Originally posted by Heretic
Most powerful? Fine. But by how much? Will it ever be enough for the majority of gamers to care?
In the next years? maybe...but not only for the greater graphics capabilities...
Greatest potential? Maybe if your talking about its ability to bring console gamers cleaner versions of PC ports (not that there\'s anything wrong with that!). With its greater flexibility I think the PS2 has much more potential to end up showing us the unexpected (technically)...
You have no idea what you\'re speaking about:)
I stopped to lap up each Sony\'s words...or some developers...
...Sony really pissed me off this time...you speak about flexibility,potential,magical unexpected and untapped power...can you prove something?...the answer is NO! Because there\'re not magical formula in hardware...if you have limitations,if you have not enough texture bandwidth,for example,there\'s nothing you can do...
Why Texturing on the DC(Shenmue2) is still equal or better than PS2?
I\'m not sure why people are arguing that the PS2 and Xbox are nearly equal in power....while the PS2 does contain some interesting parameters in its architecture the end does not necessarily mean that it can recoup its deficiencies with the Xbox and the GC. The PS2 design is a bit of a revolution, but that 4 MB of eDRAM on the GS is something that took alot of devs some time to get used to. Instead of giving them a measly small cache with vast amounts of graphics memory, Sony evened the playing field by giving a hefty 4 MB of super fast memory so you could use the cache to maximum efficiency without the need for external memory. That tradeoff didn\'t do too well. That damn cache is very fast, but it has no external memory to feed it regularly aside from the main memory of the machine, which IMO should be kept entirely for the EE. The PS2 is going to have some very geometry intensive stuff going on in games over the next years and this will be the most impressive part of its visuals. In terms of geometry, I\'m pretty sure it will outclass the GCN in polygons just because it can push more geometry around......but the more geometry we get the more aliasing we will see. I think that without a doubt, at least for the most part,the Gamecube will be far more efficient in terms of modelling with their geometry to offset the rather weak dynamic T&L it can do. But GCN does have the textures and TEV to do some shader ops so that will be a big bonus. Xbox on the other hand, can do more dynamic and static T&L from what I\'ve seen so it just might be the best of both worlds in terms of geometry. High geometry levels with grand amounts of textures along with all the vertex and pixel shaders effects. I do think the Xbox will be a much better performing machine than either PS2 or GCN in the future, but it will take some time before we will really start to see the difference.
Again, wait until the 2nd and 3rd generation games come out for the Xbox and GC....it will be more clear then.
And another little thing...about "tricks"...texturing and streaming from DVD...
Do you think that the magic streaming technique will solve the problem?...streaming from DVD? the macical technique exclusive to PS2?
People sometimes really show some ignorance(not speaking of you Heretic
...)
What some guys can\'t realize is that the total 48GB/s bandwidth is between the GS and its embedded DRAM. And not all of those bandwidth can be used for texture.
Infact, the texture read/write bus width is only 512-bit. Thus, by multiplying it by the GS\'s clock speed (147.5 MHz), you get 9.4 GB/s texture read/write bandwidth.
Anyway, back to the topic of streaming. Memory bandwidth plays almost no roll at all in streaming data from the DVD drive to memory. Why? Because the data transfer rate is limited by the DVD drive\'s own data transfer rate. At it\'s fastest, the PS2\'s 4x DVD drive can only transfer 5.5 MB/s (4 x 1,385 KB/s). It can NEVER read any faster than this. This 5.5 MB/s bandwidth is NOTHING compared to Xbox\'s or PS\'s memory bandwidth. If it\'s possible on the PS2, it\'s possible on the Xbox. Actually, the Xbox can do it better. It can use the built-in HD to stream textures much faster than even the fastest DVD drive in world.
Please note that PS2 has to use trick to keep up, while Xbox games look better in almost every aspect without using any trick at all !
And why PS2 should be more flexible?
XBox and PS2 are both 3 processors machine,Main CPU + Vu0 + Vu1 "linked" to the GS for PS2 and the XCPU + NV2a + MCPX for the XBox...
...but the difference is that XBox is almost more powerful in each department...and it\'s easier to develop for...
PS2 could be more competitive in physics and collision-system...but you should sacrifice a LOT,a LOT graphics and sound!
