Are you sure? Because that's a pretty funny statement.
PS2 is still the best designed console in terms of hardware ever (And that isn't a joke) (or is it?)
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Inuhanyou
Veteran
I don't really agree. I remember horror stories of devs being forced to learn tons of annoying things just to get code on screen. The only reason it was accepted was because of Sony's momentum and success in their previous console and how the other two competitors were not safe enough bets for many devs and consumers which fed a cycle.
The ps2 had certain cool
things as far as it's components were concerned but let's not exaggerate based on rose colored glasses
Your missing the point I think. Even if hw grew like your suggesting, the exact same problem would arise we have been seeing with developers themselves not being able to keep up resource wise with the expectations placed on utilizing huge power spikes.
Which inevitably would lead to development uniformity to save costs and pretty much the same outcome as today. Cheap uniform components that can be easily scaled and easy for developers to take advantage of and utilize across the industry.
In the days when any old company could create components for the time and any developer could scale to fit the needs of the game they want to make hw complexity and resources were much less of an issue
But the scale of games today and the hardware taken to run them is so powerful that it becomes an impossibility.
davis.anthony
Veteran
Name me a single gaming machine that was designed in an era where hardware performance doubled every ~2 years (1998) and yet still managed to stay competitive years and years after release.
If Sony had used off the shelf parts for PS2 it would have been massively outdated at it's Japanese release and flat out dead hardware by the time it released in Europe, Sony knew this.
No other piece of hardware designed in that era lasted anywhere near as long as PS2 did.
PS2 wasn't designed to be the easiest console in the world to code for, it was designed to be as competitive as positive for as long as possible in an era where hardware was useless after 6 months.
And the architecture needed to enable it to be as competitive as positive for as long as possible was the pain in the ass architecture we all know it had.
Dreamcast had relatively off the shelf hardware and it showed after 12 months of PS2 being released.
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davis.anthony
Veteran
I never said PS2 was easy, I said the best designed.
Inuhanyou
Veteran
The ps2s success has much less to do with what hardware it was packing and more that it was a popular platform that due to hype, previous success and momentum lead to it blowing up and being the console you had to create for to be a success on console.
Xbox and GameCube were not bringing the fight to it regardless of it's components. As long as it had good enough power for the time, it would have reached a similar position I think.
Sony learned the wrong lessons from ps2 with ps3 and that's why they had to course correct afterward to greater success
davis.anthony
Veteran
Why are you talking about PS2's success when I'm not and that's not what the conversation is about.
Inuhanyou
Veteran
But it is what the conversation is about. You brought up being competitive against other rivals and that being connected to how it was "the best designed system" when that had little to do with the ps2s success or ability to compete with Xbox and GameCube
davis.anthony
Veteran
The point is literally going over your head.
Inuhanyou
Veteran
If that's what you want to think. but the ps4s success shows that you are wrong. even now devs have got miracles out of 2013 year old hw and it has little to do with how exotic the components are but the developers who were incentivized to create and become more and more ambitious with their ideas
If Sony had choose the road of a custom hardware for PS4, Sony would be out of business now. Games have huge budget and take a long time to be made with 3 platforms(PC, Xbox, PS) sharing nearly the same architecture. New franchise and new genre for a studio can take 6 years to be made like Horizon Zero Dawn. Pitching ideas and concept for a new IP began in 2011 at GG. We see a games like Starfield taking the same amount of time probably with a teaser trailer at E3 2018 and a release in 2023.
Current gen consoles are powerful for the cost and price. This is not like there are a Jaguar CPU and a storage slower than PC HDD inside the console. Having custom component will just make life more difficult for developer.
Current gen consoles are powerful for the cost and price. This is not like there are a Jaguar CPU and a storage slower than PC HDD inside the console. Having custom component will just make life more difficult for developer.
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davis.anthony
Veteran
Again, you're completely wrong and off topic.
