Unknown?
Member
True but Silent Hill 3 looked way better than 2. Was one of the best looking games on the system.
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Has the PS2 aged poorly visually?
- Thread starter Paperclip Killa
- Start date
Shut0wen
Member
Literally buy a ps2 for £20 or watch footage, theres alot of bad third party games on ps2, some visually look like shit like outrun 2, splinter cell chaos theory while others like mercenaries and splinter cell double agent suffer from draw distance and poor frame rate, even decent ports like killer 7 had frame dips and long ass load times compared to the gamecube version
Tal Shiar Agent
Member
Its crazy how good the GameCube looks today. The best way to use it is of course a GCVideo HDMI dongle for the digital video port, but even just S-Video cables in the analog video port with a good upscaler looks great.
Lysandros
Member
No no no friend... I knew this might be coming. This is why i left out the peak figure of 2.4 Gpixel/s for PS2. 1.2 Gpixel/s is with Z/buffer, texture and alpha included so the comparison is fair. I am quite relaxed by the way, thanks.
Lysandros
Member
You 100% proved your claim in a very methodic and objective fashion. Thanks.
It's missing lighting and shading though...
PixelatedBeast
Member
Only on GAF does this sort of revisionist history exist. I owned almost every game system since Nintendo, and never have I heard someone say PS2 had the worst graphics, ports or hardware during that time, lol.
Punished Miku
Gold Member
Did you play any multiplatform games? Xbox was a giant beast of a system. I thought that was common opinion honestly. It's less acknowledged that Gamecube was as well, but just compare Resident Evil 4. Always thought it looked much better on Gamecube, personally.
cireza
Banned
Well this is what I kept hearing all the time, and as someone who owned all consoles in France, I can certainly confirm that PS2 was the worst by far. On CRT it was obvious that PS2 had a super poor picture, it was even worst with games that forced 50Hz as TVs often had much worse flicker in 50Hz. Which was quite funny as Dreamcast offered 60Hz for the vast majority of its games, yet PS2 which came later was 50Hz most of the time. Final Fantasy X was a flicker fest, with jagged edges everywhere, blurry/washed out textures. You could somehow guess that animations and enemy design were great, but it was painful to look at.
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Horseganador
Member
Are we seriously going to doubt the technical capabilities of PS2? Who did not hallucinate with MGS2 in that E3 of 2000? Or with Gran Turismo 3? In its day, a separate issue is making ridiculous comparisons with systems that came out 18-20 months later, such as the GameCube or Xbox, at that time it was a technological eternity.
Imru’ al-Qays
Member
MGS2/3 and FFXII still look great.
MadchesterManc
Member
Probably just folk that played on a cheap Sanyo CRT using the composite lead in the box. Looked crisp to me on a Trinitron with an RGB SCART (Was worth losing DVD playback) Then again almost everything did back then with SCART, even ran the 360 using one in the early days
Tal Shiar Agent
Member
It was consistently talked about in hardware enthusiast circles that the PS2 had the weakest video output and overall image quality of the three (four I guess if you include DC).
It's all in the wrist
Member
PS2 = individual fingers = pinnacle.
baphomet
Member
Your screenshots looks extremely bad, not even my LCD upscale picture so badly.
Anyway on high resolution display something like 480i/p look bad no matter what you do. It's however possible to emulate 6'th gen consoles, because the image quality is noticeably improved on an emulator at something like 4x the resolution.
I however still prefer gaming on real hardware. On my low resolution plasma games from 6'th gen consoles looks amazing, way better even compared to my SD CRT (because the CRT makes the image blurry to an extreme degree.).
SD CRT
Plasma
SD CRT
Plasma
I have played burnout 2 lately (PS2 is the best version, even xbox version doesnt look so good) and this game still impress me. On my plasma the textures look much better compared to my SD CRT, and picture has almost HD look to it. I have taken these photos from close distance, but from something like 2.5m from my plasma (my normal viewing distance) not even aliasing is a problem.
6'th gen games can look good on LCD as well, but it has to be low resolution and small LCD. If you have something like 26 inch 720p LCD even PS2 games looks very good.
Yea, I'm sure your LCD upscales better than the Retrotink 5x.
That plasma looks awful.
balls of snow
Member
This. Burnout 3 looks decent still.
Lumpyoatmeal
Member
Dos
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Shut0wen
Member
Did you give up your left testicle for sonys ps2? Its a poor console with good first party games but 3rd party games were shit just like the 3rd party support for the ps3
Rocco Schiavone
Member
No Shit Sherlock.
I tell you what It was the weakest because It was released before GameCube and X-Box. No surprise that the consoles that got released after the ps2 are superior.
RoboFu
One of the green rats
That’s because everyone owned one and didn’t want to talk bad about it. Lol
But it did have the “ worse “ IQ comparatively with most ports just because of its i/o hardware and low odd rendering resolutions, But when a game pushed its strengths like MGS2, GT3, or many other exclusives from some studios you could make some great looking games.
