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Is the PS/2 A Disappointment?
katananja writes: "According to this page Playstation 2 is the industry's big disappointment. This article compares de DC versus PS2 in many ways you can imagine.
To better understand the PS2's limitations and the Dreamcast's strengths, you need only look at the available video memory for your answer. While the DC has 8MB of VRAM, the PS2 has only 4MB of VRAM. The main problem arises because a polygon takes up roughly 40 bytes of RAM. When you have 5 million of them in a given second, this amounts to 5 million/60fps = 83,333 polygons in a given frame of animation. If each of these polygons uses 40 bytes of VRAM, you will use 3.33 MB displaying these 5 million PPS. This doesn't leave the PS2 much room for its framebuffer which uses around 1.2MB just to display the end data, not to mention that you still need to leave room for textures to put on those polygons." This is obviously biased 'cuz the site is 'Segaweb' but it's got a lot of interesting tidbits. As always tho, the real test is the games.
I have not programmed either the Dreamcast, or the PS2, but I feel fairly confident in saying: yes, developers can write directly to RAM on both systems.
:-)
It's kinda essential
Tim
Yeah, with the dreamcast having a year head-start. Sega's seen this before- The genesis was out far ahead of SNES, with a huge library. yet i'm willing to bet that there are more SNES units in homes than genesis units today.
For your post to be REALLY relevant, you'd be comparing the DC vs. PS2 RELEASE titles.
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
Infact the DC is one of the most rock solid consoles i have ever had.
And SSX is not a reason to get a PS2. If your gonna spend 400 bucks for one game your on crack.
That was a much better article, though a little biased toward the GameCube it was a lot clearer, and talking to actual PS2 developers yielded a lot better informed comparisons. It had a much better discussion of what the vecotr units could do, for example.
Now, if only they had included Dreamcast developers we might have a real comparison going!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's redundant because the same IBM PS/2 comments have been made in *every single playstation 2 story on slashdot*. It was funny the first time. It isn't funny anymore.
If you want to make a valid comparison, you need to compare Dreamcast release titles to Playstation 2 release titles.
Early titles never look anything like later titles - that much is beyond debate. If you're comparing currently available titles then this makes sense. If you're comparing the hardware, as this article purports to do, then comparing a first-off PS2 title to a third or fourth generation Dreamcast title is rather foolish.
I'm actually rather surprised by the content of many fan reviews (and some of the comments here). Many are along the lines of "PS2 will kill DC" or "DC won't let PS2 take off". How ridiculous is this?
You'd think, now that we've seen how one company holding a lock on a market (Microsoft?) is such a detrimental force against the consumer, we'd all be praying that all the consoles do reasonably well, to force competition to create better and better games and consoles.
I own a DC, and when the price comes down will own a PS2. I don't get to play games alot, but when I want to, I'll not be locked into a console to determine what I play. Sega has more original games than any other console maker out there. Period (Jet Grind Radio or Seaman to name two examples). Sony has some of the stronger sports games (Madden for example) and a few other genres. Sega and Sony both have great RPGs.
Hardware-wise, I've been skeptical for some time that the PS2 would appear significantly more advanced than any other new console. In comparing Madden to NFL2K (not the new, I prefer to compare first gen to first gen) or TTT to Soul Calibre, I don't see any amazing advance.
Of course this article is biased, but it's no more biased than the same FUD we've seen on PS2 sources for a year now.
No need to take my word about the video memory sizes, read the front page for this discussion. Still, there have been so many PS2 articles lately, it's no wonder we're going round in circles.
The so called 'problems' with the Playstation 2 have nothing to do with hardware, and everything to do with programmer stupidity and laziness.
Programming for the PS2 is inheirently different than for a PC or even the Dreamcast. My brother is a developer for the PS2 (as well as Dreamcast, and X-box. We've been playing games on a PS2 Development machine for a few weeks now) and is going nuts everyday reading this crap slandering the Playstation 2. Here is what is boils down to.
VRAM is used PER FRAME. You don't load up all the game's textures into VRAM and leave 'em there like you would on a PC or Dreamcast. The Playstation has 48 gigabytes of bandwidth between it's components. So, what does that mean? I means you STREAM your textures EVERY frame. If you have 48 gigs a second and 60 frames per second, you can stream up to 800 megabytes of textures PER FRAME. And that is uncompressed. The playstation allows you to do compression WHILE streaming the textures, for FREE with no extra cycles. And you can stream them directly from the DVD if you wanted.
You only need to load the textures for THAT frame and no more.
The problem is not with Playstation 2 hardware (which kicks ass), it is with the developers who are coding for it like it was a PC. The Playstation does not have a cute architecture that panders to weak programmers. It does one thing and it does it well. Coding properly for the PS2 requires programmers to get down to basics, write microcode for the VMU's and fine tune their applications to the Playstation 2's unique hardware.
What I'm afraid of, is that when X-box gets released with hardware that is basically a PC in different packaging, is that developers won't want to bother coding for the PS2 because they can just port their programs with little to no change from PC to X-box.
Hopefully, however, developers will realize their mistakes in programming for the PS2 like it was a PC and start making better software.
Perhaps the writer of the article should examine less the superficial stats of the two systems (ie. VRAM only), and begin to think more outside of the box.
You're an idiot.
It always amazes me how anonymous cowards are the only ones who post rude comments such as yours. The previous posters comments were exactly on target, which you would know if you had ever done _ANY_ graphics programming in your life. VRAM is used for textures not polygons. Newer hardware based T&L engines will change this but they are not commonplace yet. People are having trouble coding for this system because it is new and nothing else. In 6 months to a year you will see unbelievable games out that will blow away anything the DreamCast has to offer.
Finally, there is nothing illegal about purchasing exclusive rights to a software line. If you make a deal with a game company to only release their software for your platform there is nothing wrong with that. It is only illegal if you force or otherwise coerce them to ink said deal.
-sirket
All that being said, I'm not sure the PSX2 is a clear winner in the fighting games category. The reviews I've read of TTT are basically, "It's fun, but if you've played Tekken 3, you've played this game." And Street Fighter EX game has gotten mostly average reviews. The Dreamcast has some great fighting games in Soul Caliber, the Powerstone series (which I find a blast, if not particularly deep) and the 2D Marvel vs. Capcom vs. SNK vs. Your Mom types of games.
Granted, I'm sure there will eventually be more and better fighting games for the Playstation, but in the meantime, I might recommend picking up a Dreamcast and letting that tide you over until the Playstation 2 drops in price and you don't have to wait in line for 8 hours just to get one. That's my plan, anyway...
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
This is an interesting preview of bleem on the dreamcast. "Supposedly" bleem will play psx games better then the psx2, or the original for that matter. We'll see...
PC's are for work; consoles are for play; board games are for a social life.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Obviously, it would not be wise to store a bunch of geometry in VRAM. Games would need to be designed to generate throw-away geometry on the fly. That's what higher order surfaces and tesselation is for along with many, many other techniques. Some processor(s) would simply stream geometry to the rasterization hardware never staying resident in memory. At most you need to store some transformation matrices perhaps for skeleton animation, vertex blending, etc. 50 of these matrices, 4x4x4 bytes = 64bytes only takes up 3,200 bytes. You don't need a lot of frame buffer space for a television either. What's the resolution of the base TV? 320x240 or something? Triple buffer that with a 32 bits for Z and stencil and that's 1.2MB. Given low TV resolution, textures don't need to be very large either. I don't know the PS2 specs, but I'm sure it must have some texture compression as well.
Ryan Earl
Student of Computer Science
University of Texas
Unfortunately, it degrades into a battle of who can hit forward and B the fastest when playing multiplayer (at least against my lamo friends who do nothing but use the same move over and over and over and overa again).
:-)
I had this problem as well, until I learned to sidestep them and combo their ass
The VRAM on the PS2 is akin to the tiny active texture cache on your average 3D card. Texture can be brought in from main memory more quickly than most cards can load the texture cache from video memory.
Whoops, my comment was intended as a reply to the article in general, not this person's comment. My apologies for the confusion.
1. The dreamcast is mature, the PS2 is not. In terms of "fair" maybe we should compare releaserelease... but who gives a damn about "fair"? This is what's here _now_.
2. Actually, most of the release titles are mentioned in that round up. There was a startling array of good ones in the US release.
http://www.stileproject.com/ps2death.mpg
kinda funny video.
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft handles this with the XBox, who will have more influence on the developers? Microsoft or Sony?
:-)
Well, if early reports are to be believed (and that's all that exists for the xBox...) Microsoft will not be charging licensing fees for development on the xBox. While that doesn't prevent Sony from including PS2 only clauses in their contracts with developers, it does mean that developers won't have to sign aggreements with MS at all (disclaimer: I'm not an xbox developer, so I may have the licensing situation wrong
How about modifying slashcode so that when these repeat articles come up, it automatically loads the previous discussion so nobody has to waste time rehashing the same old comments.
The cake is a pie
How many living Americans actually were born in Africa? It is a constant source of puzzlement to me that blatant and open racism of this sort (a person has black skin so can't just be an "American") is not only tolerated but appears to be used by the people it's directed against. Although the same thing is starting to catch on in the UK (the MOBO awards are given to artists who are deemed racialy acceptable - ie Black) it still seems unethical to me.
Is XOR really an operation that can be performed on Racism?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Back face culling happens after projection into screen space. With modern architectures, you go ahead and dump everything that's on screen into the pipeline and let the hardware take care of the back face culling. The PS2 can chew through triangles so quickly that there's no effective cost in doing it this way.
Yeah, with the dreamcast having a year head-start. Sega's seen this before- The genesis was out far ahead of SNES, with a huge library. yet i'm willing to bet that there are more SNES units in homes than genesis units today.
I'm not sure that's true. I always thought Sega was generally seen as the victor of the 16-bit platform wars. Which made their rapid descent in the 32-bit wars so much more painful to them.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't believe any company has carried the lead from one generation of game console to the next. Generally the progression seen has been:
Atari 2600 (besting Colecovision and Intellivision)
Nintendo NES (Besting the Sega 8-bit system)
Sega Genesis (Besting the Nintendo SNES. Again, I'm going with popular opinion here... I had both consoles)
Sony Playstation (Besting the N64 and the Saturn)
For your post to be REALLY relevant, you'd be comparing the DC vs. PS2 RELEASE titles
I definitely disagree with this. Going into the holiday buying season, people should be more worried about the bang their buck can get them NOW than in some nebulous six to twelve month timeframe.
Actually, that's really easy.
:)
Soul Caliber vs. Tekken TT
Soul Caliber has the edge on TTT in everything except two player gameplay. Crisper brighter graphics, considerably better animation, and a hell of a lot more features for single player than TTT. Unfortunately, it degrades into a battle of who can hit forward and B the fastest when playing multiplayer (at least against my lamo friends who do nothing but use the same move over and over and over and overa again). Tekken is much better playing against your friends since they can't get away with that.
Both are good games, and both systems are good. I've got both so I don't care who wins. I'l aslo have a nintendo Dolphin, but I refuse to buy an X-Box!
You don't typically store polygons in VRAM. You calculate polygons dynamicly as you render the frame. Yeah, you need some sort of reference point (3D models, etc.), but that can be stored in regular RAM just fine. Anyone know how much main memory the PS2 has? The DC?
On the other hand, the Voodoo 1 also had 4MB of VRAM. I'm having trouble understanding how a "next generation" console can get by with so little. Even 8MB is puny compared to modern PC graphics cards.
------
Like many other geeks, I have an Apex to play the VCDs and such. That, of course, was $160, and it has all the other neat features thereof. The IR remote add-on is only $15 at funcoland, so that's not really a big deterrent. I mean, sure, it's extra money, but it's not a bad buy. Also, the menuing speed in the PS2'd DVD implementation is excellent (Then again, so is that of the apex) so it's an excellent platform for space ace, dragon's lair, et cetera.
This is a wonderful way, however, for families which don't already have a DVD player to get into DVD and to supply a new video game system for the kids at the same time. Sure, it's pricy, but not when you consider that it's both a game system and an excellent DVD player. It may not play VCD or out-of-region DVD (yet) but the vast majority of families won't care about that at all. For them, being able to play DVDs flawlessly is all a DVD player has to do.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Personally, I have to give props to any system that has a BROADBAND ADAPTER (e.g. connects to ethernet). Dunno if the dreamcast does this, but I know the ps2 does. I had a friend who writes for some smalling gaming mags review q3 on ps2 and he liked it, but
<ul>
<li>it only supports custom maps that come with it
<li>only 4 players max
</ul>
<p>
I had so many people tell me that this system was going to kick a pc's butt.....not with those limitations, but the broadband is a good start.
Okay I got friends that got a kick ass computer but all he do is play games. I sit in my room and surf the web, program, and help my friends make CDs off of MP3.com. I have a Dreamcast and I can't see my self paying $300 for a console. I got a Geforce 2($300 card) and all that mean is that I can turn up all the grapic details in Quake 3 but it's still the same game I don't care how good it looks. That's the only upgrading I'm doing to my computer in a long time.
