Questions about PS2

[Mobius1aic]

The one thing that amazes me regarding the PS2 is the fact that the 'bump/normal map hunt' is still ongoing after 19 years of existence. Its clear to me that the PS2 wasnt that well suited for the use of bump, normal or any of those kind of effects in games, not in any way. Geotexturing or pure polys or not, whenever it was used it was very subtle in the handful of titles that had it.

Perhaps more impressive for the PS2 was the use of spherical harmonic lighting in SotC.

Btw, we all know how chaos theory turned out on ps2,

Lot's of power, just little context that in some ways was too hampered by it's implementation. I'd like to wonder if Sony was even really paying attention to graphics in the PC space before they taped out the Graphics Synthesizer. It's clear they were all about the polys and special effects (and numbers to fluff the press & public) but not some of the finer points to clean image rendering like the Dreamcast.

Other things bother me like how bolted-on Vector Unit 0 was, and consequently went generally unused. Being a coprocessor (CP2?) to the MIPS CPU hampered it's ability to assist in graphics, and it's small caches made it difficult to work with for other things IIRC. I wonder if the FPU could've been ditched for VU0 with an expanded cache. Might've made it possible to afford a bit more die space for a third VU to operate in parallel with VU1.

 

[milk]

Interestingly the discussion about Dreamcast and bump mapping, made me look for examples on the PS2
We have Path of Neo as a clear example.
But one other title where it is claimed to have it is Hitman. I searched and couldnt find anything though. Where did it implement it?
Another interesting case is Splinter Cell on PS2. Ubisoft claimed before reelased that they discovered a solution called Geo Texturing.
This video demonstrates it:

The final game though doesnt seem to have it. Or does it? I believe it was not present and the feature was never seen again.

Everything about this tells me this is more of a geometry based effect than some kind of pseudo-pixel-shader.
-It has geometry right in the name.
-The demo showed a wireframe mesh.
-The dev talked about reusing the same mesh with thousands of polys without paying the same performance cost you normally would (probably by instancing through PS2 VUs or something akin to that)
-That's the kind of thing ps2 was good at, and other devs implemented as well
-If getting normal mapping out of ps2 by multiple raster passes with weird textures and blending modes wasn't hard enough, I can't even imagine how would you get parallaxing out of it that way.
-Certain sections of the demo show geometry that wouldn't actually be a very good fit for heightmap based parallaxing/displacement
Why did they call it geoTEXTURING then? I guess because the idea was of texturing something through geometry instead of just texels... Maybe their pipeline worked in such way that an artist would create a model and set a surface for it to repeat through like in a texture. Maybe the code took advantage of the fact all instances were within the same plane and repeated in regular spacial intervals for extra optimization.
This is all speculation, though.

 

[vipa899]

If the final game didnt use it, must be a reason for that.

 

[Nesh]

The one thing that amazes me regarding the PS2 is the fact that the 'bump/normal map hunt' is still ongoing after 19 years of existence. Its clear to me that the PS2 wasnt that well suited for the use of bump, normal or any of those kind of effects in games, not in any way. Geotexturing or pure polys or not, whenever it was used it was very subtle in the handful of titles that had it.

Perhaps more impressive for the PS2 was the use of spherical harmonic lighting in SotC.

Btw, we all know how chaos theory turned out on ps2,

Doesnt appear to have a sample of that geo-texturing feature on PS2.

 

[Nesh]

If the final game didnt use it, must be a reason for that.

Yes I wish we had some info on that from a developer who worked on the game.

 

[vipa899]

Heaving read many of the IGN head 2 heads (they are not behind a paywall anymore), it seems that PS2 versions of multiplatform games come out the worst of the 3 consoles in the graphics and sound department. PS2 versions often have the advantage in some effects, like the SSX3 glow, or some heat effect in prince of persia sands of time.
Also in SSX Tricky theres some snow particles missing in the xbox/GC versions. Do these things occur because the PS2 was able to do these effects while GC/Xbox werent, or because of PS2 was most likely always the lead platform?

 

[Rootax]

Lead platform + time/money limitation for the devs/editors i guess. On paper, I'm sur the GC/Xbox were able, one way or another, to do every thing that the PS2 was doing, but you had to rewrite code or rethinking the approach of doing things, since the strength and weakness, bottlenecks, etc, were different for 3 plateformes.

 

[vipa899]

Vice City and gta 3 were faithfull ports to the xbox, san andreas not so, it lost many graphical features.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Vice City and gta 3 were faithfull ports to the xbox, san andreas not so, it lost many graphical features.

