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Professor cyborg
If we want to stop machines from taking over, we better start becoming more like them.
By Janelle Brown
[10/20/99]

Attack on the Net
In the midst of dot-com mania, one radio ad campaign takes the offensive against online commerce.
By Andrew Leonard
[10/19/99]

Technology: View from the top
Stoking the Net's growth
Industry veteran Ellen Hancock talks about Windows NT, glass ceilings -- and how her company, Exodus, keeps its vast server farms humming.
By Julie Polito
[10/18/99]

The Hollywoodization of venture capital
The business of funding tech companies has gone gaga for brand names and boffo deals. "Visionaries," though, may be out of luck.
By Mark Gimein
[10/15/99]

Books
The Red Hat diaries
Are Linux coders and Linux companies on different paths? A slapdash new book and a recent flurry of corporate maneuvers suggest just that.
By Andrew Leonard
[10/14/99]

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Playstation was a big advance over earlier consoles because it could display 3-D images rendered on the fly, allowing a much greater sense of immersion and illusion of space than possible with previous machines. Artists define 3-D models as a series of connected polygons, with "bones" that control how they can move and "textures" that paint over these polygons to give them visual detail and depth. Playstation can display no more than a few hundred polygons on the screen at one time; if you try to do more, you get jerky action.

All the new systems boast the ability to display millions of polygons simultaneously. They offer something close to photorealism. A gamer walking into a store and watching a demo is going to be blown away.

But which system offers the best performance? Which hardware is the best?

The Dreamcast and Playstation 2 specifications are fixed. Nintendo has revealed only a few bits of information about Dolphin, probably because it knows it has to one-up Playstation 2, and hasn't decided on the system's details yet. X-Box's specs are all "per rumor" -- Microsoft won't even confirm the existence of the X-Box program.

Graphics Processing

The next-gen consoles are all blazing-fast machines, as powerful as supercomputers from a couple of years ago. Dreamcast's processors achieve 1.4 billion floating-point operations per second, Playstation 2 gets 6.2 billion. Sega likes to say that Dreamcast is 15 times as powerful as a Playstation and has four times the graphic processing power of a Pentium II (although that's a somewhat misleading comparison, since any serious PC gamer has a 3-D card in his or her machine that handles extra-speedy graphic processing).

Obviously, Playstation 2 is a more powerful machine than Dreamcast -- and Dolphin is likely to be faster yet. X-Box -- who knows? But rumor has it that the X-Box will incorporate nVidia's GeForce 256 chip -- the most powerful graphics processing hardware yet developed on the personal computer side. Exactly how that stacks up against the consoles remains to be seen -- people don't normally compare PC 3-D boards to console systems.

Sony claims Playstation 2 can process 75 million polygons per second (Sega claims 3 million for Dreamcast). The claim is greatly exaggerated. It's true only for small polygons, and only if all three of the machine's co-processors are doing nothing but geometry computations -- in other words, no textures; no physics; no lighting or other effects; no artificial intelligence; no gameplay. The Playstation 2 is a faster machine than Dreamcast -- two to four times -- but nowhere near the 25 times that a direct comparison of peak rendering rates implies.

Online Play

Dreamcast is the first console to contain a built-in modem. There's a Web browser available for Dreamcast (it sucks) -- but so far, the only Net-playable game is Sonic Adventure. Sega will be launching "classic" card and board games in an online-only format, and has announced plans for other Net-playable games, including a massively multiplayer game à la Ultima Online, but that project has been delayed. Developer Team 17, which is porting its Net-playable PC game Worms Armageddon to Dreamcast, says Sega is disorganized and confused about online gaming.

Playstation 2 will not include a modem. Nintendo at one point said that Dolphin would, but now wavers on the issue. X-Box -- who knows? Of course, it remains to be proven that console gamers want to play online at all; previous attempts to get them to do so (Sega's Saturn NetLink, Catapult's X-Band for the Sega Genesis and SNES, the Sega Channel and Sony's Net Yaroze) all failed miserably. Online gaming is, so far, an exclusively PC phenomenon.

DVDs

Dreamcast uses its own disc format, "GD-ROM," essentially a CD-ROM with one gigabyte of storage, rather than the standard 660 megabytes. All the other systems will use DVD-ROMs (although they'll also read CD-ROMs). Playstation 2, in fact, will be able to play movie DVDs -- meaning that for $299, you get a machine that works as a DVD player and a game box and will also play audio CDs. For someone contemplating the purchase of both a next-gen console and a DVD, that may be a compelling proposition.

Nintendo has decided that keeping its system's launch price low is of primary importance, even if that means it can't play DVDs or audio CDs. Interestingly, Nintendo has partnered with Matsushita, which will probably manufacture a more pricey box (under its Panasonic label) that plays Dolphin titles and does play movies and audio. So you'll have a choice.

The X-Box will basically be a sealed-box personal computer with high-end graphic hardware and a DVD-ROM drive; the operating system may well be a modified version of Windows 2000. It would be trivial to make such a system play movie DVDs and audio CDs.

In sum, as graded on pure technology, Playstation 2 clearly beats Dreamcast. Dolphin looks comparable to Playstation 2, but will probably be superior, because Nintendo knows what it has to beat. And the X-Box is a wild card.

But technology isn't everything.

Next page | Beachhead by beachhead, the battle rages