And imagine thinking it's good to compare PS4's 2013 GPU which feature wise was identical to GPU's released years later, something that wasn't the case in 1998.
When being designed in 1998 Sony had no clue how successful PS2 would be, what Xbox would look like, what GC would look like, heck I bet they didn't even think DC would be killed off so these had no bearing on how it was architecturally designed.
So the point you are making is irrelevant and pointless.
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I'd say the PS2 remained competitive in the market long after it was really competitive in terms of visuals.
By about 2004 the PC and the OG Xbox were producing stuff that made the PS2 look dated in the same way that the PS2 had made the DC look dated in 2002 / 2003. You just wouldn't really see that if you were playing games that also ran on PS2. I think the OG Xbox was probably the best placed system of that gen to remain 'competitive', but that's probably because its GPU was on the evolutionary line that we're still on today. Meanwhile, Sony had gone down a bit of a GPU dead end that couldn't easily support the features necessary to continue developing more complex materials and shaders that we ultimately needed to progress as we have. Oh and of course Xbox's HDD could allow things that no optical drive could effectively enable (like Rallisport Challenge 2) - but that did cost MS quite some dollar, on top of their already costly, badly negotiated contract with Nvidia. No free lunch and all that.
Xbox CPU was also a departure from previous console CPUs, being all OoOE and highly clocked, and probably enabled some games that you couldn't have pulled off on PS2, like maybe Morrwwind, Halo 2, Half life 2.
Clearly though, and as you say, Sony were right to design their own stuff back when they did. And if you look at bang for BOM later in PS2's lifespan after all the shrinks and simplification then PS2 represented phenomenal value.
Honourable mentions to Xbox 360 and PS3 too - in an age of rapidly advancing specs they held out very well.
CLX2 in the DC was actually very highly customised as per Sega's requests. It was actually a lot better than the cut down Neon 250 that released on PC later! Likewise, Hitachi worked with Sega during development of the SH4. While not as custom as the PS2, its was probably more custom than anything we've seen since Cell, or Xenon, (IIRC the Saturn's SH2 was actually developed primarily for Sega, as per Sega's performance requests after evaluating the SH1)
I think Sega's brokenness counted against the DC's hardware as much as anything. PS2 had a much higher BOM at launch. I think PowerVR's technology was every bit as good as Sony's, and they continue to evolve it to this day. But Sega only had so much money (or rather, they didn't
). The tech was there, but the means sadly weren't.That thing was a beast for its time, i remember seeing dead or alive 3 and its characters. At the time nothing came close to that, that console ran Doom 3, far cry, Half life 2, unreal the liandry conflict, Riddick, dues ex etc, games who where mostly pc games from the beginning. Thats impressive. It enabled HDD in a console, native DD5.1 and 480p (and beyond) for practically every game, 64mb ram, a powerfull CPU and GPU. That thing was darn capable, and darn expensive for MS. But a hell of a entry to the console market.
A response to this post in the now archive digital foundry 2022 thread:
forum.beyond3d.com
and this quote
And Gamecube would be my answer. Reported specs are behind PS2 in most regards, totally lacks a programable hardware pipeline for geometry, and can't even do 32bit color. PS2 has huge advantages in fill rate, storage space, polygons per second, color depth, and more, yet Gamecube was competitive throughout the generation and was recycled into Wii, where the hardware produced many fine looking titles even with it's still modest specs. Even Wii had lower polygon and pixel fill rate than PS2, and still couldn't do 32bit color.
Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]
Well it's to do with DFs article so...although I don't recall anyone in the thread saying anything about PCs declining. Just that pricing could stand to come down a bit to let the tech improvements not be littered with controversy. But yeah I think everyone has said their piece Its leading...
forum.beyond3d.com
and this quote
regarding PS2 being the best designed console in terms of hardware ever.
