerVR2), would not have been able to handle an arcade-exact port of Rave Racer, because even with with fastest Pentium CPUs providing the geometry calculations, they could only reach 30fps at best, half of the arcade.

A Dreamcast version could've not only been arcade-exact if Namco decided to make it that way, indeed, it could've looked 5-10 times better than the arcade. Much like Soul Calibur on DC was a huge leap from the System12 based (faster PS1) arcade.

Although the System 22 from 1993 that ran Rave Racer (1995) is significantly more powerful than System12 from 1996 that drove arcade Tekken 3 and Soul Calibur, when you step up to Dreamcast's overwhelmingly greater power, it wouldn't even matter.

While Dreamcast would and did have trouble doing exact ports of MODEL 3 games, doing System 22 games wouldn't make DC break a sweat.

System 22 could do 240,000 texture mapped, z-buffered, goraud-shaded polygons, with perspective correction and maybe lighting, the Dreamcast can do, conservatively, more than 10 times that, and probably 20 times it.

[gamevet]

System 22 could do 240,000 texture mapped, z-buffered, goraud-shaded polygons, with perspective correction and maybe lighting, the Dreamcast can do, conservatively, more than 10 times that, and probably 20 times it.

It would be closer to 12 times that.

http://www.retro-games.co.uk/sega/dcast/dreamcast.htm

Processor Hitachi SH-4 running at 200 Mhz.
360 MIPS

Memory 16MB main RAM

Display 8MB video RAM. 3 million polygons/second peak rendering rate . Perspective-Correct Texture Mapping. Point, Bilinear, Trilinear and Anisotropic Mip-map filtering. Gouraud shading. z-buffer. Colored light sourcing. Full scene anti-aliasing. Hardware-based Fog
Bump mapping. 16.77 million colors.
Hardware-based texture compression
Shadow and Light volumes. Super sampling

Sound 2MB sound RAM.
32bit RISC CPU. DSP for real-time effects. 64 sound channels. Full 3D sound support. Hardware-based audio compression.

Ports 4 controller ports.
Built-in 56kbps modem
Built-in high-speed expansion ports

[parallaxscroll]

The 3 million pps spec for DC is conservative, just like the 6-12m pps for Gamecube was conservative.

There have been articles explaining how DC can do 5-6m

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

How Many Polygons Can the Dreamcast Render?

Let's help clear up some of the confusion that centers around the Dreamcast's polygonal rate. When SEGA first introduced the Dreamcast back in November 1998, they indicated that the machine could do 3 million polygons per second, which is a sustainable rate that could be gotten through software running on the machine at that time.

The CPU was clearly an important part of the Dreamcast specification, and selection of the device was a lengthy and carefully considered process. Factors considered included performance, cost, power requirements, and delivery schedule. There wasn't an off-the-shelf processor that could meet all requirements, but Hitachi's SH-4 processor, which was still in development, could adapt to deliver the 3D geometry calculation performance necessary. The final form has an internal floating-point unit of 1.4 Gflops, which can calculate the geometry and lighting of more than 10 million polygons per second. Among the features of the SH-4 CPU is the store queue mechanism that helps send polygon data to the rendering engine at close to maximum bus bandwidth.1 The final device is implemented using a 0.25-micron, five-layer-metal process.

The system ASIC combines a PowerVR rendering core with a system bus controller, implemented using a 0.25-micron, five-layer-metal process. Imagination Technologies (formerly VideoLogic) provided the core logical design and Sega supplied the system bus. NEC provided the ASIC design technologies and chip layout, including qualification for 100-MHz operation. Fill rates are a maximum of 3.2 Gpixels per second for scenes comprising purely opaque polygons, falling to 100 million pixels per second when transparent polygons are used at the maximum hardware sort depth of 60. Overall rendering engine throughput is 7 million polygons per second, but in Dreamcast, geometry data storage becomes the limiting factor before pixel engine throughput.

You're only as fast as your slowest component, so the DC is rated at 7 million polygons per second maximum sustainable rate, and in a game situation, would most likely be rated around 5 to 6 million polygons per second depending on how good a top developer would be at squeezing performance out of the system. I consider a rate lower than 7 mpps, simply because other game code has an effect on the polygon rate. The more complex the game AI is, the lower the polygon rate that the machine can achieve.

I took the low-end of that higher than 3million-figure, thus 5 million. that's more than 20x System 22's 240K.