Crayon
Member
They note it on the website that a ps1 will display with colors shifted all weird. Never tried it to see myself.
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PS2 (contrary to popular belief) was the console that had the least correctly used hardware in history
- Thread starter Geometric-Crusher
- Start date
They note it on the website that a ps1 will display with colors shifted all weird. Never tried it to see myself.
Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
There was never an issue with the dev-kits! The main reason early games were relatively less performant was simply because people weren't using the vector units effectively (or at all in the case of Ridge Racer), which was essential as the CPU could not feed the GS anywhere close to capacity by itself.
Lysandros
Member
I didn't know about the case of Ridge 5, it didn't use the vector units at all even the VU0 in macro mode? The game was quite attractive looking in pure arcade racer fashion besides the obvious shimmering.
pepodmc_
Member
if sony holding back ps2 for the ps3 was true, they would never develop god of war 2 for ps2 so late for the system, it would have been a launch release for ps3
semiconscious
Member
it's pretty amazing just how much of sony's playstation success has basically been in spite of itself. not sure i can think of another example of this that's quite as striking...
Lysandros
Member
Are you saying that Sony/PlayStation was simply lucky and opportunistic without any inherent merits hardware and/or software wise?
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
Nah. That honor still goes to either the Jaguar, Saturn, or N64 IMO.
Jaguar: Literal hardware bugs in the registries that prevented using the RAM as intended, or Tom and Jerry to their fullest
Saturn: Rough launch state without a fully fleshed out SDK, and a short commercial life as SEGA rushed to release Dreamcast
N64: Nintendo literally forbade devs from running optimal microcode until super-late in the system's lifecycle, only to very select teams.
Compared to those systems and their circumstances, PS2 was extensively utilized and pushed to new peaks. Silent Hill 3, Tekken 5, MGS 3, San Andreas, Gran Turismo 4, Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, FF XII etc. are just some of many examples pushing the system's limits.
That's what they always say when they say that line.
And it's always wrong. Every. Single. Time.
It wasn't really that much "underpowered" compared to those systems though, and bettered them in select areas. Heck, so did the Dreamcast.
Also when you look at specific genres, you'd find the best-looking and performing example on PS2. Sim racers is one example: none of the other 6th-gen systems have a sim racer at the level of GT4 or even GT3 I'd say. Forza Motorsport comes close, but it's locked to 30 FPS and also has a less confident art style.
Considering how much later Gamecube and Xbox came out, PS2 being within the ballpark in many aspects is actually very impressive.
Jaguar: Literal hardware bugs in the registries that prevented using the RAM as intended, or Tom and Jerry to their fullest
Saturn: Rough launch state without a fully fleshed out SDK, and a short commercial life as SEGA rushed to release Dreamcast
N64: Nintendo literally forbade devs from running optimal microcode until super-late in the system's lifecycle, only to very select teams.
Compared to those systems and their circumstances, PS2 was extensively utilized and pushed to new peaks. Silent Hill 3, Tekken 5, MGS 3, San Andreas, Gran Turismo 4, Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, FF XII etc. are just some of many examples pushing the system's limits.
That's what they always say when they say that line.
And it's always wrong. Every. Single. Time.
It wasn't really that much "underpowered" compared to those systems though, and bettered them in select areas. Heck, so did the Dreamcast.
Also when you look at specific genres, you'd find the best-looking and performing example on PS2. Sim racers is one example: none of the other 6th-gen systems have a sim racer at the level of GT4 or even GT3 I'd say. Forza Motorsport comes close, but it's locked to 30 FPS and also has a less confident art style.
Considering how much later Gamecube and Xbox came out, PS2 being within the ballpark in many aspects is actually very impressive.
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Lysandros
Member
Dat 10-20% VU0 use in microcode.
