SEGA Lindbergh Arcade Board Naked - GPU Shown to be 2004-era GeForce 6 series

[suburbanguy]

http://www.gamiko.co.uk/showthread.php?t=3412




Sega's Lindbergh Arcade Board is shown, taken apart. Now we know it
can be concidered a low to mid-range PC (maybe not even midrange!),
with a single GeForce 6 series (6600 or 6800) GPU, circa 2004.

but this is not really a surprise--It has been known since the middle of last year
that Lindbergh used an Nvidia shader 3.0 capable GPU.

The question was, did Lindbergh use the then-new NV47 / G70 / GeForce 7800,
or the older NV40 / GeForce 6800. Well, now we know it's an older GPU from 2004.

Along with a standard Pentium 4 CPU, this makes Lindbergh weaker than
many of todays midrange PCs, and far weaker than highend PCs.

Is Sega ever going to get serious about technology again with their arcade games?

back in the mid-to-late 1990s, Sega's Martin Marietta powered MODEL-2
and Lockheed Martin powered MODEL-3 arcade boards kicked the ever
living $h|t out of the most powerful PCs including those equiped with
3Dfx Voodoo Cards in 1996-1998.

now we have $1000 PCs and a $300-$400 console
(with another $400-500 console on the way)
that beats the most powerful Sega arcade hardware.

sad!

edit: even sadder, it's only a GT!

SEGA, where is the highend NAOMI 3 or MODEL-4 ?

they should AT LEAST be using Quad SLI 7900s now.....

oh Sega, how you have fallen

[K-1]

what games are running on the Lindbergh board? man, back in the day Model 2 and Model 3 were so insanely amazing, hell, even Model 1 was pretty badass. I remember the first time I saw Virtua Fighter 3 in the arcades, so incredible.

[suburbanguy]

Lindbergh arcade games include:

The House Of The Dead 4
Virtua Fighter 5
After Burner Climax
Power Smash 3 aka Virtua Tennis 3

those are the ones of any significance anyway. I am SO looking forward to After Burner Climax.

now that I know what GPU Lindbergh is using, I don't have to worry that the new After Burner
and VF5 might get downgraded when they're ported to PS3 and-or Xbox 360.

PCs and consoles of the mid-to-late 90s just could NOT handle 100% exact ports of Sega arcade games, or even close translations. even the Dreamcast failed to reproduce MODEL-3 games without downgrades here and there. VF3 on DC was like 85% of the arcade. decent, but not acceptable for a console that was supposedly more powerful than MODEL-3.

[AthlonXP1800]

I am surprised to see Geforce cards in Lindbergh system, I think games made in 2005 used Geforce 6 and 2006 games use Geforce 7 series. OMG I loved Afterburner Climax, here the game trailer, it looked absolutely stunned.

I cant wait to get either ported to PS3 or Windows Vista with DirectX 10.

I noticed that Sega never disclosed what OS are running on Lindbergh system, I wonder what OS they used?

I will love to see Sega make... Golden Axe Climax, Space Harrier Climax and Super Hang On Climax.

[suburbanguy]

I'm not surprised to see a GeForce card in Lindbergh. ok maybe the card itself yea a little, but not the actual GPU. it was announced roughly a year ago that Lindbergh would have a shader model 3.0 Nvidia GPU. but I am surprised at how low-end it is.

[AthlonXP1800]

Originally Posted by suburbanguy

I'm not surprised to see a GeForce card in Lindbergh. ok maybe the card itself yea a little, but not the actual GPU. it was announced roughly a year ago that Lindbergh would have a shader model 3.0 Nvidia GPU. but I am surprised at how low-end it is.

I think you should be surprised how low end it is because high end cards on the PC with DirectX 9 couldnt matched it in terms of graphics and speed. You have to wait until Vista come out with DirectX 10 that will match the Lindbergh system.

[jAkUp]

haha thats hilarious

[Darkfalz]

1. Sega know how to make games.

2. Look at the incredible games Sega made on an SH4 and PVR2 chipset (ie. DC and Naomi).

3. You can truly optimise and make a gun run awesome if you are only designing for one specific platform and architecture, rather than a plethora of combinations.

