correction ^^
@Huk: DX plugin works fine
Couldn't agree more...
it`s even weaker in some aspects than the PowerVR that`s in theDreamcast.
Name them please ^^
Dreamcast's PoverVR2 (CLX2 chip) was running at 100 MHz, it's performance could fill over 3 million polygons per second (can be filled - not textured) in 16.7 million colors (32bit although as far as i concern dc was using 16bit palette mostly).
Nvidia's NV34 GPU is running at 250Mhz
As for supported by povervr's gpu effects/features:
Bump mapping - i'm guessing emboss which could be made by simple multitexturing, i haven't seen single normal map in any of dc's games/ Fx5200 can do all types of bumpmaping (eg. emboss, dot3, parallax)
Triangular / Quad Engine - Fx5200 can do more (polygons, tristrips)
real-time lighting - with Fx5200's fixed pipeline you can do 8 lights per vertex (with per-pixel lighting enabled you can do 16 point lights in one pass)
fog - Fx5200 can do
scaling - Fx5200 can do
rotation - Fx5200 can do
alpha-blending - Fx5200 can do
bilinear, trilinear, anisotropic texture filtering - Fx5200 can do
environment mapping - Fx5200 can do (supposably more - env. qubemapping)
super sampling anti-aliasing - Fx5200 can do (supposably more - 2,4 fsAA)
perspective correction - Fx5200 can do
ARGB gouraud shading - Fx5200 can do more (ARGB, RGBA, RGB with various bit modes)
specular effects - Fx5200 can do
CPU is not so bad.With this GPU you can`t even hope to play games at full speed if you can it`s hats down to the guys from the Demul team but for me in terms of hardware it`s impossible
You are wrong!
You see emulation involves mostly (i'm guessing that more then 80% in particular case) CPU (for interpretation, dynamic instructions recompilation), THEN translated instructions are interpreted by video plugin (to fit into hosts graphic pipeline).
I've run Sonic Adventur 2 with DX video plug and had it working at ~30fps on my old Fx5200 card (Sempron 2.8+ (2.0), 512MB DDR 400, nforce2, Win2kPL SP4). Main issue was sound - not graphics.
Screenshots:
SA2 in action - large scene, many tris to render (but not as many as could bring fx5200 to it's knees)
And vireframed version:
And low-poly view:
You can see there is about 10fps jump - too small to by caused by gfx speedup, i'm guessing it's obtained from cut-out animation calculations and geometry tree iterations.
And vf: