Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2019]

Agreed, we are making different points.

Street Fighter Alpha 2 on SNES has loading between every match, after the characters appear on screen, even. Quake 1 also had loading screens. I'm sure there are other examples.

 

I see no lie here...

 

PS2 version inferior though!!!!!

 

That wasnt for the PS2.
That was his comment during the GSCube presentation, which also had a tech demo of the Matrix. It was the vision he had about the future of the technology.

 

It is quite amazing how our perception changes. Back then those graphics were reported as being indistinguishable from the movies. Now to us they look like PS2 games.
The only section that truly looks impressive and we arent sure if it was indeed real time on a GSCube is the Final Fantasy Spirits Within demo in the above video. That looks way too good for its time to be real time.

 

MGS2 for the first time in 2001, or the E3 half life 2 tech presentation, Doom 3 was quite unreal too. Now it all looks kinda bad

 

16 × Emotion Engine CPUs clocked at 294.912 MHz
2 GB of DRDRAM Rambus main memory (16 × 128 MB)
(128 MB was a common memory allocation on devkits vs. the 32 MB on shipping units)
Memory Bus Bandwidth 50.3 GB/s (3.1 GB/s × 16)
Floating Point Performance 97.5 GFLOPS (6.1 GFLOPS × 16)
16 × "Graphics Synthesizer "I-32" Graphics Processors clocked at 147.456 MHz
512 MB of eDRAM Video Memory (16 × 32 MB)
(The "I-32" Graphics Synthesizer was a custom variant that contained 32 MB of eDRAM instead of the typical 4 MB)
eDRAM Bandwidth 755 GB/s (47.2 GB/s × 16)
Pixel Fill Rate 37.7 GB/s (2.36 GB/s × 16)
Maximum Polygon Drawing Rate 1.2 Gpolygons/s (73.7 Mpolygons/s × 16)

 

Could have been a PS3

 

My thought exactly. Would it even have been as expensive?

 

Good question... on first sight it would be much more expensive but Sony wouldn't have the Cell development costs, which ran into the billions? Also, Nvidia wasn't cheap either i'm sure, so wasn't the XDR ram.
But nah, looking at those specs, seems fantasy almost

 

True, but I wonder how viable a pared down version might have been?

I just googled the GSCube, and the first result was the GSBox, a prototype of the GSCube, utilising 4 PS2 blades and a custom chip to merge the 4 outputs.

I've not finished reading through the thread yet, but I can't help but wonder why Sony didn't lean in to this approach for the PS3?

• It would probably have been better for developers, given that they wouldn't have to learn an entirely new architecture. They'd have had to learn how to synchronise multiple streams, but would that have been more difficult than the Cell?
• It would have guaranteed backwards compatibility.
• As you said, it wouldn't have required the billions of R&D the Cell cost. Instead, it would've utilised the R&D already spent on the GSBox/GSCube.
• Four PS2's, each capable of a 640x480 output would've made for a pretty capable 720p console. Gran Turismo 4 was able to output in 1080i, so 1080p for media output would've presumably been doable.
• Edited in bullet point: Sony wouldn't have had to turn to Nvidia, who had already proven themselves an unhelpful partner to Microsoft.

The paltry amount of memory would've been a problem. 16MB VRAM and 128MB main memory just wouldn't cut it. How expensive would 32MB of EDRAM and 64MB of main memory have been per "PS2 blade"? A total of 128MB of ultra fast VRAM and 256MB main memory would've been rather impressive.

I need to go and have a look at the PS3's specs to properly compare it to this hypothetical PS2Cube.

 

Hmm dunno, but even the 4x ps2 blades spec seem rather impressive, perhaps more so then the PS3's... Seeing how devs really harnessed that PS2, all their first party studios where kinda fond of the PS2, even though it was so hard to program for, it also enabled them to do things the other platforms of the time couldn't.
The Cell/PS3 wasn't that easy to learn either.

The inclusion of a whole PS2 in the early 60gb PS3's was rather expensive one might think.

Since most games where close to 720p that generation, it wouldn't be too far off with the PS2cube idea

Sony would not have to use the GScube either, the idea of the GScube, but a more simple structure, like a heavily improved PS2, more raw power. The PS2 was very flexible, a much more powerfull PS2 wouldn't have that much problems keeping up with the 360/ps3 games we got.
Interesting thought at the least, somewhere it must have been on the table at Sony, but they didn't go for it, i mean the GScube and all...

This potentional PS2cube wouldn't need as much memory as the PS3's 2x 256mb either i think. The PS2 had 32mb against the xbox's 64 but they werent a whole gen apart either, they were clearly playing in the same generation of power.
Not that the PS3 was bad anyway, uncharted for the time was something else

 

This is the guy that made the PS2 Duck demo!
Kutaragi wanted him to work on the graphics that dont use polygons. And he managed to do it! And the rubber duck was the result!
Disappointingly enough this technology was never used in actual games, but it was probably a gate to the PS2's untapped powers.
It makes me wonder what we would have got if his work was used further.
The water effects of the tech demo are beyond anything that was done in real time graphics and it probably challenges present implementations.

 

To be honest I have no idea, I cant imagine anything without polygons. He describes his efforts to meet Kutaragi's demands for polygon-less visuals and he says something about b-splined curved surfaces patches that tessellated into triangles whatever that is in the tweets. Maybe he means the visuals were constructed with curves that generated triangles rather than being constructed with polygons from the get go. I d like to hear an explanation.
They manage to cram in a form of tessellation, normal and refractive water too,

 

Wait, no polygons? Instalove, for me! I'm OBSESSED with alternatives to polygons. I'll try and find more info.

 

I didn't know someone had made a demo using bézier surfaces (if that's what he used) of PS2 !

I still remember vividly the video-game magazines hyping like crazy the nextgen bézier surface feature of PS2 ! But it was all marketing PR as we never saw that in any games. We were also drowned with tons of impressive specs, that were never actually used in 95% of games (very few of them did, like MGS2, yeah that shit was nextgen, but it was a rarity on PS2).

On the other hand, Dreamcast had already nextgen graphics (like 1, 2 years before PS2 games) but few knew about those games and how great those looked (Sonic, Soul Calibur, Shenmue, Toy Commander ...).

Poor Dreamcast (). Killed by deceitful marketing from Sony (that all journalists were happily regurgitating directly from Sony's mouth), bad marketing from Sega and obviously EA .

 

Just keep reading the tweets; Dylan himself explains how he used b-splines, not bezier.