will PS3's GPU be more modern than PS2's GS for its time?

[London Geezer]

More modern than PS2 for its time?.. or more modern than PS2 was supposed to be (this close to its launch) for its time?

More modern than the square root of the first revision of the second generation of Playstation Home Entertainment System times one hundred and twenty-eight. Plus.

I'll stop with the direct replies to Sega guy, there's enough people trying to explain where he's wrong, so i'll just go to bed and leave it to you guys.

 

[Jov]

Yeah I mentioned that I like SEGA, but I also like Nintendo, Bandai, sometimes Konami, CAPCOM, Take2, SNK, Valve, Bungie, RARE, and other devs equally that make great games too, I believe I mentioned that DC is not superior to PS2 but PS2 should have been better than what it turned out to be instead of fast 2 years old tech.

This fast 2 year tech was probably the most interesting and ironically had the best support.

There will always be someone who will state console XYZ should be better even when it kills the competition in more ways than one. The PS2 did what Sony's overall goal, winning the war this generation.

 

[see colon]

Let me just make sure that the person who said this is aware that there was an actual 3d game on Saturn that did require the 4MB cart made by none other than CapCom, one of the last retail Saturn games in Japan known as Final Fight Revenge, a port from the Arcade Titan hardware that is the same as Saturn and that although the game was not "apparently" stellar in the visuals compared to Fighters Megamix and Virtua Fighter 2, it did feature the use of additional animation sequences for the character's fighting moves that would not otherwise fit into the standard 1.5MB vram

i own FF:R, and it is rubbish! well, average at best. it plays similar to Street Fighter ex, looks worse in most situations (no lighting, jaggies galore) and has some of the goofiest supers ever to grace a capcom fighter. we're talking darstalkers goofy, only IMHO it doesn't fit the subject matter. dead or alive also uses the 4MB cart as well (optionaly), iirc, and looks increadable for a saturn game. better than vf2 in most aspects, and somewhat mistakable for the arcade version to the untrained eye. DoA is a much better demonstration to what could have been done with the 4MB cart than FF:R.
here's a pic of doa:

and here's one of ff:r

one thing i can say about both ff:r and doa on saturn is that both games have very little polygon flashing, poping, and general glitchiness usualy associated with 3d games on the saturn.

capcom was also planning on releaseing resident evil 2 for the saturn and it was reported to use the 4MB cart, but it was cancelled. it was supposed to have more animation, better textures, and a host of new effects for the pre-rendered backgrounds. i often wondered if those new features made their way into the n64, DC, or GC versions of re2.

 

[Jacob]

Squeak's post:

And why is that?
You don't seem to realise that the VRAM on the GS plays quite a different role than the VRAM in DC. It's meant to be used as a temporary buffer for textures and frames, not a temporary geometry and permanent texture storage like on DC.
DC can allocate, at best, around 5Mb for textures, while PS2 has around 20Mb of bandwidth @ 60fps to share between textures and geometry.

Look at GC, only 1Mb for textures! And worse still, NV2a, which is rumoured to only, have 128Kb of texture cache!!.

Akumajou's reply:

So basically you are saying that the GS is a much better idea technologically speaking than GC and NV2A?, even though those other GPUs work completely different from ideals established in PS2 EE+GS.

I'm still wondering how you got to that conclusion after reading Squeak's post, really. Where did he imply that the GS is a much better idea? Am I missing something? I thought that Squeak's point was to prove that all the systems work differently, and you can't just compare a few numbers here and there and get the whole picture.

It also lacks enough memory bandwidth and hardly enough memory storage for game execution code as well as high resolution textures that could have been implemented if Sony would have been fully aware of squashing DC and any other console that could have shipped a year later in terms of technology.

"Squashing any other console that could have shipped a year later in terms of technology"?

Look, there seems to be a problem here. You're accusing a company of not providing hardware technologically more advanced than what the competition could release 18 months later after they knew exactly what was inside the PS2.

You say they should have put more RAM in it. DC (1998) has 26Mb total, PS2 (2000) has 40Mb, GC (2001) ~43Mb, and Xbox (2001) 64Mb. I'm not going to make a bandwith comparison, as PS2 is quite fast for its time in this aspect. What's your point?

 

[Steve Dave Part Deux]

Squeak's post just confirms that he doesn't know how a cache works. There are features of the GC's cache that make it unique, but it still functions exactly as any other cache would on any system.

