OG XBox was planned to launch with an AMD CPU until last minute.

Both DC and OG Box were designed from the offset for 480p, and Xbox was also designed to output 720p and 1080i over component. So 720p is definitely in there at the end of "6th gen".

Had MS not aborted the OG Xbox in 2005 I think this would have increasingly paid off across 2006, 2007, 2008 as sales of larger screened HD tv's exploded.

The number of HD supporting Xbox games actually seems pretty impressive if this list is accurate:

https://www.neowin.net/news/these-are-the-games-you-can-play-in-720p-and-1080i-on-the-original-xbox/

 

Near the end of the PS2 life cycle some games were released with 480p support too.
The DC was impressive that many games at least in the EU territory offered progressive support by default and you could choose between 50hz and 60hz.
The PS2 was offering the option to choose between 50hz, 60hz and progressive very late and in very select titles such as Tekken 4

 

Yeah, for sure. Back then on PC, 1024*768 was the common resolution for many games on current video cards. Obviously PS2 and Gamecube had more exotic video hardware, but we have a pretty good idea how well Xbox's GPU could handle most games at that resolution based on it's close PC relatives. If you had a Geforce 3ti or Geforce 4 4200 you would most likely have to lower resolution in very few games, and probably only later in the generation. Stuff like Doom 3 maybe.

Look at Return to Castle Wolfenstein running at 80 FPS at 1600*1200 on a Geforce 3 for example. And it's limited to 480p60 on Xbox. It had plenty of power to spare.

Wasn't one of the most significant drivers of the HDTV adoption rate the launch of Xbox 360 (and PS3 being on the horizon). I remember reading articles back then where they were basically saying that I think. Had they waited a year, people may still have not had the screens.

 

I see the old XBox as a 720p console as much as I see PS360 as 1080p. It's not really the comfort zone for the machine. The old XBox has more than a few 480p games that push it to the limit and beyond.

I think it is rather substantially bottlenecked by memory bandwidth compared to a discrete Geforce 3/4.

 

Xbox was massively bandwidth bound compared to compatible PC cards of the time so Xbox's GPU limits are a lot power then we saw on PC.

Top end Geforce 3 Ti 500 = 8Gb/s bandwidth all to itself

Top end Geforce 4 Ti 4800 = 10.4Gb/s bandwidth all to itself

Xbox = 6.4Gb/s total (CPU could take 1Gb/s leaving 5.4Gb/s for rest of the system)

So talking a ~3 to 5Gb/s (if not more) bandwidth advantage to PC, so no way would Xbox ever get close to doing what an equivalent PC part could do.

 

I mean, yeah, you are almost always going to have bandwidth limits. But at 480p, I think we can agree Xbox, PS2 and Gamecube are all stupidly overpowered in relation to their target resolution.

 

Stupidly overpowered and ps2 do not belong in the same sentence. It really suffered in comparison with the introduction of shader based hardware on pc and xbox imo.

 

That has nothing to do with it's power relative to it's target resolution.

And considering when PS2 was designed (1998 iirc) it did damn well when compared to shader based hardware. But that's a discussion for another thread.

 

Sorry, I didn't explain my point well. PS2 was powerful in certain areas, but the graphics leaps at the time left it looking very dated when compared to the more cutting edge graphics of the time. Same way ray tracing is arguably a potential game changer today.

 

Games that used shaders abundantly were not common place, I know as I have a 2005 retro PC for the games of that era and a side from a few high end examples shaders were barely used. So I will have to disagree with you on it looking dated, especially as graphics are personal preference.

 

That can be true, sure. But PS2 had more fill rate than Xbox or Gamecube by a long shot, has theoretical limits of hundreds of polygons per pixel at 640*480, and a vertex pipeline that was more flexible than anything in the PC space until 2004/5 IIRC. Sure, it has shortcoming, and it essentially has to do more advanced effects by brute force and multipass rendering, but the fact that it was able to do that is telling of it's power. There's a reason why some multiplatform games look better on PS2 than Xbox (or even PC), and it's because the system was powerful for it's time.

I only wish the texture filtering was better.

 

PS2 was quite much behind the OG Xbox on just about every level hardware wise. And it showed whenever the xbox got games that took advantage of it. Not sure about the gamecube though.

 

Many games were barely more than a slideshow though, like Driver and Driver 2.

G-Police included a graphics draw distance setting to improve the also-a-slideshow-at-times framerate.

 

PS2 didnt look dated at all when it was released.
PC ports looked downgraded, but games that were made for the PS2 were not matched by PC until later.
RRV, TTT, SH2, MGS2, DMC, GT3, Ace Combat 3 etc were demonstrators of next gen gaming.

 

PS2 was really impressive for sure, the jump from Silent Hill 2 to 3 was almost mindblowing. But at the end of consoles lifecycle when games like Splinters cell 3 were realsed xbox was on another level. Like next gen system.

 

Yeah, exactly. The PS2 was extremely impressive for its time of release. Which would be march 2000 for the japan launch. Its the biggest generational leap weve ever had i think going from PSX to PS2. In some ways its not all that 'fair' to compare to say the og xbox which released 1.5 years later which was a lifetime in technological advancements at the time. Even today a 1.5 year gap between consoles would have serious impacts (say the PS5 would release 2022 instead of 2020 for the XSX.

If you confine them to the same generation (6th), then ye the Xbox was quite far ahead, as some 6th gen developers on this very forum have shared here.

 

Not entirely accurate.

 

PS2 still had a fill rate, bandwidth, and geometry advantage, though. It wasn't outclassed in every metric. And those advantages showed for PS2 in games that took advantage of them.

 

Xbox couldn't match PS2 for particles and post processing like early version of DoF and motion blur.

The beauty of that generation was that all the machines had completely different hardware and each had advantages over the other which made it interesting.

 

Hence the 'just about everything', BW/fillrate was a architectural difference, the PS2 needed them. See it like this, native PS2 games that took advantage of the whole arch that where ported to Xbox where quite close to the PS2 versions (even bad ports like mgs2). Games that took advantage of the Xbox and where ported to PS2.... ye we all know what happened then
Its just not a total fair-comparison hardware wise seeing the gap in time between the releases.

PS2 did impress the most though, being the first out the gate (DC didnt even make it to EU i think), it was the first console to power us with tekken tag, GT3, MGS2 graphics before the xbox and gc even saw the light. Its massive sales ment an ongoing support and devs optimized the hell out of that system.