Retro Games Analysis Technical Discussion *spawn*

PSman1700 said:
Surprisingly (for me atleast), the xbox had the much more capable CPU, it wasnt even close (as compared to what the PS2 uses as CPU). During the 6th gen itself i thought the EE was the most powerfull cpu of the time.
NV2A was supposedly very far ahead aswell, in a different class alltogether if devs are to be believed, programmable pixel shaders and its twin vertex shaders, clocked at 233mhz, teamed to double the amount of quad pumped ram, it was quite 'unfair'.
The Xbox also had access to 1gb of HDD for 'scratchpad', hardware dd5.1 (all games have it, basically).
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I'd forgotten about the Xbox sound chip! Yeah, it was quite a beast for its time iirc (just checked, and yeah DD5.1 encoding, 256 stereo voices, 64 3D channels). It was so good and so underutilised that I'm sure I read that MS decided go with something simpler and cheaper for X360, and lean on the CPU to do more of the work that time.

I remember ERP (i think it was him) saying that regarding multiplat games, they had the PS2 as a baseline, and the xbox was just porting and it would work quite well.
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I think he also said something to the effect that PC / Xbox versions would have increasingly had more effort put into them as the GPU landscape shifted, and I think he was implying that the PS2 would increasingly struggle to keep up where this was the case. Which makes sense I guess. When an increasing part of what makes your game look good is Z-brush bump mapped models, high res textures and pixel shader effects, a system that's not adept at these things would comparatively suffer.

The PS2 was very impressive for its time of japan-release (march 2000). The Xbox with its november ww 2001 release was even more so impressive though. The GC was supposedly trading blows with the PS2 in many regards, to contrary belief it was doing that with the xbox. Probably due to it being released around the Xbox's launch.
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Early on I think the GC made quite a splash - pretty good geometry, some nice lighting effects, and colourful textures. PS2 never really had satisfying textures (IMO and I acknowledge others will feel differently), but in many other ways the complex but fast PS2 hardware had room for growth as the industry developed its knowledge and experience. Being unquestionably the number 1 platform magnified this effect IMO.
 
PSman1700 said:
Isnt it fewer then 20 months though? The PS2 was released in japan march 2000 right, with a US/EU release in oct 2000 (when i got mine). The Xbox was october or november 2001 for a WW release. For everyone outside of japan, the xbox and PS2 where about 12 months apart.
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I remember Xbox launching in November, though I think it was early in 2002 for us in the EU. "Tier 2" countries always get forgotten. :cry:

Bit of a change of topic, but I'd like to have seen what Sega could have produced with a $300 msrp, and a global late 1999 release date instead of an initial late 98 launch in Japan.

Even with just the same old SH4 and CLX2, they could have had more hardware in there and had time address their significant launch yield issues due to being on a new process. With double the ram, a second SH4 to use exclusively for T&L, and a modest boost in clocks I think they'd have had something that could have produced some pretty remarkable results for a 1999 launch.

I mean, they'd still have failed, but I'd like to have seen such a product. :D

As Naomi 2 demonstrated, the GPU could frequently handle significantly more lit geometry, and with more texture detail, than the DC could usually support.
 
Right, that was early 2002 for us in europe indeed :p No idea why im looking at US releases and launches all the time. 12 months difference between xb and ps2 for the US/north america, 18 or so for Europe.

The dreamcast never even really saw daylight here, it was an intresting machine too, and belonged to the 6th generation of consoles. Often forgotten ;)
 
I'd say the whole era from DC to Xbox was a fascinating time with a mixture of evolving graphics hardware join terms of features and performance and also being the 2nd generation of 3d consoles where devs get to do more but also refine in ways.