Geometric-Crusher
Member
I don't know about it, with the exception of 5 or 6 games, all other multiplats run or looks better on the PS2.
baldur's gate, tony hawk pro skater 3, dark summit, 4x4 evo 2, agent underfire, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex, SoulCalibur II, Die Hard: Vendetta, spyhunter, ufc, f1 2002, f1 2003, v-rally 3 , tony hawk underground , ssx trick, ssx3, medal of honor frontline, red faction 2, X2: Wolverine's Revenge, True Crime: Streets of LA, Finding Nemo, Pac-Man world 2, SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom, Burnout 2 : Point of Impact, Def Jam: Fight for NY, Catwoman: The Game, Spider-Man 2, hitman 2, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, Batman Begins, Tony Hawk's American Wasteland, Call of Duty 2 : Big Red One, Medal of Honor Rising Sun, Medal of honor, Peter Jackson's King Kong, True Crime: New York City, Tomb Raider: Legend, X-Men: The Official Game, Need for Speed, Cars, Ice Age 2, Monster House, The Lord of the Rings, RoadKill, serious sam.
GC It's like Trunks, hidden power
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ShirAhava
Plays with kids toys, in the adult gaming world
PS2's almost complete lack of 480p support has been the bane of my existence for a long time
having to have a dedicated CRT tv for it (I hate CRT tvs, CRT monitors are awesome tho) so is lame
The Garo is damn near useless with PS2 because you cannot start the console in 480p and
have to put it in some jank ass mode that only works on the few naively supported games
and even then you will have issues and don't get me started with audio and it all feels so silly
when Dreamcast had fucking VGA support in 1998 Using a PS2 on a CRT monitor is at best a joke
I should sell that whole setup and all my PS2 shit on the GAF marketplace thank goodness for emulation
having to have a dedicated CRT tv for it (I hate CRT tvs, CRT monitors are awesome tho) so is lame
The Garo is damn near useless with PS2 because you cannot start the console in 480p and
have to put it in some jank ass mode that only works on the few naively supported games
and even then you will have issues and don't get me started with audio and it all feels so silly
when Dreamcast had fucking VGA support in 1998 Using a PS2 on a CRT monitor is at best a joke
I should sell that whole setup and all my PS2 shit on the GAF marketplace thank goodness for emulation
Lysandros
Member
It's a recurrent theme indeed, quite a bit revanchist sensibilities involved i guess.
Geometric-Crusher
Member
Tekken 5, gta San Andreas, Gran Turismo 4, Gow They could get even better, just look True Crimes NYC
MGS 3 has decent hardware usage, the degree of evolution MG2 to MGS3 is the same GOW2 and ''GOW3'' and GT4 to ''GT5''
NeverYouMind
Member
I think Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban, and Kingdom Hearts II did so.
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MujkicHaris
Member
RAIDEN1
Member
I was thinking from the perspective of who has the better catalogue, and lets not kid ourselves PS2 games on PS5 are VERY few and far between, look what Sony did when it was implied that more of the PS2 era would come to PS4, hardly anything did..
Ronin_7
Member
No idea what this guy is talking about
hybrid_birth
Gold Member
I imagine that alot of people just used it as a DVD movie player and that's it.
After all it was probably the cheapest DVD player at the time.
After all it was probably the cheapest DVD player at the time.
semiconscious
Member
no. here's what i'm saying:
i'm simply pointing out that there've been instances, such as with the ps3 cell processsor, where the company was able to overcome their own self-inflicted obstacles, & still manage to do well:
sony's helldiver 2 account-linking screw-up is a more recent example. .
so, no, i'm in no way saying/implying that sony's just been lucky... tho, if you seriously don't think that the whole xbox one 'tv, tv, tv' debacle wasn't an extraordinary example of sony fundamentally just being lucky, what can i say?...
funking giblet
Member
That would be PC. wait states and DRAM refreshing kills performance, WE CAN DO BETTER! *furiously acid etches*
TGO
Hype Train conductor. Works harder than it steams.
Yes & No
By the time, the PS2 was at a price that would appeal to anyone wanting it as a DVD player. The actual DVD player was less than a PS2.
But those that were interested in it as a game console probably most definitely used it as their main player.
I never used a dedicated player until PS4.