Why a game system? Just put in the game and that's it. That's what I love about my DC! I don't have to fight over drivers. Write or post about games being ported to Linux(I still want them tho) and download patches for a game. Game systems is great, if someone never used a computer then what would they have to do? Learn the OS(Windows because it's easier for most), then make sure they have the right almount of Ram, Hardrive space, Video card and a good CPU for that game. Also you have to remember if you want your games to look good as consoles you would have to make sure you keep upgrading. That includes from the Ram on up to the OS knowing M$.
=)
As for the PS2 and the DC it's all about the games. I don't care how they look, you can tell people what hey want but if they see a good game on PS2 then they will go there. If the same game is put out on both the DC and PS2 and let the user show how the game look. I would like to play FF 9, but I don't feel like going out and PS just for that. It's all about the companies, because they don't care how hard it is to program for long as people keep going and staying hype then the will keep pushing out games.
From Zero to Hero... Starbuck Zero
IGNcube compared Nintendo GAMECUBE and Sony PlayStation2 in "Gamecube Versus PlayStation 2." In the article there are "comments from respected development houses Bioware, Naughty Dog and Oddworld Inhabitants, as well as Left Field Productions and Factor 5."
>>in reporting an article on DC vs PS2 that was written by a Seg-affiliated site. That's like reporting on a MS review that Linux sucks: it's pointless....
Are you expecting some psx site to release these facts? No-the only people who will are those who care. If you want to find a decent rebuttal for this go for it, but it's gonna be hard to disprove an article that's all facts.
There are marked advantages to console systems, like fighting / puzzle games, which have never achieved success on the PC. Just as RTS, and FPS will probably never be serious on the consoles. I have yet to see a viable version of Street Fighter, or Tekken appear on my PC. Also, console games rarely have bugs. How many Quake 3, UT, Half-Life, Diablo, Starcraft patches have you downloaded? Its nice and simple.
This isn't entirely fair. Many console games have bugs (and they are just plain never fixed). Usually these aren't the showstoppers you find in PC games fortunatly, however the multitude of Starcraft patches (for example) have been to fine tune the play balance of the game and to fix extremly obscure network exploits. There was only one actual "crash the game" bug fixed that I can remember, and it was some sort of oddity with the last Terrain campaign that triggered only very rarely AFAIK. One of the weaknesses for consoles is that you can't patch a game once it is released (which DOES lead to better release quality games) which can lead to games with festering bugs. Just look how many people say character x is the only character I play, because that character is slightly (or sometimes grossly) unbalanced. Of course these munchkins also wonder why nobody wants to play with them.
I read the internet for the articles.
Clic k here to see someone beat the crap out of a PS2 box.
(Ignore the banner ads...and right-click where it tells you to...)
Just look how many people say character x is the only character I play, because that character is slightly (or sometimes grossly) unbalanced. Of course these munchkins also wonder why nobody wants to play with them.
This is a good point that I didn't really think about. I guess they are "fixed" in future revisions of the game (look at the castration of Ryu and Ken in street fighter games). Alot of times however, a character may seem underpowered, but the true fact is that nobody knows how to use them properly. (Try playing against me as Adon in SFA2)
Also, you could argue that consoles get better games because more people play them. Diablo has sold amazingly well, and has grossed maybe 2 million copies. Each iteration of Final Fantasy trounces that number, and I don't even want to think about how many copies of Zelda or Metroid are out there.
Consoles have the advantage of a stable platform. You know that everyone has the same machine, with the same controllers. A game developed for the PC has to take everything into account, and not everyone even has a gamepad, let alone one with a standard configuration, and the keyboard doesn't lend itself well to certain style games.
I'm hoping the X-Box can use its hard drive to address things like play balance and things of that nature, but at the same time preventing developers for using it as an excuse to put out shoddy software, and patching it later.
Captain_Frisk
A Voodoo1 is also limited to 640x480 resolution. However, that's considered high-res in the console world where (the TV equivalent of) 320x240 is the norm. Ever wonder why the N64 was able to put in full scene antialiasing on Voodoo1 level hardware?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
RE: You must be hardware designed to be sure.
Nope, sorry. Software.
RE: What makes you thnk that Sony's engineers who struggled to meet the marketing BS specs published have not tried every possible thing to make it happen?
They could have been constrained by costs, licensing agreements, deadlines, any of a number of reasons that have NOTHING to do with the engineering standpoint.
RE: What makes you think that some other people will be able to reverse engineer hardware without any specs,
Please check up on the dictionary definition of hacker. The hacker scene died when people started trading curiosity, rifling through pinouts documents et. al. and poking around with a soldering iron and/or hex editor for kiddie scripts and warez.
RE: possibly breaking Sony's license and getting sued later can do it???
I'm of the opinion that when I buy something it's mine, and if I fuck with it, and the warranty goes bye bye that's my problem and I couldn't care less.
RE: The days are changing, it;s no longer C64 world.
Yeah, but curiosity doesn't have to change, does it?
RE: Chips are more complicated to design, it takes very well coordinated efforts of MANY talented individuals to design one.
On the flip side, we also have the collaborative power of the Internet and more sophisticated and cheaper tools. So what's your point?
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
and it makes me teary-eyed to see Sega get savagely thrashed by Sony. Sega and Nintendo are the one's responsible for timeless classics like Sega Rally Championship, Virtua Fighter 2 and Super Mario, not Sony. What beat Sega was PlayStations hardware architecture, which was easier for game developers to program for than Saturn's multi-cpu blah-blah-blah. Ergo, third party development flourished for the PlayStation and Sega got the sloppy seconds. Let's hope the DreamCast can withstand the PS/2 marketing flurry and perhaps even wobble Sony with a good combination... God knows Nintendo won't release anything decent for adults!
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
A few questions for the /. community. First of all, has anyone seen a revamped version of Terminator vs Robocop for consoles or PC's?
2nd: Who would win a fight:5 Robocops and 5 Terminators VS 1 superman, 2 batmin, and 2 spidermin???
Everything is but a number spoken by itself.
The Z-Buffer is all well and good, but it doesn't fully stop from rendering images that aren't visible. The ATi Radeon has "HyperZ" which only renders visible objects, and the boost can be upwards of 50% FPS when it's enabled. The Kyro uses the PowerVR chipset as well, and it gets more performance out of less MHz than the competition (although it's still weak...).
One of the reasons that consoles seemingly have less bug-prone games than PC's is because it is a stable platform. When you develop a PC game, you target a particular set of hardware (which is never the high end as that would limit your profits, so those who bought that $600 vid card, has 512MB ram, and a 1gig proc may see some benefits, but if the game was not designed with that in mind, you're just hitting diminishing returns much quicker), but almost every PC is a bit different (whether hardware or software as in drivers or OS), so the range of possible incompatibilities (ie, bugs) is much larger on a PC than on a console.
They can't because the video memory is embedded into the graphics synthesizer chip.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The PS2 has...
32 MB of DRAM.
2 MB of Audio RAM
4 MB of VRAM
The Dreamcast has...
16 MB of DRAM
2 MB of Audio RAM
8 MB of VRAM
"I Geek, therefore I know." -Riskable
--------------------------
-Riskable
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
Bingo. And by operating entirely off the main bus, you can do some deep, deep analysis without burdening the main bus, even spitting data straight into the graphics hardware without revisiting the main bus.
Sony have shown how to structure programs for anti-aliasing with zero cost. The kind of trickery and special-case handling other systems use isn't required. It really is spectacular hardware.
katananja shouldn't do math. Pixels != Polygons.
"He treats objects like women, man!"
- The Dude, The Big Lebowski
Phil Harrison VP of R&D at SCE Explains all of the memory issues on Gamers.com.o n/index There are also video explanations in ASF & MOV format concerning the memory. A good read.
http://www.gamers.com/s/feature/000717-philharris
"PC's are for work; consoles are for play; board games are for a social life. " WELL SAID!
DrPascal: Not the language, the mathematician.
The first thing that surprised me about the PS/2 was its high price and i was reluctant to buy one mainly because i was pretty confident i could get a couple of my friends to build a clone for me that would still run Windows and Wolfenistein3D. At first the choice of games for the PS/2 was pretty slim, mostly DOS apps and a few weak ones for Windows 3.0 but i guess when IBM RELEASED THE "PS/2" (PERSONAL SYSTEM 2) IN 1987 we really had no idea what things might be like more than 10 years later when sony would release the "PSX2" (PLAYSTATION 2) in 2000.
another crappy football game, an even worse fighting game.
We've all seen the screenshots, we know it looks like jaggedy crap compared to the dreamcast. Which is pretty freakin pathetic considering the dreamcast is TWO YEARS OLD!!
Even if the Dreamcast did look worse, at 1/3 the price and with so many more(and better) games...
screw PS2
what happens to these broadband adapters if IPV6 is released and widely adopted by broadband providers?
Yeah, what if it rained beer?
My other
Then you also have to worry about drivers every 3 months(random period), about OS updates every year, and game patches every other week for the first 2 months of it's existence. How is that bad? You don't prefer to update games that have bugs, or to boost your FPS by having better hardware support? Either way, consoles are moving in that direction. The Xbox comes with an 8GB harddrive and is broadband-enabled...
PS2 vs. PC
Even more interesting, however, is the article about the architecture of the Playstation 2's Emotion Engine. I'd suggest that anyone read both of these articles before believing all the claims in that SegaWeb article.
I have a couple kicking around. Wonderful design, but I've found all the plastic clicky bits are very fragile after about 10 years of service. IT'S AN OUTRAGE.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Can you come up with better ones than he did? Or do you just enjoy writing useless comments like this?
I for one thought it was an interesting way to think of RAM and bandwidth.
DrPascal: Not the language, the mathematician.
Basically, I hold that if you are born in the US, you are not an African-American, but just an American. If you immigrate to the United states from Africa, then you are an African-American. My Grandfather was Polish-American. I am an American. Granted not everybody agrees with me, because if we can't lable people we can't show how disadvantaged they are.
Vermifax
Vermifax
Logout
They do not change.
and so, studios who develop for consoles like the ps2 or the dc can focus more on the game itself, rather than how many new high-tech widgets and crap they can stuff in a game.
UT on pc- buggy as heall
quake on pc- finicky
everquest on pc-- too many problems to mention
tekken tag -- hmmm. works great.
gee, i wonder what system i'll buy oni for...
semantics are everything!
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is why there's a job shortage in IT. All the kids in this country just plop in a CD and it works. They never need to tinker with the computer to see how it works. So then they don't feel comfortable working on computers and don't go into the computer field. I remember seeing an article somewhere a couple weeks ago that explained why making everything easier is not necessary the best path to take. I'm in IT only because I was forced to figure out DOS memory management and editing .INI files and the like as a kid.
The dumbing down of America...do your part to prevent it.
Games are the natural proving ground, but Sony has enough of the current market (and general buzz about the new machine) to help them though this transitional period.
When the Gamecube and Xbox make an appearance the market will get too small for niche consoles. I find it hard to believe that 4 console makers are each going to find enough share of the market to make their businesses feasible.
-- Hob - Java Spectrum Emulator
Yeah....
...but can it play DVD's and PS2 games at the same time. Then i will buy one.
That's exactly right - and if you want another example to prove that point, look at the market share of PalmOS devices vs. Windows CE. The incredible amount of software available for the Palm is just like the Gameboy situation.
A small proportion of people want the coolest, fastest, most colorful gadget available. Most people want what satisfies their needs at the right price. Unfortunately for the first group, they aren't a big enough group to make devices like Windows CE a good proposition when you think about the proportionally higher R&D & production costs for their devices. (hence Philips dropping their Windows CE line) Fortunately, these devices are produced by engineers who mostly belong to that first group.
Of course the availability of software is also driven by the quality of the development tools. The Codewarrior IDE is excellent - you don't even need hardware to start work, the emulator is just as good as the real thing. The documentation from Palm is about the best I've seen for any platform. By contrast, Windows CE requires an add-on to VisualC++. In the early days you had to use assemblers and DOS to build for CE! And finding which Win32 API calls were actually present was largely a matter of guesswork. I wonder how manay developers were (like me) so disgusted by the Windows CE development environment that they switched to Palm and never looked back?
Can you run Linux on it?... and if so... maybe a cluster?
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
1 word - Pokèmon...
Hmmm... if fighting games is the only stuff you use a console for, then the Dreamcast should very amply fulfill your needs. It doesn't have TTT and SFEX3, but it does have Soul Calibur, Dead or Alive 2 (so does PS2), two versions of SF3, SFA3, VF3, and tons more. Wait 'til Guilty Gear X comes out, too. Besides, Tekken and SFEX are rather poor fighting games.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
Only my immediate conclusion on the feel of the thing. I'm sure the DC can travel great, but it just feels cheap.
