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Back in the day, Sega's Daytona USA was the king of arcades. All those polygons flying around at 60 frames per second, it was incredible. It was also hugely expensive. What was the first games console that had the same power in terms of textured mapped polygons per second? Also, when did home PC graphics cards match the power of the Model 2 board?

Edited to clarify that I'm talking about number of texture mapped polygons per second being higher than the Model 2 board.

As an aside, what was the first mobile game console that could beat the mighty Model 2 board in terms of texture mapped polygons per second? PSP maybe?

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I suppose that if you asked Sega's marketing department, they would say they were the first to deliver this kind of performance in a home console. This being with the 1998 release of the Dreamcast, only five years after the Model 2 arcade boards. Certainly the Dreamcast is known for providing faithful home console ports of Sega's arcade games of the period.

The earlier, 3D-capable Sega Saturn console had a quite serviceable port of Daytona USA. I think the performance of that console limited what could be done in the port. But it's possible that a less rushed and more optimized port could have looked much better. The Saturn did not make programming/optimization easy.

Looking at it more objectively, I guess the PPS numbers (polygons per second) should be a relevant measure. I've seen estimates of ~2M PPS for the Model 2. This also puts it squarely in line with the Sixth generation home consoles (Dreamcast, Playstation 2, XBOX).

A good summary of high-end PC graphics performance at the beginning of the Sixth generation of consoles can be found in this answer. Once again, the 1998-99 time frame is a reasonable approximation for when you'd find similar performance as what the Model 2 gave 5 years earlier.

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    I seem to remember the Model 2's PPS being estimated at 360,000 texture-mapped polygons back in the day. Is this 2M figure for flat polys?
    – AJM
    May 12, 2022 at 12:12
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    @AJM Correct, you are.
    – Brian H
    May 12, 2022 at 14:44
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    Daytona CCE is the less-rushed and better-looking Saturn port of Daytona, though it's more like a do over. After the success of the Sega Rally conversion, Sega had that team do a completely new version, discarding the original port. Also perhaps relevant: Sega's claim at the time of the release of Daytona 2001 for the Dreamcast was that they'd had headroom to add polygons over the arcade original.
    – Tommy
    May 12, 2022 at 14:59
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    @Tommy Better looking perhaps, but at least one reviewer at the time disliked the extensive changes to the gameplay and the way the car handled.
    – AJM
    May 12, 2022 at 17:49

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