/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10521059
The DC had some strengths over the PS2 (namely twice the VRAM, support for texture compression, progressive scan VGA output, and hardware AA), but it wasn't 'technically more powerful' on an overall scale.

The PS2 had a CPU that was clocked faster (300MHz versus 200MHz), twice as much RAM (32MB vs 16MB), and had some hardware quirks that specific developers were able to tap into in truly amazing ways (Kaz at Polyphony Digital has gone on record saying that the PS2's fillrate was faster than the PS3's, which was something they had to adjust to when developing Gran Turismo Sport/GT5).

Areas where the DC tended to excel were things like texture quality and texture variation, which again goes back to having more VRAM. The Emotion Engine shids and fards all over the SH-4 in the Dreamcast though, so it excels in areas like polygon counts and complex (for the time) physics simulations.

Games that were developed by highly skilled people specifically to take advantage of one platform really showed this off. You couldn't port Shenmue II to the PS2 and keep its texture quality and variety any more than you could port Gran Turismo 4 to the Dreamcast and keep its insane polygon counts. Later on in its life PS2 devs were able to brute force their way past a lot of these limitations though, so you'd get games like Yakuza and GoW that were incredibly impressive for their hardware.