When you consider how long it took them to render the movie (using huge render farms) it is pretty f'n impressive Son.
The Final Fantasy demo was just data from the now-in-development full-length CG movie based upon the game series, rendered in real time by the GScube. It showed a girl (with animated hair threads) in a zero-gravity spaceship, with a user-controllable camera viewpoint. The demo rendered about 314,000 polygons per frame, and included an impressive character with 161 joints, motion-blurring effects, and many other cinematic feats. According to Kazuyuki Hashimoto, senior vice president and CTO of Square USA, the GScube allowed them to show real-time quality, in "close to what is traditionally software rendered in about five hours." Sony believes that the GScube will deliver a tenfold improvement over a regular PS2, and future iterations of the architecture expect to reach a 100-fold improvement. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000804/crespo_01.htm That was in 2000. 18.4 Million polygons a second with all effects. Not so impressive now, but then it was pretty nice.
I assume when these demos were first shown they were running on a development system. Did any of these demos eventually make it onto disk and into the wild?
Dreamcast cancellation comes down to one thing, everybody stopped buying games for it overnight. I know an EA employee who claims you can tell when the utopia boot disc was released by looking at the sales figures. The dreamcast never reached it's full potential, but I can't name a game that I'd bother to dig mine out for.