As for SSX, that's the game they had at the kiosk, and it's damn cool. Doesn't mean it's the only game I'd buy the console for, but it's rare to see a really kickass launch title ( IMHO ).
Also doesn't mean the DC doesn't have good games as well.
I have yet to get enough play time to judge.
And yes, I am on crack.
They're not, but the writing on the site is definitely going to have a Sega slant to it, whether or not Sega puts any pressure on them. I wouldn't be surprised (not alleging anything, mind you) if Sega didn't offer them some form of incentive to breathe a little more life into DC.
I think it's pretty clear that the PS2 is a more powerful platform than DC. As stated previously, though, what really matters is the games, and the jury is (for the most part) still out, there. It also seems clear that you have to do more work to get amazing performance out of the PS2, while the DC is better for lazy developers. So which is the better platform? The one that has the games you want.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is a wonderful way, however, for families which don't already have a DVD player to get into DVD and to supply a new video game system for the kids at the same time.
Yeah, and it's a wonderful way to bend current DVD player owners over and fuck them up the ass.
I have a DVD player. Moreover, I have a GOOD DVD player that's better than the PS2 one and so Sony putting a DVD player into the PS2 is completely and utterly useless to me, and in fact incurs the additional cost of paying for shit I don't want or need.
Fuck families. Fuck the kids. I want a game console, dammit.
--
Kevin Doherty
kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net
Kevin Doherty
kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net
Thankyou! This was what i've been saying all along.
your initial premise "It has the best next-generation games available for any console by FAR, including some really killer online titles" is an opinion not shared by everyone. I'm not saying I believe it, however it is likely.
Vermifax
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If anyone is interested in a GOOD example of what the PS2 can do, check this: http://www.gamestop.com/large-screen-shots/992021l 6.jpg
Thank you.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
Screw that! I was going to buy a Playstation2, but not now. Not now that I know that it only has 4MB of VRAM. Why would I want a game system that has only 4MB of VRAM, when another game system as 8MB of VRAM. Who cares about games. I want the system with the highest tech stats, because I don't even play video games. I just piss and moan about gaming system stats all day.
From http://www.dricasworld.com/news/101100h9.shtml
Planetweb CEO Ken Soohoo being asked about coding on the PS2 platform...
Q: Seeing that your company has first hand experience, is there any truth to the rumor that the PlayStation2 is a pain to code on?
A: Well, it depends on what you mean by a pain. You know, it's very powerful. It's got a ton of different graphic engines, and graphic paths, and you can do so much with it. It's not like they just loaded up on a giganto CPU and said "Well here you go, isn't this neat?". They have made a lot of custom hardware inside this platform. It means that in order to get the most out of it you're going to really have to dig deep and work hard. That means that the lifetime of this product line will be very long. It means that a year, two years, three years from now, you will still see games that are getting better and better and better as people learn how to make all those paths shine, and work in parallel and all those things they were intended to do by the hardware designers. So frankly, a general purpose CPU is pretty quick. You pound the compiler at it and there you go, you're done. So it really depends on what you mean by difficult. I wouldn't characterize it as difficult. I think a classic games programmer from the last decade and a half of making games is very excited about working on the PlayStation2. It's one of the most imaginative new systems to come out from a hardware architecture perspective. I think that people who entered programming in the last four years are used to "Well, here's the C compiler, let'er rip," and they're not really used to what games used to be, which was custom hardware.
And it doesn't play VCDs, SVCDs and the like, unlike most $170 DVD players nowadays.
But it has better DVD quality than those $170 players; better, even than most $500 players. (This is going on reviews I've read, not my own personal experience.) You may need VCD support and a 5-disc changer, but most people only care about quality and price.
So the only good reason to get a PS2 anytime soon is for the (you guessed it) games.
Well, the people in Japan who have only bought an abysmal average of 1.8 games/ PS2 sold seem to disagree with you. Of course, that number will rise once the games stop sucking so much.
Also, from what I read, developers can also write directly to ram. Can the DC do that? I dunno what boost that would give to the PS2?(yes I got one) People compare these 2 consoles and say "Oh the DC is better and has better games..." but fail to mention that the DC has been out for a year. Was everyone expecting the PS2 to come out with a years worth of games at launch? Anyways, I would love to see a comparison dealing with a little more attention to detail about the two different technologies.
Yeah, I realized after that I posted that I was probably too glib about tossing terms like 'z-buffer algorithms' around when a generic z-buffer algorithm is just about pixel-by-pixel go/no-go decisions on rendering from a given polygon.
The tile rendering system you describe sounds quite worthwhile, and I have no doubt the DC does something as smart as that. I was mainly objecting to the 'textures both sides of the polygon' bit.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Except the MOBO awards are given to white artists as well. It's music of black origin, not music by black artists. Though it seems to have a slightly narrow defination.
Details details. Since when has Microsoft had to ship anything to take the #1 spot on any review or poll? :-) X-Box is THE best gaming platform of all time. It beats out the PS2, Dreamcast, and Dolphin without a fight. If you start out thinking otherwise you'll just end up in a bad mood when the reviews come out. Just start to accept Microsoft==FAST, Microsoft=Good.. Microsoft==Stable. Can I put my clothes back on now?
heh, they could. think about it. they have several ways.
Memory stick - just stick it in the pcmcia slot in the back. im sure theres a way to remove that plastic that is in there now.
HD slot - why not, the firewireport can run a HD anyways, its gonna be like that in Japan, why not here too?
Sure, remember all the technological edges the Jaguar and TurboGrafx systems had? That ensured their long term success...
Or actually, it didn't help at all and they got run into the ground.
The DC has a very limited supply of games of C quality. I've got over 50 DC games, and I honestly HATE, not just don't really like, HATE, over half of them. I enjoy playing maybe 5.
I guarantee that in a year's time I'll have more than 5 PS2 games that I really like playing and less than 28 that I hate.
Oh yeah...don't buy a PS2 on Ebay...I'm looking for a solution around that...if I can find it...muahahahaha...I'd just love to see when those guys who bought 15 machines are suddenly left holding 15 and nobody wants to buy their inventory.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
Dammit everyone. Since when has an ethernet adapter been called a "Broadband adapter". Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!
does anyone here even own a ps2? i seem to be one of the few folks that got a ps2, and can make an unbiased judgement, since i consider myself to be unbiased. why do i consider myself unbiased? i own a ps2, a drica, an n64, a psx, an snes, and an snes. since i still buy [and enjoy] games for all the consoles listed, i thknk this would make me unbiased. do i like my ps2? yes, i sure do. i just played timsplitters from 11pm to 7am, and had a hell of a time. and when we started get hostile towards each other, we busted own samba de amgio and the maracas. oh yes, samba de amigo is on the dreamcast. it seems as if the only people who judge a system once they have it are the unbiased types. my final point is, don't say it sucks until you play some fucking games.
'Mullethead. A hairstyle that's a way of life'
I'm not saying that Pretty Graphics aren't good, I'm saying that gameplay shouldn't be sacrificed for them. And in too many newer games, they are. Today's gamers may like graphics, but they still want games that they can enjoy for a long time.
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
Haven't SquareSoft and Sony already pumped mucho buxos into the development of PlayOnline? I don't think Sony would be stupid enough to fund a company that will create a service that their products won't be able to handle. And how do you peeps think the PS2 followers will be able to combat the X-Box people when PlayOnline goes multi-platform? These are the golden years of gaming, imho.
GuyFantasy | News Writer | www.square-x.com
Why are we living in a society where we have to quantify everything against everything else? Why is it that people can see things so dramatically different, due to a little education? Why is it that people are always seeming to be so disatisfied with this, that, and the other, that the original point of something has been distorted and completely lost?
:). Honestly, I think they're both absolutely amazing system, so why try to convince me, or anyone else, of otherwise?
In today's society, the age of the Internet, if you will, speed is one of the most key things to have. It seems like no matter what you do, if you don't have enough speed, you're not going to be successful, either with yourself, or with other people. If you think about it, everything involves speed these days: computers, cars, sporting events, food. Given that, it's only natural that video game systems would also want a lot of speed. But the double standard steps in when video games should only want speed to impress, not to satisfy. You can apply that logic to anything involved with a video game (system). If you were to talk with the old video game companies (Atari, pre-SNES Nintendo, pre-Saturn SEGA), they would tell you that they weren't out to just satisfy people. They were out to impress, whether through graphics, or gameplay, or speed, it seemed like whatever they did was always cutting-edge, because it had never been seen before. Assuming that the same sort of logic applies to today, why are everyone's panties in a bunch because they think that the PS2 might have some flaws when compared to the Dreamcast? There's absolutely no necessity to compare the two systems, except to make people feel stupid about the 4-pound piece of plastic that they've just purchased. Quantification doesn't make things better, it's just makes them less-impressive.
Just a few weeks ago, I was reading a story in my English class at school. A (nonfiction) story about a marine biologist who was plagued with seeing sea otters, and the such, in a purely scientific way. He was upset that he couldn't truly appreciate marine life how non-marine biologists do: with wonder and enjoyment. He had to look at the animals with a purely scientific view, not necessarily because that was what he was paid for, but simply because it's what he'd gotten used to. Essentially, the moral of that story was that looking at things with wonder and enjoyment, without having to dissect them and assign numbers to different categories of their existence, is a lost feeling when you become too educated about a topic. Given that, who on Earth wants to see two video game systems compared. If these plastic boxes are here for people to enjoy them, then what's the point of taking that away? Education doesn't make things less interesting, it just makes them less mystical.
Even though I'm only a sophomore in high school, I know that there used to be a time when people considered themselves lucky; they figured that there was nothing better than living in the most opportunistic country, having faithful friends, and watching a movie every Thursday night on NBS (in color, to boot). Where along the line did people start looking for things to be disappointed in? In every single idea these days, a flaw of some sort is always made apparent by someone. Keeping in mind that I'm not counting flaws that HAVE to be pointed out (things like those Firestone tires, etc.). I'm talking about the unnecessary things, like comparing a video game's system specs to another's. I'm talking about things that seem to serve very little purpose other than pissing on someone's parade (NOTE: One of the sure-fire ways of finding one of these stupid comments are to look for sentences that start "Sorry to tell you this, but.."). Disatisfaction doesn't change the product, it just changes the world around it.
So now that I've addressed all three of my initial questions, I'll just do a little real-world ranting. The other day, I was in CompUSA and I played Madden 2001 on the PS2. My eyes were probably as large as dinner plates because I was so amazed at the quality of the graphics, sound (particularly the commentary), and really just the whole presentation of the game. Who cares if the PS2 has 4MB of video ram and the DC has 8? It's not quantity; it's what you do with the quantity (a.k.a. quality
It's really just a sad fact that geeks always want numbers to understand things. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love numbers. Math has always been my favorite class, but some things should just go unquantified, particularly if that was never the intent. I'll propose one last question: What happened to fun?
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
There IS a bit of FUD in there... Perhaps you should look for a less biased source to link to?
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
The X-Box does ship with a broadband adaptor.
Really? Where can I get one?
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
p.s. the italics was a horrible industrial accident involving funyons and pez... or me forgeting an ending /i tag... either way
It's not for everybody
>Who's the black private dick, who's a sex machine for all the chicks?
Steeeve Dahl! (sorry, Chicago radio personality reference. Seeing that made me have a sudden flashback to 1984 growing up in Chicago Heights.)
Money isn't tight, but I still wouldn't blow a couple hundred dollars on a console and then almost a hundred bucks per game. Especially since I've never found a console that produces graphics and speed that compare to my PC (or whatever PCs I have at the time that each console has been released throughought the last fifteen years).
I hate to sound like an old curmudgeon -- I just honestly don't understand the appeal to these boxes in this day and age... I'd suggest saving that $200 and applying it to a high-end video card. Then every time you buy a game for your computer (if you actually pay for it, that is) put the $30 or $50 that you're saving over the cost of a console title toward future upgrades.
Hell, just a thought . . .
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seumas.com
Even that wouldn't exactly be fair. First generation games typically have vastly differing quality, with some consoles shipping with strong first gen games, and others with poor first gen games. I'd wait for the second or third generation comparisons before making any conclusions about any of these consoles. Hell, look at the original playstation. Most of the release titles are just plain sad, whereas some of these end-of-life games being released now are exploiting the machines true capability and producing graphics that almost compare to these new machines.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
A few Cowards have hit this point already, but I'll take the risk of redundancy in order to present it with some sort of minimum elegance.
Simply put, you need to look more into what games are available on both systems. There are, of course, plenty of PC games that don't require any more thought than the console games you're denouncing, but more importantly, there are plenty of console games that require just as much thought as any PC game.
There's at least one passel, maybe more, of RPGs for consoles(Final Fantasy 1-8, Chrono Trigger/Cross), as well as strategy-based games (Fire Emblem, Ogre Battle Tactics), puzzle games (Chu Chu Rocket, Daedalian Opus [I know it's a really old game, but damn does it take thought...]), and more...