The lack of a CD player actually helped that decision.
Shake Your Rump
Member
I don't know the status of emulation, but you likely want to go that route unless you plan to use a CRT. Interlaced PS2 looks poor even with the best real-time de-interlacing techniques. Trust me, I tried. An emulator rendering everything progressive and digitally might be the better choice on a digital display.
Depends how you define 'issues'. Early devkits ran at half the clock-speed. Spring 1999 - 66% clock version came out (These were - for anyone wondering - what the 'fake' tech demos all ran on - yes, even FF8 Dance was on an underclocked PS2).
Full clocked devkits were only released late 1999 (Sep-Oct), so most launch titles had less than 6 months of development on real-performance hardware.
PSP: hold my beer (seriously - if I ever shown you the full list of issues for that console you'd never believe me that hw made it to launch, but just see one of the examples below).
And it's not just these two, to my recollection there's no console that shipped without some really nasty bugs (and often the count is some 100 or so odd issues for a given machine).
Just a tiny sampler of some fun examples below:
- PS2 CPU jump instruction had a flaw if address was 5 or less instructions away. That meant really tight loops would result in undefined behavior and compiler(s) had to auto-pad the code with NOPs to avoid the issue.
- GCN GPU had geometry clipping routine that ignored perspective correction (resulting in PS1 style warping of some interpolated parameters) but also ran so slow that the same routine was several times faster on the CPU (which - to be fair - you wanted to do anyway to get the math correct).
- PSP Texture compression would decompress textures before loading them on GPU, making every texture lookup about half the speed - but worse - making cache about 6x less effective which would further reduce performance to something so low texture compression was completely un-useable on PSP.
Also if we want to talk missed opportunities in hardware - PS2 not having bi-directional memory bus to GS (the direction had to be manually flipped) stands tallest to me. It was basically the difference between PS2 being a high-power Deferred renderer (and the only console that could do FP pixel shading in 2000-2005) and well - what we actually got.
But let's be fair here - hw misses/bugs is not what this thread is about - how well hw actually got utilized is, not whether some features were just broken and thus not applicable to be utilized.
Graphic artist being exposed to either of those(well, at least the former) is a sign of bad utilization to me.
The artists didn't need to know about VRam at all if your engine knew what it was doing - this was precisely a software problem this thread (as I read it anyway) would be about.
Geometry construction though I'm not really sure what it refers to - the only thing that I ever remember running into there was UV precision but that was not triangulation related.
TNT Sheep
Member
It does seem quite a lot of multiplatform games are better on PS2 than on GC. Though, in some of your examples it is a toss up. Some missing or toned down effects in the gamecube version in exchange for a better framerate.
Some games that look better, run better or both are: Resi 4, Killer 7, Viewtiful Joe, Super Monkey Ball 1+2, the first Splinter Cell, Sonic Heroes, Shadow the Hedgehog, Rayman 3, Beyond Good and Evil, Timesplitters 2, Enter the Matrix, Serious Sam: The Next Encounter, Metal Arms, Tales of Symphonia, Extreme G racing 3, 007 Nightfire, 007 From Russia with Love, Simpsons Hit and Run, Pacman World Rally, Ultimate Spiderman, Call of Duty Finest Hour, Prince of Persia, Harvest Moon a wonderful life, Turok Evolution. All either look better, run better or both.
You can argue about some of the choices, but it's definitely more than 5 or 6 games.
newtypepilot
Member
looks up OP's post history
dude, dreamcast is dead. Saturn is dead. Let it go. smh.
dude, dreamcast is dead. Saturn is dead. Let it go. smh.
Geometric-Crusher
Member
Yes, there are more than 6 for sure. However, I dispute four games on this list, two have higher fps in exchange for lower settings and 2 are virtually the same in both, I will not mention which games they are so as not to turn the topic into a dispute in the search for details.
squarealex
Member
PS2 can achieve some weird thing with Physic only runing on VU0 with so many low data, can achieve RT Reflexion too.
of course, this kind of thing can't be in the game we know or in some way like dedicated engine games. (Like with Naughty Dog achieve to running Jak & Daxter full 60fps open-world map)
Matrix: Path of the Neo is a good example of what you can achieve with a PS2 (Bump mapping, Bloom HDR, Dynamic shadow, Motion Blur), many "modern shading" but in software way bc the speed of filrate can do it. When the other consoles can't in hardware way or software way. (low filrate compared to the PS2).
Also, Hitman Blood Money is some wizard shit to running on PS2.
PS2 in hardware is like "Create your own thing" instead of "Use my dedicated GPU power"
of course, this kind of thing can't be in the game we know or in some way like dedicated engine games. (Like with Naughty Dog achieve to running Jak & Daxter full 60fps open-world map)
Matrix: Path of the Neo is a good example of what you can achieve with a PS2 (Bump mapping, Bloom HDR, Dynamic shadow, Motion Blur), many "modern shading" but in software way bc the speed of filrate can do it. When the other consoles can't in hardware way or software way. (low filrate compared to the PS2).
Also, Hitman Blood Money is some wizard shit to running on PS2.
PS2 in hardware is like "Create your own thing" instead of "Use my dedicated GPU power"
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Geometric-Crusher
Member
this here uses a fraction of the power of the ps2 but no dev has ever tried to replicate this, it drives me crazy
peronmls
Member
Do you have any citation? Pretty sure there was time and money then. I've read plenty of developer interviews where they talk about how great the programmers were with memory management and working around limitations. Horror games for PS2 look great and have great lighting and shading with some compressed texturing. I never heard of any complaint other than the PS3.
polybius80
Member
there are many games that do good use of the system but its more interesting when you find amazing games you didint know
some lesser known
Ikusagami have a DF retro video
Haven (travelers tale games in general are amazing they had the best particle system at the time capable of as much as 17 million tirangles per seconds, their youtube channel is a must gamehut )
Transformers
Malice, I think despite not being finished as intended did a good use of the system
state of emergency and state of emergency 2
Area 51
NeverYouMind
Member
What do you mean by that? It was an enhanced port of an arcade title that ran on suped up PS1 hardware like Tekken 3. Many fighting games have had tag mechanics before and after.
CamHostage
Member
...or a parody requote of some other "popular belief" post, or I dint know what this is?
Lots could be said about the issues and challenges and maybe mistakes of PS2, but none of that is in this post. Just gibberish and conspiracy theories. What gives?
Geometric-Crusher
Member
only extra official quotes from programmers who developed on the sixth generation systems, which can be found on Beyond3d and here.
for example, afalada said initial kits ran at lower clock speeds, 40% lower than the real PS2.
In ign there are interviews from 24 years ago where it is suggested that the documentation was incomplete at launch, in short no one really knew how to use the machine, so they were left with only 1mb for textures (used the old way, not as cache or so ) so they chose to do the field rendering to save memory, cpu etc. But you know that, I imagine.
Your real doubt is related to Sony's supposed obstacle to the use of bump mapping and texture techniques.
I looked for the post on B3d but couldn't find it, it takes time, I would have to read it for hours.
What is known is that Sony's 2002 manuals even taught how advanced techniques could be obtained on the PS2 (however, a fraction of games use)
As I said, causal reasons led the generation to take the course it did, with ps2 games basically being like GTA SA having smooth textures like a blade.
The logic is very simple, if people are buying, then more of the same will be delivered. Was Matrix Path of Neo the new Donkey Kong Country in terms of sales? No, then forget about new games using the technique, simple as that.
PS2 in the multiverse where Sony cared about improving kits, even low-budget projects would replicate the look of Tekken Tag, RR5 would be indescribable.
CamHostage
Member
OK, I agree with you there that the PS2 weirdly does not have a great homebrew or exploratory scene, considering how interesting projects might be if new, efficient ways to code for the VUs actually used the hardware well in ways that developers of the time constantly struggled with.
There are some homebrew projects out on it though. No great "games" that I can see, (mostly a lot of ports of emulators and also some port projects or light indie games ported over from PC,) but there are a few nice demoscene experiments. Mostly a lot of fractal routines and then a lot of landscapes, also some nice lighting effects, nothing that really signs as uniquely capable though on PS2 IMO.
CamHostage
Member
Ikusagami / Demon Chaos is always my favorite example of a developer flexing what only the PS2 can do (even if there's not much reason for it to do it...) The actual game is slightly less bonkers (only the demo sample had the 65K in real action, mostly because it at some point doesn't make any sense as "gameplay" when all you're doing is swimming through enemies with your sword taps) but it still is a fireworks show to see, with a cacophony of particle effects and an damn-near abuse of motion blur and a ton of enemies (and friendlies too, who carry flags and fire projectiles for your cause) and a general low-fi/maxed-out look of repeating textures and models stamped and spawned as many times as the console could take it.
This is in most opinions not the way games should be made, but I'm so glad this game was made this way...
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Seider
Member
Kutaragi designed the Ps2 hardware in a way that its games were not easy to port to rival platforms. He tought that with the success of Psx, every developer out there would want to develop games for the next Sony system. And if Ps2 had a extrange and martian architecture, those games would be difficult to port to Dreamcast, Gamecube, Xbox or even Pc.
I think he tried this again in PS3 launching it only with Cell... but developers were used to Xbox 360 and denied to develop for PS3 withouth a GPU. Thats why they added a Nvidia GPU to Ps3.
I think he tried this again in PS3 launching it only with Cell... but developers were used to Xbox 360 and denied to develop for PS3 withouth a GPU. Thats why they added a Nvidia GPU to Ps3.
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TGO
Hype Train conductor. Works harder than it steams.
Yeah but for us in the US & Europe that was 2 months.
So 2001 was it's first year and like you said it was fire!
I never understood how shaders and lightning was available on only few games like the bouncer and tekken tag yet never used even in big dev games like final fantasy 10 which obviously looked like all the rest ps2 games. Nice looking game but defirnly not using ps2 power to end
Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
News to me, but then again were they actual dev-kits or were they "target boxes"? Often the units sent for initial evaluation bore little resemblance to actual dev-kits, for instance I remember us getting the first round of 360 units in Mac-style cases -in fact they may have actually been powerMac's with some sort of modification*. Its 20 odd years ago so I can't remember any PS2 dev-kits that weren't properly cased-up in the full ridiculous jumbo PS2 style!
I'd be extremely doubtful if any launch title didn't spend a significant amount of time on final-specced dev hardware, and at the very least they'd have been evaluated on test units (retail units with modified firmware) so I cannot imagine this would have been close to as impactful as the sudden need to parallelize the rendering system due to the fundamentals of the h/w design.
*I'm not being vague here on purpose. People need to understand how limited access is due to NDA's when studios/teams receive pre-launch hardware. So unless you are specifically tasked with working with these evaluation devices, you have to stay well away and what your team-mates are allowed to disclose is small.
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Redneckerz
Those long posts don't cover that red neck boy
All this text when you literally could just read the Copetti article on the PS2 architecture to know why it doesn't do shaders.
In this day and age, blissful ignorance regarding consoles should be a thing of the past. Educate yourself or stop posting on GAF, its not like you are a well known member here with your 223 posts.
They had actual (early, lower-clocked) PS2 silicon in them if that's what you're asking. Obviously - they sometimes lacked featureset of final kits (it wasn't until the final - DTL10000 black monolith that you actually had an integrated DVD drive in the devkit), and they looked more like a half-open, blown-up 1990s modem than a console devkit, but that's part of the charm of early hw.
Ok just realized there's actual photos online nowadays:
At least they didn't use literal ducktape like Oculus did in theirs...
It should be noted that Sony largely avoided 'target boxes' in their history - even with PS3 early kits, half of the silicon was already 'real' (as in actual Cell processor) - it was only GPU side that took awhile to materialize but that had more to do with late direction changes than normal production cycle.
