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[West Texas CEO]

My favorite aspect of the PS2s design is its ridiculous DRAM bus width...

2560 bits !

 

[Thaedolus]

it's pretty amazing just how much of sony's playstation success has basically been in spite of itself. not sure i can think of another example of this that's quite as striking...

I’m not sure I’d really put it that way. Sony just prioritized things differently than other manufacturers. PSX had a slow loading CD drive that failed a lot, but that also allowed for less expensive games with flashier cutscenes and voice acting and such at a time where it was really novel. There were a lot of games on PlayStation that weren’t exactly bangers, but it didn’t suffer from the long droughts of no new games that the N64 suffered from.

Everything is always going to be a give and take when you’re designing a product, Sony prioritized some things and…it’s hard to argue with the success they’ve had over the last 30 years

 

[cireza]

PS2 had plenty of years of activity and was, for sure, exploited correctly during its lifespan. Despite a complicated and certainly not straight-forward architecture. The console was selling a ton, so developers had no other choice but to get good at it, and this is what happened.

Still the console with the worst picture quality of its gen, by far.

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

"all those 60 fps games"... like two?!

ps2 is the 6th gen console with the largest 60fps library.

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

There's more 60fps games on PS2 than Xbox or GameCube or PS3.

Jak & Daxter 1, 2 and 3
Sly Racoon 1, 2 and 3
Ratchet & Clank 1, 2, 3, Deadlocked
Gran Turismo 3, Concept, 4 Pro, 4
Tourist Trophy
Burnout 1, 2, 3, Dominator, Revenge
Sims 1
Ridge Racer V
Tekken Tag, 4 and 5
Virtua Fighter 4 and 4 EVO (will this one fix jagging issue)
Rez
SoulCalibur 2 and 3
Dead or Alive 2
God of War 1 and 2
Devil May Cry 1, 2 and 3
Dynasty Warriors 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Maximo Ghost to Glory
Maximo: Army of Zin
Metal Gear Solid 2
Dark Cloud
Enter the Matrix
Spider-Man
Def Jam Fight for NY
Tony Hawk Underground 1 and 2
Castlevania Lament Of Innocence & Curse Of Darkness
Mark of Kri
Zone of the Enders 1 and 2
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 1 and 2
SSX 1, SSX Tricky and SSX 3
Crash TwinSanity
Crash Nitro Kart
Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex

And I missing many...

Not mentionning all Sports Games or 2D games isn't?

Enter the Matrix is 30fps on PS2 because it has motion blur and fog

The Bouncer
Evergrace
Armored cor 2
gun griffon blaze
ephemeral fantasia
tony hawk's pro skater 3
Klonoa 2
SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom
Soul reaver 2
007 underfire
onimusha serie
star wars starfighter
Projetc Eden
okage shadown king
Drakan
extermination
timesplitters 1 - 3
suikoden 3
Shinobi
Rygar
Rayman 3
Kill switch
Quake 3 revolution
Half LIfe
SpyHunter
Fur fighters
spy fiction
soldier of fortune
Kya
valkirie profile 2
Bujingai Genji
blood will tell
Viewtfull joe
F1 grand prix challenge (only ps2 has F1 60fps gen)
Transformers.
Toy Story 3
Katamari Damacy
V-Rally 3
Nightshade

 

[consoul]

yes it is true

no it isn't

 

[Lysandros]

I remember an old post that was proposing one of the chips had what looked like aa hardware on it but it didn't work or something. It was a really long time ago. That's all I can remember. Well, maybe it had something to do with dividing numbers. There may have been pictures with it?

Anyone remember this theory?

Yeah i remember reading a developer mentioning the dedicated hardware antialiasing was non functioning due to a giant bug and even official documentation saying something like "the antialiasing hardware doesn't work, do this instead (describing another method)". I am not so sure but i think this was a criterion developer posting on sega16 forums.

 

[PaintTinJr]

PS2 had plenty of years of activity and was, for sure, exploited correctly during its lifespan. Despite a complicated and certainly not straight-forward architecture. The console was selling a ton, so developers had no other choice but to get good at it, and this is what happened.

