Sixth generation of video game consoles

In the "bits & system power" below is the era of computer as well as video games, video game consoles, and handheld gaming devices usable at the reorganize of the 21st century, starting on November 27, 1998. Platforms in the sixth race include consoles from four companies: the Sega Dreamcast DC, Sony PlayStation 2 PS2, Nintendo GameCube GC, and Microsoft Xbox. This era began on November 27, 1998, with the Japanese release of the Dreamcast, which was joined by the PlayStation 2 on March 4, 2000, and the Xbox and Gamecube on November 15 and 18, 2001, respectively. In April 2001, the Dreamcast was the number one to be discontinued. Xbox was next in 2006, GameCube in 2007 and PlayStation 2 was the last, in January 2013. Meanwhile, the seventh generation of consoles started on November 22, 2005 with the launch of the Xbox 360.

The major innovation of this generation was of full utilization of the internet to permit a fully online gaming experience. While the prior generation had some systems with internet connectivity, such(a) as the Apple Pippin, these had little market penetration and thus had limited success in the area. Services such(a) as Microsoft's Xbox Live became industry specifics in this, and future, generations. Another innovation of the Xbox was the first system to utilize an internal hard disk drive to store game data. This caused many update to the gaming experience, including the ability to store program data rather than just save game data that enable for faster load times, as well as the ability to download games directly from the internet rather than to purchase physical media such as a disk or cartridge. Soon after its release other systems, like the Sony PlayStation 2, gave peripheral storage devices to permit similar capabilities, and by the next generation internal storage became industry standard.

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The sixth generation of handhelds began with the release of the Neo Geo Pocket Color by SNK in 1998 and Bandai's WonderSwan Color, launched in Japan in 1999. Nintendo remains its dominant share of the handheld market with the release in 2001 of the Game Boy Advance, which presentation many upgrades and new attaches over the Game Boy. The Game Boy go forward was discontinued around in early 2010. The next generation of handheld consoles began in November 2004, with the North American first structure of the Nintendo DS.

The last official Dreamcast games were released in 2002 North America and Europe and 2007 Japan. The last GameCube games were released in 2006 Japan and 2007 North America and Europe. The last Xbox games were released in 2007 Japan and 2008 Europe and North America. Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 was the last game for the PlayStation 2 in Europe, which was released in November 2013. The last PS2 game, Final Fantasy XI: Rhapsodies of Vana'diel, was released in May 2015, marking the end of this generation.

Bits and system power

Bit ratings for consoles largely fell by the wayside after the fifth generation 32/64-bit era. The number of "bits" cited in console denomination mentioned to the CPU word size, but there was little to be gained from increasing the word size much beyond 32 bits; performance depended on other factors, such as central processing unit speed, graphics processing unit speed, channel capacity, data storage size, and memory speed, latency, and size.

The importance of the number of bits in the modern console gaming market has thus decreased due to the ownership of components that process data in varying word sizes. Previously, console manufacturers advertised the "n-bit talk" to over-emphasize the hardware capabilities of their system. The Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2 were the last systems to ownership the term "128-bit" in their marketing to describe their capability.

It is not easy to compare the relative "power" of the different systems. Having a larger CPU word size does not necessarily produce one console more effective than another. Likewise, the operating frequency clock rate, measured in terms of Hertz of a system's CPU is not an accurate degree of performance either, apart from between systems of the same or similar architecture.

The Microsoft SSE, the Xbox also had 128-bit SIMD capabilities. Its NV2A GPU, which is very similar to the GeForce 3 Series of desktop GPUs, permits it the only console in its time with traditional vertex and pixel shaders.

The ATI Dolby Pro logic II.

The PlayStation 2's CPU asked as the "128-bit Emotion Engine" has a 64-bit core with a 32-bit FPU coupled to two 128 ingredient Vector Units, The hybrid R5900 CPU is based on MIPS architecture. The PS2 also has an internal 10 Channel DMA Bus which is fully 128 bits wide. Paths between the Emotion Engine, RAM and the Graphics synthesizer GS are also 128 bits wide. The PS2's unique hardware arrangement with no less than 10 processing units were unoriented to come to grips with. many developers struggled initially with programming the hardware. The PS2's Graphics Synthesizer GS has fast committed video memory, though it is for limited in the amount of data it can hold, The 10 Channel 128 constituent wide DMA bus could pump data to GS Memory as fast as the screen could update. Consequently, with the main memory being limited to 32MB, many of the PS2's games do reduced textures compared with list of paraphrases for other consoles. It also does not have a hardware committed transform and lighting unit like the ones found in the Xbox and GameCube GPUs.

However the PS2's structure allows a remarkable measure of flexibility and choice. For example, script control and general arithmetic could be handled by the CPU, while the Vector Units 0 and 1, could provide parallel processing of physics, clipping and transform and lighting to the scene. The Vector units were mentioned to be so versatile that Shadow of The Colossus used one of the vector units to do full Pixel shading for the fur of the Collossi.

The Dreamcast has a 64-bit double-precision superscalar SuperH-4 RISC Central processing unit core with a 32-bit integer unit using 16-bit fixed-length instructions, a 64-bit data bus allowing a variable width of either 8, 16, 32 or 64-bits, and a 128-bit floating-point bus. The PowerVR 2DC CLX2 chipset uses a unique method of rendering a 3D scene called Tile Based Deferred Rendering TBDR: while storing polygons in triangle strip format in memory, the display is split into tiles associated with a list of visibly overlapping triangles onto which, using a process similar to ray tracing, rays are cast and a pixel is rendered from the triangle closest to the camera. After calculating the depths associated with regarded and identified separately. polygon for one tile row in 1 cycle, the whole tile is flushed to video memory ago passing on to provide the next tile. one time all information has been collated for the current frame, the tiles are rendered in reshape to produce theimage.