Posted: 03/05/99    Previous | Headlines | Next

GameSpot News

You may have seen or heard about the Dreamcast 2 elsewhere on the Web - and its supposed code-name "Avatar." The information was actually enclosed in an e-mail that was spread around to various magazine editors a few days ago, sent by a very suspicious anonymous@nec.com. Attached graphics claiming to be screenshots from the hardware couldn't be opened.

The specs are pretty impressive as listed, but it would make no sense for Sega or any of its partners on the Dreamcast to release specifications on a next-generation platform at this time. Not only would that severely cut into sales of the Dreamcast, it would be really premature. The supposed 2002 release date is a good three years away - and by that time, these specs would more than likely have to be much more impressive. Even if a Dreamcast 2 is being worked on somewhere inside Sega, it would make about as much sense for the company to say anything about it now as it would be for Sony to release specs on the PlayStation 3 today.

GameSpot News spoke with two Sega representatives this morning. One said that the report of "Avatar" is false, but to keep in mind that the Dreamcast is a constantly evolving platform. The second representative referred to the Avatar report as a "news leak," suggesting that the specs were accurate, but unintentionally revealed. That representative told us Sega's official position on Avatar: "Until you hear it from us, it's pure speculation that it's for the Dreamcast... it's not a Sega Technology."

Despite that, these specs do not indicate an "evolved" Dreamcast, but rather an entirely new inside to the machine, including new main processors.

Just in case you want to check it out for yourself, here's the full e-mail, so you can see what kind of claims are being made about "Avatar":

Straight out of NECs research labs here is some info on Sega's next hardware project, code named "Avatar". Specs and early real-time demo screen shots included. Enjoy. You don't have to thank me :)

CPU - Handles 3D Transformation
Hitachi UH1 (Ultra Hitachi 1)
Clock Speed:  800mhz
L1 cache size: 512k
Floating Point Performance: 16 GFLOPS max
Integer Performance: 1500 MIPS
Bus size: 256 bits
Bus bandwidth: 8.4 Gigabytes/second
Transistors: 120 million
Manufacture: .13 micron
Able to calculate  100 million polygons/second

Co-processor - Handles Artificial Intelligence/Artificial Life, Collision Detection & MPEG2&3 Decoding
NEC 8600
Clock Speed: 200mhz
Floating Point Performance: 1.8 GFLOPS max
Integer Performance: 400 MIPS
Bus size: 64 bits
Bus bandwidth: 1.2 Gigabytes/second
Transistors: 26 million
Manufacture: .18 micron

Graphics Processor
PowerVR chip code named "Excelsior"
Clock Speed: 300mhz
Bus size: 256 bits
Fill Rate: 8.4 full featured billion pixels/second (deferred rendered)
Max resolution: 1920x1200 @ 32bit color
Max texture resolution: 4096x4096
Max color: 48bit RGBA
Effects:
* Perspective correct true-color Gouraud lighting
* Perspective correct transparency
* Perspective correct texture mapping
* Trilinear and anisotropic filtering
* Depth buffering
* Full Scene Anti-aliasing
* Fog and depth cue with vertex level control
* Scissor and stipple masking
* Full alpha blending modes supported
* Specular highlights
* 48-bit floating-point Z buffering
* Environment mapping
* 32 Overlay planes
* 8x8 Anti-aliasing multisampling
* Volumetric effects
* Hardware translucency sorter
* 256 layers of translucency
* True Bumpmapping
* True Phong shading and lighting
* True Raytracing
* 100 million textured, gourad shaded, lighted polygons/second
* 60 Million polygons/second with ALL effects enabled

Sound processor
Clock Speed: 100mhz
Voices: 256
* Vortex2 technology

Other Information
* 64MB of main RDRAM, 32MB of RDRAM for textures
* DVD-ROM media format
* Backward compatible to Dreamcast due to emulation
* Expected release date is sometime in 2002 in Japan