In terms of pure graphics alone it was a pleasure reading comments in this forum from devs on their approach to getting the most out of the architectures they were working on. Search for some of Fafalada's comments and you'll see what I mean. There was plenty of high quality discussion to be had and read.
 
function said:
Early on I think the GC made quite a splash - pretty good geometry, some nice lighting effects, and colourful textures. PS2 never really had satisfying textures (IMO and I acknowledge others will feel differently), but in many other ways the complex but fast PS2 hardware had room for growth as the industry developed its knowledge and experience. Being unquestionably the number 1 platform magnified this effect IMO.
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Yeah textures is one area where it suffered.
There were some games out there that really impressed with the texture work though. DMC1, Silent Hill 3, GT4.
I dont remember how exactly developers were using the super high bandwidth with the 4MB VRAM to get out of the memory limitations. Also I dont know how many and which ones really took advantage of it.
 
PSman1700 said:
The GC was supposedly trading blows with the PS2 in many regards, to contrary belief it was doing that with the xbox.
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What's the source for this? I'm not that aware of the subtleties of hardware from that era, but on paper (just by mhz numbers and stuff) the gcn blows the ps2 out of the water. Anecdotally (as someone who owns both) the spec difference seems to measure in up games. The limitations that seem obvious to me are the weird disks, and the lack of the super talented teams making ps2 exclusives.

edit: apparently i am ten years late to this argument: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/was-gc-more-or-less-powerful-than-ps2-spawn.52550/page-3
 
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cwjs said:
What's the source for this? I'm not that aware of the subtleties of hardware from that era, but on paper (just by mhz numbers and stuff) the gcn blows the ps2 out of the water. Anecdotally (as someone who owns both) the spec difference seems to measure in up games. The limitations that seem obvious to me are the weird disks, and the lack of the super talented teams making ps2 exclusives.

edit: apparently i am ten years late to this argument: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/was-gc-more-or-less-powerful-than-ps2-spawn.52550/page-3
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I love those old discussions about hardware that no longer occur here. Also reminds me how much better games were back then.
 
Sonic said:
I'd say the whole era from DC to Xbox was a fascinating time with a mixture of evolving graphics hardware join terms of features and performance and also being the 2nd generation of 3d consoles where devs get to do more but also refine in ways.

In terms of pure graphics alone it was a pleasure reading comments in this forum from devs on their approach to getting the most out of the architectures they were working on. Search for some of Fafalada's comments and you'll see what I mean. There was plenty of high quality discussion to be had and read.
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Super nostalgic time for me as well, covering my high school years. Xbox 360 launch in Fall 2005 was my first semester in college. Watching how things evolved without any real understanding until well after the fact makes the early 2000s era that much more interesting. PS2 was a graphical architectural dead end, and somehow Sony seemed still convinced to work that kind of thinking into the PS3 until the last minute with the RSX adoption. And I still hate that the Wii was an upgraded Gamecube. A single core 1.5 GHz PPC7400 + Radeon X1600 would've at least put the Wii into the 360 and PS3's ballpark and sphere of feature support.
 
Mobius1aic said:
Super nostalgic time for me as well, covering my high school years. Xbox 360 launch in Fall 2005 was my first semester in college. Watching how things evolved without any real understanding until well after the fact makes the early 2000s era that much more interesting. PS2 was a graphical architectural dead end, and somehow Sony seemed still convinced to work that kind of thinking into the PS3 until the last minute with the RSX adoption. And I still hate that the Wii was an upgraded Gamecube. A single core 1.5 GHz PPC7400 + Radeon X1600 would've at least put the Wii into the 360 and PS3's ballpark and sphere of feature support.
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The OG xbox 2001 made a serious impression on a me as a pc gamer. Never had consoles had that much of graphical power and aswell very good FPS and online gaming, the S controller was very good for first person shooters.
 
