PS2 vs PC at launch [Necro-Tech]

[Davros]

The monitor was also a lag-free, big analog thing that weighed more than the tower.

Back in the day I spent years lusting after a 21" trinitron but they were close to £1,000 then after a few years of owning a lcd I saw one in a pawn shop for £12 I could of cried

 

[vipa899]

Speaking about Xbox 360 is good to remember some things. It was very impressive not only because at launch it was more powerful than any PC. But also because it was strongly ahead of average PC. I bought Xbox 360 in August 2006, 8 months after it launched. All my friends and people who I know had PC with 1 core CPU, most powerful GPU was NVIDIA 6800 and only one of my friends had it, and RAM 1-2 GB. No one had HDTV, even HD ready, no one had widescreen monitor, no one even had flat monitor. That was great time to be Xbox 360 owner! When I started to play Xbox 360 I played on SDTV, it was 4:3 and wasn't flat! After two months I bought VGA cable and connected my Xbox 360 to 4:3 not flat monitor. That was amazing improvement! I showed games on Xbox 360 and people were shocked how good they look. Then there was Gears of War release. One of my friends told what game looks like movie! Almost after a year I bought flat widescreen monitor and that also was great improvement in graphics quality. In the end of 2008 I changed to 32" 720p TV, and only in 2012 I bought Full HD TV 55". So it was I long way! And I still play on Xbox 360!

Then your friends werent exactly running top-end hardware avialeble when 360 launched, that would be a A64 x2/FX60 or pentium D dual core (4 logical cores).
Geforce 6800 is from 2004, thats about 2 years before xbox. 2GB ram was standard and the least to have to play BF2 (2005 game),
FX60 with X1900XT and 2-4GB ram, with a X-Fi soundcard was high-end when xbox released. Would say with those specs the PC was ahead hardware wise.
Your comparing a 2003/2004 pc to a 2006 xbox and where impressed.....

 

[vipa899]

I think it's probably debatable whether Xenos was outright better than *the* best PC GPU on it's day of launch. That GPU being the 7800GTX 512. Xenos was certainly more advanced but in terms of raw power the 512 had it beat in most areas. They compared directly as follows:
512 Xenos
Pixel Fill Rate: 8800 4000
Texel Fill Rate: 13200 8000
Geometry Rate: 275 250
Memory Bandwidth: 54.40 22.40 (+256 edram)
Total Shader GFLOPs: 255.20 240

Of course Xenos was a lot more flexible so I guess creative devs may have been able to produce better results out of it. It's also worth not forgetting about the 1900XTX. It launched about 3 months after Xenos I believe but was certainly far more powerful, albeit still less advances and using dedicated vertex/pixel shaders.

Long time no see! pjbliverpool, remember you from the now shutdown-pcvsconsole.com forums, which went console centric. You were one of them who understands pc hardware is superior to consoles.
Obviously a X1900XT was the faster card/the card that could produce overall better looking games then the xenos. Xenos might be a tad more advanced but that wont mean superior over the X1900XT for games overall look. Would be like saying a 8400GS is faster then a 7900GTX, the former being more advanced.
It didnt launch 3 months after, more like1 month, 360 came about end of nov 2005, X1900 early jan 2006, X1900 being closer to 360's release then X1800.
Not counting the xbox came later to europe and bad avialebility.

CPU wise its harder to say, but i remember some site claiming even a P4 being better, although that might be exaggerated, i think a Pentium D or A64 X2 would have the overall edge on high clocks.
PC was superior to the 360 around launch we can say. So was the PC when the first xbox came, slow cpu, more advanced gpu yet less grunt.

Texturing and filtering were really the shortcomings of the PS2. There wasn't enough memory for really high res, high color textures, and applying textures cut the fillrate in half. But because the fillrate and bandwidth was so high, especially when considering the output resolution, many games made up for it by piling on multipass effects.

To answer the OP, the PS2 at the time had a very feature light GPU with fillrate that wasn't matched at launch. The mighty Geforec 2 GTS could draw 800 MP/S and twice that in Texels (1.6GT/S) while the PS2 did 2.4 GP/S and half that with textures (1.2 GT/S). The important thing to note here is that the GF2GTS was bandwidth constrained. It's unlikely you could ever achieve those numbers in game. The PS2 was a fillrate and bandwidth monster, but things like high quality texture filtering, or complex shading, weren't part of it's hardware feature set and had to be done with old fashion multiple passes.

