Erm.. didn\'t Sony already announce (repeatedly) that the PS2\'s maximum capabilities are around 78 million untextured/unlit polygons per second.. with the number dropping down to anywhere from 20 to 25 million pps when in the context of an actual game enviroment?
Yeah, we\'re talking a 20 million polygon per second difference.. but still.. 20 million polygons per second is an awful lot and a far cry from 100 million pps. How can Jak & Daxter handle over 100mpps (raw) when the PS2\'s preformance doesn\'t even match that number?
Well, to be precise, 66 mpps is only the limit of VU1, but that\'s besides the point. What the game does though, is significant:
The whole world (or island) in Jak & Daxter is being rendered at once. You can go off to anyplace and you\'ll see everything unchanged. This is only possible though by simplifying objects that are further away. In other words, imagine yourself in the town looking at the house in all its glory. Go a few miles up to the jungle and you\'ll have quite a nice view on to the town you were just moments before. Upon looking down at the house you just looked at, it seems to be unchanged. What the engine did though is simplifying that object from say a few thousand polygons into something that looks just the same, but using only a few polygons. The clue is, no difference is seen as the house is too far away to make out the small details anyway. Following up on that, you do have an engine performing calculations on 100\'s millions of polygons (I\'m taking a guess here), but in the end, you are only rendering something between 10 to 20 million/sec. So, what I did mean is not that the PS2 is
rendering that many triangles per second, but that the engine has to handle and manage that many, while only rendering only what\'s necessary.
I remember an interview with Jason Rubin a while back explaining this in more detail (and about the sheer number of polygons the engine has to handle). I\'ll look for it later on.
Anyway, be carefull when talking about the specs Sony released. Sony mentioned two specs (for EE and GS independently); one is refering to perspective transformation performed on VU1 (66 mpps) and the other for the GS\'s rendering performance (75 million, 32 pixel, untextured, raw polygons/sec). This number though is only under certain circumstances, i.e. you could surpass this number by running the VUs in micromode devoted to perspective transformation and rendering smaller triangles on the GS.