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Sub_Level
wants to fuck an Asian grill.
Whats really bizarre to me is that earlier PS2 games have cleaner image quality than later PS2 games.
MGS2 looks cleaner than MGS3
FFX looks cleaner than FFXII
Tekken 4 looks cleaner than Tekken 5
DMC1 looks cleaner than DMC3
I think this is because the earlier games had simpler geometry and pushed less polygons. Those later PS2 games all look amazing emulated/remastered, but on native hardware they were dirty. Anyone else agree/disagree?
MGS2 looks cleaner than MGS3
FFX looks cleaner than FFXII
Tekken 4 looks cleaner than Tekken 5
DMC1 looks cleaner than DMC3
I think this is because the earlier games had simpler geometry and pushed less polygons. Those later PS2 games all look amazing emulated/remastered, but on native hardware they were dirty. Anyone else agree/disagree?
CuteFaceJay
Member
That was truly masterpiece. Sadly today no similar racing game
Burnout Paradise remaster on the Nintendo Switch runs at a smooth 60. You should pick it up if you got the system.
A few of those earlier games mentioned are capable of running in progressive scan mode (480p) rather than interlaced which might explain this. Later PS2 titles seem to drop support for it entirely, leaving them running only in interlaced mode. Also many PS2 games don't even run at the full NTSC/PAL resolution, something like 640x448 with some games even going lower than that.
Still, at least we got Gran Turismo 4 which managed to pull off 1080i (540p)
Yeah. I think many ps2 games use field rendering, which only draws half a frame at a time to boost performance.
Corporal.Hicks
Member
Keep in mind, photos do not do justice, because colors and contrast looks wayyy different in real life (both my CRT and plasma have PERFECT COLOR DEPTH AND CONTRAST, while on my photo yellow color look more like white, and red color like orange), and I'm also taken these photos at a close distance because I wanted to show the difference in sharpness (my plasma is huge compared to CRT). SDR blur the details and that's the problem with CRT's. For example, if you look at the car selection screen, the car thumbnails show far more detail on the plasma photo than on the CRT photo. Whats more on my CRT it's even hard to read big tachometer digits, while as you can see the same digits are perfectly readable on plasma photo.
Your retrotink 5x screenhots looks extremely pixelated and that's now how PS2 games looks on my CRT, plasma, and even my sony LCD that's upscaling the image many times unlike my plasma. My plasma has very low resolution panel, so PS2 image looks as good as it can look because upscaling inst ruining the image (the image is sharp without ringing and upsclaing artifacts). I also had fullHD plasma, but picture qualtiy from PS2 games werent nearly as good (aliasing was way more noticeable and the picture was softer on top of that). Only emulator can beat the image quality of my plasma from PS2 games. IMO on LCD it's better to use the emulator than buy something expensive as retrotink and play with pixelated picture. If you have big LCD TV with very high resolution, then no upscaling will make PS2 games look good.
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Surf Ninja
Member
On a quality CRT or PVM it's kind of shocking how good some PS2 games look, especially Final Fantasy X.
polybius80
Member
actually its 30 fps rock solid except for very specific situations where it can go to 26 fps for a second during a very complex explosion
I am not going to accuse you of telling lies because I have no idea whats your intention, maybe you genuinely believed what you said even if it was wrong, back in the day we mostly had the writen opinion of ign and gamespot to know the differences between systems and rarely a proper comparison, but today you can simply write "ps2 black framerate" in youtube and watch it for yourself
you literally used a heavily zoomed screenshot where the health bar and the ammo bars are clearly missing its obvious you are not showing the whole picture, black support 480p and 16:9 activate those first and then put a complete screenshot for a vaild comparison, if your Retrotink 5x gives you that while playing then its definitely broken
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Corporal.Hicks
Member
PS2 games (especially 60fps games) often run at sub 480i
(not even 640x480 interlaced), And on top of that, the quality of the image was very noisy, because PS2 had very small amount of VRAM (and no S3TC compression support), so developers were forced to compress the color depth and used dithering to mask this imperfection. Yes, compared to dreamcast the PS2 has much worse image quality.Black on PS2 is very good example. This games has very strong dithering on PS2 that's masked on SD CRT with composite cable, but when you use component 480p output you can clearly see dithering dots and noise (PS2 component output is extremely sharp). IMO The Xbox Classic version is much better, not only because it has a cleaner picture, but more importantly because it has much less input lag, which makes aiming much easier.
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Represent.
Represent(ative) of bad opinions
Now this is a game that needs a remake by a talented studio. Just a pure visual feast with intense and bombastic gunplay. Could be incredible on todays hardware if they pushed for fidelity and went all out with destruction and hit reaction.
polybius80
Member
looks like is the opposite, lists of games with alternate modes reveal more later games added support for such features compared to early games in fact there are games series where each newer entry added modes, you can force games without support to run in progressive mode with freemcboot anyway so you can play games without support in progressive mode now and adapted for HD and FHD screen much better
Dr. Claus
Vincit qui se vincit
The big thing is that they were more focused as well. They didn't try to make these massive, bland, forgettable open worlds with hundreds of NPCs. It made them stand out all the more by having a few, incredibly well designed characters and cohesive narratives that don't outstay their welcome.
AAA games today have too much bloat.
SolidQ
Member
i've played it, and don't like it
Games of Today
Member
Some games still look great like NFS Most Wanted and Burnout Revenge.
Other games, especially ones with night missions, will give you aids from squinting to see anything with the extreme black levels.
Other games, especially ones with night missions, will give you aids from squinting to see anything with the extreme black levels.
MiguelItUp
Member
I don't think so at all. At the time it was known that of the "big three", it was in last place in terms of visual power. But that didn't mean it was bad by any means, it was far from it. Especially with its beyond impressive library of games.
Depends on the game, but some still look amazing to this day, IMO.
Depends on the game, but some still look amazing to this day, IMO.
Dr. Claus
Vincit qui se vincit
There is a reason why Nintendo stopped chasing after top end power trends and why Xbox has routinely failed despite having the strongest hardware.
What matters is good, strong games coming out routinely. Graphical fidelity is impressive for the first few seconds, but then people quickly forget and move on to the next big new game. PS2 had a consistent release of amazing, high quality games that didn't rely on pushing graphical fidelity and instead interesting gameplay, unique settings, and just being *fun*. Both the OG Xbox and GC also had great games, but they were never as consistently released.
polybius80
Member
yes, games with more complex geometry produce shimering as the geometry gets very small when far from camera or small parts jumps between scanlines giving the impression of noise, a game with simple scenarios and smoother textures like MGS2 will definitely look less noisy compared with MGS3 which has trees and plants everywhere it also doesnt help that lot of ps2 games use textures in a way that look very sharp in oblique angles compared to your standard mip mapping of the era looking like anisotropic filter on steroids, giving far more detail but producing noisy images but this particularity does marvels when using emulators where you can increase resolution
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Impotaku
Member
With a decent scaler box both ps1&2 can look pretty nice. Ps1 gets shit on a lot people saying it’s aged super poor but through a scaler it looks great. Same for ps2 the textures might be lower res but with the right scaling it can look great. However both through a modern TV set with no processing they can look a little rough.
MiguelItUp
Member
Oh definitely, it was just all up to preference. I personally loved my PS2 most, Gamecube second, and my Xbox last.
There were games for everyone across all platforms. But man, the PS2 flow and overall quality felt insane compared to the others IMO. Especially at the time.
I was shocked how much that changed in the next generation when I loved my 360 much more than my PS3.
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Corporal.Hicks
Member
The PS2 library was unrivalled, but the Xbox library was impressive in its own right. I still have not completed every game on my Xbox Classic and I have this console since 2003. I loved my PS2, but xbox impressed me with it's graphics. Some xbox games like for example the splinter cell series looked like next gen compared to PS2.
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Dr. Claus
Vincit qui se vincit
Gen 6th was the last generation where I loved all 3 equally. You had so many great games on each platform. I loved playing Splinter Cell on Gamecube, killing Covenant and paltforming as a voodoo doll on Xbox, and exploring haunted places on my PS2.
Gen 7 was an odd one. The Wii I really disliked, despite loving its UI and concept, its games felt super gimmicky and lacked depth for the most part. It was only really the rare exclusive that I really jumped at to play.
360 was my love and baby for the first half of the generation. Absolutely adored it and hated the pS3, but around that time Xbox tried to chase Wii money and stopped doing what made it successful and then Sony picked up the slack and improved on *everything*.
Gen 8 though was disappointing. PS4 was by far the winner and it wasn't even a competition. I loved the WIi U, but it lacked games and the Xbox One was a fucking mistake. Seems MS still hasn't learned their lesson come Gen 9 and PS5/Sony has grown arrogant and switched to being an American run company, pissing off the core reason why they were so successful: Japanese games. Needless censorship, pissing off devs, doing what ruined Xbox (chasing the same tired gameplay gimmicks with no evolution). Blegh. Oddly enough Nintendo finally got their heads out of their asses and made a decent system with the Switch.
PixelatedBeast
Member
What hardware enthusiast circles? I grew up with a computer wiz in my house, the only serious hardware enthusiast conversations I remember were about PC accessories, gaming handhelds, audio tech and remote control airplanes(before they were classified as drones). There was no console war like it is now to speak of, so there wasnt any incentive for people to make comparisons. There wasnt even any tools availible for people to analyze and compare, lol.
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