[the absolute destiny: apocalypse]
I don't know, we've all seen this coming, right?
There's already been a lot of commentary on how the PS/2 is less than expected. Get over it. Wait 'til the games come out: it's still about what's the most fun, right?
Yeah, mod me down, I'm too close to the 26 mark as it is.
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[ approaching AI ]
The PS2 short is badly aliased. Wasn't that a problem with some early Japanese PS2s that has since been fixed?
Eenie meenie miney moe
Stupid voters have to go.
Inca dinca dinca do
I can do it, why can't you?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I would say that PS/2 has been pretty successful so far. Look on the back of your computer. What do you think that is that you're keyboard's plugged into? (Unless, of course, you have an Apple, Sun, or other weird hardware.)
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Is there Diablo 1/2 for console? How about Worcraft 1/2 and Starcraft? Or Quake 1/2/3? Or Unreal?
I thought so...
And I don't care about Sonic and Mario and Zelda and whatever other crap consoles have.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What a lot of people perceive as antialiasing problems on PSX2 are in fact (at least partially) the result of bad mipmapping. Although the hardware will (if you ask nicely) select a miplevel based on vertex Z, it will NOT take into account the polygon slope. That means that a polygon that's sloped with respect to the viewer does not correctly drop to a lower miplevel. The result is that silhouette polys (which are typically at a sharp angle to the viewer) get a badly pixellated/sparkly look.
The solution is to switch off the auto-mipmapping and calculate the mipmapping parameters yourself. Although the vector-units are nice and fast at this sort of thing, it's certainly not free.
something like 10 MILLION Playstations (first one) already sold.
More like 70 (seventy) million as of Dec 99 ...
But anyway...
Most of the techno mumbo jumbo is meaningless to my tiny mind, but the pictures I see on the article definately put the Dreamcsat on top. The user who keeps posting the 2 urls comparing Dreamcast and PS2 also shows a good difference.
I know most Slashdot readers are gung ho on the PS2, but I bought a Dreamcast a couple months ago and love it. There are soo many different kind of games being built for it, where I see the ps2 having the old game ideas thrown back together in monotonus renditions...
10MB/frame on screen for the PS2 and 25MB/frame on screen for Dreamcast... Ouch... I supposed writing to VRAM is a mounds quicker then writing to GS-memory.
Oh welps...
Who's the black private dick, who's a sex machine for all the chicks?
Pity the poor computer salespeople.
'Yes.. I'm here to complain about this keyboard for my PS/2'
'Why? What's wrong with it'
'There's no freaking square ports on the back of my computer! It doesn't fit!'
Or even worse
'Funny.. I bought a mouse from you that said it was PS/2 compatible.. But my son's playstation didn't like it one bit.'
Weapons of Mass Analysis
Give it a break, already! This is what, the fifth or sixth PS2 article in the past 72 hours?
Really, Taco, we need a PS2 icon so that some of us can add it to the "ignore" list...
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Go ahead and moderate me down for this, but why is Slashdot posting press releases as though they were fact?!
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
But you forget that it was a HD/ethernet combo, with a lot more sales potential (even if you ignore the fact that your estimates of the broadband sales are off by an order of magnitude).
Also, for the person who thought it was questionable the X-box would ship with etherenet - I think MS would remove memory before dropping the etherenet. I think the X-box has a lot of problems going for it, but it's 90% sure it'll ship with an adaptor... just like I'm 90% sure the PS2 will ship a broadband adaptor given the market they are trying to go after.
And remember this - the PS2 is not going to have a modem because Sony wants the baseline of development to be broadband. I wouldn't be surprised if they talked the UT people out of supporting USB modems to ensure that was so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Dreamcast
THANK YOU.
Oh yeah, all those "broadband adapters" (aka ethernet) that are current in PCs everywhere are going to need a hardware upgrade for IPv6!! Certainly not just a new TCPIP stack that lives completely in software!!
Genius
What the author probably meant is that the DC graphics libraries are smart enough to not do texturing for polygons which are completely occluded by other polygons, but that is a software function, not a hardware function.
Wrong. It's certainly possible the DC libraries don't pass completely occluded polygons to the graphics hardware, but that's not what deferred rendering is about. First of all, the Imagination Technologies chip uses tile based rendering (or perhaps more clearly 'defered texturing'). What this means is that it's got a small z-buffer on chip, and renders the scene in small tiles the size of this z-buffer. Defered rendering refers to the fact that only those pixels that are visible as determined by the z-buffer are textured and shaded. In a traditional architecture (e.g. Nvidia) the whole polygon is textured & shaded.
Z-buffer algorithms have been doing that in 3d graphics systems for years as well.
Software z-buffer algorithms certainly. Although, of course, you don't need a z-buffer to determine if a polygon is completely occluding another one.
Great games
If you look at the design of the PS2 architecture you'll see that it's a good 5 years ahead of where everybody else is. The PS2 was design for dynamic media applications. (3D Games) This is were you have some small loops of code that process a huge amount of data. (Renedering 3D images) If you look at the PS2 you will see you have a very wide data bus thats connected to a bunch of very fast vector units. (The V1 , V0, Emotion engine) If your a geek you need to read the following links. It's really opened my eyes to the power of the PS2. PS2 Architecture VS PC Architecture Emotion Engine Analysis
even then, you cant explain how the machine stayed alive till pokemon hit, which was 1997. it was the steady amount of games.
Sega dumped the Gamegear in favor of a three platform company, that was Genesis, 32X, and Saturn. If you just think back to then, people who had one remember that all of the sudden the games just stop comming for it.
Its easy to see how GB lived. every time it ran out of gas, they were able to pull it out. during the color portables, it was games that were like the super nintendo games it was copying. During the 32bit rush, it was shrinking the console, and getting cheap. when the 64 came out, it finally got color. and now when the next gen systems are comming, they have one that can look like most of the 32bit games.
heh yeah.. get a nice pc (yeah it's expensive, but hell, it's probably the best thing you have to do). geforce2 and a nice cpu, for example, and invite friends who own PS2/DC machines, just to see the change in their face :)
Im not fully versed one all the inside tech of the ps2, but ill make some semi-eduacated inferences based on something someone who says they know said.
>>
ok, but they have to be SOMEWHERE. ps2 has 32mb main memory if i recall. So thats the texture limitation, barring compressin, and the space used for models, processing physics, et al. Also, that still doesnt get passed all the other stuff you need for each frame. theres a reason games dont run in 640x480 with FSAA on the ps2, and it all comes down to the vram limitation, and in the end, will have the biggest impact on how good the overall image quality will look in the future.
>>
Texture streaming: lets use quake 3 arean for an example.
heres how i see the dreamcast/pc way;
vram contains texture data for any givin level, and its all loaded at once. So, when you do a 180 in Q3A, it knows it has the resources to draw whatever texture is behind you.
heres how i see the ps2 way;
vram contains essentially a texture *buffer* for that frame. 4mb is a hard limit of per-frame textures. I dont care what your bandwith is, for the architecture, you are locked down to 4mb a frame. Well, thas not counting any other stuff that has to be in the vram.
On a pc, you could have 32mbs of textures in your view area at once. If you dont see what im getting at, consider this. one any on frame, the ps2 coud have say a mona lisa texture on a wall, and lets say it takes all texture ram for whats viewable in a single frame(~4mb). On the pc, in theory, you could have say 8 different textures of that size in one frame.
now lets say you have a room with 4 walls, each with a texture in the middle that takes up all the vram on the ps2. your staring forward a the mona lisa, you turn 90 degrees to a picture of the president. this is where you have to texture stream. First, you would need to allocate a pool ofyour main ram for textures(they gotta be somwhere). lets say we have no game data, so we use all 32mb of it. now when you turn, it would seem that the cpus have to chunk out to vram what bits of texture are viewable. So as you turn, and your view changes from one pic to the other, the cpu(s) are constantly transferring new texture data to vram(ie, different sized chunks of 2 textures). This gets in to so many problems i dont even feel like typing them out. In truth, i dont think you could do the texture work on a single frame of Q3A in original size/bit depth textures on the ps2 in a lot of spots. You stil have the pool of textures in main ram, bu you still can only have so much on screen at once.
Now, Q3A is an instance where you need textures on demand, that being you need all the textures fo a level loaded in to some form of ram all at once because you never know where a player is going to go. On racing games or other games where you have a linear progression, then you can start doing texture dumps from the DVD as you are playing. DVD isnt that fast so you have to be pretty conservative with how much data your taking from it. Could you imagine being in quake and tuining around and watching a wall texture load from the DVD?
now, the pudding is, how much VRAM would you have left for textures on a game runing 640x480 with FSAA? I dont think it matters how fast you stream, you have that texture limit per frame.
also, the 800mb of teture being streamed is kind of misleading, seeing as that would be if you a) had enough ram and b) that was ALL you were transferring. even then i dont htink you could do it. its a bogus number.
now im not positive any any architecture i mention, and would love some edcation if someone knows more on any of this.
>>
if anyone could provide some detail on what goes in to both z-buffer and pre-sorting, it would be appreciated.
i am also curious as to why games do not run in 640x480(a makeshift cure for no AA on a tv screen)
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
Think: high bandiwidth, as in, 32 megs on my video card, and a slower (relative to a PS2) pipeline to 256 megs of main memory, with a variety of faster (relative to a PS2) bulk storage devices behind it. The PS2 gets the discount version; only 4 megs of video memory, which optimally gets updated on a per frame basis from, ooh, 32 megs of system memory, or the very high speed (relative to a PC-XT) bulk storage device. Guess what? In this scenario, the PS2 loses in it's ability to deliver, every single time. As for media delivery, who has the media to deliver? If you're streaming video, my PC has quite enough bandwidth. If you're generating 10 (oops... I mean 3) megs of procedural textures each frame, then the PS2 wins, so long as you can do it in a way that is friendly to its low grade CPU with fast vector units on the side.
Are there reasons to choose this architecture? Sure... my guess is once they decided on Rambus, they had high bandwidth memory that was expensive. This architecture probably saved them money over putting in lots of extra memory. It also does encourage some procedural stuff, since you have to store them in main memory, anyway. Maybe they think it's a neat feature and want to distinguish themselves that way.
Wow, that's a rant. Anyway, get your console based on games, not architecture. At best, the PS2 is five years perpendicular to everyone else, the same way Transmeta claims to be. And if you're counting on building up a library of good games from lots of publishers, fast, that's probably not a good place to be.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hey, say what you want, but PCBoard is still running on that Model 50... Viva la Fidonet!!!! ;-)
Well, I stole them from Ars Technica, because I couldn't think of anything better. Try to do it yourself without spending an inordinate amount of time on making a post :)
Only those who dream can grasp reality.
Is this news? "SEGA SAYS PS2 SUCKS" Well, I'm shocked.
dinosaur comics
Hmmm. I'm obviously an old timer, but a PS/2 was around in 1987 -- the IBM Personal System/2, when they tried (and failed) to make the architecture proprietary. What's left of it all is that little DIN socket on the back of your PC called a PS/2 mouseport.
My point -- oh yes -- it's darn confusing to those of us over the age of 25 if you start re-using industry TLAs. Talking of which, just who the heck are RMS and ESR?
I agree with you. But just look at the Dreamcast. It has the best next-generation games available for any console by FAR, including some really killer online titles, and yet it's heading quickly towards the grave by all indications. There's obviously more to the equation of what makes a console succeed, but for the life of me I just can't understand why the DC isn't selling out systems and games all over the place. They have AWESOME games, a killer price-point, and pretty decent marketing.
The PS2 has incredible momentum, and that will drive system sales, which will in turn incent developers to make great games for it, which will in turn sell more systems. Sega was somehow able to short circuit this cycle, and get a bunch of killer games even though the system hasn't had great sales, and yet it seems like they're still doomed.
Ya got me..
paulb
Paul Bettner
Game Developer et al
Insightful enough, but I simply have to mention the most friggin underrated game ever: Shining Force. Always been a Sega game, and one of the best RPGs a console has ever had. Infinitely better then the oh-so overrated Final Fantasy..... Final Fantasy has lame number inflation (10 thousand hitpoints anybody?), and the dumbest combat system in the world (oooh I stand here, bad guys stand there, we hurt each other.... we heal if we need it, and occasionally we're ambushed and have enemies on BOTH sides), whereas Shining Force has initiative, overhead grid view stuff, movement, strategy, area affect spells, etc.... anyway, sure Sega doesn't have all the good games, but Sega has a lot of good games that just didn't get good publicity. For some reason people just don't KNOW about them.
That and a blue hedgehog with attitude is cooler then a fat slow plumber :p.
I understand that you wrote This is obviously biased 'cuz the site is 'Segaweb' but it's got a lot of interesting tidbits. As always tho, the real test is the games.
