> I would say that one polygon on MODEL 3 is worth 10 polygons of a 1990s PC 3D
> chip. so for example, a 3Dfx Voodoo2 which can supposedly do 3 million polygons
> per second peak, gets blown out of the water by supposedly weaker sounding Model
> 3 board. Voodoo2 probably only does 400K to 500K polygons in actual games with
> everything turned up.

No way. The Model 3 isn't really that powerful at all. It was fairly impressive when it came out but its specs are grossly exaggerated. The Model 3 is a scaled down Pro-1000 derivative and it doesn't have 2 of them. It might have 2 geometry processors or 2 rasterizers or whatever but that's nothing out of the ordinary.

The Model 3 had limited bandwidth for sending 3D data. It operates on "models" which are collections of polygons (objects, essentially) which are all transformed by a common matrix and link to the next object to be drawn. I talked to someone who worked at Real3D and they claimed that initially all polygon data was fetched from VROM and that Sega was very disappointed with this so a couple megs of polygon RAM were added for dynamic vertex data (deformable car models, etc.)

Still, the VROMs for most games are 32-64MB and they contain almost all of the polygon and texture data. It's an interesting architecture that worked extremely well for the time period (the CPU essentially only had to update matrices) but that sort of hardware has gone the way of the dodo.

The modern approach is to just throw geometry at the cards and have them render it (caching of polygon data as draw lists is also common, I believe.) It's a more flexible but resource-intensive approach.

> It takes a Gamecube or an Xbox to rival & surpass the quality and performance of
> MODEL 3, in practice.

No way. By the time the Riva TNT hit the scene, Model 3 was obsolete.

Model 3 games definitely do not push around hundreds of thousands of polygons per scene. Try a few thousand. I remember Ville once hooked up a polygon counter to his D3D engine in Supermodel and in Sega Rally 2 there were around 9K polys per frame. And note that these are being fetched from the Real 3D board's local memory!

I could add some statistics-gathering to Supermodel to get some more figures but it's been almost a year since I've compiled and ran the program and some games are bitchy and might require some work to get running again (we poked around Supermodel a lot constantly tweaking and breaking compatibility.)

> MODEL 3 also has alot of texture space, so typically MODEL 3 games have more
> texture variety even though DC can do higher res textures.

Model 3 had 8MB of texture memory. Max texture resolution was 256x256.

> the proof is in the games. a lot of Dreamcast and PS2 games look like shit
> compared to MODEL 3 games.

You need to take another look. Model 3 games look nice because of nostalgia and because they're moving fast on arcade monitors but if you look at still shots or examine them closely, you'll see lots of billboards and simple geometry with relatively ordinary texture mapping.

DC kicked Model 3's ass hard. Look at Naomi vs. Model 3, even. There's no comparison. None whatsoever.