Mobius1aic said:
PS2 was a graphical architectural dead end, and somehow Sony seemed still convinced to work that kind of thinking into the PS3 until the last minute with the RSX adoption.
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To be fair to Sony, they looked at what worked with PS2, and went with it on PS3. Cell's SPE's aren't a much different concept from having the 2 vector units on PS2, for example, only taken to the next level. Obviously PS3 changed course and had it's own issues, and it's easy to look at it's flaws, and the flaws PS2 had with the clarity of hindsight, but it's also easy to understand that they had the most successful video game system of all time, so it's custom design with lots of vector math must have been working for them. They just failed to see where the rest of the industry was going until it was too late.

The same can be said for Xbox One and Kinect. 360 Kinect sold incredibly well. It's easy to understand why Microsoft thought people wanted a new one. They just failed to see that people bought Kinects and only used them once.

On a somewhat tangential note, has there been a company who had a really successful 3rd generation of consoles? While there are some metrics that could count PS3 as a success, it was clearly not the success that PS1,2, and 4 were. Sega's 3rd console was Saturn. Microsoft's was One. Nintendo... Does Virtual Boy count? If not, N64 still got trounced by PS1. And if we aren't counting Virtual Boy, Nintendo's 6th console was WiiU! Calling it now, PS6 is doomed.
 

Pretty interesting that Open Lara has been ported to the....Sega Saturn.....

And I am really curious about this. The DF explains how each version handled visuals.

I wonder how OpenLara handles polygons in the Sega Saturn version. Most likely it rasterizes geometry conventionally. But how is this translated to the Sega Saturn that used quads for sprite deformation for the textures?

It looks much closer to the PS1 in terms of colors
 
see colon said:
To be fair to Sony, they looked at what worked with PS2, and went with it on PS3. Cell's SPE's aren't a much different concept from having the 2 vector units on PS2, for example, only taken to the next level.
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To be fair on Cell, it set out to target the real bottleneck of future computing and that's memory/data access, not processing power. When you have access to data fast enough, you have the luxury of enabling more processing, but processing without data is idle and wasted silicon.

Whether it was the right way to go about it or not, it did make sense to consider a new, clean-slate architecture for future computing over just sticking with legacy systems, irrespective of what architecture PS2 used. In the end, the solution to the problem lied/lies more in software design than hardware. Big, fat processors stuck on linear memory-buses can be kept highly occupied by designing the software to support the hardware, rather than expecting the hardware to support a human-friendly software design. And this is what we had in the very beginnings of software, with hand-crafted machine code optimising the shitz out of 8 bit silicon in mind-bending ways. The hardware-friendly optimisation is still necessary but on a higher level, and at this level the hardware tweaks needed to maintain functional-unit occupancy become a lot simpler to incorporate into existing processor architectures without needing something completely new specific to the task.
 
Nesh said:

Pretty interesting that Open Lara has been ported to the....Sega Saturn.....

And I am really curious about this. The DF explains how each version handled visuals.

I wonder how OpenLara handles polygons in the Sega Saturn version. Most likely it rasterizes geometry conventionally. But how is this translated to the Sega Saturn that used quads for sprite deformation for the textures?

It looks much closer to the PS1 in terms of colors
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While this is fairly silly, it is neat that we will have a cross platform piece of software that we can sort of benchmark some of the more exotic 32bit machines with. Also, does OpenLara support Tomb Raider 2 and 3, or just the first game? Because it would be great to see Saturn get those games as well.
 
It was the first Xbox that was the most forward looking i think, basically the first x86 console which was weird at the time. But fast forward 20 years later and practically every console has gone into that direction.
The emotion engine/cell (ps2 and ps3) designs, while intresting/exotic, obviously werent the way forward, not in performance not in developer friendlyness.
 
see colon said:
While this is fairly silly, it is neat that we will have a cross platform piece of software that we can sort of benchmark some of the more exotic 32bit machines with. Also, does OpenLara support Tomb Raider 2 and 3, or just the first game? Because it would be great to see Saturn get those games as well.
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It does appear to support other Tomb Raider games on PC at least

Imagine playing other TR games on the Sega Saturn.
 
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