For each system's capability comparisons, why not let an independent reviewer review the two systems and then report on that? There is no purpose in reporting an article on DC vs PS2 that was written by a Seg-affiliated site. That's like reporting on a MS review that Linux sucks: it's pointless....
then again, i guess it fits in with rest of the topics today...
(although it may sound like one, this is not meant to be a troll, it's just my two cents...i also don't have, or intend to buy, a DC or PS2, so I'm definitely not biased either way)
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You do not store polygon data in the framebuffer memory!!! The ps2 has 32MB of RDRAM main memory for storing polygon data with mad bandwidth to send it to the GPU which will write pixels into the frickin framebuffer!! This post was so ignorant. With 4MB of VRAM there is more than enough room for 1280 x 1024@24bpp. Jeesh...
Mike
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
Of course, I think it's strange they would put so little memory in a new game machine today, considering what effort they put into the other components, but still, this argument seems pointless. I guess the PS2 will never do HDTV, but will any of the other current games boxes?
COMDEX/Fall, 1987.
Despite the VRAM issue (which IS an issue, I agree), the PlayStation 2 is markedly better hardware than the Dreamcast...But of course it is...Just like the XBox is going to be better than the PS2. That's the luxury you have when you release a year later.
The REAL problem with the PS2, I think, is the fact that it was overhyped exactly in the way The Phantom Menace was. In both cases, there were very few true advertisements by the companies involved, but the media latched on because of past success and blew the whole thing out of proportion. The result in both cases is products that can't possibly live up to what people expect, so you wind up with large factions of backlash.
That's life, I guess.
In closing, just to echo what many others have stated: Its all about the games. Whoever gets the best games wins.
What I don't understand is that no one ever mentions the fact that gaming consoles are limited by low resolutions TV sets. Gaming consoles are starting to reach the end of their life. When HDTV takes off, I predict computers being integrated into entertainment systems. Besides, this article seems useless in nature because there is no way that a higher frame rate is really going to effect a gaming system that uses low rate display to begin with.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
This article is a total sham. First off, the PS2 doesn't store any of it's polygons in VRAM. VRAM is used solely for textures, frame buffers, and color lookup tables. There is no limit to the number of polys the PS2 can draw because they are drawn as they come in off the bus. There is a theoretical limit on how many it can draw in 1/60th of a second but this is limited by the bus speeds not by VRAM, and for the most part, not the GS.
The dreamcast, however, uses a different rendering technique that requires all polygon data be stored in VRAM because it does post-processing for sorting without using a z-buffer. The advantage here is that the dreamcast can render double-size and get free anti-aliasing. But this means the dreamcast has a hard limit that no amount of assembly can get you more polys drawn. There is a trick you can do on the PS2 to get anti-aliasing but you have to give up almost all of your VRAM. For this reason most PS2 games don't have anti-aliasing. The PS2 does provide hardware accelerated anti-aliased drawing, but for anti-aliased drawing you have to have pre-sorted polygons. And all PS2 games (I know of) use the Z-buffer for sorting so they disable anti-aliased drawing. In short, the anti-aliased drawing features on the PS2 are totally useless.
That is the big difference between PS2 and dreamcast. So the dreamcast actually looks better (anti-aliasing) but the PS2 is capable of drawing much much more poly data.
-- Virtual Windows Project
Forget the GameGear, there were two other systems from the same era with MUCH better hardware and much worse marketing/game support: The Atari Lynx and the Turbo Express. The Turbo Express not only has awesome hardware specs, but played the exact same games as the TurboGraphix-16 console. Anyone else out there remember Bonk?
-B
I've had my IBM PS/2 model 50 for years now, and I must say, that it's nary a keeping up with the technology, and furthermore...
Oh, you mean the playstation...Never mind.
Nope, Andrew Jackson. Twain could spell.
The cake is a pie
But one of the major problems is: the games! Somehow Sony has convinced several major developers not to release their flagship titles on the Dreamcast. Example: Namco does develop stuff for Dreamcast, but why don't they release Tekken Tag Tournament for it? Same with Street Fighter EX3 by Capcom - other versions of Street Fighter are available for the Dreamcast, but not the EX-line :(
So I don't have much choice, as fighting games is the only stuff I use a console for...
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft handles this with the XBox, who will have more influence on the developers? Microsoft or Sony?
Well, seeing as this site has many other consoles that they cover, you really think that they'll put a Sega slant on things? The way I see it, everybody is entitled to their opinion, and that's just what it is - their opinion, based on technical information and a side-by-side comparison.
My opinion though is that they hit the nail on the head. We have a Japanese PS2 at work (have had it for months), and the games for it aren't that great. Ridge Racer 5 looked terrible (all of the building looked the same because of the low texture memory), and everything else that we have for it (I don't remember the titles, but we have about five of them) look so-so. The only game that we play on it (on a regular basis) is a Japanese baseball game by Konami. I don't know what the game title is (I can't read Japanese), but it's a "big head" baseball type game (the characters are cartoons with overly inflated head and feet), with Japanese teams. We have Square's baseball title as well, and while it looks pretty good, it's not that great in playability (and believe me, I almost say the same about World Series 2K1).
Also, before you say that the DC is for lazy programmers, have you tried to program for it? I write programs for it on a daily basis (it's my job after all), and let me tell you, if you're a lazy programmer, you'll get poor results.
-- Joe
We've found that for the PS2, it's actually faster to just go ahead and draw all the backfaces than it is to cull them -- mainly because the PS2's strength is in its poly-pushing, and its main processor is relatively weak. (Another significant difference between the PS2 and a PC.)
You left out Microsoft==Hacked.
I found the articles interresting, and it is nice to see that you can proof everything with numbers.
BUT. As much as I like the Dreamcast, I doubt that it will prevail against the PS2.
For once, the Dreamcast is a gaming only console, and as that it is EXTREMLY nice to look at and the games I have I love.
The PS/2 on the other hand is an entertainment system, it plays CDs, DVDs, AND games. And Unlike Sega Sony has a huge movie studio (Columbia Tristar) which produces movies, so the rate of 14:1 is not quite true, because for every DVD sold because of the PS/2 they make money. Yes, that money doesn't go into game divison, but in the end all that matters to Sony is what they have in their coffers at the end.
What we see right now are first generation titles, Soul Calibur looks great, but most other games wheren't that good. Additionally: As good as Sega is in creating games, they alone cannot produce enough games to keep them aloft, and if Sony sells enough consoles (even if they are only used as a DVD Player) they can show developers there is a base.
PSX1: In 1997 I was at the E3 and met a friend of mine there who develops games in Germany, he was looking for a publisher for his games, and they where also talking about console titles. He told me favoured the N64 as his development platform over the PSX. The reason for this he told me was that MOST games on the PSX where a loss, despite the hight costs for the N64 cartridges.
So if even the most games developed for the PSX produced a loss there was still enough money coming in from some games to keep the publishers aloft. And if it was only for the large install base.
So my summary is: Wait and see in a year. Yes, the Dreamcast HAS the better games, and Sega is an awsome development house (I cannot wait to get my hands on Shenmuen), but I fear that the last one standing is not the Dreamcast but the PS/2. Sega will not go away, I am sure they'll develop for the XBox and I am also sure they're going to continue to develop for the Dreamcast, but I doubt they really are going to continue to develop a new console on their own.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
SIX articles on this benighted piece of electronic "wonder" in the last two days. And still no new topic for it so I can GET IT OFF MY HOME PAGE.
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Sorry buddy, you're wrong.
IPV6 is entirely software. At one point, I had IPV6 going on my home lan, but went back to IPV4 for convience. The worst thing that could happen would be a ROM upgrade. If they have flash memory, flashing it would fix it.
python -c "import string,re;print string.join(map(lambda x:chr(string.atoi(x,36)),re.findall('..','2z2t2x36
Couldn't Sony just create a leaseable engine that uses the VPU and bandwidth, thus sparing others from doing it?
Even IBM doesn't list it on their public history of milestones pages. :)
Seriously, though, the trademark for Sony's platform is PS2, not PS/2. The former stands for "PlayStation 2", and the latter is IBM's "Personal System/2".
[
Consoles display images at half the resolution that most PC users are running games at these days, thereby needing only a 1/4 of the VRAM for the frame buffer. The textures can also be a lot smaller as well.
The only thing I can add :
Do not name anything you do 'PS 2' Failure guaranteed.
Also, that many polygons will probably never be completely optimized by any given game, allowing for more of that 4MB to be used. One reason why is because it's being played on a /TV/, an item that doesn't have a very large resolution, thus less memory is required. And how about system memory? It'd be feasable to store pixmap data there temporarily, I'd think. It really depends on how it's managed. Some 4Mb video cards I've seen well outperform 8Mb cards made by other companies.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Hello?? This is from segaweb.com... They MAY not be the most unbiased source of info on the Sony PS/2 vs the SEGA Dreamcast....
Of course it's a big disappointment for the main consumer, because they are encountering what the Japanese and the rest of the non-sony-worshipping game industry saw back in March - THERE ARE NO GOOD GAMES!
There's no point in bragging about your 66 million poly (cough with everything off cough) when the only thing you're going to do with that is port over your old PS1 code and add new models. Why the hell do I want to play RRV when it feels exactly the same as RRIV (and in some cases probably worse).
When Metal Gear Solid 2 comes out, or some other new original title comes out, I'll buy one. And when that happens, there will also be a reason for non-sony-worshippers to buy one as well. Personally, I think Hideo will be the first person to make a title worthy of all the hype (MGS2), but I'm not ruling out anything else before that (I'm keeping a keen eye myself on Team SOHO's The Getaway - if they pull that off, it could be quite cool)
But at the moment, all I see are 6 or so okish first gen eye-candied up ports, and 20-odd pieces of crap, all 26 of which that would look and play exactly the same on the DC.
While there is the possibility that Segaweb #includes bias.h, I am greatly offended that it was asserted that it was a biased review because the source attacking something CmdrTaco obviously finds 'neat,' as do I.
But let's keep in mind that because such a review attacks something we might like, this is no cause for retaliation. Maybe their argument is valid and well-supported, I'm not expert, I don't know. But maybe there are some points that were completely ignored to support such a conspiracy theme, as CmdrTaco pointed out.
anybody have any ideas on what items they may have missed? Remember to reply with unbiased opinions and compare and contrast similar features but certainly don't reply with comments which are either untrue or aren't reported fairly :-)
Of course IPV6 is all software. But the broadband adaptors will sell now, and next year,,,
So, how do you distribute software updates to the owners of the etherenet unit? It could come on CD/DVD/GDROM, but I'm not sure all of these companies will allow for the possibility. In the XBox for example, I think the OS is in ROM. Perhaps they hvae flash updates...
All I'm saying (and it wasn't a really good point) is that within the next few years things could change quite a bit and that consoles to this point have not generally been known for flexibility of updating.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It pains me to admit this, but I AM one of those foolish few who actually own a PS2+DC+N64. Plus my 5 PC's plus my wifes PC and my 2 daughter's PC's and 2 color Gameboys.
What games are available to us are what makes our purchasing decisions.
It's pretty sad though, to see that mudslinging has moved from the political arena's main marketing tool to the Gaming Industries FUD engine.
When you actually compare the technologies, the only difference is the method that the engineers chose to acheive their design goals.
Whether or not they met those goals is entirely subjective, depending on the game, the system, the mood of the gamer reviewing the system, and sometimes, the phase of the moon.
or as that a mouse?
I'm still working on a clever footer.
________
Doesn't the PS2 come with built in DVD? If it can play movies, I'm buying one once the price drops under $200. That's what a regular DVD player costs anyhow. The games are just bonus.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
I was one of the crazy's who sat in line (well, not really, I was the only one there for 3 hours) to get one of these on the 26th. Skipped the second half of the day from work (I was "sick" from exhaustion from being up all night, cough cough) and took it home to find that the CD Drive doesn't spin or the CD Laser isn't connected to the motherboard correctly. (In either case, I put a CD in and nothing happens. I can do everything else, though.)
Spent 30-45 minutes with Sony tech support, and they're sending me an airbill and I'm sending my PS2 to Fremont, CA (from Atlanta) and 10-14 days later they'll send me back.
All in all, I'll get it back in 4-6 weeks.
So, yes, it's a disappointment, because I didn't sit in line all night to get a system on Christmas day. Right now it's a $600 paperweight (after buying all the games and accessories) sitting on my dining room table.
And the Playstation 2 fails miserably.
The Dreamcast has so many good games coming out for it this holiday season its not even funny, and the sad thing is nobody is going to care because they are all buys taking out a loan to buy a PS2 off ebay.
Its a sad world we are in...
1) Graphics are not as good as Dreamcast.
2) Only two controller ports (WHY?!).
3) Very expensive.
4) No remote control for DVD (WHY?!).
We also concluded that the only reason the PS2 plays PSX titles is so that you can keep convincing yourself that your PS2 is better than your PSX.