5-6 months is the best anyone got at launch, for the PS2 devkit with full spec. And test-units(the retail box with modified firmware and a few other tricks) wouldn't even be released until a year after the launch. Devkits with DVD emulators would come even later, as the did the performance analyser kit. Basically - PS2 launch was very wild-west in comparison to how good people have it nowadays, and we're not even talking development software here, which was basically a wasteland for years to come.
Well all of those add-up. It was a perfect storm of late final hw, design paradigm shifts (programmable compute pipelines were a radical new thing back then), and requiring early developers to basically write raw assembler/machine code for performance sensitive parts.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Opinion - Is the PS2 the reigning king of 60 fps 3D games?
I just saw this interesting tweet from DF's John Linneman: And a history of 60 fps Xbox launch titles for comparison: Wasn't that super impressive looking Gamecube Star Wars launch game 60 fps? Wind Waker, Luigi's Mansion and Mario Sunshine were all only 30, so Nintendo weren't...
I love these threads, the anger that PS2 brings out is so delicious
.I'm not sure of Ridge Racer V, but when Sony started to emulate the Emotion Engine in the second revision of the PS3, certain games had issues running at full speed since they used the R5900 FPU for geometry instead of the vector units. Tekken Tag was one of the games affected which hints that it's not using the vector units that much.
Digital Foundry also mentions that Ridge Racer V made extensive use of field rendering which is the why it has such a jagged look, possibly it's also running on the CPU/FPU alone. Both these were launch games so It woudn't suprise me if Namco had to cut corners to get these games to launch on time.
PaintTinJr
Member
I think the premise of your statement is interesting, but "least correctly" wouldn't be words I would have used because it is an existential question when you add the word "correctly" against making art(games).
What I would agree with is the idea that the PS2, especially against today's tooling and knowhow, or PS3's tool improvements, could have had a much cleaner image in polygon rendering/texturing and better results than it did, even in first party games like Ico - which was originally built for PS1 IIRC. - and much more so than its 6th gen main competitors - xbox/GC which were more tapped out with their best efforts in transforms/fillrate/shading IMO, so wouldn't gain as much improvement from today's tooling, IMO.
I would also say that gen 6 was the first real gen of true multi-platform development when LAN commercial cross-compiling tools and Source control systems and their integration came of age(Codewarrior/VS6) and project sizes and marketing budgets ballooned forcing game design into a more generic state around a lead platform configuration, rather than separate team designs leading for each port, as it had seemed to been far more in the 5th gen and 4th gen.
The PlayStation 2 may have benefited heavily in its first years of developer support in ways that the Saturn/N64 didn't in the previous gen, because of the market share of PS1, but the complexity of PS2 and it not being based on a desktop PC like the Mac-esq cube or WinTel Xbox gave rise to super successful middleware engine RenderWare by Criterion because cross platform development with such a machine was a nightmare for many indies that could have done well in the 5th gen on PS1 IMO, but were now reliant on a target market on a device they couldn't really design for, and just wanted their PC version to work on it well enough for sales, and hope their other versions didn't outshine it for features and techniques even when they'd spent a disproportionate of dev time on the PS2 version.
Unlike the other PC-esq systems, the stream-processor designed PS2 with memory configuration to match didn't even run PS2 linux great on the console, probably because the CPU @295Mhz and cache's wasn't strong for modern general tasks without hand-rolled code, unlike the Xbox Pentium III @733Mhz and Cube's IBM PowerPC 750CXe @485Mhz were based on leading edge desktop CPU tech.
So I'd argue the PS2 was likely furthest from the vanilla PC lead platform for most of the games, and even though products like RenderWare or UE worked around the hardware being complex and weaker in the CPU department the PS2 for all its great technical specs wins in streaming/processing/fillrate compared to the other two, had trouble in one area or another on multi-plats IMO, except for yearly sport games like PES that optimised recursively, helping it be the best version by physics, animation, ai. And that in turn helped Konami and EA with a lot of their other development efforts. But it still felt like game "design" even by Sony was a compromise and looked rough in areas, and that today's tools and techniques and a longer gen would have seen even better results beyond SotC, GT4 and MGS3.
