I think the DC had the technical strength to go up against the PS2, not just early on, but for quite a while. The PS2 is incredibly flexible in theory, but looking at its library it seems like most developers just used Sony’s default rendering setups. If you ignore the quickie PS1-to-DC ports and only compare titles which got equal effort from developers, it can be hard to tell the difference, and in some cases I’d even say the DC version looks a little nicer.

In this alternate universe where the DC didn’t get killed off prematurely, what might’ve eventually turned the tide for the PS2 would be having between 1.5 and 2 times as much RAM (depending on how you account for different distribution), although that advantage may not have existed if it weren’t for the large gap between their release dates.

But Sony could afford to delay for two years; consumers waited for them. Sega couldn’t sustain launch-pitch marketing for that long, especially with an actual console on store shelves that people could experience firsthand, as opposed to teaser videos of what the console “might” be capable of. Few publishers or consumers wanted to invest in a console before the clear winner of the previous generation had entered the market.

All that being said, I don’t know that the DC was really under-utilized, in technical terms. I feel like a good proportion of the games in its library are using almost all of the power it had under the hood. Perhaps Sega’s management and engineers had learned their lesson from the Saturn, because the DC seems very straightforward from a programming perspective. It’s almost ironic that it lost to the PS2, which took flexibility and parallelism to heart at least as much as the Saturn did, if not more.