One thing i do think about dreamcast shenmue and shenmue2 is that they look amazing,truly amazing,i love the graphic engine and also how many details they added to really make a city feel like a city.
So dreamcast had to be quite strong still...
But i do think ps2 was stronger,i mean ffx on a dreamcast? nah,,,

You forget, the dreamcast has a few advantages that the ps2 doesnt.
Mostly, hardware culling(tile rendering) but it also had a much better development suite then the ps2.

So yes, ff whatever could have been done with no problems.

That all depends on how many polygons Final Fantasy X was pushing, and what kind of lighting effects were used throughout the game as the PS2 has better lighting effects than the Dreamcast.

you think DC can run games like God of war? Metal gear 3?? Gran turismo 4?? resident evil 4??

I don' t think the Dreamcast could even run Metal Gear Solid 2 without the game being watered-down, much less Metal Gear Solid 3.. Even the PS2 experienced a few hiccups here and there with Metal Gear Solid 3. There were some graphical glitches whenever entering the first person viewing mode in certain parts of the jungle.

I haven' t played God of War yet so I don' t know about that one but I don' t see the Dreamcast running certain parts of Resident Evil 4 without choking on its own silicon and slowing to a crawl. There' s just no way. Rendering the first town alone, which appeared to be completely polygonal, would have probably had smoke coming out of the Dreamcast ;).

Now if Yu Suzuki and AM2 were locked away to rebuild Resident Evil 4 from the ground up for the Dreamcast utilizing it' s strengths and coding down to the metal, I believe we' d have one hell of an impressive looking game but it wouldn' t look the same as the GameCube version.

Well, like i said, hardware culling can afford the dramcast better geometry then the ps2 is capable of.
Hardware culling is also called hidden surface removal or tile rendering.
So any geometry you dont see isnt drawn in the frame buffer.
Therefore you could get twice the detail from dreamcast hardware then from the emotion engine, because of overdraw, polygon throughput is locked, you can' t squeeze more performace out of it.
the ps2 has only 2 advantages over the dreamcast, and has a few disadvantages.
It' s better able to do particles and environmental mapping, and the DVD drive, and faster, more abundant ram.
But it' s less able to handle multi texuring, full scene anti aliasing(via multi sampling)
And most importantly the dreamcast has had one of the better sound systems around, only 2nd to the xbox.

As you' ve seen in that forum, the ps2' s hardware didnt get any stronger, the development software did.
So image what could have been done if the more technicly elegent dreamcast at this time!?
It was truely a system before it' s time.

I thought i might look up something for you.
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=1435
The article is a little old, but the kyroII and the dreamcast were based on similar chipsets.
From what i understand, the emotion engine is most comparable to the geforce 256(maybe less) and if you know your video cards pretty well, that doesnt say alot for the ps2.

It' s a real shame the dreamcast was underused.

there is no way dreamcast could be more powerful than ps2, the only advantage that DC had was its ram which is the double of PS2, other than that DC can' t match
let me remind you that DC is not a true 128 bits

CPu DC 200 mhz / PS2 333 mhz
DC 3 millions poly per sec / ps2 over 50 millions poly per sec

DC 1,4 GFLOPS/ ps2 6.2 gflops

GD rom / DVD rom

now you can go check out this specs all over the interent, and say sony is hyping their machine, say those specs are useless but hey the difference is there

yes DC wowed me so much at the past , i played many beautiful games, but then i got the pS2 and first games were Jax and dexter and ICO ... you realize just from those two games that pS2 graphics have really something special and those two game (first generation) have blown my mind...

i don' t you people why you exagerating so much and fusing about sony, i mean come on!! look where we at now , this guy just dared to say that dreamcast can deliver better graphics than PS2... ppffffff

Actually the PS2 was 300 mhz, the PSP is the one with 333 mhz CPUs.


Also while it' s not a certainty, I think the Dreamcast would have seen a Virtua Fighter 4 port if AM2 felt it was capable of handling it but instead they sent it to the PS2.

I think i pretty much explained my case to you,
Although the main cpu was a little slower, the gpu was more then a match for the emotion engine.
I gave you the chance to look up the chipset and do some research, but you still refuse to believe it..
That' s ok i guess.
My only regret, is that there is no way to show the world what the dreamcast could have done with better tools.