Somebody explain to me how Ps2 is ACTUALLY supposed to handle textures

I\'m just wondering if any developers have used the Ps2 correctly in regards of textures.

To tell you the truth i dont think hardly any of the developers know how the ps2 is ment to handle Textures.

PS2 Tool readme : " texture streaming" -
1. remove the plastic pad on the back of the PS2.
2. Situate the PS2 under a  fast watertap.
3. cut out all textures from textbook.
4. activate the watertap\'s stream at high speed.
5. insert the cut out textures at the top of the stream.
6. the textures should stream at high speed through
the PS2. The water additionally keeps it extra cool.
LOL    
Knotter8:rolleyes:

its a video games console, who cares!!!

[nO-One]

From what I understand they have lowered the resolution and stored them in a 4mb buffer which they belived to be the vRam.

Sony didn\'t a big code library like they did with the psx so they developers were forced to figure this out by themselves.

That just shows how much Sony cares about their developers. They could have at least told them how to stream it.

[Bobs_Hardware]

Originally posted by nO-One
From what I understand they have lowered the resolution and stored them in a 4mb buffer which they belived to be the vRam.

Sony didn\'t a big code library like they did with the psx so they developers were forced to figure this out by themselves.

Originally posted by JediMaster
That just shows how much Sony cares about their developers. They could have at least told them how to stream it.

no, actually, it shows how ignorant the developers are.  When the PSX was released, Sony released a great deal of libraries to maake it a relatively easy console to develope for.  However, these same developers complained.  They didnt want to use these libraries, they wanted to tap directly into the machines power.  So, Sony listened to the developers.  And when they created their new machine, allowed developers to get right to the heart of the machine, releasing very little libraries.  But, because the machine is radically different from the standard PC architecture, and much more powerful, they didnt know how to use it properly, using the Cache frame buffer as a vRam...something which it was not intended for

Good words there Bobs Hardware ! :cool:

Knotter8

I don\'t understand thw whole streaming thing..where\'s Dr Yassam when you need him? he should know the entire story behind the texture streaming  technology

Bob is da man.

[Bobs_Hardware]

Streaming means the data is constantly on the fly.  Moving back and forward from the Cache (PS2 has no vRam) and the main mem.  this is why the PS2 was designed with an exceptionally large bandwidth for the GS.  Where as normal architecture uses texture storage.  The 4 megs imbedded chace on the PS2 is not vRam, nor is it meant to be used for storage (which is what most developers have been doing).  4 megs was considered adequate, and because its not vRam but imbedded directly on the chip, it is much much faster, and much much more expensive (possibly why they didnt have more than 4 megs)

...Now if all developers were just as smart
as you are Bobs.....




But to be honest, maybe it\'s kinda hard to do. If I look at
myself doing something in Maya, for example : A large landscape
made out of a single \'nurbs plane\' then the texture map I would
map on it, has to be pretty detailed, thus big. If I were to apply
a smaller texture to it, then would feel \'stretched\' and look blurry.
So a large(r) texture is ,in that case, needed and larger means more kb or even mb.

example :


Look at the ground surface ; see it\'s made out of seperate
nurbs planes. I had to do this because the original ground
texture was too small for a single large plane. So I had to make
this bumpy sculpted ground surface out of 10 x 10 nurbsplanes
and then apply each with a somewhat different texture. That\'s
alot more work then applying one texture on one plane.
So I can imagine the devs pain a bit.  

Knotter8:laughing:

[BizioEE]

where\'s Dr Yassam when you need him?

I was wondering the same:)...he told me some weeks ago that he has a lot of work to do...I put him under stress with several questions about the X-Box:D....he knows a lot of things and he gave me a lot of material...let\'s hope he\'ll spend more time here in the near future

[nO-One]

Originally posted by Knotter8
...Now if all developers were just as smart
as you are Bobs.....

Actually they are...it just sounds alot easier than it is.

For years now all developers have been using the large buffers/low bandwith approach,and now they are being asked to completly change their way of thinking.With almost no support,they get the hardware but have no idea how to use it.
And they must constantly resend the info into the GS,if you are in a game with a large landscape (let\'s say Giants) usually the developers would just send the testures to the memory where they would stay and be happy,but on the PS.2 they must constantly resend the textures.

Too get the full power they must constntly feed the EE and the GS with data,and they must use the Vector units.But to get the most performance out of them they must give them just about equal amount of data (there\'s no use in giving VU0 alot of things to do,but VU1 does nothing).So they have to let the EE process the data,split ot down and feed it to the VU\'s.  (If I remember correctly VU0 is more ited with the EE,whereas VU1 is more tied to the GS,so they probly wouldn\'t be handling the samw data)

And as far as I know the PS.2 doesn\'t have a standardized programming language,as far as I know programmers used C++ on the DC which developers were used to.The X-Box has DirectX,and the GameCube has OpenGL API\'s all which developers are used to working with.

Bobbo was quite correct in that Sony were also listening to the developers in that they wanted to get more hands on with the hardware,but they must give them some idea on what it is that they must do to get the full power out of it.Not just let them figure it out for themselves.

Originally posted by BizioEE


I was wondering the same:)...he told me some weeks ago that he has a lot of work to do...I put him under stress with several questions about the X-Box:D....he knows a lot of things and he gave me a lot of material...let\'s hope he\'ll spend more time here in the near future

this guy is one of the few xbox fans I have respect for, he is intelligent and knows what he is talking about