Ok, he said they "couldn't be bothered with". Perhaps he meant time constraints.
Nonetheless, if the PS2 is placed above the Gamecube, why do late Gamecube games look consistently better than late PS2 games?
If no developer ever figured out how to extract better visuals from PS2 than from GC, doesn't that mean that the GC is, in practical terms, the most powerful solution?
FWIW I don't ever consider any developer who ships anything lazy.
When you're building a cross platform game, there is always an element of lowest common denominator, it's about costs (and I don't just mean financial).
PS2 was often the "lead SKU" at big publishers because of the installed base, Xbox was a version you had to do, in most cases you could write a simple version of your renderer and just drop the assets on Xbox and they would usually run faster. So you'd increase texture quality and call it done.
Usually when you dropped it on gamecube it would run slower and you'd have no memory left, so you downsample to make things fit, figure out how you could use ARAM without crippling performance and ship it.
If you wrote an XBox exclusive with no intention of ever shipping on PC, and you actually spent time optimizing there was a lot of performance to be had, usually most titles were CPU limited because then the polygon indices had to be copied into the GPU ring buffer (which wasn't actually a ring buffer). If your app was pushing a lot of geometry it could literally spend 60% of it's time doing nothing but linear memory copies.
It was possible to place jumps into the ringbuffer, to effectively "call" static GPU buffers, but it was tricky to get right because of the pipeline and the fact you had to patch the return address as a jump into the buffer so you'd have to place fences between calls to the same static buffer.
If you did this however you could trivially saturate the GPU and produce something much better looking.
On GameCube the biggest issue is it was just had pathetic triangle throughput, the 10M polygons per second (I don't remember the real number) assumes you never clip or light anything.
GameCube was DX7 class hardware for the most part, albeit a more fully featured version than ever shipped in a PC. The GPU just wasn't very fast.
As I said it's real benefit was the memory architecture and I still feel it was over engineered.
On the whole it wasn't a bad machine, but I wouldn't have said it was "more powerful than PS2)
I have MP and MP2 for my GC still, even though I no longer own the cube itself. I sold all my other Cube games years and years ago to help pay for my PS3 which now stands cold and dead on my apartment floor. Bet that cube still works, if someone's still using it...