And Gamecube would be my answer. Reported specs are behind PS2 in most regards, totally lacks a programable hardware pipeline for geometry, and can't even do 32bit color. PS2 has huge advantages in fill rate, storage space, polygons per second, color depth, and more, yet Gamecube was competitive throughout the generation and was recycled into Wii, where the hardware produced many fine looking titles even with it's still modest specs. Even Wii had lower polygon and pixel fill rate than PS2, and still couldn't do 32bit color.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
A well designed piece of hardware would be one where it has contemporaneous performance and is easy to to use, program for and extract performance from.
A badly designed piece of hardware is one where it is incredibly hard and time consuming to extract much performance out of it and virtually impossible to use any feature to its advertised specs.
As such neither the PS1, PS2 nor PS3 were well designed consoles. Although the PS1 was probably the best hardware design of those 3.
For PS2 ... Impressive hardware? Possibly, I liked it. Interesting hardware? Absolutely without a doubt. Well designed? Certainly not from a development or design POV.
Regards,
SB
A badly designed piece of hardware is one where it is incredibly hard and time consuming to extract much performance out of it and virtually impossible to use any feature to its advertised specs.
As such neither the PS1, PS2 nor PS3 were well designed consoles. Although the PS1 was probably the best hardware design of those 3.
For PS2 ... Impressive hardware? Possibly, I liked it. Interesting hardware? Absolutely without a doubt. Well designed? Certainly not from a development or design POV.
Regards,
SB
Xbox. Simple straight forward PC design that allowed many devs to hit the ground running. It’s not coincidence that the last two gens have followed the original Xbox’s design strategy.
Stop trying to cheaply reinvent the wheel and allow devs to use existing knowledge base and tools.
Stop trying to cheaply reinvent the wheel and allow devs to use existing knowledge base and tools.
davis.anthony
Veteran
I wouldn't call a console that launched later than PS2 but yet often performed and looked worse in multiplatform games a better design in my opinion.
what games were these? I had the impression that GC performed equally and better in most cases
Personally considering what was available during PS2's design and release, I consider PS2 a fucking beast although terrible at taping into its potential. It was something else.
I also believe that PS1 was also a fucking beast originally. There was nothing in 1994 at that price that could match it. I remember PC graphics at the time being horrible with 3D.
Also Sony did the best they could to make it as friendly as possible with the developers.
The PS3 was simply a mess.
I also believe that PS1 was also a fucking beast originally. There was nothing in 1994 at that price that could match it. I remember PC graphics at the time being horrible with 3D.
Also Sony did the best they could to make it as friendly as possible with the developers.
The PS3 was simply a mess.
It was definitely not. This thing has no hardware texture compression and not enough vram.
The texture limitations was very visible in many early games where most textures were low resolution compared to many games in older but better designed hardware: Dreamcast. Sure soon developers find solutions to the problem of limited vram but the lack of hardware texture compression when even dreamcast had it was an incredible design error IMO.
I'd say Gamecube was one of the best designed console and quite developer friendly seen how incredible the first games looked. Games didn't need PS2 DVD 4GB storage when most of that was useless pre-rendered cutscenes. Gamecube 1.5GB discs were a better storage solution for games (with its own advantages, many multiplatform games had actually faster loadings time on gamecube) but obviously many PS2 users bought Sony console in order to play DVDs.
The texture limitations was very visible in many early games where most textures were low resolution compared to many games in older but better designed hardware: Dreamcast. Sure soon developers find solutions to the problem of limited vram but the lack of hardware texture compression when even dreamcast had it was an incredible design error IMO.
I'd say Gamecube was one of the best designed console and quite developer friendly seen how incredible the first games looked. Games didn't need PS2 DVD 4GB storage when most of that was useless pre-rendered cutscenes. Gamecube 1.5GB discs were a better storage solution for games (with its own advantages, many multiplatform games had actually faster loadings time on gamecube) but obviously many PS2 users bought Sony console in order to play DVDs.
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