PS2 fanboi topic: is this thing finally coming into its own?

[Grall]

Looking at the ZoE2 video and the Silent Hill 3 photographs and possibly other titles too like DMC2 maybe ( or Fafracer, anyone? ), are we at last starting to see some truly kick-arse graphics on the PS2?

I'm playing FFX right now and I have to say it's a pretty mixed bag right now. Some of the (battle, mainly) effects looks awesome, while the lack of mipmapping and trilinear filtering makes the graphics shimmer rather bad. No shadows also distracts quite a bit I have to say despite I usually don't notice/care much about such things.

How widespread is the use of the performance analyzer? What does that thing DO anyway, and how much extra power does it (generally) allow you to wring out of the hardware? What's the state of vectorizing compilers for the PS2, btw? Do people still have to hand-code for the VUs? Since softcos are generally said to be bad at utilizing VU0, how easy is it to let that thing handle DTS sound? For that matter, what can the IOP with its 2MB of RAM do? It's not very fast, granted, but every little bit helps, right? The link between the IOP and PS2 is pretty fast too right? Does the sound processor have a programmable DSP btw and how powerful/useful is it anyway, and is that 4:1 PCM sample compression that SNES pioneered still present? (Guess it is, since PS2 can play PS games, sound and all, and PS also had it...)

What is Naughty Dog working on these days now that they've finished their previous game a while ago? Any other "uber" technically proficient PS2 programmer teams working on anything special? FFXI, what will that look like? Re-use of FFX engine without muhch change?

Feel free to answer any other related questions I seem to have forgotten. Keep topic to PS2 only, I don't want to hear any bullsh!t about lack of progressive or dolby digital or image quality issues or any of that chap, uh sorry, crap, okay?


*G*

 

[Guest]

No and no!
If PS2 displayed SH3 or ZOE2 graphics in 2000/1, it would be regarded as awesome moresome! Haters in the old days would have no choice but to STFU!!!
Now is too little too late for PS2 to impress when we have the Cube and XBOX around.

ZoE2 video

OTOGI!

Silent Hill 3

Nice modelling but we are pass the stage of 1-2 high polygon 'demos'.

DMC2

I do not think that game fits the criteria here.

Fafracer

It better have 480p support, minimal aliasing and good textures. Lazy8 and Deadmeat are lurking to pounce anytimo!

FFXI, what will that look like?

Again, too little too late for PS2 to impress when you have hot hot hot GC and Xbox games coming, with better textures, aliasing, pixel effects, lighting and image quality.

 

[AbbA]

No and no!
If PS2 displayed SH3 or ZOE2 graphics in 2000/1, it would be regarded as awesome moresome! Haters in the old days would have no choice but to STFU!!!
Now is too little too late for PS2 to impress when we have the Cube and XBOX around.

ZoE2 video

OTOGI!

Silent Hill 3

Nice modelling but we are pass the stage of 1-2 high polygon 'demos'.

DMC2

I do not think that game fits the criteria here.

Fafracer

It better have 480p support, minimal aliasing and good textures. Lazy8 and Deadmeat are lurking to pounce anytimo!

FFXI, what will that look like?

Again, too little too late for PS2 to impress when you have hot hot hot GC and Xbox games coming, with better textures, aliasing, pixel effects, lighting and image quality.

ZoE2 is very impressive and Silent Hill3 is the same, even if you have GCube and XBox..!!
I' haven't see anything like ZoE2 on GCube and XBox.

abbA

 

[Guest]

Mamamia!

Nice tezztures and 480p. Too bad poor captures woe those. :?



ZOE2 is a cool game with some crazy particles but once again, it came a little too late to have that "!POW!" effect.
ZOE2 in 2000/1 would have made many naysayers drop their jaws in disbelief! but not in 2003. Looks great taht about it. [/code]

 

[Phil]

Chap:

Feel free to answer any other related questions I seem to have forgotten. Keep topic to PS2 only, I don't want to hear any bullsh!t about lack of progressive or dolby digital or image quality issues or any of that chap, uh sorry, crap, okay?

I think your screens is exactly what we did not want in this topic.

As for Naughty Dog, I read a while ago that their working on Jak & Daxter 2. Also, for part 1, they did not use the PA2, so if they're using it for part two, I really can't wait to see how it will turn out. Gran Turismo 4 is another racer that's supposed to wow the audiance, probably even at this years E3!

As for general information on the PA2, did you ever catch that file I once put up on my site? It had a pretty long and good read about it...

 

[London Geezer]

chap, if u TRY to look at the broader picture.... think outside the box... or the xbox....

... and you'll see that maybe the gc and xbox are a bit too little too late.....

but maybe thats just me...

 

[PeterT]

... Xbox games coming, with better textures, aliasing, pixel effects, lighting and image quality.

Yeah, everyone must notice how superior the magnificient xbox aliasing is. If you are already impressed by the powerful aliasing featured in most PS2 titles you'll be blown away by the xbox games currently in development that are about to unleash even more extreme and exciting aliasing on the unsuspecting puplic.

