So they have sharpened their claws and filled their arsenals, all competitors claim theirs is the one, and at these prices THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE.
The table below gives all available information on each of the four next generation consoles.
In an epic battle for console market domination, there are no rules, nor any room for mercy. Announcement upon announcement is unleashed on unsuspecting gamer citizens, creating the environment in which all these companies thrive, that of confusion.
So which is best, which console has the biggest RAM size? How many floating operations per second can it carry out?
For a change we are not going to tell you which one is the Ultimate console (even though we do have an opinion) but we are going to let you look at the facts.
The choice is yours.
|
FEATURE |
DREAMCAST |
PLAYSTATION 2 |
GAMECUBE |
(MS)XBOX |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
CPU |
200MHz Hitachi SH-4 (Dedicated 128-bitprocessor, 1.4 billion floating point operations perecond) |
295MHz Emotion/Engine (128-bit processor,6.2 billion loating point operations per second) |
405MHz PowerPC Gekko (128-bitprocessor, 0.18 micron Copper Wire Technology) |
733MHzIntel/Pentium III with SIMD Extensions |
|
VIDEO CHIP |
NEC PowerVR DC (3 million polys / second,texture mapping, Gourad shading, z-buffering, ightsourcing, and anti-aliasing |
147MHz Graphics Synthesizer 25 millionpolygons per second with texture mapping, Gourad shading,z-buffering, light sourcing, mip-mapping) |
203MHzFlipper (6-12 millionpolygons per second assuming actual game computations,0.18 icron Copper Wire Technology, 12.8GB/second textureread bandwidth, 3.2GB/second main memory bandwidth,sub-pixel anti-aliasing, alpha-blending, ulti-exturemapping/bump/environment mapping, mip-mapping, bilinearfiltering, S3TC real-time texture decompression) |
300MHz X-Chip by nVidia (300 millionpolygons per second untextured/unlit, 100 millionolygons per second textured and lit, 4.8 gigapixels persecond anti-aliased pixel fill rate, full-sceneanti-aliasing, 8:1 texture compression, uses modifiedversion of DirectX 8 API) |
|
SYSTEM RAM |
16MB SD-RAM |
32MB DRAM |
24MB 1T-SRAM |
64MBUnified RAM |
|
VIDEO RAM |
8MB |
4MB VRAM |
NOT YET RELEASED |
64MBUnified RAM |
|
AUDIO RAM |
2MB |
MB |
NOT YET RELEASED |
64MBUnified RAM |
|
AUDIO CHIP |
Yamaha Audio Engine (32-bit ARM 7 RISC CPUwith DSP, 64 channels and full 3D support) |
SPU2 (Dolby, AC3, DTS), 48 channel |
Special 16-bit 101.25 MHz DSP |
AC3 encoded game audio, 256 channel |
|
MEDIA TYPE |
Double-Density GD-ROM (12X speed ConstantAngular Velocity, 1.4GB) |
DVD-ROM Drive (4X 6.2GB DVD-ROM, 24X CD-ROM) |
Proprietary 8cm diameter mini-DVD (1.5GBcapacity, 128ms access time, 16-25Mbps transfer peed) |
DVD-ROM Drive (4X 6.2GB capacity) |
|
OS |
Microsoft indows CE and Sega API,CD/DirectX Suite |
roprietary |
Proprietary |
Modified version of Windows 2000 |
|
EXPANSION POTENTIAL |
High-speed Serial Port |
Two USB Ports, one IEEE 1394 (Firewire)port, one Type III PCMCIA card lot |
Two high-speed serial ports, 1 high-speedparallel ort |
USB port, 10/100 Ethernet port, HDTV support |
|
NETWORK OPTIONS |
Removable 56.6Kbps modem shipped with unit.A broadband modem will soon be released. |
Third party modems available at launch,cable modems available next year. |
Add-on Modem available at launch, Broadbandmodem available later. |
10/100 Ethernet port |
|
CONTROLLER PORTS |
4 |
2 |
4 |
4 |
|
HARD DRIVE |
None | None | NONE | 8GB harddrive |