Enable trilinear, anisotropic and use say 20MBs worth of textures and see how much good the theoretical numbers do for the PS2.
Considering the mgs2doc.(not sure, havent seen in a while.) says some models are up to 10MB and clearly there are many other textured objects besides that one, The textures are no prob.... The anisotropic is also not a prob. since there are games with excellent IQ and thus it would be only trivial to enable it.
Again the deal is are the Gf1's 20,000 polys at 60fps with a few texture, and effects enough to offset the ps2 advantage in rendering speed, fillrate, T&L(both speed and flexibility), b/w... I don't think so heck if u limited the ps2 to just that few polys it could probably hack all those effects, and then some...
Do you have the game? It is very low poly, even by circa 1999 PC game standards.
Well if the upgrade was small, say to 1000 or 2000 polys per char. it'd still look blocky.... but with a dozen or more of those and the backgrounds... u'd be outdoing quake 3... EDIT: anyway doesn't the Unreal engine use the cpu alot or something like that... hmmm...
"The first basic requirement for a game to take advantage of Hardware T&L is that it must use either the DirectX 7 or OpenGL API. This means that unless a game uses DirectX 7's Hardware T&L engine or the implementation in OpenGL it will not receive any benefit from the GeForce 256's hardware T&L. ...the game must not use its own transforming or lighting engine. This immediately takes Unreal Tournament out the running because it uses its own T&L engine."
Now, if you are saying that you need 100FPS to be able to play Quake3 or any other game, the PS2 looses to the GF1 by default. You mention framerate fluctuation, if it doesn't drop below 30FPS at any point, how is it any different then any console title?
Cut the texture rez, and I guess it should go to 1000+fps with even 1920x something HDtv rez on ps2... not sure if it could output that but it could do it internally at least...
Anyways I just don't see the Gf1 so called advantage, either bottleneck or whatever..., the fact is the GF2pro doesn't appear to be going above 2M polys... that means a game like J&D is already running at 5X the geometry... and some of the games with even higher geometry could be running with an order of magnitude more geometry....
EDIT
We already had the fillrate 480M... now i went to another site and found the bandwith... "Basic math will tell us that this results in around 2.6GB/s of local memory bandwidth on a regularly clocked GeForce 256 card."
Slowly a picture is beginning to emerge...
the Geforces small bandwidth, low fillrate, low polycount, etc... pretty much are serious bottlenecks....
The GS needs 48GB/s to operate more than an ORDER of magnitude the Geforce's bandwidth...
HOW is this suppah b/w limited Gf1 supposed to handle the stuff the stuff the GS does.... nobody knows....