New Grand Theft Auto 3 Dreamcast port is an amazing achievement

The Dreamcast thrived from 1998 to 2001, but Sega’s financial fortunes famously ended early. As a result, many games – both announced and unannounced – were suddenly cancelled, and as new games appeared on other platforms, many often wondered if these games would be possible on the Dreamcast? Well, with the unofficial release of Grand Theft Auto 3 on the classic Sega machine, we finally have the answer to at least one of those questions.

GTA 3 itself really needs no introduction – it was a cultural event, after all, but before GTA 3 took the world by storm, the development team at DMA Design, the creators of Lemmings, released several Grand Theft Auto games for PlayStation, PC and yes, Dreamcast . That’s right – GTA2 received a port on the Dreamcast during its short life. The result is certainly interesting, but as a game developed primarily for the PlayStation, it’s limited. It runs very poorly on the Dreamcast, which I find unacceptable given its origins. However, if you can ignore it, many of the ideas that defined the series originated here. GTA was popular, but not as popular as the series after GTA 3. The Dreamcast version is unfortunately also quite low quality considering the platform it runs on, which only makes the GTA3 port even more impressive.

The new Dreamcast version is based on the reverse engineering project RE3 – a non-emulated version of the Rockstar Engine built from scratch. When creating a playable image, you need to use the PC version, from which the data is extracted and converted into the appropriate file formats. It is currently optimized for use with optical disc emulators that replace the Dreamcast’s optical drive, but can be played from a burned CD-R, although there are caveats. Essentially, this is the full version of GTA3. All missions, maps, cutscenes and audio have been cut, although with some reduction in quality in some places, which we’ll get to.

Let’s start with comparisons: GTA 3 has been released many times over the years, but I wanted to stay modern and compare it to the original PlayStation 2 version. I used the original consoles to record the game, but with a PixelFX Gem installed on each to provide a clean digital output HDMI.

So the first thing I want to point out is a visual effect that I didn’t use in most of the comparisons – the so-called “footprint” feature. This is an accumulation-style blur where previous frames are used to create a sort of blur effect in post-processing. He also mixes colors to create a unique presentation, which is central to GTA3’s visual design language. The Dreamcast is not well suited for these types of effects due to its unique memory layout in relation to handling textures and frame buffers. Essentially, if you try to use the framebuffer as a texture (a copy of the full frame), you will end up with two correct pixels followed by two incorrect pixels. The Dreamcast version has two alternatives to choose from, but the performance hit is noticeable and it’s clear that further work is needed.

I immediately noticed some minor texture mixing issues here, as well as differences in the character model. The Dreamcast version pulls from the PC version of the game, which has changes to the character models, so there are fundamental changes and even some extra objects that aren’t present on the PS2. I also noticed that texture resolution suffered to match the Dreamcast’s memory. During the conversion process from PC data, textures are scaled down across the board compared to other versions of GTA 3. This may seem strange now, but according to SKMP (the project lead), it comes down to memory limitations, but not necessarily the textures themselves.

Essentially, the game sends a huge amount of vertex data to the GPU, and the GPU needs to store all those vertices in memory before rendering them. While the models appear simple at first glance, the large size and number of objects on screen mean that GTA 3 uses a fair amount of geometry. So while the Dreamcast has 8MB of VRAM versus 4MB on the PS2, due to the way it runs on the Dreamcast, vertex data eats up more than half of the system’s VRAM pool. Subtract the framebuffer data and other VRAM resident objects and they only have 2.3MB of VRAM left for textures.

Also, in addition to downsizing, all textures are compressed using the Dreamcast’s VQ texture compression, but it turns out that VQ compression isn’t very good at compressing the paletted textures used by GTA3, so additional artifacts rear their head as well. However, there is still hope. The team is working on ideas to overcome this issue, and over time we should see stable builds capable of loading textures at full resolution. I also noticed problems with light glare from headlights crossing the world. This is something the team is still working on – there’s currently a depth mismatch going on there, and these light flashes are essentially 2D objects projected on top of the world’s geometry. However, these are the main limitations I noticed in terms of visual issues, because otherwise we have something very close to the original game.

Moreover, all major visual elements were cut out – light maps, shadow textures from trees and lampposts, light halos, street lamps and traffic lights, fog and much more. It’s all here. One of the most impressive features of this port is the streaming system. Part of this is because GTA3 itself is designed with optical disc streaming in mind, so there’s a lot of leeway here, but it’s still difficult, especially since the Dreamcast has half the system memory. PS2. The game tries to keep as much data in memory as possible to avoid crashes, while a separate streaming thread handles fetching the data from the original media.

The original version was optimized for use with the GDEMU optical disc emulator, but I don’t have such an emulator, so I chose a burned CD-R. The team sent me an updated build that prioritizes CD-ROM performance, and… it works. In the original build, every time the game loaded a sound effect it would pause, making certain missions nearly unplayable, but now? It works surprisingly well from CD, which is quite an achievement.

Regarding performance, let’s discuss my testing options. I used the V1 trail effect on the Dreamcast, which is the closest to the PS2. However, with this feature enabled, the frame rate on the Dreamcast is limited to just 15 frames per second, as exceeding this value is currently not possible, although I’m told there are plans for further optimization. However, it is unlikely that we will see more than 20 frames per second with trails. I was just curious to see how it compares to the default state of the game on PS2. This testing also showed me why GTA 3 was always so choppy on PS2: the frame rate is poor, with a lot of random 16ms spikes. I’ve always noticed this back in the day – GTA3 isn’t that smooth compared to its contemporaries. However, this was forgiven due to its revolutionary design, but now we know why this happens.

With V3 traces enabled (there is no V2, in case you were wondering), the Dreamcast’s frame rate increases but remains in sub-20fps territory most of the time. It’s worth noting that V3 trails are included in the default menu, so this is what you’ll most likely encounter on your first boot. This time the frame rate moves into a 15-20fps window, which is further improved by disabling trails entirely. The fact is that all this is measured in fairly undemanding areas. Move to the central city island and the increased geometry causes problems – frame rates in some areas are in 10fps territory, and maybe even lower.

Analyzing the performance data got me thinking about framerate issues on the PS2 and what a new port of GTA 3 might look like. After all, years later the PSP game Liberty City Stories was ported to the PS2 and there I made a pleasant discovery: the overall visual quality and performance have been significantly improved on the updated version of the GTA 3 map. Traffic has become much denser, models are improved, and elements such as fences and fire escapes are added. The lighting is better and the frame rate is much smoother. There’s definitely a lot of extra space here.

However, I have to say: the Dreamcast version is still in development, but even this first release is amazing: it has a lot of cool features and more to come. The game can mostly be played as is, although there is currently a progress stopping bug in the Bomb da Base mission that makes it impossible to completely complete it normally right now – but this will also be fixed in the future.

The key takeaway for me is that the Dreamcast development community has managed to create what appears to be an almost miracle port. For example, elements like the motion blur effect are something DC simply wasn’t designed for, but the development team nailed it. The ability to run such a large game at this level of performance is already incredible. Personally, I’m skeptical that Rockstar could have pulled this off back in 2001—the studio was still learning how to make games like this, and the original PS2 release was pretty crude. However, looking at this new Dreamcast port it’s clear that the performance is poor, but remember this is the first release and as a proof of concept this port is incredible. In fact, the Dreamcast can completely handle Grand Theft Auto 3. The dream will never die!