 

[Akumajou]

Squeak's post:

And why is that?
You don't seem to realise that the VRAM on the GS plays quite a different role than the VRAM in DC. It's meant to be used as a temporary buffer for textures and frames, not a temporary geometry and permanent texture storage like on DC.
DC can allocate, at best, around 5Mb for textures, while PS2 has around 20Mb of bandwidth @ 60fps to share between textures and geometry.

Look at GC, only 1Mb for textures! And worse still, NV2a, which is rumoured to only, have 128Kb of texture cache!!.

Akumajou's reply:

So basically you are saying that the GS is a much better idea technologically speaking than GC and NV2A?, even though those other GPUs work completely different from ideals established in PS2 EE+GS.

I'm still wondering how you got to that conclusion after reading Squeak's post, really. Where did he imply that the GS is a much better idea? Am I missing something? I thought that Squeak's point was to prove that all the systems work differently, and you can't just compare a few numbers here and there and get the whole picture.

It also lacks enough memory bandwidth and hardly enough memory storage for game execution code as well as high resolution textures that could have been implemented if Sony would have been fully aware of squashing DC and any other console that could have shipped a year later in terms of technology.

"Squashing any other console that could have shipped a year later in terms of technology"?

Look, there seems to be a problem here. You're accusing a company of not providing hardware technologically more advanced than what the competition could release 18 months later after they knew exactly what was inside the PS2.

You say they should have put more RAM in it. DC (1998) has 26Mb total, PS2 (2000) has 40Mb, GC (2001) ~43Mb, and Xbox (2001) 64Mb. I'm not going to make a bandwith comparison, as PS2 is quite fast for its time in this aspect. What's your point?

When he said the line:

Look at GC, only 1Mb for textures! And worse still, NV2a, which is rumoured to only, have 128Kb of texture cache!!.

Pay attention to how he makes it sound (or read) like the smaller the cache, the worse it is, his line makes absolutely no sense.

And not 18 months like you said but at least since they were going to be the market leader anyways their specs should have a bit more significant.

Since London boy, is going to sleep then this is probably my last post reguarding what I was talking about with him/her so cherrio.

 

[cthellis42]

Pay attention to how he makes it sound (or read) like the smaller the cache, the worse it is, his line makes absolutely no sense.

Sort of like thinking Sony should or could have stuck another 4MB of video eDRAM on an external cart?

 

[Megadrive1988]

Flipper's on-chip 1T-SRAM memory was reportedly going to be 8 to 16 MegaBytes, not the final 3.12 MB. so it's one thing to wish that Sony had used more than 4 MB eDRAM in GS but there was no indication that would happen--unlike with Gamecube, where the expectation was--at least 8 MB if not possibly 16 MB--only to be disappointed with the 3+ MB when Dolphin was was unvieled as Gamecube in August 2000.

 

[Almasy]

When he said the line:

Look at GC, only 1Mb for textures! And worse still, NV2a, which is rumoured to only, have 128Kb of texture cache!!.

Pay attention to how he makes it sound (or read) like the smaller the cache, the worse it is, his line makes absolutely no sense.

And not 18 months like you said but at least since they were going to be the market leader anyways their specs should have a bit more significant.

Since London boy, is going to sleep then this is probably my last post reguarding what I was talking about with him/her so cherrio.

You´ve some sort of reading deficiency, (or a deep psichological problem), since in no instance does the post even IMPLY that PS2´s handling of cache-ing is better or worse than in GCN or Xbox. All it says is THEY WORK DIFFERENTLY.

Your "complaints" are preposterous as well. You´re honestly bitching about Sony because they couldn´t provide a better machine than competitors with 18 months younger technology? What a ridiculous arguement. Following that line of thinking, why not bitch about PS2 not being as powerfull as NVidia´s NV40 then? It doesn´t make any sense, since technology advances over time and reduces prices on certain components. What you asked was senseless in the time that PS2´s features had to be decided on.

PS2 stomps on DC on most terms and to this day manages to offer visually impresive titles, that compete favorably with those other two 18 month younger machines. Frankly, I wouldn´t know what else to ask for.

 

[Jacob]

Pay attention to how he makes it sound (or read) like the smaller the cache, the worse it is, his line makes absolutely no sense.

What?

