PS2 EE question

Depends on the workload. SIMD workloads hugely favor the XCPU since it's pushing 4x 32 bit SIMD (SSE) max versus the Gekko's 2x 32 bit. I also can't remember if the XCPU technically has an FPU + Vector Processor for it's SSE implementation.

Non SIMD workloads could favor the Gekko despite the clock speed deficit with it's 4 stage pipeline. SIMD/FPU workloads were only 7 stages IIRC. Pentium III was 10 stages for non-SIMD. The Wii's clock boosts certainly helped narrow the gap, but it's really hard to just say one is better than the other. Both the Wii and Xbox have their share of some very busy game worlds with alot going on. For the latter I think Halo 2, for the Wii I think Xenoblade. At least with the Xbox CPU you can easily sorta simulate what it could theoretically handle by playing PC games on a similarly clocked Pentium III. The Gamecube and Wii's PPC750s are not all that different from the Apple G3 versions, but of course there are much fewer games on Mac to make [Fuji] apple to [Granny Smith] apple comparisons.

I don't think the GC or Wii could've handled Half-Life 2 all that well (clearly built with SSE in mind). We saw how Far Cry (FC: Vengeance) played out on the Wii at launch, which definitely was a rushed job. Aside from graphics, physics were much more paired back compared to the Xbox versions.

According to a post here by Exophase : https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...cube-relative-to-its-peers-spawn.59940/page-5

Referring to the Pentium - "There are only 8 128-bit registers and while they support 4x32-bit FP operations it only completes 2x32-bit per cycle. Its integer SIMD is limited to the original MMX instruction set over a separate set of 8 64-bit registers. Both MMX and SSE were pretty deficient compared to AltiVec."

"On Gekko the ps_madd family of instructions execute in one cycle and perform two FP32 FMA operations so the overall throughput is four FLOPs per cycle.

On Pentium III addps and mulps perform four FP32 operations in two cycles. They can execute in parallel on ports p0 and p1, so the overall throughput is also four FLOPs per cycle."

So they are even in terms of processor throughput, per clock.

Half life isn't a good example because it runs terrible on the Xbox. Not that I think they optimized it as much as they could either.

Wii has games with pretty nice physics such as boom blox and Super Mario galaxy, and i'm not saying Xbox couldn't handle those but I also saw nothing like that on Xbox.

 
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He was referring to the G4 though,

But that's the G4. Gecko doesn't have AltiVec. Instead it just has a fairly limited set of "paired singles" operations which can do 2x32-bit FMAs per cycle. So Gecko certainly doesn't have the level of FP performance that G4 has, let alone more like you claim. And it has no integer SIMD. All things considered, a good programmer can do comparably well with SSE (per cycle) and can do a lot more with MMX if the algorithms can use packed 8-bit or 16-bit data types within the confines of its instruction set.

As i understand him and reading more of his posts he seems to say that the XCPU and gekko are as fast clock for clock indeed, which makes the XCPU a whole lot faster as in the GC, and about on par with the Wii's CPU?

Mario Galaxy doesnt seem as advanced as HL2 and half life is an FPS.

Also HL2 doesnt run that bad on the OG xbox, it dips below 30fps quit often but its playable. Its not SOTC-bad atleast :p
Far from a optimized port, just as Half Life 1 was for the PS2, 30fps with dips well below 15, and there it was unplayable in Decay atleast. And im sure PS2 is able to run the first half life very well.

Regarding Burnout 3, even though a programmer on that forum states it wasnt possible on GC, i dont really know, perhaps its true but it seems abit strange it wasnt possible at all.
 
In that thread I was mistaking g4 for g3 (gekko) and he was responding, but the quote I posted is about Pentium and gekko.

Watch the video, 10fps is worse than shadow of the colossus :p Mario galaxy‘s gravity mechanics are physics based and it runs at 60fps locked. Note i'm not saying it´s more physics heavy than half life ; it´s just a good example of what wii can do.

