/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.5375901]

What are some interesting rendering capabilities of hardware from the last millennium?
Apparently, the Dreamcast is capable of normal mapping, which is something PC hardware could only claim the following year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY4DN97fiCo

[Anonymous No.5375983]

>>5375901
It sorta is, but it's not well documented or used by any official title and it ABSOLUTELY kills fillrate and therefore performance. Nice, but relatively useless in practical use on this platform.

Simple offset/emboss mapping is more realistic in a game scenario on the DC. You also need a certain screen resolution to start with for these effects to be worthwhile.

[Anonymous No.5375987]

>>5375901
One of the Expendable devs posted here about the Environment Mapped Bump Mapping integration, running on the Matrox Millennium G400 chipset. Apparently there are hacks to make their approach work on non G400 cards, but at the cost of speed since these techniques rely on at least one extra texture pass.

[Anonymous No.5375992]

>>5375987
Not the best card on the market then, but the Environment Mapped Bump Mapping was kinda their marketing gimmick.
I think games like Drakan did a less sophisticated version, at least on terrain geo.

[Anonymous No.5376359]

>>5375992
Isn't there also an official Matrox demo that uses it profusely?
I think EMBM has the implicit advantage over DOT3 of not needing to be applied globally to create cohesive imagery. It looks terrible when you have your super cool normal mapped figure lose all its definition from a unidirectional ambient term.

[Anonymous No.5378268]

It was all crystallized when first SSam came out. It had more graphics options than graphics drivers of the time