Of course, the Dreamcast next to the PS2 is so much better (except for the controller of course)... and the $20 Dreamcast keyboard lends itself well to Quake3. No word on whether Unreal on the PS2 will support a $50 USB keyboard.
Kris
Kriston J. Rehberg
http://kriston.net/
Kriston
> Once you've used a DSL line or cable modem there is simply no going back
Au contraire, as a matter of objective fact you are wrong. I've used modems of various speeds, ISDN (back in '95-'96) and DSL more recently. Because of the absurdly high prices and the availability of free net access at 56K, I've opted to just use the free service. There are only three salient advantages to the "high bandwidth" options. Connectivity is always there without going through the sign on dance. You still have access to your phone line. You can download large files in reasonable times. For other activity the differences are marginal. Web surfing has many bottlenecks that have nothing to do with you connection speed. Neither email or news reading are significantly improved (except huge enclosures).
For gaming the most important characteristic (usually) is latency and there are many factors which affect it. Depending on how high capacity is achieved there is a definite possibility that latency and capacity are inversely related.
In any case all the current so-called high bandwidth options are just kludges by the copper monopolies used to diminish the possibility of new competition for true high bandwidth opportunities.
But the context of the discussion is within the world of online games. I can see if a person were price sensitive and mostly used e-mail and news, that a 56k connection would be bearable. Even then though, if you get a lot of e-mail or subscribe to a lot of lists DSL holds a definate advantage. But for online games, 56k simply can't hold a candle to any of the highspeed options. I would be interested to hear what highspeed solution would offer higher latency than an analog modem. Even if Cable modems get crowded they still offer, at peak, such vastly better play that it is still worthwhile to suffer through slow periods.
There will always be some people that go against the grain, but what kind of a percentage do you think would drop from DSL back to modems? Again, the general trend is forward from teh numbers given, and those numbers are I think enough to make a viable target market for consoles.
Also, how free is that 56k connection - remember that you are tying up a phone line, which means you either do not have use of the phone or you have to get a second line (which costs about as much as a cheap DSL line).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why pay for something that costs more and may do the task less well? Most people buy these devices to organize their lives and the Palm's low cost, excellent software, long battery life and small form factor are compelling reasons to buy. CE devices typically have much shorter battery lifetimes and questionable organizer facilities.
Personally I'd love an iPaq but I think I would use it more as a toy than something to keep all my appointments in.
Uh, not that I condone (or even have done/will do this) but...
Some people are putting down that $200 deposit (plus $20 rental), then just never returning the unit. I'd be interested to know what story they're giving (I suggested to an acquaintance who intends to do this that the old "my dog ate it" excuse probably wouldn't work).
Provided, of course, you like the PS2. If not, you return the unit and get your $200 back.
Cheaper than $1000 on eBay. Hell, I saw auctions this morning with over $600, but the RESERVE hadn't been met yet. Greedy SOBs...
Moof!
And who ever posted the screen shots of the two cars, could you be more biased? A) you're comparing different games. B) you never mention what the shots were taken on. If I take a screen shot (I couldn't) of a DC game through my Monitor (the VGA adapters by pass the 'puter, hence no screen shot) and put it next to a screen shot of a game running through an RF apater for my PS2, of course the DC is going to look better.
My advice, rent them both, go to a site like IGN or Daily Radar, find games they gave their highest rating to for each system, rent those, and when you've played them all, buy the one you want. It's that figgin simple.
"News for nerds"?? This is more like "Bickering for Lamers"
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Whoever wrote the article needs to get his/her/its facts straight. The specs for the PS2, available at http://www.sc ea.com/ news/press_example.asp?ps2=ps2&ReleaseID=9, indicate that the graphics subsystem for the PS2 has 4MB of embedded DRAM. This is not necessarily the total amount of video memory that the PS2 has, and it's quite likely that a fair amount of the 32MB of system memory can be used for video as well. The embedded DRAM, however, implies that the graphics chip has 4MB of memory on the die, similar to what Bitboys Glaze3D was supposed to do (whatever happened to that, anyway?), which could lead to emormous performance increases since it can access that 4MB directly. Sorry, but I think PS2 beats DC any day...
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Or at least it used to be, perhaps. I wouldn't have thought that I would touch a Microsoft-developed console with a 10-foot pagefile, but the quality of the game development studios who have obviously been shown what they'll be able to work with (plus a dumptruck full of money, I know I know) and have chosen to work on games for the X-BOX which won't even be out for another year or more makes me think I might give this a chance.
On the Dreamcast/Playstation side of the coin - Square has always developed for the PS, and probably always will. I love the Final Fantasy series, so I will most likely buy a PS2. Dreamcast looks pretty, but the best utilization of it's technology seems to have been the Sonic game and the NFL game. I hate the Sonic series and I loath footbally games - and the successful and "good" games that come out on a platform tend to influence the genres/styles of the games that quality designers put out for the same platform in the future.
All that said, I play most of my games on me 'ol Wintel box. Sue me, they're almost always better games, and I get to play with a keyboard and a mouse. Put that in your D-pad and smoke it.
These comments and opinions are mine and mine alone, although they shouldn't be.
Blockbuster's renting them. The store my brother works at had 5 available for $20 / 5 days. And they were all there when we rented one Saturday evening... it's a (relatively) cheap way to get a fix without waiting in line or paying big $$$$.
Simply replace "does" with "will", and you'll find your rate of heart attacks sharply diminish! With just a bit of imaginitive in-brain editing, you too can read what was obvious instead of what was written. From the tone of your replies, you'd almost imagine I was a proponet of the (e)X-box!
Also, the person who wrote screaming about it being called a "broadband adaptor" has a really good point - I got sucked into the stupid marketspeak and will call it an etherenet adaptor from now on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I hate to say it - I have a PC the a Matrox G400 Max and the PC games look great and a mouse is a good controller!
:-)) all in one controllerstick - The Dual Shock controller II analog is OK, but have you'd ever play a whole day with some off the best off N64 games! Great graphics does NOT beat great control of your HERO... read this about the control of the Indy - N64 controller vs. the PC http://ign64.ign.com/news/27030.html!
:-)) BUT beware you could end up falling in love with N64 as I did... (I used to B a PC only freak - 70 % N64 STILL!!! 30% PC (only netgames like Counter Strike seems cool!) PS2 isn't out yet in Europe so I haven't really tried that on yet!!
BUT I wouldn't ever trade my (still) inovative Nintendo 64 controller FOR ANYTHING! That analog presure 8xsensetive in the controller = You can sneak, walk slow, walk, walk fast, run, SUPER run
Rent Waverace 64 & Excitebike 64 and Perfect Dark for the N64 for a weekend just to feal the diffence
If it doesn't feal right, it's proberly a waste of time...
Winner: Dreamcast.
The PS/2's launch lineup was the biggest disappointment of all and were it not for EA and Madden and SSX...well, I shudder to think of the possibilities.
"According to this page Playstation 2 is the industry's big disappointment. "
:)
uhm, www.segaweb.com?
Think about it.
--------
the ps2 just plain looks cheap compared to the sega dc. i can't give you ANY technical reason's. it was a surprise to me as well. we played the dreamcast football side-by-side with the ps2.
the sega looked richer and moved more smoothly.
however, congrats to your marketing dept. that shortage business paid off well
As another poster mentioned, just having that space for amazing amounts of in-game music or textures or whetever is already handy.
But the PS2 does a pretty good job as a DVD player, even for those that already have one:
DTS and DD5.1 output
Supposedly really good video output
Progressive scan capability (though you'd need an output they don't make yet).
S-video or component output.
Really the only problem seems to me to be the need to buy an extra remote (even if it is cheap), and I've heard the player is light on features (like only one speed of slow forwards, and no slow backwards? That was in a review of the Japanese unit, I hope they improved that with the other aspects of DVD support).
I'm getting rid of the DVD player I have (which was a decent mid-range) and just using the PS2.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
PS2 vertices in VRAM ?
Comes to show how clueless are those technical writers.. if they knew anything they'd be coding not writing some lame articles on the web.
bau
How many people posting here actually HAVE a PS2?
Now, how many have a dreamcast?
Since there are about a million more dreamcasts out there then PS2's public favor will be in favor of the dreamcast.
I do actually have a PS2, and for the type of games that consoles do well, console-style RPG's and action games, it beats any PC ive seen.
The sports games (which high-end PC's usually rule on) are very close to being better on the PS2.
Its much too early on to be able to say that "Console X is much better then console Y" or "This console will never stand up to my PC"
Lets check back on this in a year or so. (Tho, knowing slashdot we will see this article again next week when some other website flames the PS2)
-nite
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
1 word - resolution. You're not going to be running at 1600x1200 on your TV any time soon, are you?
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
I go buy a game, pop it in my Playstation 2, sit on the couch with my feet up and play it on my 53" TV.
No video drivers. No sound drivers. No rebooting to Windows. No moving my computer to play it on the TV in some wack res. No playing it on my 19" monitor. No compatibility problems.
None of that. I pop in a CD and play. Plus, I like arcade type games that aren't real involved and there are just more of those on consoles. I still play PC games...mainly stuff that just wouldnt carry over well to a console like strategy games and MechWarrior games. But consoles are a LONG way from obsolete when it takes a video card that costs as much as the whole console to compete.
Seeing as how you're posting on Slashdot, there's a very high probability that you own your own computer. Also, given that you have money to spend on not only a computer but a PS2 and games, it's likely that you have a lot of disposable income.
:D
With that disposable income and a semi-decent computer you can:
Upgrade your computer to a monster, play all of the latest games (even many console games) with a better online experience and still use the same hardware for other things.
or
Buy a brand new console every year that isn't compatible with other systems and does nothing but play games. If you're lucky, it'll include a sub-standard DVD player or online play through a crappy dialup gaming ISP even though you already have a better ISP. And your computer is too slow to play PC games and in general pretty much sucks for everything but word processing and IRC.
for about the same price. Wow, that's pretty biased.
Now, which one you choose (or maybe you don't have to choose and have enough money for both) depends largely on how much you value your computer experience and how much you value the games everyone else is playing.
Myself, I find playing Q3 or UT on my PC is much more fun than any of the Final Fantasy or Street Fighter games, though there are a few PSX games I do like. (Driver, Chrono Cross and Tony Hawk come to mind.) Bleem! sucks donkey balls, but I'm looking to buy a used PSX.. the PS2 needs to come down a LOT and the PS2 games need to get better before I'll spend money on it.
--
I went to a public technical presentation of the PlayStation last month. The system programs like a network of special purpose machines with pipeline and cache issues from hell. One disappointment of the PlayStation is the design of its sound. The sound system is not programmable, so your games will probably never get to use 3D effects.
One the other hand, all of the new generation of game consoles rock compared to the old generation. The platforms are getting more tightly controlled and aimed at larger production houses. I laughed at the slide that showed the chart of what NDAs you needed to sign to see the NDAs you needed to sign to see the contracts. :-).
On a final note, a Director of Technology over a Sony candidly told me that Sony prefers to make proprietary standands, open them up to the industry, and get them adopted. They make more money off the licensing streams on a few hits than on misses.
No stock options or ESPP for folks working at Sony.
Profit motivates invention.
Actually, the guy is only half wrong - the DC's PVR chip has to store the entire scene on-chip before it can render it, the PS2 doesn't. Kind of makes the opposite point to what he intended. However, this is slightly made up for by the fact that the PVR doesn't need a zbuffer and the PS2 does.
However muddled and biased the article is, it's still basically correct about the DC making better use of VRAM. The texture-compression is especially good; a lot better than S3TC and the like, and miles better than the PS2's only comperable option (4bit palettised textures, ugh).
In your world that all may be so. But here on Earth, things are oddly different - for one thing, or PS2 games cost only $50!
Also, as long as consoles have existed here they have been for the mainstream market and the PC has mostly been for hardcore gamers! For instance, I think there are something like 10 MILLION Playstations (first one) already sold. When's the last time you heard of a PC game selling a few million copies? And consoles are just easier to use.
I'll bet if you asked a random sampling of people about Diablo and Mario, you'd find a lot more people knew about Mario.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's not the DC's graphics libraries. The Dreamcast uses a version of the PowerVR Series 2 chip, which uses a tile-based renderer. Because of the way the chip is designed, it culls occulded polygons in hardware before sending them to the rasterizer. Because of this, PowerVR chips don't use a zbuffer (which was a big thing when all you had were 2MB graphics cards) and need much less memory bandwidth. In practice the scheme works really well when it is programmed correctly. However, PowerVR's chips never worked very well on PCs because the way standard APIs and games are designed don't mesh well with a tiled-based graphics chip. However, there is some evidence that the new NVIDIA and 3DFx chips may be borrowing some ideas from tile-based engines, so it is possible that they may become popular after-all.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
if i may add a small [but significant] point: the game boy beat not only sega's game gear, but also nec's turbo express -- which far surpassed both.
crib
Please don't read my journal
Stolen analogy for analogy from the article that was posted on Slashdot a while ago ;)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Your assertion that the gameboy was an inferior design than the gamegear is not entirely correct. Remember, hardware power, graphics and sound and the like are only one portion of the design parameters of a portable unit. Recall that the sega gamegear was TWICE as big as a game boy. My brothers actually had both of the systems. Which came with us on the car trips? Not the game gear with it's carrying case (complete with shoulder strap). Game Boy was a superior product to game gear because the design compromises made at the hardware level enabled big gains in the usability level.