[suburbanguy]

Originally Posted by AthlonXP1800

I think you should be surprised how low end it is because high end cards on the PC with DirectX 9 couldnt matched it in terms of graphics and speed. You have to wait until Vista come out with DirectX 10 that will match the Lindbergh system.

sorry, that just makes no sense whatsoever.

Lindbergh is a lowend or at best, midrange PC. it's not, as far as anyone knows, custom or extra powerful in any way. Lindbergh has a stock 3.0 GHz Pentium4, nothing special. it's got 1 GB of fairly SLOW DDR memory, which is below par. it's got a GeForce 6800GT, nothing special, and getting old now. and for the GPU it's got 256 MB of GDDR3, again nothing special.

A highend (or even good midrange) PC of today with a GB of DDR2 system memory, a single GeForce 7800 GTX (G70) or 7900 series (G71) or Radeon 1800 (R520) series or 1900 (R580) series with 512 MB GDDR3 would signifcantly outperform Lindbergh's rather outdated GPU.

nevermind an Nvidia SLI or ATI CrossFire PC rig, and further, nevermind Quad SLI, let alone upcoming dual-core CPU PCs with Windows Vista / DirectX10 / Shader 4.0 with the upcoming Nvidia NV50/G80 or ATI R600 GPUs which would completely blow Lindbergh out of the water being a whole entire GPU generation ahead.

now that is purely hardware.

of course, Sega, an outstanding developer, could make better games on Lindbergh which uses 2003-2004 technology, than most western PC developers using 2005 technology. but thats more to do with software optimizations on a fixed platform and with programming by a top notch developer.

take the same developer, Sega, on newer PC hardware, and they would blow away their own efforts on the weaker Lindbergh.

Sega's arcade system lineup currently is:

Aurora - very lowend board - slightly more powerful than Dreamcast/NAOMI, but weaker than NAOMI 2 which was shown in 2000.

Lindbergh - midrange board (although currently Sega's most powerful board - and hopefully something in the pipeline that's really highend) which uses STANDARD PC technology from 2004.

even an Xbox 360-based or Playstation3-based arcade hardware (which would be concidered only mid-range hardware from the way arcade hardware used to be done) beat Lindbergh significantly.

the bottem line is, Sega isn't shooting for even high-end off-the-shelf hardware let alone truly cutting-edge, custom, proprietary military/workstation grade hardware as they did in the 1990s. Sega has taken not one, but two significant steps down in arcade technology, with Lindbergh as their current flagship.


sorry for the little rant :/

[sznupi]

But you're missing the point...even though, hardware-wise, it's made of PC parts, it's NOT a PC, so don't compare them directly. BTW, many of you said than in days of Naomi things were different...well, not really. Naomi hardware was exotic, but not that powerfull - Kyro/Kyro2 cards used in PC (of the same heritage as Dreamcast/Naomi) were faster than its GFX part.

The thing is...arcades/consoles can:
1) Have overall hardware design/architecture geared towards processing games (obviously not the case here, but when one looks at PS2...)
2) Run o lightweight operating system
3) Have games optimised the **** outta them - you must develop only for ONE, SPECIFIC hardware type - you don't have to care about how the games scales, so you might do things that, yeah, are possible on comparable PC, but nobody does them because the game won't run acceptably on slower machines. Oh, and you can play with hardware a bit more directly when you're sure what it is...

Just look at PS2. Its hardware specs aren't very impressive...but it beats the hell out of one of my PCs which is theoretically around two times faster.


And one important point - it's safer for them to go with hardware that is for sometime on the market...reliable and so on. Might be important, especially given very "unfriendly" enviroment in which many of the arcades must work And, more seriously - no surprises. Going with cutting edge stuff migh be one of the things that caused for Sega finacial troubles.

[snowmanwithahat]

you guys amaze me, some of you don't consider it to even be a mid-range system? i know it's not the fastest, but it's by no means slow, it can play every game other than CoD2 at 1440x900 for me with atleast 2xAA flawlessly, i'm not surprised that it uses it really

[$n][pErMan]

the 6800GT is hardly a slouch. Oooo .. so you dont get 95 FPS running the highest settings .. big deal... anything over 60FPS most people cant even notice anyway. Although with a P4 that weakens it a bit