MDK2 and MDK2 Armageddon for Dreamcast and PS2 - Screenshot comparison
MDK2 was originally designed for the PC and Dreamcast at the same time, and the Dreamcast game was released in March of 2000 as a 1st gen Dreamcast title. The Dreamcast version takes advantage of several of the custom PowerVR chip's hardware effects, if not its bandwidth and CPU saving abilities. MDK2 features high color high resolution textures, probably in the area of 16bit to 24bit color textures at 640x480 on the Dreamcast version. It also features real time shadow casting and reflective surfaces (mirrors, mostly), which is a hardware feature of the PVR chip that takes no CPU effort to produce. MDK2 is a game with extraordinarily large and open game scenes for a 1st gen Dreamcast title, and the framerate consistently drops into the range 15 frames per second.
The PS2 version titled Armageddon came out a full year later, in March of 2001, and features easier default difficulty and a scalable difficulty setting. The Dreamcast game has a reputation for being a hardcore favorite and very difficult, while the PS2 version is significantly easier to play. The PS2 game suffers from PS2 quality texture mapping, which typically means 4bit-8bit color textures, the same as PS1, Saturn and N64 textures, that are also lower resolution overall. This version also lacks the realistic shadow casting and reflective surfaces of the Dreamcast. The lack of these effects is not because the PS2 wasn't capable of the effects. Since these effects were hardware supported by the Dreamcast PVR chip, it was a matter of the effects needing to be hand coded to the PS2 hardware, which is an effort few 3rd parties would be willing to sacrifice precious development time on. Bioware also elected not to improve the framerate for the PS2 game, which is worse than the Dreamcast game, if it's different at all.
The last two pictures are shots from the Xbox game Knights of the Old Republic, which is a later Bioware game which seems to be using much of the same graphics engine as MDK2. These shots, and the sub 20 FPS much of KoToR runs at, is exemplary of how similar not just the PS2 and Dreamcast are in graphical performance, but the Xbox as well.
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