..:: PCSX2 Forums ::..

(09-12-2011, 11:23 PM)rama Wrote: [ -> ]The Gamecube hardware was inferior to the PS2, so any GC game should've been possible on the PS2 as well.

What!? I remember they used the excuse that the GC was stronger as the main reason as to why Resi 4's textures and lighting and sound quality were lesser.

And we all know how marketing people always tell the truth

LoL, but if it is the case that the PS2 is stronger it just seems outright silly that they made a shoddier version for the stronger hardware

It makes sense, properly porting it to the PS2 would be a lot of work, considering the radical differences the PS2 has plus the extra difficulty of coding for such a system. They did a fast, cheap job at it then blamed it on the PS2

My childhood naievity has just been smashed

Oh well

Speaking fairly objectively (I've owned and enjoyed both GCN and PS2... F*** the x-box though)... I'd say the most impressive GCN games visually outdid the PS2... Whether that was due to ease of programming or not I wouldn't know... but I remember getting my PS2 a couple years after getting my gamecube and my first thought when I played a couple different games were "Wow... I honestly thought these games would look better."

That said, when I watched the opening cinematics for Star Ocean 3 I shut up for at least a little while

It was never that the PS2 graphics looked bad, but I assumed before I got the PS2 that most games would be on par with the best of Nintendo's first and second party titles on GCN.

(09-12-2011, 11:26 PM)Fezzer Wrote: [ -> ]What!? I remember they used the excuse that the GC was stronger as the main reason as to why Resi 4's textures and lighting and sound quality were lesser.

I recall in some interview that the main reason RE went to Gamecube was because Mikami hated how difficult the PS2 was to develop for I'd say PS2 got the crappier version because he wasn't directly involved with it, he only provided a little help on the sidelines because the guy begged for his help

the GS is a fully programmable shader capable graphics synthesizer
the Flipper is a fixed function unit that ATI inherited during a buyout of another company.

the lack of programmable shaders on the flipper is why the NGC/Wii has to write back and reload from system memory to update many textures.

I approve of this thread.

(09-12-2011, 11:23 PM)rama Wrote: [ -> ]The Gamecube hardware was inferior to the PS2.

Not what I heard. The GPU and CPU were much more powerful on the gamecube. Why did Soul Caliber 2 look and have a smoother/better framerate than the PS2 version? Why do character movements in FFX shake like jittery caffeine addicts yet they moved smoothly in Resident Evil 4?
on).

If anything, the Gamcube was indeed capable of reaching near-Xbox levels in terms of graphics. Having a 1.5GB limit on games didn't help.

Gamecube GPU

162 MHz "Flipper" LSI (co-developed by Nintendo and ArtX, acquired by ATI)
180 nm NEC eDRAM-compatible process
8 GFLOPS
4 pixel pipelines with 1 texture unit each[14]
TEV "Texture EnVironment" engine (similar to Nvidia's GeForce-class "register combiners")
Fixed-function hardware transform and lighting (T&L), 20+ million polygons in-game[17]
648 megapixels/second (162 MHz × 4 pipelines), 648 megatexels/second (648 MP × 1 texture unit) (peak)
Peak triangle performance: 20,250,000 32-pixel triangles/s raw and with 1 texture and lit
337,500 triangles a frame at 60 FPS
675,000 triangles a frame at 30 FPS
8 texture layers per pass, texture compression, full scene anti-aliasing
8 simultaneous hardware light sources
Bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic texture filtering
Multi-texturing, bump mapping, reflection mapping, 24-bit z-buffer
24-bit RGB/32-bit RGBA color depth
Hardware limitations sometimes require a 6r+6g+6b+6a mode (18-bit color), resulting in color banding.


PS2 GPU

Graphics processing unit: "Graphics Synthesizer" clocked at 147 MHz
Pixel pipelines: 16
Video output resolution: variable from 256x224 to 1280x1024 pixels
4 MB Embedded DRAM video memory bandwidth at 48 gigabytes per second (main system 32 MB can be dedicated into VRAM for off-screen materials)
Texture buffer bandwidth: 9.6 GB/s
Frame buffer bandwidth: 38.4 GB/s
DRAM Bus width: 2560-bit (composed of three independent buses: 1024-bit write, 1024-bit read, 512-bit read/write)
Pixel configuration: RGB: Alpha:Z Buffer (24:8, 15:1 for RGB, 16, 24, or 32-bit Z buffer)
Dedicated connection to: Main CPU and VU1
Overall pixel fillrate: 16x147 = 2.352 Gpixel/s (rounded to 2.4 Gpixel/s)
Pixel fillrate: with no texture, flat shaded 2.4 (75,000,000 32pixel raster triangles)
Pixel fillrate: with 1 full texture (Diffuse Map), Gouraud shaded 1.2 (37,750,000 32-bit pixel raster triangles)
Pixel fillrate: with 2 full textures (Diffuse map + specular or alpha or other), Gouraud shaded 0.6 (18,750,000 32-bit pixel raster triangles)
GS effects: AAx2 (poly sorting required),[47] Bilinear, Trilinear, Multi-pass, Palletizing (4-bit = 6:1 ratio, 8-bit = 3:1)
Multi-pass rendering ability
Four passes = 300 Mpixel/s (300 Mpixels/s divided by 32 pixels = 9,375,000 triangles/s lost every four passes

Just because the PS2 has a higher polygon/vertex count doesn't mean the number stays at 75,000,000 when all lighting and textures are applied to the gourad shaded polygons. In-game vertices are much lower after the GPU renders them into to the game; my understanding is that very few games reached 12,000,000 per second.

PS2 GPU < ATI's Gamecube GPU. Good day.