(sorry, couldn't resist)

 

[Johnny Awesome]

I think that Konami has really pushed the PS2 to the limits. Sony 1st party is also doing pretty good work. I'm watching ZoE with a cautious eye.

 

[Grall]

Chap:

Negative comments and bitching in general is unwanted in this thread, as is screenies and random juvenile gushing about games on other platforms. Please stay on topic. If you can't bring yourself to behave, I will have to ask the powers that be on this board to moderate your ass back into place.


Phil:

No, I must have missed that stuff about the PA2. What's the address to your site please?

Sorry to hear Naughty's locking themselves into the cartoony platform genre, they've been doing that for like ten years now. I'd like to see them develop a serious Turrican-style shooter with all their technical expertise. That could bring a serious wow-factor to the visuals, as they have some damn smart coders over there.

Didn't know GT4 was so near release, nor even that one was in development but hey, I should have been able to figure that one out myself... Any game that does well usually spawns a sequel, hehe! Anyway, driving really isn't my style, but if it helps to further the state of the PS2 art then I'm all for it!


*G*

PS: How the heck did they do 4x AA in baldur's gate anyway? Does it run in like 320*240 or something, or do they do it in multiple passes or something?

 

[Fafalada]

How widespread is the use of the performance analyzer? What does that thing DO anyway, and how much extra power does it (generally) allow you to wring out of the hardware?

There's perhaps a few dozen PAs around the world, and all of them are property of Sony (it isn't being sold yet). Maybe less, SCEK still doesn't have one
It's basically a piece of hardware used to get a performance profile of an application, down to very low level hardware details that would be difficult, and sometimes close to impossible to measure purely by software. As any tuner utility, it is a quick way to see the big picture where your app might be wasting cycles, as well as allowing microanalysis of less obvious parts.
In its own, it of course doesn't give any performance - it's up to you to think of ways to improve on critical parts (but numbers themselves are often suggestive of what better solutions might be).

What's the state of vectorizing compilers for the PS2, btw? Do people still have to hand-code for the VUs?

I am pretty sure noone hand-codes anymore nowadays.

Sony provides VCL preprocessor, which is essentially a 'smart' assembler with support for variable naming, auto loop optimization and a bunch of other goodies. Needless to say it's a big step over hand coding. Some companies also combine it with other preprocessors to improve on the functionality further adding support for other high level language extensions (like functions etc.).
VectorC for VU is also neat, but I haven't had much experience with its efficiency yet. It's definately comfy to just write your shaders in C++ though. (yet still not as comfy as it would be in function languages, Archie would add 8) )

Since softcos are generally said to be bad at utilizing VU0, how easy is it to let that thing handle DTS sound?

Utilizing VU0 for custom things is a rather elaborate problem, that doesn't have any generalized solution to it - best approach may entirely change depending on what you want to do with it. This could have been avoided with some relatively minor changes to VU0 (imo) but the way things are, it's not easy.
In case of DTS however, you have a library with functions as simple as Play/Stop, so it is really quite easy to use.

For that matter, what can the IOP with its 2MB of RAM do? It's not very fast, granted, but every little bit helps, right?

It can do quite a bit, some people have even gone as far as running entire game logic on it (personally I think that's a little silly, but hey, it's possible).
I am still partial to the idea of running MP3 decoder on it, but I never got around to trying to write one.

As for Sound, it's basically two PSOne sound cores bolted together, with one optionally accepting output from the other as input, so you can do some postprocessing effects and what not. Not particularly programmable though.

 

[Guest]

london_boy
NON-sense! Good graphics are never too late!


Grall,
Just saying that good PS2 things came a little too late.

 

[London Geezer]

little chap telling people they talk non-sense.... now thats funny

 

[zidane1strife]

are we at last starting to see some truly kick-arse graphics on the PS2?

Yes, we are seeing good gphx... but I think the best is yet to come... maybe even another jump or two similar to the ones we've had... e3...

 

[Grall]

Chap:

As for that too-little-too-late comment, well the sales figures aren't exactly agreeing with that. Now get back on topic or take a hike, kiddo. I'm tired of your fanboi BS.


Fafalada:

Hey, thanks man! Faf coming to the rescue... That was some good info you provided there! Didn't know the PA2 was that scarce still. Kinda weird, I think. Wasn't it quite a while ago since talk about this thing started doing the rounds on the internet?

As for high-level VU compilers: so they produce efficient code then, I take it? It's nice if they relieve the programmer I suppose, but if they can't take advantage of the PS2s somewhat complex architecture then what's the real gain? The PC world is full enough of lazy programmers, we don't need them on consoles as well, heh heh!

As for using VU0 for "custom" things, then what do you mean by custom things? Is it basically meant to run physics calculations and VU1 do geometry processing, or how does it work?

