NV2A was good, but the original Xbox CPU was a low clocked 733 MHz P3 Celeron. Intel already had released 2.0 GHz P4 and AMD had 1.4 GHz Athlon Thunderbird, both over 2x faster than the Xbox CPU.
Xbox 360 GPU (Xenos) was ahead of PC GPUs at launch (both in features and in performance). It was also ahead of the PS3 GPU that launched one year later. Memory bandwidth wasn't that great compared to PC GPUs, but EDRAM meant that render target writes (and alpha blending) didn't consume any memory bandwidth at all. In complex scenes (lots of overdraw or blending) it had practically way more bandwidth than PC GPUs. Xbox 360 CPU (Xenon) wasn't that bad either. It had 3 cores / 6 threads. 3.2 GHz. Full rate 4-wide SIMD multiply+add (FMA) among other goodies. But it was in-order CPU and PCs had out-of-order CPUs that were significantly better for running generic code. Still I would say that Xbox 360 was one of the only recent consoles that had an advantage (albeit pretty small) compared to PC hardware of the same time. But Geforce 8800 GTX was released one year later and it was significantly ahead of Xbox 360 GPU (in performance and features, it was the first GPU with compute shader support).
not really a Celeron, a little faster, but yes by November 2001 733 Coppermine was no longer all that great for a PC... the GPU perhaps compared favorably against a Ti 500, but it not only had slower memory but also shared it with the CPU, so I'm not sure.... also 6 months later and the ti 4600 was out, and a few months more the 9700, less than a year later and I think the NV2A already felt clearly outdated for a PC.
the 360 GPU memory bandwidth was half of what a PC GPU had, and it was also shared with the CPU, but the rest was clearly ahead no doubt.
PC also had lousy frame pacing and screen tear. I tried to get NWN to run at 60 fps, but setting all the options to lowest quality, it only managed that in the simplest of cases, still dropping frames most of the time, and looked extremely plain. If you disabled VSync to avoid the frame drops, you got multiple tears in the simplest scenes, and if you made it look pretty, you ended up with low framerates.
In terms of game experience, it's pretty subjective.
well I think you will find that many PS2 games had bad framerate, tearing and so on, also at the time PCs normally had refresh higher than 60, like 85 at least was the average, so I suppose your target would not be really 60 for vsync, and tearing perhaps a little less obvious than at 60?
PS2 was developed for tv's (though I had the linux kit which could have a 1024*768 desktop), and launch titles like Tekken Tag tournament had character models and floor textures which were years ahead of anything produced for PC at that point. 60fps as well.
2001 GT3 also looked better then almost everything released before.
Console games at the time had better art-styles, character models as well as better developers in general (or at least developers wanting to push the gfx further).
PC had much, much more power. Compare max Payne on a P3 1Ghz with geforce 2 to the PS2 version, and PS2 seemed like a cheap joke.
and at the time TVs were inferior to PC monitors, a severe limitation, outside of the linux kit the best you could get was probably component video out of the PS2, but most games early on didn't support progressive scan
GT3 looked great no doubt (I think Gt3/4 were probably the best looking games on the platform, but at the same time it lacked in some aspects to PC racing games, obviously resolution, aliasing, no car interiors, no damage and so on), but as you mention max payne, most of the multiplatform games I can remember early on the PS2 life would be far better on a GF2 gts, some perhaps possible at twice the res or close, in Max payne another advantage was with load times, I think the levels were split on the PS2 with more and slower load screens,