The VRAM size really screamed for more use of procedural texturing, and the fillrate and poor AA screamed for modelspace AA, maybe rendering models full size with a lower lod to then render the geometry outline with full LoD with the modelspace accumulation AA jitter for 2 or 3 passes, etc.
Are we talking PS2?
The GS had edge-AA, which ostensibly did the same thing MSAA does but it's more cumbersome to use as it requires geometry to be sorted to some extent.
There were some games that did use it (probably more than using MSAA on some other console(s)) but it was uncommon for a simple reason - it just wasn't practical.
From what I recall - Jak 2 used it in character closeups/realtime cut-scenes, as an example of a higher-profile title that used it.
RoboFu
One of the green rats
The premise of these kinds of discussion are interesting , but doesn't really make anything different for historical sake. You can also say a lot of consoles hardly ever saw their full potential.
And another argument is the ps2 had more optimization put into it over time than any other console at that time being the market leader by a large margin.
And another argument is the ps2 had more optimization put into it over time than any other console at that time being the market leader by a large margin.
Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
Not true, it was just different. The rasterization speed of the GS was crazy good, which is why a lot of devs (especially Japanese ones) of that era got into what would later be considered "bad habits" of overusing transparency effects particularly in their VFX systems in order to get a good result.
I'm pretty sure the problems with the PS3 were in many ways due to this thanks to the late adoption of the NV GPU over what was originally intended to be GS2. My suspicion being that the original intent was the have the 2nd CELL's SPU's doing all the T+L work and directly feeding into a fill-rate monster equivalent to the GS.
Honestly, I feel like overall the PS2 was used to its full potential. But that took a long time to be realized because frankly it wasn't an easy machine to optimize for.
If you were a coder around when the original Playstation came out you'd have immediately understood why Cerny's mantra was "time to triangle" for PS4, the original PSX (which was how we were first exposed to it name-wise) was remarkably quick and easy to get code up and running on, and it really massively helped drive uptake.
With PS2 and especially PS3 the learning curve had gotten really steep, with only the most hardcore of coders actually wanting the headache of wrapping their minds around what it took to make those pieces of hardware sing.
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squarealex
Member
There's more 60fps games on PS2 than Xbox or GameCube or PS3.
Jak & Daxter 1, 2 and 3
Sly Racoon 1, 2 and 3
Ratchet & Clank 1, 2, 3, Deadlocked
Gran Turismo 3, Concept, 4 Pro, 4
Tourist Trophy
Burnout 1, 2, 3, Dominator, Revenge
Sims 1
Ridge Racer V
Tekken Tag, 4 and 5
Virtua Fighter 4 and 4 EVO (will this one fix jagging issue)
Rez
SoulCalibur 2 and 3
Dead or Alive 2
God of War 1 and 2
Devil May Cry 1, 2 and 3
Dynasty Warriors 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Maximo Ghost to Glory
Maximo: Army of Zin
Metal Gear Solid 2
Dark Cloud
Enter the Matrix
Spider-Man
Def Jam Fight for NY
Tony Hawk Underground 1 and 2
Castlevania Lament Of Innocence & Curse Of Darkness
Mark of Kri
Zone of the Enders 1 and 2
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 1 and 2
SSX 1, SSX Tricky and SSX 3
Crash TwinSanity
Crash Nitro Kart
Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex
And I missing many...
Not mentionning all Sports Games or 2D games isn't?
PaintTinJr
Member
I would agree, but optimisation isn't game design really, it is reactive, rather than proactive.
The Jak being mentioned is interesting, because I recall seeing a behind-the-scenes documentary about that game which made it seem like that was one of the games - like SotC - that really got full exclusive software designed for the hardware treatment, although sadly the art part in the run and jump mechanics and gameplay fell short IMO, and felt really pedestrian to a Mario sunshine, like comparing Crash/Jak/Rachet to Mario animation. But was still quality from a software engineering on the PS2 angle IMO.
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