Still the console with the worst picture quality of its gen, by far.

Sounds like a problem that fits the maxim: "Better one volunteer than ten conscripts.", no? Developers definitely needed encouragement after the Xbox was giving them the easiest path to develop on console - most memory, and a HDD, and effectively a stripped back WinTel PC.

 

[Seider]

Recently has been released a Mario 64 rom running at 60 fps on original Nintendo 64 hardware. This shows that Nintendo 64 was underused in its generation too.

All games in these old consoles could have been better with more time in development and more knowledge of the system.

 

[Panajev2001a]

My favorite aspect of the PS2s design is its ridiculous DRAM bus width...

2560 bits !

… and that was from the page buffers to the Pixel Engines and texture units, those buffers had an even faster connection from the DRAM macros … well over the 48 GB/s the GS was quoted for. A full speed bi-dirextional GIF-to-GS bus and 8 MB of eDRAM would have made it a true beast.

 

[nial]

Yeah but for us in the US & Europe that was 2 months.
So 2001 was it's first year and like you said it was fire!

Which I think it's a kinda unfair comparison, especially since people will also mostly mention Japanese games like Gran Turismo 3 (and 2002 was meh, honestly).
PS2's first year starts at March 2000.

 

[The Stig]

Oh yeah I forgot about the fat PS3. That's the 60gb one right? I might look into getting one of those. Cheers

thats the one. absolutely amazing gadget.

i love mine, ps, ps2 and ps3 in one box

 

[The Stig]

Also GT2 to GT3 A Spec is probably the biggest jump in graphics we'll never see again.

i still remember it blowing me away when i saw it running in a store

 

[Fafalada]

Anyway - back on topic of this thread - I do think the 'wrongly utilized' vs. 'under-utilized' are two very different things.
I have an idea what console takes the top spot on the second bucket - but that's a different thread alltogether... maybe I should start that sometime.

As for the 'wrong' bit - PS2 did have a larger than usual contingent of software that was just plain doing things against the hardware. And that's partly by design - both architecture being very open-ended/flexible (so people have to find their own way), and software being entirely in developer control (no real SDKs or drivers to help you along the way when it came to graphics subsystem).
It's sort of like if NVidia went - 'screw this, you guys write your own drivers' to the PC community - inevitably we'd be having a lot of software doing things just 'wrong' from GPU perspective.

All this being said - I do think there are certain things HW was capable of that just weren't seen much, or showed-off in the most interesting ways.
For instance - taking another platform showcase - Wreckless - the rendering stack was basically built around the very things PS2 excelled at, but by and large, we never got anything quite as - show-offy on the PS2. Admittedly - we never got anything else as show-offy on XBox either - that title was unique in its own right - but still.

Another one being Deferred shading - but that - as I mentioned elsewhere, was utilizing HW in ways it just wasn't quite meant to work, but just happened to be possible. This is the type of things we sometimes see from 8bit platforms 20-30 years later, so who knows, we may yet have some homebrew for it one day.

 

[Mace_Dragon]

I thought this was going to be about the power flip switch in the back versus holding the power button it turn the machine off.

 

[SHA]

Still one of, if not the, GOAT consoles.

It's rare to see haters on that console, seriously, this is impressive.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Not true, it was just different. The rasterization speed of the GS was crazy good, which is why a lot of devs (especially Japanese ones) of that era got into what would later be considered "bad habits" of overusing transparency effects particularly in their VFX systems in order to get a good result.

I'm pretty sure the problems with the PS3 were in many ways due to this thanks to the late adoption of the NV GPU over what was originally intended to be GS2. My suspicion being that the original intent was the have the 2nd CELL's SPU's doing all the T+L work and directly feeding into a fill-rate monster equivalent to the GS.

That is almost exactly what the working prototype was, no second CELL but a Toshiba fabbed GPU with only triangle setup, pixel shading, texturing, and tons of eDRAM while all vertex/geometry processing would be handled by the SPU’s on the single CELL BE.