How does this apply to dreamcast/ps|2? We must remember that hardware is only half of the equation. For example, which is more important to the gaming audience, DVD playback or 4-player games? Will US audienes be put off by the lack of quality launch titles (due to sony's extreme hubris when dictation development environment, i might add)?
My prediction: Dreamcast fades because sony is a bunch of bitches. But nintendo kicks everyone's ass next year with the gamecube, which offers a nirvana of power, form factor and ease of development.
Tetris rules.
(With apologies to Dave Barry, regarding "Read This First!)
:P)
This fine console runs only games that require no thought.
WARNING! Strategic analysis or storyline reflection performed while playing the following games does not count as "thought":
Front Mission 1-3
Ogre Battle
Tactics Ogre
Vandal Hearts 1-2
Vanguard Bandits
Final Fantasy Tactics
Final Fantasy 1-9
SaGa (Final Fantasy Legend) 1-3
Phantasy Star 1-4
Breath of Fire 1-3
Lunar: The Silver Star
Lunar: Eternal Blue
Herzog Zwei (had to throw at least one semi-obscure Genesis title in there
Read ;th is article that gives statistics to show 11% of American homes have high speed access right now - that's a combination of cable modems and DSL.
Furthermore, look at the rate of growth. That's the figure for Fall 2000, yet in the spring of 2000 that figure was only 5%. Don't you think that by spring of 2001 it will be a lot higher still?
Once you've used a DSL line or cable modem there is simply no going back - and everyone who has one raves on and on about it so much that co-workers are easily sold on the idea.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, the link works. However, /. seems to have taken to insterting random " " and ";" characters around links. That combine with the fact that you STILL have to select "Plain Ol Text" to get ExTrans, and you have a super annoying comment entry system.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...it was totally proprietary! :]
PS: I'm making fun of the typo in the article subject, in case you don't get it.
I'm sorry - the comparison was pretty unclear. What I meant by that figure and the PC game sales (and thanks for the correction to seevnty million PSX units!) was that a successful console game is probably going to sell an order of magnitude more units, making it a lot more mainstream than a PC.
I should have noted that a successfull PC title might sell a million or two copies, whereas a successful PSX title might be more like 20-30 million. Quite a difference!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I believe that the PS2 stores it's polygons in system ram instead of in the framebuffer. That is what most video cards do. Also, textures are stored in system memory rather than the frame buffer. I'm not sure how the dream cast uses it's 8 megs, but I know that they aren't storing their polys. I know that on Windows, the polys aren't stored in the frame buffer, only the textures, frame buffers, and Z buffer(and not always the textures). Sega might be storing their textures in that memory space, but that would be severely limiting if they do.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
That's fine if you're fill-rate limited, but if instead you're bus-limited, it's a waste. I can't speak for the PS2, but on the PC platform, saturating PCI or AGP with geometry data can be an issue on a fast machine at high frame rates. Not sending back-facing polygons can help dramatically.
I have a DVD player. Moreover, I have a GOOD DVD player that's better than the PS2 one and so Sony putting a DVD player into the PS2 is completely and utterly useless to me, and in fact incurs the additional cost of paying for shit I don't want or need.
Actually, you need to look at it from the flipside. The PS2 supports MPEG-2 decoding and the 4.7 GB+ DVD disc format for enhanced game play. The fact that it can play DVDs is a neat bonus. If you play console RPGs, like Final Fantasy VII & VIII, then you can see what the ability to mix MPEG-2 video into the gameplay and no longer having to use 4 discs for one game will buy you.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The WinCE environment has been under development for a relatively short period of time. With the WinCE 3.0 environment, most of the things you talk of aren't there anymore. First, WinCE 3.0 has it's own FREE! development kit, requiring no Visual Studio at all. It's standalone. If you have any familiarity with Visual Studio, it's very easy to use. We're not in the early days anymore. You don't need DOS. As for Win32 API calls, almost all of them are there now, with the exception of some of the Win16 carryovers.
The machine itself is a lot beefier in all cases now. Back to the original argument, don't judge the viability of a platform by the early examples. Palm has been around for years, and they have done a good job of working around the hardware. The newest WinCE developments are coming out as easy or easier to deveop for than Palm. The only thing I agree with you on is the price of the newest devices. But, as seen with the Dreamcast, and soon with the PS2, prices drop.
Because you can't, you won't, and you don't stop...
In this case slashdot is linking to a very uninformed article. On PS2 hardware, you can use different forms of HARDWARE COMPRESSION to save space for polygons and textures. You can easily get to 10 bytes per polygon with all features compromising just a little quality. The list of mistakes in technical speculations is longer, but I cannot tell you more...
And the gamers follow Square left and right.
Got that right. That's reason numbero uno that I'm buying a PlayStation2 -- Final Fantasy X. I will buy whatever console that Square targets its games for. Heck, I'm even going to buy a color WonderSwan if Square sells their updated ports of the old Nintendo Final Fantasy I, IIj, & IIIj in America. I bought my Playstation for Final Fantasy VII, and I'll buy my Playstation2 for Final Fantasy X when it comes out.
I'll follow Square anywhere -- other than X-box that is.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The article makes some good points, but in the end it's all about the games. And with the sucess of the PSX, the the ps2s backwards compatability, and all the insane hype it's getting, where do you think all the good games are going to be? Sega just doesn't have enough pull... The real winner here.... Xbox?
Fair point, except that the Shining Force isn't exactly the same genre as Final Fantasy, and never has been. The former is more comparable to games like Tactics Ogre, Vandal Hearts, or Final Fantasy Tactics, all of which, IMO, easily beat Shining Force at its own game. Not that it's a bad series, and it does have precedent, I believe. But Sega's RPG support has always been rather rocky, particularly in the USA, and, as a gamer primarily interested in RPGs, I have little interest in most of Sega's consoles.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
>You don't store polygons into vram.
Yes you do
Take it from a PS2 programmer: you don't. Polygons get drawn into the frame buffer, yes, but you don't have to allocate vram for each polygon that needs to be drawn. Got it?
1) The Dreamcast can dial up to a standard pppd running on Linux. See? None of this crappy game ISP thing you pulled out of your ass. 2) My Dreamcast cost $200 cdn. My video card alone cost $450 cdn. Gathering enough for a good Dreamcast setup (dreamcast, 3 games, carry case, 2nd controller, VGA adapter and memory card) cost about $500. What were you saying about the same price? 3) BTW, if you like Tony Hawk, you had better not try SSX for the PS2, or you'll find yourself trying to get one. That game is fucking hard to stop playing.
--
FreeCell doesn't count...
Mother fucker....
1) The Dreamcast can dial up to a standard pppd running on Linux. See? None of this crappy game ISP thing you pulled out of your ass.
2) My Dreamcast cost $200 cdn. My video card alone cost $450 cdn. Gathering enough for a good Dreamcast setup (dreamcast, 3 games, carry case, 2nd controller, VGA adapter and memory card) cost about $500. What were you saying about the same price?
3) BTW, if you like Tony Hawk, you had better not try SSX for the PS2, or you'll find yourself trying to get one. That game is fucking hard to stop playing.
--
It's a nickname, no more or less juvenile than Rico_Suave(Weird Al, maybe?) or 2nd Post! as our respective nicks.
I don't disagree that most games today will run on older hardware, but that cements the concept and idea that a console is a useful device. It is cheaper than a PC, and it will not be upgraded, and the games that come out 5 years from now will still be fun, because it is the game, and not the hardware, that is the gating factor in 'fun'.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
The X-Box does NOT SHIP, yet.
*rant*
I'm so sick and goddamn tired of hearing about how great the X-Box will be. It ISN'T yet. People seem to forget this, like the geniuses at Salon.com, who said, roughly, "Sure, PS2's the best hardware on the market NOW. But why buy one when you could wait for X-Box or Dolphin?" It's about as ridiculous as saying, "Yeah, the NES has great graphics NOW. But it's going to suck hard when PS2 comes out, so why bother?" Sheesh.
Second, there are a few fledgling programs out there that are written for the Dreamcast by non-typical 3rd parties, like Sintendo, and the oft-cited Bleem! for Dreamcast. Why? Because unlike Sony, the Dreamcast hasn't been secured extremely well against piracy. You can bet your life that Sony's gonna have one hell of a tough anti-piracy system after the debacle of the mod-chip / backup copy mess that went on with the first Playstation. So? Well, the Dreamcast can be ported to a lot more easily than the PS2 (Old-schoolers: Grow up, we're not talking about the PS/2, despite what some posters claim. And no, moderators, it's not funny anymore.) Unless damn powerful libraries come out to route around the oddities, I doubt that too many developers will bother pushing the system to its max. Learning entirely new systems, while fun, is costly.
Another interesting point that the article made: The Dreamcast has done much better than its specs claimed it could, but the PS2 has not. The whole "early games" argument holds no water for me. The PS2's been out for a year now in more Easterly parts of the world (read: Japan), and the developers have had time to adjust. It's a big step, and those are much easier to take in terms of programming paradigm shifts than small ones, I find. (This is why I still program in Pascal. C still evades me, without all the little idiosyncrasies that I've become accustomed to. Programming in ASM came much easier) There are no little quirks to max the system out. It's just one hulking behemoth. I'm sure we'll see games use more than todays as time progresses, but 5-6Mpolys/sec on a machien supposedly capable of 10 times that? No amount of programmer stupidity can account for that kind of short coming unless its something in hardware, especially when the livelihoods of these programmers is resting on it.
Anyways, I'm likely going to be buying a Dreamcast soon. Why? Because it's hackable. Sega's a lot more open about its hardware than Sony.
-=Canar=-
--over and out.
Actually there are two full-screen anti-aliasing tricks. One recquires a lot of VRAM, is relatively slow, but looks very nice. The other recquires no extra VRAM at all, has a minimal speed hit (order of 20 scan lines IIRC), but is slightly lower quality (and can look a bit trippy, hint hint). I'd reveal more, but then I'd have to kill you all.
There is one problem with the calculations presented in the article:
4MB of RAM would not store the display lists for an entire second. Rather, it would set them up every frame. Therefore, those 5 million triangles could be done each frame. This is not including textures or anything else that will chew up memory.
This reminds me of a PlayStation vs. Nintendo 64 article where they stated that the PS could do 2 mil. triangles per second when the N64 could only manage 1/2 mil.. What they failed to mention was that the PS figure was for 2D flat shaded triangles and the N64 number was for fully textured and lit 3D triangles.
Then, the PS was the older console. Now, the Dreamcast is. A company will always try and make it's older product look good by trying to shoot down a well hyped new-to-market machine.
I'm sure similar bias exists here.
Actually, the PS2 does not ship with a broadband adaptor (though it will have one shipped around January, I believe).
Also, I think that the Dreamcast has a broadband adaptor coming out fairly soon.
The X-Box does ship with a broadband adaptor.
Interestingly, I think that shipping with a broadband adaptor is the right idea, though I think the X-box will not do well for other reasons. Sony's take on this all is that while they think broadband will be growing and a worthwhile market for the PS2, they said in an interview that they thought broadband would really be mainstream around the release of the PS3 (which then presumably would ship with a broadband adaptor).
In one way they may have a good point - what happens to these broadband adaptors if IPV6 is released and widely adopted by broadband providers? Will they be able to cope? There's still a lot of technical facets of consumer broadband that might alter in teh next few years.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...the fact that Sega has had four system failures in a row: SegaCD, 32x, Nomad, and Saturn. With a history of essentially dumping systems about a year after release, why would anyone have confidence in Sega? Even many game magazines/review sites were pre-forcasting doom on the Dreamcast, even before the specs and software support was known.
>I had thought Sony did have some kind of library
>now that developers could use
I've been thinking about this for a while myself. The GameCube, Xbox etc are claimed to be innately better than the PS2 becuase of their anti-aliasing features, but what's stopping PS2 developers from having the hardware render a frame at say, 1.5 times the resolution, and shrink it down to send it off to the TV? I'm sure the hardware could handle it. Or is not as simple as that? I'm not too technologically minded in terms of 3d graphics and such.
- 4 MB VRAM has nothing to do with polygon performance
- 66 M polys per second is indeed achievable in best case
- PS2 does not store polygons in VRAM
- PS2 can decompress JPEG/MPEG2 on the fly
- there is no GT3 for PS2, the screenshots are from the first GT2000 demo, which is more than 6 months old, its just a port of GT for PS1
- memory -> GS bandwidth is not 10 M/frame
- there are many more methods of antialiasing than the one mentioned
- vector units are used in all the games
- full performance has not been extracted because of time to market
- it's getting tiresome to even list all the mistakes...