He's saying that those systems (GC and Xbox) can have better textures than PS2 and DC, even when they only have 1Mb and 128k of texture cache respectively, which is true, and therefore proves that your point about the 4Mb embedded DRAM isn't neccesarily true.

Edit: The "and worse still" in his post, refers to a case in which there's even less texture cache available than GC yet, as we all know, Xbox is above the other three systems when it comes to texturing.


As others have pointed already, the mips core and the lack of a bigger cache are the main limiting factors when it comes to PS2 (well, and flawed support for certain things on the GS). You can make the point that having more VRAM would have solved a lot of problems, which is true, but such a thing wouldn't have been feasible cost wise back in the day. It's like saying that DC/GC/Xbox could be doing a lot more if they had ten times the amount of memory they have. True, but what's the point when such a system couldn't have been sold at a reasonable cost. it's like saying that Xbox's design is flawed because it only has 64Mbs of memory.

And not 18 months like you said but at least since they were going to be the market leader anyways their specs should have a bit more significant.

Ok, I've to ask.

What would have been acceptable to you?

 

[cthellis42]

it's like saying that Xbox's design is flawed because it only has 64Mbs of memory.

Well sure it is. I mean, nearly two years later they could easily have afforded to put in 128MB and been much better, right?

 

[London Geezer]

Squeak was obviously being sarcastic. shame people need emotiocns to pick up sarcasm.

 

[London Geezer]

What would have been acceptable to you?

He vantz ze big numbahz. DC had 8MB VRAM? Vell, PS2 shud hof had 16MB VRAM!!! Obvious reich? I meen ze bigger ze beddah!

 

[Squeak]

Squeak's post just confirms that he doesn't know how a cache works.

How is that?

There are features of the GC's cache that make it unique, but it still functions exactly as any other cache would on any system.

The GCs texture cache AFAIK is slower and more granular than a normal cache but it is, like you wrote, a cache in the normal sense of the word, while the GS eDRAM is a scratchpad fed by software, and not automatically like a cache. But the two chunks of memory still plays approximately the same role WRT to texture buffering.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Squeak's post just confirms that he doesn't know how a cache works.

How is that?

There are features of the GC's cache that make it unique, but it still functions exactly as any other cache would on any system.

The GCs texture cache AFAIK is slower and more granular than a normal cache but it is, like you wrote, a cache in the normal sense of the word, while the GS eDRAM is a scratchpad fed by software, and not automatically like a cache. But the two chunks of memory still plays approximately the same role WRT to texture buffering.

for render-to-texture effects the GS is the only GPU of the three that does not need to hit main RAM to store the rendered off-screen surface like you do on Xbox and GCN.

 

[London Geezer]

for render-to-texture effects the GS is the only GPU of the three that does not need to hit main RAM to store the rendered off-screen surface like you do on Xbox and GCN.

...Which is why Ps2 was the first console to use post-processing effects extensively, and still is the fastest (apparently, i could be wrong) at those kind of effects, out of all the consoles. Effects like motion blur, DOF and other so called "cinematic effects".


My god, that word brought back memories from 2001, like mentioning Corona brings back memories of the 90's dance stuff and "The summer is magic!! magic!! oh oh oh!!!"

 

[Fafalada]

...Which is why Ps2 was the first console to use post-processing effects extensively, and still is the fastest (apparently, i could be wrong) at those kind of effects, out of all the consoles.

Well if we can adjust numbers for target screen resolution, I would nominate PSP for the honors.

My god, that word brought back memories from 2001, like mentioning Corona brings back memories of the 90's dance stuff and "The summer is magic!! magic!! oh oh oh!!!"

Culture Beat forever!!
You just did this on purpose to remind some of us are getting older haven't you :?

 

[London Geezer]

Well if we can adjust numbers for target screen resolution, I would nominate PSP for the honors.

That's cheating.

Culture Beat forever!!
You just did this on purpose to remind some of us are getting older haven't you :?

Moi? I would never be so cruel. Besides i mentioned a 90's thing, i could have mentioned Spandau Ballet just to check who is really old around here.

 

[cthellis42]

Hmm... What does it say about me that I really like Benny Goodman?

 

[Fafalada]

That's cheating.

Why, is PSP not a console?

Anyway, it's not so much the question of what music we remember, more like what it reminds me of - and the early nineties dance is so... highschool...