Was PS2 maxed out? (or close to it)

[sribo]

Hi,

The "128-bit" era of consoles is my favorite, the one that pushed realism and immersion to a satisfactory level while being limited enough that the graphics remained quite stylized / video-game-like, and the one that was the most exciting for graphics when each major game came out.

Regarding this question if PS2 was more or less maxed-out, I was wondering why there don't seem to be any real answers 20+ years later (at least in most of the threads and forums I've read), it's always brought up that consoles like the N64, Saturn, Dreamcast weren't pushed enough because they didn't have enough talented developers or because they didn't last long enough, but for PS2 it's the complete opposite, it had the longest lifespan of its generation and the vast majority of the most skilled developers. The games that impress me the most on PS2 are mgs3, Shadow of The Colossus, Transformers (2004), Shadow of Rome, Burnout Revenge, Tomb Raider Anniversary (2007), and I don't find them that impressive, unless the strengths of the PS2 are more technical than visual and I don't necessarily notice what is really impressive (or maybe it's not what impressed the average gamer at the time?), what do you think?, am I ignoring even more impressive games? (gow2 is not one of them for me anyway), maybe I also forgot a bit the "wow" effect back in the day.

 

[Davros]

The quick answer would be if there were games with low framerates then the answer would be yes

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Your premise is kinda flawed. On the one hand, 'maxxed out' means you are utilising 100% of the logic gates 100% of the time, or as much as its physically possible to. Basically consume all the resources so there are none left to use on doing more. But that doesn't mean you are using them efficiently. So then you have using the hardware not 100% of its calculations but achieving good results with the logic gates you are using.

As devs learnt more, they developed alternative methods. And over time, new ideas emerge. Hence there might be things possible now that no-one even knew about back then, such as, I dunno, SDF shadows.

So go look up some retro 8bit consoles. What's being achieved on them is incredible, and 100x what was achieved in their lifetime. Hence nothing that maxxed them out in the day in terms of saturating the resources was comparable to what they could actually achieve. That's the state of PS2, and any other console. Given another 50 years of dedicated interest and exploration, even better will be possible on PS2 than the best seen yet. But is anyone going to bother and will you ever see it?

 

[sribo]

The quick answer would be if there were games with low framerates then the answer would be yes

yeah, Shadow of The Colossus falls into this category given its framerate issues, but for it to be close to what I mean by "maxed-out" I would say at least in fairly normal gaming conditions, i.e. 25-30fps at least.

Your premise is kinda flawed. On the one hand, 'maxxed out' means you are utilising 100% of the logic gates 100% of the time, or as much as its physically possible to. Basically consume all the resources so there are none left to use on doing more. But that doesn't mean you are using them efficiently. So then you have using the hardware not 100% of its calculations but achieving good results with the logic gates you are using.

As devs learnt more, they developed alternative methods. And over time, new ideas emerge. Hence there might be things possible now that no-one even knew about back then, such as, I dunno, SDF shadows.

So go look up some retro 8bit consoles. What's being achieved on them is incredible, and 100x what was achieved in their lifetime. Hence nothing that maxxed them out in the day in terms of saturating the resources was comparable to what they could actually achieve. That's the state of PS2, and any other console. Given another 50 years of dedicated interest and exploration, even better will be possible on PS2 than the best seen yet. But is anyone going to bother and will you ever see it?

indeed, maxed-out is a bit of a generalization, it's true that what a console can do and what was done on it at a time are different things, so we can consider that the best possible was done with the tools and knowledge at the time, at least in the games I mentioned? it's interesting because games are often considered to push the hardware the most etc but that doesn't necessarily mean much in the end.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's hard to say. There are certain developers who extracted the best possible at the time. But you might have an effect that isn't a good fit for a platform, that the devs do amazing things to make that work, and as a result the framerate tanks and some people think it's unimpressive which it's technically a great accomplishment.

Over the years we had a few game profiles covered here, and it turns out a lot of potential wasn't used, notably in the VU0. Does that mean better was possible, or there wasn't any meaningful way to actually use that math capacity?

 

[Cyan]

the PS2 reached its final form with ICO. And Gran Turismo 4. Plus the old man in Silent Hill looked photorealistic.

Maxing out a hardware in 7 years isn't easy, i.e. as of recently it has been found that the Amiga 500 could run Doom if you used other techniques. Doom used the VGA Mode 13H and the Amiga only could run it at abysmal framerates, and thus the popularity of the Amiga decreased.

Silent Hill had a PC version too but I never played that game on PC nor I know which hardware you needed at the time to run it, compared to the PS2. But it could be interesting seeing how the PS2 and PC version -which admits high resolutions- of that game look nowadays.

 

[Remij]

Yes. Shadow of the Colossus.

 

[Sega_Model_4]

Gran Turismo 4 for me is one of the most impressive games on the PS2, super detailed car models and ran in high resolution at 60 fps.
When you play on PCSX2 in 4K, the game still impresses today.

And recently, they remastered the game with texture mods and several bug fixes.

