Shenmue Dojo

Dreamcast is relatively weak against the Playstation 2. I'm pretty sure you all of know this. Dreamcast can't handle realtime shadow & reflections, complex shader and physics or the higher amount of polygons like the PS2 can. This makes me wonder: Could Shenmue have been better on the PS2?

Of course the Dreamcast can do all of these things with the right engine.
The overall performance gap isn't that large either. The Dreamcast is a texturing powerhouse with it's quad texture compression and twice the VRAM. The PS2 has to hold up against that with its (for the time) extremely high memory bandwith. One must also keep in mind that the PS2 had years and years to grow on the developers while the Dreamcast faded away before it could be fully utilized (though Shenmue II got pretty close I'd say).

Shenmue's graphics and especially those of Shenmue II are made pretty by the texturing work and could push the PS2 quite hard because of this. The games are surely possible on the PS2 and it has advantages because of the DVD drive but my guess is that not everything would easily carry over. The PS2 also has less audio channels (48 vs 64).

A more interesting debate is if Shenmue would've been more succesfull on the PS2. The PS2 had a massively larger userbase but on the other hand Shenmue might've drowned among all the other big titles, not being promotable as the killer app as it was on the Dreamcast.

asdfguy wrote: Dreamcast is relatively weak against the Playstation 2. I'm pretty sure you all of know this. Dreamcast can't handle realtime shadow & reflections, complex shader and physics or the higher amount of polygons like the PS2 can. This makes me wonder: Could Shenmue have been better on the PS2?

what are you talking about? dreamcast isn't less powerful than ps2 at all.

PS2 could push more polygons but the Dreamcast was superior at texturing.

Shenmue would probably look more grainy on the PS2. But it would be on one disc.

From the huge library of the ps2 only a handfull of games run at 640x480, most of them run at something around 512x256 interlaced with n64 quality textures, so the game would have look aweful since it relies on crisp graphics and detailed textures.

Sure, the ps2 can push more polys and effects, but at hilarious resolutions and baaaaaad textures.

Some examples from games ported from Dreamcast to Ps2.












There is a reason for those infamous jaggies on PS2, low resolution rendering.


When you emulate the Dreamcast at higher resolution it becomes pretty apparent that it was a texturing monster for its time.












The ps2 can't came close to it.Period.

If it was out on PS2 the only difference would be slightly more people would be mad Shenmue 3 isn't out yet.

I feel Dreamcast was a superior console hardware-wise.

There was all this BS that DC could only draw 3 million polys/sec and PS2 could draw 70 mil/sec but that wasn't true at all,

I don't think Shenmue would have looked good on PS2.... it would have had worse textures and jaggy graphics on Sony's system.

That said, would a game like Metal Gear Solid 3 be possible on the Dreamcast? My answer might be 'no' but I dunno.....

I do think PS2 could draw a few more polygons probably but textures looked way better on DC.

SMDzero wrote: I feel Dreamcast was a superior console hardware-wise.

There was all this BS that DC could only draw 3 million polys/sec and PS2 could draw 70 mil/sec but that wasn't true at all,

I don't think Shenmue would have looked good on PS2.... it would have had worse textures and jaggy graphics on Sony's system.

That said, would a game like Metal Gear Solid 3 be possible on the Dreamcast? My answer might be 'no' but I dunno.....

I do think PS2 could draw a few more polygons probably but textures looked way better on DC.

I think a game like san andreas would've been impossible on dreamcast, metal gear solid 3 less so