You think the GF2 with a decent cpu would give better looking games results overall then the PS2 if both optimized?

That still leaves you without an OS and the rather expensive controller. It's also the lovely US pricing. An RX 470 still runs you €200+ in Europe. Sure, you could shop around endlessly, but that way you're bound to run across a PS4 deal as well at some point. And why would you wanna build a PC like that in the first place. A couple of years ago a GTX 750 could go toe-to-toe with the PS4 as well. Now it's hopelessly outdated.

Not saying people should buy a GTX750 for serious gaming, if a GTX750 was about as fast as the PS4's GPU, it still is, the 750 doesnt get slower neither the PS4's gets faster or slower. If the 750 is outdated so is the PS4 (which imo it is). You can talk about optimizations for PS4 but you can only do so much. If you want better graphics you need to buy a PS4 Pro to keep up, a new trend to consoles.

EDRAM really helped 360 achieve what the system was capable of. Obviously, it introduced it's own shortcomings, like the necessity to split your output into tiles if the scene exceeded the 10MB capacity, but overall I think it was the reason that most games ran a bit better on 360. The bandwidth to write as many pixels +Z with MSAA that is physically possible from the chip without memory contention is a huge advantage. The unified system memory didn't hurt either.




Deus Ex, Elite Force, Giants and Quake received PS2 ports if people want to make direct comparisons. They held up pretty well, except for resolution. I don't know about the rest of the titles, but Quake had KB and Mouse support.

Yes those games came to the PS2, but did they held up well? Giants was visually far better on pc according to reviews, read the gamespot review
https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/giants-citizen-kabuto-review/1900-2835526/

As for Dues Ex, are you serious? my god you better left that one out, just do some Dues Ex pc vs ps2 google and youl se. Doubt you actually played those games on both platforms.
Quake 3 was a decent port, but Q3's game engine's quit old, you could just say that Half Life on PS2 held up very well to its PC variant, not really suprising huh?

Im sure the P3 or athlon / Geforce 2 GTS combo can produce better looking games, as its just superior hardware, alot more pricey though.

 

[Blazkowicz]

In early 2005 a cheap or common new PC had some Pentium 4 variant (possibly a 3GHz Prescott), 512MB RAM and a Radeon 9200 with DDR 64bit memory.

So you're not wrong but by then it was quite the upgrade treadmill to stay at the top, with nothing much anymore to show for it outside of games. (by that I mean you didn't gain new abilities like playing mp3, playing divx)

Even regarding graphics cards, used to be you had a choice of geforce 4 Ti 4200, 4400 or 4600 or using cheaper older tech. Thus a single GPU chip was serving the whole "geforce 4 Ti" market, and you didn't miss much anything going with "merely" the ti 4200.
If choosing between a X1300, X1600 or X1900 (with the X1800 having a short shelf life) now that's quite the range! So IMO, there got to be a gap between high end and low end that wasn't that big before. Though in absolute $$$ terms it wasn't technically bad.

 

[vipa899]

I want to add, cant seem to edit my posts, IGN did a head to head back in time, comparing Quake 3 on pc, ps2 and DC. IGN concluded that the PC sporting a voodoo3 had 'the best graphics of the lot'.

 

[Davros]

@ Blazkowicz
the Geforce 4 series was from 2002, it's rival was the 8000 / 9000 series
While the X1000 series was 2005, it's rival was the Geforce 6 series

 

[Blazkowicz]

I worded it badly.
It's to be read as : "just a few years before, you just choose between ti4200, 4400 and 4600 which were all the same thing..."
"then by 2005/2006 you had wide ranges of graphics cards instead".

By that I mean we were beginning to have huge gaps between high end and the bottom of midrange, like 4x faster instead of 1.5x to 2x faster for instance.

Not a very bad deal if you stay reasonably current btw but if you got upgrade fatigue then console specs didn't look bad at all.

 

[HMBR]

That still leaves you without an OS and the rather expensive controller. It's also the lovely US pricing. An RX 470 still runs you €200+ in Europe. Sure, you could shop around endlessly, but that way you're bound to run across a PS4 deal as well at some point. And why would you wanna build a PC like that in the first place. A couple of years ago a GTX 750 could go toe-to-toe with the PS4 as well. Now it's hopelessly outdated.

