Texture cache of the NGC, PS2, Xbox

[jackal256]

From what I gather the PS2 = 1MB, GC = 1MB, Xbox = 16MB(just a guess).

1. Was It hard to produce texture rich games on par with the Xbox/PC?

2. What tricks were used to overcome the 1MB cache on both the Gamecube & PS2.

3. Does the PS2 have texture compression or much of It just done in software.

Rayman 2, Rayman 3, Burnout 3, Burnout dominator seem to be the best examples I could see that the PS2 could run colourful games without the reduced colour look.

 

[Nesh]

Devil May Cry 1 had pretty nice textures too

Silent Hill 3 had insane texture quality also.

I wonder if the PS2 in the case of SH3 was streaming in and out textures using the huge bandwidth since the corridors and darkness allowed for areas to be hidden, thus streaming higher quality assets based on what was visible.

edit:

Tekken Tag Tournament was insane as well

 

[Nesh]

The PS2 in particular supposedly used the huge bandwidth to stream in and out textures into VRAM
This is from an old discussion in the forums
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/question-about-ps2-pushing-texture-on-the-bus-ondemand.11375/

 

[Rikimaru]

PS2 was designed to stream data to VRAM constantly.
PS2 does not have hw compression, but supports palletized textures.
GC and Xbox have hw compression afaik.
GC was limited by main RAM, but some devs used slow ARAM as a data cache.

 

[milk]

The topic that will never die.

EDIT: actually THE eternal most prolific B3D topic was the n64's texture cache. Got those mixed for a moment there...

 

[jackal256]

The PS2 in particular supposedly used the huge bandwidth to stream in and out textures into VRAM
This is from an old discussion in the forums
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/question-about-ps2-pushing-texture-on-the-bus-ondemand.11375/

I've had those thoughts I'm pretty sure Burnout 3 & Revenge did this a lot, With forced AA + turn off the mipmap the textures are the same quality as the Xbox versions.

 

[davis.anthony]

PS2 has a lot of games with amazing textures, you just can't see them because of PS2's poor IQ and poor video output quality.

It's only when you use an emulator that you truly see the quality of some of the textures.