Resident Evil 4 on Gamecube ?

[Fusion]

Anyone think the Gamecube could shift this amount of detail around in real-time ?

http://www.cube-europe.com/preview.php?prid=56

I know it's an ATI chip in there with embedded DRAM, and a design close to the radeon , maybe ? or was it totally custom ?

But Capcom are claiming that what you see in those screenshots are completely real-time.
Yet previous incarnations have been pre-rendered backdrops, with real-time overlaid characters.

Any thoughts ?

I must admit, if those ARE real-time, then they certainly blow anything I've seen on any other console to date.

[stncttr908]

Very nice, if those are real time as they claim, I must say that I'm very impressed.

[Grechie]

that game looks sik

[sytaylor]

its not suprising that the gamecube is only just starting to shine, having suffered from unrelenting cutie ninty graphics and half arsed ps2 ports.. i remember reading the details of the gamecubes specs and the thing is just incredible... it has a bottleneck free architecture, everything is lightening fast and remarkbly scaleable.. even though the cpu isnt that powerful, clock for clock all the parts of the machine are outstanding in comparison to anything else

[nin_fragile14]

That's in realtime? Wow.

[-=DVS=-]

Well it looks good only becouse everything is in dark and low resolution , maybe it uses low textures/low poly and have prerendered shadows except character that why its not hard to render it and it looks good :p
Splinter Cell made in little screenshots looks awesome to , on Xbox :rolleyes: as does Metal Gear Solid 2 on PS 2 .

Nothing to get excited about :D would be cool if that game would come on PC ;)

[Serath]

Originally posted by -=DVS=-
Well it looks good only becouse everything is in dark and low resolution , maybe it uses low textures/low poly and have prerendered shadows except character that why its not hard to render it and it looks good :p
Splinter Cell made in little screenshots looks awesome to , on Xbox :rolleyes: as does Metal Gear Solid 2 on PS 2 .

Nothing to get excited about :D would be cool if that game would come on PC ;)

Yer right, but ya gotta think of it like this. Even if it IS low rez, where else can you get that much sexxxy detail for $200?

[-=DVS=-]

Originally posted by Serath
Yer right, but ya gotta think of it like this. Even if it IS low rez, where else can you get that much sexxxy detail for $200?

Hehe your right also , Game Cube is realy cheap compared to high end PC systems :)

[marqmajere]

WHOA!:eek: *breaks all other GC games in collection* That's the one for me. :D

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by Fusion
I know it's an ATI chip in there with embedded DRAM, and a design close to the radeon , maybe ? or was it totally custom ?

it's not an ATI chip and the architecture is nothing close to a radeon. it is a custom graphics chip.

anyway, yes, i believe the GC can probably do it in real time :D

[Fusion]

it's not an ATI chip and the architecture is nothing close to a radeon. it is a custom graphics chip.


Time to eat humble pie, me thinks :D

Now, given the time frame ATI developed this chip, around the time they were developing Radeon tech. Are you telling me they never included one part of the Radeon technology ?
Seems a bit silly to develop something entirely new, when they already had something pretty good.


MPU ("Microprocessor Unit")* Custom IBM Power PC "Gekko"
Manufacturing process 0.18 micron IBM copper wire technology
Clock frequency 485 MHz
CPU capacity 1125 Dmips (Dhrystone 2.1)
Internal data precision 32-bit Integer & 64-bit floating-point
External bus 1.3GB/second peak bandwidth (32-bit address space, 64-bit data bus 162 MHz clock)
Internal cache L1: instruction 32KB, data 32KB (8 way) L2: 256KB (2 way)
System LSI Custom ATI/Nintendo "Flipper"
Embedded frame buffer Approx. 2MB sustainable latency : 6.2ns (1T-SRAM)
Embedded texture cache Approx. 1MB sustainable latency : 6.2ns (1T-SRAM)
Texture read bandwidth 10.4GB/second (Peak)
Main memory bandwidth 2.6GB/second (Peak)
Pixel depth 24-bit color, 24-bit Z buffer
Image processing functions Fog, subpixel anti-aliasing, 8 hardware lights, alpha blending, virtual texture design, multi-texturing, bump mapping, environment mapping, MIP mapping, bilinear filtering, trilinear filtering, anisotropic filtering, real-time hardware texture decompression (S3TC), real-time decompression of display list, HW 3-line deflickering filter.

[thcdru2k]

artx made the chip, ati happened to buy them after it was already done.

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by thcdru2k
artx made the chip, ati happened to buy them after it was already done.

exactly. and all the rumors that were flying around that R300 was the product of the "ArtX team" at ATI is pure garbage.

[R.Carter]

ArtX left SGI in 1997 and they won Nintendo's business from MIPS (another company that grew out of SGI). ArtX started from scratch with "Flipper".

ATI bought them for $400 million in stock in April 2000. See this (http://www.ati.com/companyinfo/press/2000/atiartx.pdf).

The GameCube uses ArtX 3D graphics accelerator called "Flipper" which uses 3.1 MB of embedded MoSys 1T-SRAM for Z-buffers, frame buffers and texture cache. It is a 128-bit graphics engine capable of a throughput of 12.5 million triangles per second. It incorporates hardware geometry processing for real-time 3D T & L and also uses S3's texture compression to achive 6:1 texture compression ratios.

It uses a custom PowerPC processor from IBM called "Gekko" that has a unique memory interface that uses embedded and external DRAM and has some kind of special graphical processor interface as well.

The "Gekko" runs at 485MHz while the "Flipper" runs at ~162MHz.

The system has 24MB of main 1T-SRAM memory and 16MB of secondary memory (81MHz DRAM).

I think that the key to the performance of the GameCubes is the use of embedded SRAM memory for really low latencies and high bandwidth.

For more detail on the Flipper look here (http://www.2002.arspentia.org/sexgods/flipper).