 

[Davros]

Yes. Shadow of the Colossus.

I played that on a core2 quad and it ran badly there as well

 

[Karamazov]

How do you define maxing out ? Lod ? Résolution ? Fps ? All of it ?

Mario 64 was 30fps with slow downs and yet someone spent years to make it reach 60fps on an actual n64.
Team ico are great at delivering wonderful experiences and poetry, but I'm not sure there are so great at optimizing their games.

 

[Cyan]

Gran Turismo 4 for me is one of the most impressive games on the PS2, super detailed car models and ran in high resolution at 60 fps.
When you play on PCSX2 in 4K, the game still impresses today.

And recently, they remastered the game with texture mods and several bug fixes.

running at 4K on a RTX 4090.

 

[sribo]

It's hard to say. There are certain developers who extracted the best possible at the time. But you might have an effect that isn't a good fit for a platform, that the devs do amazing things to make that work, and as a result the framerate tanks and some people think it's unimpressive which it's technically a great accomplishment.

Over the years we had a few game profiles covered here, and it turns out a lot of potential wasn't used, notably in the VU0. Does that mean better was possible, or there wasn't any meaningful way to actually use that math capacity?

Ok, apparently there are no known games that used VU0 extensively.

the PS2 reached its final form with ICO. And Gran Turismo 4. Plus the old man in Silent Hill looked photorealistic.

Maxing out a hardware in 7 years isn't easy, i.e. as of recently it has been found that the Amiga 500 could run Doom if you used other techniques. Doom used the VGA Mode 13H and the Amiga only could run it at abysmal framerates, and thus the popularity of the Amiga decreased.

Silent Hill had a PC version too but I never played that game on PC nor I know which hardware you needed at the time to run it, compared to the PS2. But it could be interesting seeing how the PS2 and PC version -which admits high resolutions- of that game look nowadays.

Ah this guy, iconic.

yeah, and if we take the Wii into consideration (basically an overclocked GC that we can consider from this generation technically) it goes up to 11 years and yet the Wii's potential appears to be underused too.

Gran Turismo 4 for me is one of the most impressive games on the PS2, super detailed car models and ran in high resolution at 60 fps.
When you play on PCSX2 in 4K, the game still impresses today.

And recently, they remastered the game with texture mods and several bug fixes.

Of course, I would also add Ghosthunter and Gun (2005) among the PS2 games that were very good-looking.

How do you define maxing out ? Lod ? Résolution ? Fps ? All of it ?

Mario 64 was 30fps with slow downs and yet someone spent years to make it reach 60fps on an actual n64.
Team ico are great at delivering wonderful experiences and poetry, but I'm not sure there are so great at optimizing their games.

Which uses the console's potential as much as possible (VU0 included) with a decent resolution and framerate (the usual 512x448 and 30fps are good enough), ideally with advanced effects and fairly complex games (so no fighting games etc), it's true that "maxed-out" is somewhat ambiguous when considering the overall results and the visual aspect because in a purely technical sense a demo can use the maximum of the hardware without the constraints of a full game.

 

[Liandry]

There was a lot of games for PS2 released in 2008, 2009, and even 2010, and many of them were with better graphics than many games from before. Many people just switched to Xbox 360 or PS3 in 2005, 2006 and 2007 and didn't played latest PS2 games. One of good options is to compare platforming games (pixar, dreamworks etc.), because those games were released till 2011. Yes, those games have stylized graphics, but still showed a lot of PS2 potential. If we compare platformer games from 2000-2002 with games from 2008-2010, we can se huge difference. Anyone who is interested can check games list.
P.S. Maybe thread can be moved to Questions about PS2 thread?

 

[sribo]

There was a lot of games for PS2 released in 2008, 2009, and even 2010, and many of them were with better graphics than many games from before. Many people just switched to Xbox 360 or PS3 in 2005, 2006 and 2007 and didn't played latest PS2 games. One of good options is to compare platforming games (pixar, dreamworks etc.), because those games were released till 2011. Yes, those games have stylized graphics, but still showed a lot of PS2 potential. If we compare platformer games from 2000-2002 with games from 2008-2010, we can se huge difference. Anyone who is interested can check games list.
P.S. Maybe thread can be moved to Questions about PS2 thread?

yeah, I only knew a few of those games that came out later (Tomb Raider Anniversary - 2007, GOW2 - 2007, Star Wars - The Force Unleashed - 2008, Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier - 2009) and many were multiplatform games that weren't very impressive on PS2 and often less than the previous games (Tomb Raider Underworld, Silent Hill Shattered Memories, Sonic Unleashed...) but there are a lot of them so it requires digging into the lists indeed (it's still a bit surprising that we haven't heard more about these games since then)

 

[milk]

I really apreciate the look of Tomb Raider aniversary on PS2. More than technically polished, which it is, the art direction really shows how the artists were well versed into what looks good on that feature-set and what doesn't, and they played so well to its strengths.

 

[Nesh]

It would be interesting if we saw any attempts of porting "impossible" ports to the PS2 these days and see how they would fair.