Yeah, Broadway and pentium look to be on par, not considering Wii's faster fsb and memory.
 
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Flipper was a polygon crunching monster, but it was lacking in certain features compared to Xbox. *Perhaps* criterion could have ran burnout at 30fps on GC, but they didn't want to make that compromise. The game certainly made good use of the Ps2's uniqueness.
 
Regarding Burnout 3, even though a programmer on that forum states it wasnt possible on GC, i dont really know, perhaps its true but it seems abit strange it wasnt possible at all.

I think he said it might've been possible if they scaled down the polygon and particle counts. As is, the gamecube wasn't capable of it (at least not at 60 fps like ps2 and xbox). And it's not like they didn't try either.

http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showth...mcast-Graphics&p=645458&viewfull=1#post645458

"Even with VU0 running in macro mode, at 50% of the throughput of microcode, the results were better than what we'd get on the GC with hand tuned assembler. You could do more physics, more collision detection, more AI, more everything. Oh yeah...and more graphical effects on higher poly vehicles."
 
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If i understand right its the GC's GPU thats lacking, and its CPU cant help it out because its needed elsewere, or something like that. Black also appeared only on PS2 and Xbox, the latter having better graphics and audio aswell. Seems GC was less powerfull then PS2. Dont know where i read it, but someone said Xbox>PS2>GC, even if thats hard to believe :)
 
If i understand right its the GC's GPU thats lacking, and its CPU cant help it out because its needed elsewere, or something like that. Black also appeared only on PS2 and Xbox, the latter having better graphics and audio aswell. Seems GC was less powerfull then PS2. Dont know where i read it, but someone said Xbox>PS2>GC, even if thats hard to believe :)

I think it really just depends on the kind of game you're trying to make.
 
Wii has games with pretty nice physics such as boom blox and Super Mario galaxy
Metroid Prime had ragdoll physics on enemies and skinned characters throughout also at 60fps locked (nearly almost 100% of the time), so must have worked out the CPU pretty well. Plus, the game ran realtime decompression on data spooled off the disc during idle CPU clock cycles... :)
 
In that thread I was mistaking g4 for g3 (gekko) and he was responding, but the quote I posted is about Pentium and gekko.

Watch the video, 10fps is worse than shadow of the colossus :p Mario galaxy‘s gravity mechanics are physics based and it runs at 60fps locked. Note i'm not saying it´s more physics heavy than half life ; it´s just a good example of what wii can do.

Yeah, Broadway and pentium look to be on par, not considering Wii's faster fsb and memory.

I think more often than not Hl2 hit the 30FPS target (or close enough), while SOTC was constantly slow (under 20) and also hit 10FPS, at least that was my impression back then playing both;
Hl2 I played the entire game and there were only a few places where I felt performance was bad, while SOTC I stopped playing because of how bad it was running; now consider that it's a PC port made for 512MB+of ram and 2GHz CPUs a not a exclusive.

obviously unfair due to higher settings, but even the 360/PS3 version targeted only 30FPS and had drops, the Tegra4/k1 version also had drops to around 20FPS in what looked like CPU limited cases.
 
Exactly what i meant with 'not sotc unplayable'
Also, hl2 seems to lag most after loading a new area (playing from hdd). Seems a straight port to me, atleast everythings there but very unoptimised like other hl/hl2 ports.
Dont think they could get it running on gc/wii like that.
 
Exactly what i meant with 'not sotc unplayable'
Also, hl2 seems to lag most after loading a new area (playing from hdd). Seems a straight port to me, atleast everythings there but very unoptimised like other hl/hl2 ports.
Dont think they could get it running on gc/wii like that.

2x post thx to my smartphone
 
Metroid Prime had ragdoll physics on enemies and skinned characters throughout also at 60fps locked (nearly almost 100% of the time), so must have worked out the CPU pretty well. Plus, the game ran realtime decompression on data spooled off the disc during idle CPU clock cycles... :)
Mhmm. In any case a third party multiplat of that era wouldn't be able to Max out gamecube's skinning capabilities - even if it was the worst of the 3 consoles in that regard. And I'm sure Criterion was right btw. There's other people such as this forum's ERP that said the same thing about GC's ability to clip polygons.