I included the OS price on my post, and my post is not trying to compare cent by cent, but to give the general idea that you don't need used parts (like on that video) to achieve that level of performance, trying to match prices is a little silly, but you can get a good gaming capable PC for prices not to far for consoles (and save money not paying for live/psn on the following years), that's it.

(also, I think there are ways to get Windows for less, for example I got it for free legally via the test program)

controller is optional on the PC, and there are hundreds of options, I still use my mouse and KB from the PS2 era actually (MS 1.1 keeps going forever), the 360 controller on the PC is still adequate if you prefer gamepads.

when the 750 ti was released the console gen was fairly new (and the specs were moderate for the 750, the big deal was power efficiency, not overall perf/price, the 7850 OC/R7 265/R7 370 was better at perf/$), so they had more to learn in terms of optimization than they have now I think, I don't expect the requirements for ports at console settings to grow much now, 470 should be safe playing ports better than PS4 until the end of its life... feels like the old gen a bit, from 2006 until perhaps 2008 having a PC to beat the consoles was a little pricey, after that it was really not a problem until the end of the gen, but it should be even less now given the hardware is less different or advanced on the consoles this gen.

yet the 750 ti is far from hopeless on every game out there, when you consider things like 30FPS cap, slow load times and CPUs specially, I can see a PC with a 750 Ti still doing better on some new titles.


also the 470 I mentioned is kind of overkill if you are trying just to beat the PS4, check the digital foundry video for Prey, the GTX 1050 non Ti with the Pentium delivers a far superior experience to any consoles, considering double the framerate + fast load times,

I want to add, cant seem to edit my posts, IGN did a head to head back in time, comparing Quake 3 on pc, ps2 and DC. IGN concluded that the PC sporting a voodoo3 had 'the best graphics of the lot'.

and you could achieve voodoo 3 levels of performance in 1998 on the PC (Voodoo 2 SLI), the rate of development was pretty amazing, a Geforce 2 GTS was already so far ahead of the V3, and I think they used a 30FPS cap on the PS2.

for those ports I think ram was critical, PS2 had so many ports with levels split and bad load times... in 2000 any gaming VGA would have at least 32MB at 2.7GB/s, with the GTS at over 5GB/s + the system ram (at least 128MB PC 133) and the hard drive, it was a huge disparity, like the TV vs Monitor back then.

 

[bunge]

I want to add, cant seem to edit my posts, IGN did a head to head back in time, comparing Quake 3 on pc, ps2 and DC. IGN concluded that the PC sporting a voodoo3 had 'the best graphics of the lot'.

The context of the thread isn't a console vs. PC or even PS2 vs. PC. It's this:

When the PS2 launched in march 2000, did it best the highest end pc of the time?

That's a very specific question and you're all over the map with answers defending the PC throughout the ages. How about stick to the thread topic?

 

[Blazkowicz]

Well I remember a war plane game on the PS2 (didn't have a PS2 myself) that had a cool motion blur effect. Something the 3dfx Voodoo5 promised by the way but didn't deliver (not enough samples nor enough brute force, as well as no game support whatsoever)
You can find a specific Quake 3 demo and enable motion blur on Voodoo5, sadly it's only for the floating spinning weapon/ammo etc. items not the game scene in itself.

So, a PS2 did something a PC couldn't do at all.

Even a 2000 mid range PC is somewhat more powerful than the PS2 imo : 700MHz CPU, geforce 2MX (rather fast actually, similar to Geforce SDR). The Athlon, Duron, Pentium III and Celeron with 100MHz FSB were about the best CPUs.
But PC games used fixed function rendering, be it with DirectX 6, DirectX 7, OpenGL 1.1. About the same 3D features as Nintendo 64 and 3dfx Voodoo1 really, with more polygons and more pixels or stuff like higher res compressed textures. Not that it was bad.

 

[vipa899]

That's a very specific question and you're all over the map with answers defending the PC throughout the ages. How about stick to the thread topic?

It wasnt me who started about PS4 and the like.

also the 470 I mentioned is kind of overkill if you are trying just to beat the PS4

Very much overkill indeed, its whats in the PS4 Pro, actually abit less total TFLOPS then the 470.

I think they used a 30FPS cap on the PS2.

Many games were 60fps aswell, though with drops below that. Its clear to say that multiplatform games where better on pc hardware from 2000 then on the pc, excluding a game or two.

So, a PS2 did something a PC couldn't do at all.