Suppose you have a fighter game, could you like let one VU do the T&L for backgrounds and the other VU for the characters for example? Is it possible to merge the two display lists produced by this process in some kind of useful and effective manner, even when the background actually covers the foreground?

As for using VU0 for DTS, how much power does that require really? Is it all on the VU or is the CPU involved as well? Could it even do dolby digital you think?

Cool to hear people using the IOP for various stuff, hope that kind of thinking continues as new software comes available for the machine! Are you using it for anything in your title?

As for the sound processor, does it have access to the entire 2MB of the IOP, or does it have a dedicated .5MB of sound RAM just like the original PS? Would be cool if it had the full 2MB, as that is quite a lot of sound data when factoring in compression! What do games in general use the IOP memory for anyway, disk cache and scratchpad mainly or what?

Lots of questions... Sorry.

*G*

 

[Johnny Awesome]

I think that Konami has really pushed the PS2 to the limits. Sony 1st party is also doing pretty good work. I'm watching ZoE with a cautious eye.

 

[Thowllly]

As for the sound processor, does it have access to the entire 2MB of the IOP, or does it have a dedicated .5MB of sound RAM just like the original PS?

AFAIK, the sound processors doesn't use the IOP memory, they have their own 2MB of ram (The PS2 has 40MB of ram in total, 32MB main, 4MB GS, 2MB IOP and 2MB sound). What I would like to know is if the sound processors have 1MB each, or if they share the 2MB.

 

[Fafalada]

Well the way PA is used is that basically you have to do an appointment with Sony to run your app through the analyzer. Whether it'll ever be distributed I wouldn't know.

As for high-level VU compilers: so they produce efficient code then, I take it? It's nice if they relieve the programmer I suppose, but if they can't take advantage of the PS2s somewhat complex architecture then what's the real gain?

VU compilers are just that, they take care of VU code, so any other architectural nuancess are still in your hands.
As for efficiency, as long as it stays fairly close to optimal (90% or so) it's a very worthwhile gain. Problem with handcoding things is maintanance of the code - anything that is a little longer and more complex becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

As for using VU0 for "custom" things, then what do you mean by custom things? Is it basically meant to run physics calculations and VU1 do geometry processing, or how does it work?

Various math problems really, physics included.
Anyway main problem with efficient VU0 use is managing the data flow. For one, because VU0 doesn't have a built in output path like VU1 does, and we have to work our own ways to get results out. And secondly, because most problems we want to solve with it are fairly general purpose, their entire data flow isn't nearly as predictable or linear as processing geometry is.
This means that you may be facing completely different data management solutions for particular problems, and makes things tedious to use at best.

Is it possible to merge the two display lists produced by this process in some kind of useful and effective manner, even when the background actually covers the foreground?

By all means, that's one of the things architecture was designed for.

As for using VU0 for DTS, how much power does that require really? Is it all on the VU or is the CPU involved as well? Could it even do dolby digital you think?

From what I know, it's around 4-8% of cpu. Not a lot really. Couldn't say about Dolby, maybe Archie could tell more about that.

As for the sound processor, does it have access to the entire 2MB of the IOP, or does it have a dedicated .5MB of sound RAM just like the original PS? Would be cool if it had the full 2MB, as that is quite a lot of sound data when factoring in compression!

Sound chip has it's own dedicated 2mb of memory (yes it's shared by both cores). Since IOP is also the I/O processor, it's fairly easy to have streaming directly to sound memory, without ever touching main mem or cpu.

What do games in general use the IOP memory for anyway, disk cache and scratchpad mainly or what?

Well, controller libraries and a few other things are in there. When loading it's also used as read ahead buffers yeah. There could be other things, I guess (in our case we still have a lot of it free...).

 

[AbbA]

Mamamia!

Nice tezztures and 480p. Too bad poor captures woe those. :?



ZOE2 is a cool game with some crazy particles but once again, it came a little too late to have that "!POW!" effect.
ZOE2 in 2000/1 would have made many naysayers drop their jaws in disbelief! but not in 2003. Looks great taht about it. [/code]

PDO is a "simple" "rail's shooting", ZoE2 is a complete free game and its graphics is more impressive!!

http://jpn01.konami.co.jp/movie/zoe2/zoe2_cm60j.wmv

 

[London Geezer]

YEAH.... as faf put it, whats so ground-breaking about a semi interactive cut scene!?!?


and ZOE (the first one) was one of the best looking games at the time and even after months of release.... shame about gameplay and longevity...

 

[wazoo]

I'm buying non Nintendo consoles for racing and RPG.

I think WRC2 is the best package of rally ever created, graphics included and I'm still waiting to evaluate a xbox RPG.

I'm quite surprised about Square. KH and FFX are clearly first gen (GT3 caliber), I am curious about their 2nd gen engine.

Ea, Konami and Sony make progress every year. Most of the rest of the industry mainly follows the iteration of the renderware engine.

I expact lots of things from next E3.