I think this also explains why balder's gate on the GC doesn't have water that ripples like the other versions - the deformable mesh used isn't suited for the GC.

Prime has water that ripples when you shoot it but that's subdividing of polygons - a different method entirely. Goes to show GC had its own strengths.

But yeah, they didn't even max out the ps2 with B3 so you can bet the version that wasn't green lit didn't have all that could be done to it.
 
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Regular character skinning (under 4 weights per vertice) is natevely supported by hardware T&L, which gc had. Cryterion's car damage, likely used some other kind of geometry defformation, which PS2 vector co-processors could handle well, and so could xbox geometry shaders, but gc had no choice but to run them on the cpu.
 
Regular character skinning (under 4 weights per vertice) is natevely supported by hardware T&L, which gc had. Cryterion's car damage, likely used some other kind of geometry defformation, which PS2 vector co-processors could handle well, and so could xbox geometry shaders, but gc had no choice but to run them on the cpu.
I don't know, that criterion developer said it was skinning. Just because GC could do it doesn't mean it was good at it I guess.
If i understand right its the GC's GPU thats lacking, and its CPU cant help it out because its needed elsewere, or something like that. Black also appeared only on PS2 and Xbox, the latter having better graphics and audio aswell. Seems GC was less powerfull then PS2. Dont know where i read it, but someone said Xbox>PS2>GC, even if thats hard to believe :)
We have absolutely no insight as to why black didn't appear on GC. Could be projected sales or anything else.

But saying the PS2 is above the cube because of a certain geometry deformation technique is supreme cherry picking. It's like saying Dreamcast is above PS2 because it has much better image quality (Ps2 is the only console from that gen I HAVE to play on a CRT). Or Ps2 is above Xbox because it can't reproduce the particle system in Zone of the enders 2. Or Xbox is the weakest of the 3 because of its bandwidth. It's missing the bigger picture, and also comes across as a kind of crusade to place one above the other.

Bottom line is they're all different machines with quirks here and there, unlike what we have today with Xbox one and PS4 which is more or less a numbers game.

Exactly what i meant with 'not sotc unplayable'
Also, hl2 seems to lag most after loading a new area (playing from hdd). Seems a straight port to me, atleast everythings there but very unoptimised like other hl/hl2 ports.
Dont think they could get it running on gc/wii like that.

One thing to keep in mind is that shadow of the colossus *locks* the framerate to 20fps at points, so we don't know how many more frames it's actually processing above that. Frankly the performance drops of the two games seem comparable from what I saw of the digital foundry video.

If the Wii couldn't handle Half life 2 it would be because of its technical nature and what it was built for, not so much a lack of power. I know 64mb was really limiting for HL2, and Wii does have more memory, and its cpu is comparable with faster access speeds. I'm guessing half life 2 uses normal maps, so GC and Wii couldn't do that. But again, that's missing the point, a from the ground up game for gamecube and Wii would be playing to their strengths.
 
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Trying so hard to generalize things is going to leave you wanting.

I understand but it isnt so hard to say that xbox>ps2 as the more capable machine, gc doesnt seem to be as clear but personally i rank it above the ps2 even if it some things are better suited there. Metroid is Halo level, very impressive in special snow effects.

@phoenix_chipset

Yeah well-said/explained.
 
I am also on the fence that GC was overall more powerful.
The PS2 would shine over GC only if the game put strong focus on the very very specific areas where it excelled.
But the GC's games looked better uniformly in normal situations.

My assessment entirely.
 
In terms of asking a machine to calculate something, and the machine calculating it, the PS2 was clearly ahead of the GC.

In terms of rendering the most satisfactory image for a given goal .... it's not so straight forward. One could frequently - and easily - make the case for final output from the GC to be perceptually better than that of the PS2.
 
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