Someone else correct me but, i dont think that effect is so special for a 2000 gaming pc? Sure the ps2 could do some effects the pc couldnt at same speed, but so could the geforce2 do many more that the ps2 couldnt at reasonable speed.
Maybe somethings could be offloaded to the more-powerfull pc cpu like 1ghz p3 or thunderbird.

. About the same 3D features as Nintendo 64 and 3dfx Voodoo1 really

Would developers have optimized and squeezed all the power outta pc with GF2, P3 1ghz and atleast 256mb rambus ram, games like god of war 2 and sotc could be done on it with better overall graphics, maybe some features reduced but others improved.

 

[liolio]

I don't really get the topic "PC" is quite a vague statement whereas the PS2 is a known quantity.
The PS2 packed 10.4 and 43 millions transistors (started on a 250nm process in 2000) then came the Gamecube 21 and 51 millions of transistors (180 nm process in Q1 2001) and finally the xbox 28 and 60 millions transistors (150NM and 180nm process in Q4 2001).

The closest we have to a PC is the Xbox which launch later and was heavily subsidized. Both the Xbox and Gamecube silicon budget was quite higher than the PS2. I can't see a PC competing on price but trying to be fair to the PS2 a competing PC composed of a AMD Duron Processor and a STG4000 KYRO GPU.
I think the PC would win (if running optimized software) but it is hardly fair as a PC would have more RAM and VRAM, burn more power, costs more (even using the aforementioned parts, etc.).

As for the untold question which system could have offered the most bang for buck, I would put bet on a Broadway CPU and KYRO II GPU XBOX lookalike.

 

[bunge]

It wasnt me who started about PS4 and the like.

What does that have to do with going on a rant and pushing things further off topic?

 

[vipa899]

What does that have to do with going on a rant and pushing things further off topic?

Then please refrain from going on about it and talk about PS2 vs PC.

 

[Rootax]

Well I remember a war plane game on the PS2 (didn't have a PS2 myself) that had a cool motion blur effect. Something the 3dfx Voodoo5 promised by the way but didn't deliver (not enough samples nor enough brute force, as well as no game support whatsoever)
You can find a specific Quake 3 demo and enable motion blur on Voodoo5, sadly it's only for the floating spinning weapon/ammo etc. items not the game scene in itself.

So, a PS2 did something a PC couldn't do at all.

Even a 2000 mid range PC is somewhat more powerful than the PS2 imo : 700MHz CPU, geforce 2MX (rather fast actually, similar to Geforce SDR). The Athlon, Duron, Pentium III and Celeron with 100MHz FSB were about the best CPUs.
But PC games used fixed function rendering, be it with DirectX 6, DirectX 7, OpenGL 1.1. About the same 3D features as Nintendo 64 and 3dfx Voodoo1 really, with more polygons and more pixels or stuff like higher res compressed textures. Not that it was bad.

(I guess it was Ace Combat ?)

 

[Blazkowicz]

(I guess it was Ace Combat ?)

Certainly, might have been Ace Combat 4

Someone else correct me but, i dont think that effect is so special for a 2000 gaming pc? Sure the ps2 could do some effects the pc couldnt at same speed, but so could the geforce2 do many more that the ps2 couldnt at reasonable speed.
Maybe somethings could be offloaded to the more-powerfull pc cpu like 1ghz p3 or thunderbird.

I thought this motion blur effect was clearly an example of "crazy" multipass rendering on the PS2. I don't know much if generic DirectX 6/7 rendering could do that by the way, perhaps not or perhaps you would have to re-render everything several times (start over with the CPU and GPU redoing everything). And that may be too hairy (there weren't multiple render targets)

Perhaps only the Voodoo5 with "T-buffer" feature could do that, since that specifically allows to render things multiple times at once (or do it to that effect) and accumulate / blend them (I hope what I'm writing makes good sense), it was pretty limited though : 2 samples on Voodoo4 (used for 2x rotated grid supersampling FSAA), 4 samples on Voodoo5, 8 samples on Voodoo5 6000. For a cost ineffective system I would have liked a Voodoo5 6000 doing tricks at low resolutions. (or 1024x768 with very high IQ for not too demanding things)
To have a point of comparison, Voodoo5 6000 was 1.33 gigapixels/s and 1.33 gigatexels/s ; using it with 4x or 8x FSAA was crazy brute force wasting fillrate.

afaik motion blur on PC took off with DirectX 9 pixel shaders post processing e.g. Crysis.