"lost" ?

 

[vipa899]

Yes SA on xbox doesnt have the orange glow the ps2 version has, many dont like it but i do. Some other graphical features are only on ps2 aswell. Pc version can be modded to get the same ps2 gfx though otherwise its like xbox og.

PS2 allways had some effects over xbox ports in most games.

 

[vipa899]

Another example, the sparks discussion that went on some forums.

LIke someone else wonders, is it that the og xbox couldnt do any bloom effects, applied to those particles perhaps? More often then not PS2 versions had some extra in the effects department.

 

[chris1515]

Another example, the sparks discussion that went on some forums.

LIke someone else wonders, is it that the og xbox couldnt do any bloom effects, applied to those particles perhaps? More often then not PS2 versions had some extra in the effects department.

I am not sure but if I remember well PS2 had a better fillrate than Xbox.

 

[vipa899]

That was the ps2s big advantage.

 

[Liandry]

I have question about PS2. As I know in super slim ps2 there was chip where was CPU, GPU and RAM combined. Please tell me someone is this true or false. If this is true, how many transistors have that chip? As I know for dram there is 8 transistors for 1 bit. So for 32 mb or RAM in PS2 that should be 268 million transistors. IF Chip in PS2 have CPU. GPU and RAM combined that is more than 300 million transistors.

 

[Panino Manino]

I have question about PS2. As I know in super slim ps2 there was chip where was CPU, GPU and RAM combined. Please tell me someone is this true or false. If this is true, how many transistors have that chip? As I know for dram there is 8 transistors for 1 bit. So for 32 mb or RAM in PS2 that should be 268 million transistors. IF Chip in PS2 have CPU. GPU and RAM combined that is more than 300 million transistors.

They just put the EE and the GS into a single chip, like more recent consoles that use a "SOC" uniting the CPU and GPU.

 

[TapamN]

I have question about PS2. As I know in super slim ps2 there was chip where was CPU, GPU and RAM combined. Please tell me someone is this true or false. If this is true, how many transistors have that chip? As I know for dram there is 8 transistors for 1 bit. So for 32 mb or RAM in PS2 that should be 268 million transistors. IF Chip in PS2 have CPU. GPU and RAM combined that is more than 300 million transistors.

I'm pretty sure DRAM is typically one transistor (and capacitor) per bit. SRAM is often 6 transistors per bit. Both require extra control circuitry for things like address decoding or buffering that would also need to be factored in, but I don't know much extra that is. It would depend on the interface (e.g. EDO RAM vs SDRAM vs RDRAM).

 

[Liandry]

They just put the EE and the GS into a single chip, like more recent consoles that use a "SOC" uniting the CPU and GPU.

That is photo of motherboard in ps2 slim. I talked about ps2 super slim.

I'm pretty sure DRAM is typically one transistor (and capacitor) per bit. SRAM is often 6 transistors per bit. Both require extra control circuitry for things like address decoding or buffering that would also need to be factored in, but I don't know much extra that is. It would depend on the interface (e.g. EDO RAM vs SDRAM vs RDRAM).

I found different info.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-transistors-are-in-a-1GB-memory

 

[davis.anthony]

Heaving read many of the IGN head 2 heads (they are not behind a paywall anymore), it seems that PS2 versions of multiplatform games come out the worst of the 3 consoles in the graphics and sound department.

If you look at some of the current YouTube channels that compare these older consoles using modern techniques it's GC that suffers more than PS2.

It was often missing a lot of effects compared to PS2 and Xbox.

Here's just one example (I imagine some people may actually prefer how the GC looked with those missing effects but it doesn't look like the same game)

 

[Liandry]

If you look at some of the current YouTube channels that compare these older consoles using modern techniques it's GC that suffers more than PS2.

It was often missing a lot of effects compared to PS2 and Xbox.

Completely agree. I compared some games for GC and PS2 and always version for PS2 was better. More effects. IN Baldur's Gate Dark Aliiance there was no 3d water with physics like on PS2 and Xbox. And that was most amazing effect in that game. I can't even tell that is effect, because that was real tima calculation of polygons with physics.

 

[TapamN]

I found different info.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-transistors-are-in-a-1GB-memory

Huh? That link is almost exactly what I said.

SRAM is often 6 transistors per bit.

Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) then there are 6 transistors per unit cell “bit”

I'm pretty sure DRAM is typically one transistor (and capacitor) per bit.

Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) then there is only one transistor (and one capacitor) in each bit

You were saying there were 8 transistors per bit in DRAM

As I know for dram there is 8 transistors for 1 bit