Honestly, I feel like overall the PS2 was used to its full potential. But that took a long time to be realized because frankly it wasn't an easy machine to optimize for.
If you were a coder around when the original Playstation came out you'd have immediately understood why Cerny's mantra was "time to triangle" for PS4, the original PSX (which was how we were first exposed to it name-wise) was remarkably quick and easy to get code up and running on, and it really massively helped drive uptake.
With PS2 and especially PS3 the learning curve had gotten really steep, with only the most hardcore of coders actually wanting the headache of wrapping their minds around what it took to make those pieces of hardware sing.

Agreed, just thinking that in the future as the race to better and better manufacturing processes dies we will need to go with more and more exotic architectures to get performance out of consoles and even PC GPUs (there is a limit to price even for PC gamers and to power consumption for those beasts too).

Engines provided by first party developers to third party ones like Decima and/or deals with middleware like Unreal Engine will become very very important in that scenario IMHO.

 

[EviLore]

30fps is for scrubs, OP.

 

[Doctor Hades]

I bought a PS2, I believe, at release but it was mostly used as a DVD player and I still continued to play most of my games back then on N64, Dreamcast and, of course, PC. I was always disappointed with the PS2's image quality and remember being pretty shocked at how bad Ridge Racer 5 looked on my Panasonic CRT TV. Even the PS2 port of Dead or Alive 2 looked ugly image quality wise in comparison to the Dreamcast version which I'd been playing on a VGA monitor for months at that point. The PS2 was otherwise a fine console with plenty of good games but I felt its image quality let it down along with the usual sub-par PAL ports with top/bottom borders here in the UK.

 

[RobRSG]

I need to re buy a PS2. Are they easy to set up via HDMI for modern TVs?

Shopping list:

• Any PS2 with 1 or 2 Dualshock Controllers
• GBS-Control (Upscaler)
• Good quality Component Cable
• Memory Card

If you want to play games directly from Hard Drive instead of Disc, I can recommend also buying:

• Fat PS2 instead of Any PS2.
• Ethernet Adapter (There are SATA versions with no Ethernet port).
• Harddrive or SATA SSD of your choice, depending on which Ethernet Adapter you chose.
• An extra Memory Card with FreeMacBoot and other tools pre-installed.
• SATA or IDE to USB adapter (to transfer games from your PC)

 

[FewRope]

I need to re buy a PS2. Are they easy to set up via HDMI for modern TVs?

I recently set up a PS2 with a 4k monitor through OSSC and the image quality is better than I was expecting, you maybe need to watch a few video to start tinkering but its legit impressive to see PS2 that well on a modern monitor

 

[Madserb2023]

Just imagine how much better the Xbox One would have been if they just utilized that second GPU or the cloud.

 

[T-0800]

… and that was from the page buffers to the Pixel Engines and texture units, those buffers had an even faster connection from the DRAM macros … well over the 48 GB/s the GS was quoted for. A full speed bi-dirextional GIF-to-GS bus and 8 MB of eDRAM would have made it a true beast.

 

[Geometric-Crusher]

A software that the community never set out to make was a homebrew Performance Analyzer, as it's the only way to know which games really push the system.
I learned from the community that one way to analyze with the naked eye, without instruments, is to observe the following items
frame rate, resolution and shadows.

Those who are used to the current generation will notice that there is a performance mode and a quality mode, basically for a game to reach 60fps it is necessary to reduce the pixel rate per frame by half. (4k 30fps-> 2k 60fps)
The other alternative is to make a cut in the graphics, reducing geometry, effects and especially shadows, the cut in shadows indicates that there was a lack of juice. In the sixth generation the most common cut was in the shadows. This way, the resolution and frame rate are fixed. The Dreamcast never lowered the resolution in exchange for fps. Re-volt was a beautiful game at 30fps but a 60fps mode could be enabled via code in exchange for reducing draw distance and turning off effects.
On PS2 there is no choice between fidelity and performance, this choice is already made by the developer during production. It's amazing how games like 007 Agent Underfire, GOW2 and Jak 2 run at 60fps with all enemies having shadows.