Max Payne 2 made a strong blur effect in cutscenes though, not requiring special hardware features. It was not interactive though ; I have the feeling it's faking it with fog effects.

 

[HMBR]

a game that comes to mind for a lot motion blur on PC is NFS Underground (2003), the game could run with DX7 cards (no pixel shader) but if I'm no mistaken the motion blur effect could only be activated with a Geforce 3( PS1.1) and higher, the PS2 version had a strong motion blur

 

[see colon]

You think the GF2 with a decent cpu would give better looking games results overall then the PS2 if both optimized?

Depends. Are we normalizing system memory to be the same?

Yes those games came to the PS2, but did they held up well? Giants was visually far better on pc according to reviews, read the gamespot review
https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/giants-citizen-kabuto-review/1900-2835526/

As for Dues Ex, are you serious? my god you better left that one out, just do some Dues Ex pc vs ps2 google and youl se. Doubt you actually played those games on both platforms.
Quake 3 was a decent port, but Q3's game engine's quit old, you could just say that Half Life on PS2 held up very well to its PC variant, not really suprising huh?

Im sure the P3 or athlon / Geforce 2 GTS combo can produce better looking games, as its just superior hardware, alot more pricey though.

You can doubt what I played on what hardware all you want. I played DE, Q3, and Giants on both. DE and Giants have higher polygon character models than the PC version, with lower quality textures. What really kills DE is the load times, and the fact that the levels had to be chopped up, making loading happen more often. Giants I think had much harsher reviews IRT graphics than it should have. Yes, it doesn't look as good as the PC version cranked, but the PC version ran like trash back then as well. Google some benchmarks and you'll see people getting about 40FPS at 640*480 with 800mhz cpus and OG radeons and non-ultra GF2s. Texture resolution takes a hit on PS2, of course, but the character models are higher poly and performance isn't that far off from what you'd get on PC at the time.

Also, Quake 3 came out in December 1999. PS2 launched in March 2000. The engine wan't old compared to PS2 hardware at all.

 

[vipa899]

Depends. Are we normalizing system memory to be the same?

Altering memory would be massive to a system like the PS2. But from what i have learned from other people working with the system is that its actually the main CPU being the problem/too weak. That suprised me as many where convinced the CPU was all that powerfull.

Its a long time ago i played giants but from what i remember the PC version was more pleasing. Think i had a GF2 Pro, so that might be better then a GTS. And reading all the reviews, the PC version being visually better. PS2 version came and got reviewed a year later.
Polygon count doesnt mean a better looking game, the PS2 might be better at some effects but pc had things like textures, bump mapping.

Also, Quake 3 came out in December 1999. PS2 launched in March 2000. The engine wan't old compared to PS2 hardware at all.

Ok my bad, had quake 3 mixed up with half life- Though, IGN did a head to head between the PS2, PC, and DC, giving the edge in graphics to the PC version. But it sure wasnt anything that impressive anyways, PS2 certainly could do better, as could the GF2 pc.

As a console alliance, i wouldve used Silent Hill 2 or 3 in defense, SH2 on pc missed some effects, SH3 on pc required atleast a Geforce 3 due to i think vertex shader, which was done in software on the PS2 (VU?).
Although konami didnt really do any great porting (even the xbox version wasnt as good), this fog effect for exemple could be done on the PCs CPU just like it was done in software on the ps2.

According to this link, http://www.hardware-infos.com/grafikkarten-nvidia.html
The GF2 GTS is around 6.4Gflops

The Pentium 3 1GHZ 2Gflops
http://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/Computing/Computing_Power.htm

PS2 total gflops was 6.2GFLOPS? No idea about the GS, but the EE total is 6.2Gflops.

 

[Davros]

I don't really get the topic "PC" is quite a vague statement whereas the PS2 is a known quantity.

Well its p.c at ps2 launch time (and I guess that extends to the life of the ps2) so that narrows it down a bit

ps: since someone mentioned Giants and I have it installed

2.1 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
-<REQUIRED>-
Windows 95/98/2000/ME with DirectX 8.0 (included)
Pentium II/K62 350 MHZ
64MB RAM
875MB Hard Drive space for installation
4X CD-ROM drive
DirectX certified sound card
8MB Direct3D compatible video card
100% Microsoft compatible keyboard and mouse
-<RECOMMENDED>-
Pentium II/K62 450 MHZ or higher
128MB RAM
1200MB Hard Drive space for max installation
16MB or higher Direct3D compatible video card