Firingsquad heeft het eerste deel van hun Sega Droomkast review online gezet. De Dreamcast werd gisteren officieel geïntroduceerd in de VS. De NEC / Videologic PowerVR accelerator van deze speldoos heeft een maximale fillrate van 100Mpix/sec (tiled rendering, dus er worden alleen zichtbare pixels gerenderd):
The remarkably low fillrate may also shock a few readers as it's even lower than last year's S3 Savage3D accelerator for the PC. Yet again, the numbers can be misleading. The first "special case" the Dreamcast has is that it is a console and not a PC, which means that it only needs to run at the NTSC limit of 640x480. Part of the reason why PC owners need such fast 3D accelerators is that PCs need to run games at high resolutions such as 1024x768 to reduce aliasing. On a TV, 640x480 is plenty. Remember that an average DVD only has 480 lines of resolution. Detailed faces in real gameplay Player models in real-timeThe second distinction is that the PowerVR chip is an infinite-plane based deferred renderer rather than a conventional triangle renderer such as that with S3, NVIDIA, or Sony. The developers of the PowerVR, NEC and VideoLogic, have quoted performance as being "250-500 MPixels/sec" and on occasion even claimed a fillrate exceeding 1 gigapixel/sec! Though marketing hype is half of the situation, the PowerVR chip has been measured at a fill rate exceeding 1 gigapixel/sec in the past! To understand why these different numbers are being thrown around, you need to first understand how these numbers are determined.