All in all, DC is like a 2 year old PC with a kinda decent graphics chip. PS2 is like a PC you'll see in 2 years, but without the perfect drivers.
The article forgets to mention some interesting DC features like the famous seek bug or the controller insertion bugs, not to mention its GD read slowness or incapability to decompress MPEG2 in real time. And btw, Sega's C++ compiler is a quick hack university project, it cannnot even optimize code for Dreamcast's dual issue CPU. Hahahaha.
On the DC, indeed, on any tile-rendering chip, you store a complete display list in VRAM, as it needs to be processed for each tile.
4Mb is fine, if you know how to use it, and can stream (more like torrent) textures from main RAM.
Whether intentional or not, you have some bad information here.
Consoles have a very different mindset than a PC, where an analogy can be made with the difference between an oven and a microwave. There are superficial similarities, there are some overlaps, but mainly they fill two different functions in a household. Not a perfect analogy, but useful, I think.
A console is $200. For 5 or 6 years. That's it. PS2 will probably by $300. Add $40 for another controller, maybe $60 for some specialized add ons, and you've made an investment of $400 for 5 years.
A gaming PC, to be fair, costs about $800 today. I won't count a monitor into that cost, but hey, a 32" tv isn't a cheap thing either.
Across 5 years, lets say you upgrade memory, once, cuz M$ releases their next OS which requires twice the memory. And you up the HD, for similar reasons. Lets use today's prices, but cut in half, due to Moore's Law. That means 128mb will cost you $70, and a decent HD will cost you $150(I'm assuming disk size doubles, rather than price falling). Then let's say you upgrade your vid card once, to keep up with the M$ upgrade trend. Say another $200. That means in 5 years you can casually spend $1230, already twice what a console offers.
Then you also have to worry about drivers every 3 months(random period), about OS updates every year, and game patches every other week for the first 2 months of it's existence.
Whereas a console, you buy, plug in, and pop a game in, and you're set. Is that worth saving $600? I think so. I own both a PC and a console.
As for game price; Most PC games are about $40-$60, that I know of. Surprise, a 3cd set for the PSX is only $50! Year old games are $30, and 'classics' are $10-$20 (classics in the PC sense would be Civ, Doom, Quake, Alone in the Dark, etc)
Then there are used games ^^
Dunno, just a rebuttal, that even if a console isn't for the curmudgeon like you, it fits into the lifestyle of many (another analogy would be a boombox single unit CD player/stereo, and a component built audio system. Why buy a boombox for $200 when you can apply it to buying a better reciever, or a cd unit, or an amp, or speakers, etc?)
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
Gameboy was released in summer '89. Remember the Nintendo Power comics where Howard Phillips and Nester were playing Tetris on the beach?
Also, the Super Nintendo was released in fall 1991. You are still correct, but the date margin is two years, not five or six.
I used to actually believe that the quality of the system itself matters when predicting the success of a new system.I no longer believe any such thing. Look at the GameBoy.
The GameBoy came out at roughly the same time as the Sega GameGear. Both were portable systems riding on the coat-tails of new systems (SNES and SegaGenesis). One of the main differences I remember was that the GameGear had a BEAUTIFUL screen. It was back-lit, and was color. The GameBoy, as we all know, was in the classic Green&White.
However, the reason I have to remind you of the GameGear screen but we all know what the GameBoy screen looks like is that the GameGear flopped, while the GameBoy is still alive TODAY!
Can you believe that?!? The GameBoy is still being played by a new generation of 10-year olds. There's a new thin design, and there's a weak color version, but the console is the still the same technology as 10 years ago. Is there ANY other game system of any sort that has this sort of shelf life? I can't think of anything.
The reason the GameBoy is still around is the game support. Nintendo had a monopoly on the good games. The GameGear was killed because they just didn't get the good cartridges. It's all about the games. Mario and Zelda and FinalFantasy just beat the crap out of Sonic and PhantasyStar and so forth.
The test of whether the PS2 will survive will NOT be how much video ram it has. That'll help, sure. The real test will be what games they get and how well they implement them.
Of course the article is going to be biased. As you pointed out, it's on Segaweb!
Basically, this guy's argument boils down to: The PS2 is hard to program for, so therefore it's inferior. I won't defend either console, because I think they are both a huge waste of money. You get more features for the price on a $700 PC.
I don't know why he thinks that the GS's VRAM limits the poly count. Most graphics architectures I'm familiar with do not use on-chip ram for geometry data (it's all just DMA'ed over). Although 4MB is still a little skimpy, it can easily accomodate the frame buffer and textures for a single game. Sega's claims of 66M polys/sec probably refers to the system's bus bandwidth, and represents an ideal upper limit.
I'm not familiar enough with the PS2 architecture to comment on the possibility of storing texture data in system RAM, but if it's anything like PCI or AGP on a PC, then you always can store textures there.
He then goes on to bash the PS2's texturing. Out of all the factors dealing with texturing that he could discuss (number and speed of the TMU's, available texture modes, the impact of texturing on the speed of the rendering pipeline) he picks the one that the PS2 just doesn't have: texture compression. OK, that's just ONE aspect. Let's see a more thorough analysis, pal.
"The sad fact is that only a few development houses like EA have been able to extract reasonable next-generation performance out of the PS2 architecture."
Probably because it's NEW hardware.
This is just pro-Dreamcast FUD everyone. We're bound to see lots of pro-Dreamcast and pro-PS2 FUD in the months before christmas. Just skimming through these "articles", it is clear that the authors don't seem to know what they are talking about.
In the long run, people won't care about polygons and how many FPS a game will run. The thing that will make or break a console is the software. I have a Dreamcast and it has a bunch of Quality games. I would like to have a Playstation, but there is just no use right now. There aren't that many Quality games for it. I would take one in a heartbeat right now though (if I could get my hands on it). I'd put that thing up for auction on eGay.
Wes Leonard http://www.wesleonard.com
Since when does VRAM have anything to do with the number of polygons drawn? Polygons are in RAM and drawn straight into the frame buffer.
4MB and 8MB of RAM has a big effect on the number of textures you can use, but thats all. VRAM size has absolutly not bearing on the number of polygons drawn.
The software is relatively immature and doesn't tap the true potential of the hardware, but the PS2 is already best of breed in several games. I pretty much do multiplayer, so I don't have a complete list. The five games which rock (all multiplayer with the sole exception of SSX which is only 2 player) are:
EA's SSX (snowboarding/racing/freestyle)
EA's football (Madden)
EA's hockey (I'm no hockey fan but this is fun)
Tekken Tag Tournament (tag rocks for 4 players)
TimeSplitters (silky smooth FPShooter)
The first four are well known best-of-breed games. The fifth is the no-name sleeper which just rocks (so far). Smooth and fun with a variety of settings, and even the ability to make custom maps for play!!! The full package and a good step toward solid innovation on the PS2.
So, I'd say the PS2 is already kicking some butt especially considering these are all launch titles. I hope the games just keep getting better and better, and I can't wait for GT3 (here's to hoping it's 4 player!).
= Joe =
Hey, don't forget about the "black, sleek, and with a blue LED"-factor! That's a rather huge one for me... ;^)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
I think my enjoyment of MGS had a lot to do with the nostalgia factor; the original Metal Gear on the NES was one of my favorite games.
Granted, MGS is definitely overrated. The gameplay really was only a small advancement over MG and MG2, and the cinematics were frequently corny.
But you can't deny that MGS's impact on gaming has been huge, it has set the standard for style and cinematics in a video game. And MGS2 seems to be pushing harder in the area of gameplay, so I have no reason to not look forward to MGS2.
Ever See a Dreamcast game on a 21" VGA monitor? Just make your own (dang custom connector!) cable to hook directly to the console's VGA output, then find an older fixed-frequency monitor with slower phosphors (60Hz refresh workaround). It looks STUNNING.
You'll notice that the screenshots linked to are at 640x480 for both the Dreamcast and the PS2. Has anyone busted out the oscillscope on the PS2's video connector to see what's available? There are only rumors of VGA output at this time.
Say...Wasn't VGA introduced with the IBM PS/2? Funny how it took 10+ years for the console world to catch up.
Gaming consoles deliver what Windows doesn't: It works... You insert a DVD, turn in on and it runs.
We should expect gaming consoles to become thin clients too, with browsers, Java etc. Needs more memory, of course, but that's where we are going. The PC is dead.
The TV will surf, the fridge will have a screen, the watch on the wall will display information, your phone will surf, your palm computer will rule your world, and maybe you will also have an archaic PC.
I'm sure at some point someone is going to come out with a hardware mod that breaks the bottleneck on the memory (increase your memory on the PS2! Get 40 million polygons per second!)
I know in the days of yore, every time something cool came out (e.g. Commodore 64) there were hordes of soldering iron wielding folk who'd figure out how to soup it up (e.g. 20 second backup - your hardware and software mod of choice)
Whatever happened to modding these kinds of things?
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Don't waste your bandwidth then.
Get back to arse technica...
--------------- Delete Windows before you mail me
I can really see there what some of the articles were talking about. All of those shots look aliased or washed out. I do wonder how much you'd notice it when you have a high frame rate, though.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
http://www. her ald.com/content/archive/news/click/clickdocs/08415 8.htm
Face it, the good consoles are the ones that have good games. And the gamers follow Square left and right. NES to SNES to PS to PS2. the most successful consoles have had Square as one of their main game producers.
Sanchi
"They said we couldn't do it [Athlon]... but we built it, we shipped it... and we didn't have to recall it." Rich Heye
The rules are different when you've more than one bus and CPU that you're thinking about. If you can offload the checking to an underutilized secondary/tertiary processor and never have to touch any of the vertex data on your main CPU, it's worth it.
I have a Playstation and I love it, but I never have time to play it all that much. I'm buying a Playstation 2 and I'm really excited about playing it -- but my real reasoning is that its a DVD player! Now I'll have a new big screen TV, Playstation DVD player, and a Power Mac Cube with a flat screen. I feel so... high tech and sleek! :-)
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
http://www.segaweb.com/features/ps2dis.html
I believe there is a good chance games written for the ps2 will, eventually, look better than games written for the dc. The very restraints people complain about will also cause developers to innovate. Do you remember what the ps games looked like when it was new? Now look at the improvements they've made. I just hope Sony does their part to help developers, before they drop the ps2 for the dc.
Your calculations are flawed: you assume that they redraw EVERY pixel EVERY second at a full rate. It isn't often necessary to do this. I mean think about it, if a PC used such a retarded redraw method for say...Diablo 2 it would take like 3 seconds a frame. Plus, a better video processor helps to juggle that and possible reduce the RAM requirements.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
I personally prefer PC games to console games because I get bored with games where all that you can do is kick, punch and shoot. Most PC games have much more depth than that. They require you to THINK. Console games do not.
Since opening the case voids the warranty, there'd have to be some external tap to plug the RAM into. The N64 had one becase a) dev versions carried more RAM for debugging etc., and b) because they planned to have the 64DD add-on which would include a RAM expansion. When the 64DD got scrapped in the US, they still released the RAM pack because Factor 5 made Rogue Squadron, and it looked schweet. This worked because it was already easy to add the RAM. I don't have a PS2, so I don't know if it has the same little latched cover, but I doubt it--I've never seen it as a selling point of the system, and considering how a bunch of N64 games vield their improved everything with the RAM pack, you'd think that would be a marketable feature--like force feedback was when the Rumble Pack came out.
I'm no Sony sympathiser (sounds like the McCarthy era), but when a commercially better product is released to the marketplace, the competition has to better themselves, or put up with producing an inferior product.
People aren't going to give a flippin' rip about the hardware, BECAUSE THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT IT! As stated in the article, the games is where it counts. If IGN is reporting that Sega is losing money on the Dreamcast, and is looking at a joint-venture with Nintendo, then I wouldn't worry about it too much.
I'm a big Dreamcast fan, but what would prevent Sony from doing a VRAM memory expansion, similar to what N64 did for its core memory?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Still, the casual gaming public hasn't had much of a chance to try out the Playstation 2, thanks to Sony's shortages. I always find it a bit ironic when I see a Sony or PS2 game ad on TV, when you literally can't buy one of the consoles, no matter how bad you want to (unless you're willing to shell out a few grand).
I remember reading a developers interview on one of the gaming sites about this. (Ill check and see which one later) It still is possible to display what they say dispite the obvious.
Yes, PS2 has 4 megs for vram. however, it does have a streaming technique to make it seem like theres more.
For one, system memory can be used for textures. so now, in some situations it can have more than a DC. Plus due to the fact that the streaming can take place from memory, to memory, or CD to memory at rambus speed, it dosn't take as much as a hit as people think.
An example was used, the crash bandicoot series. the first one had to fit all of its data in the two megs available on the playstation, so the levels were broken into sectors to allow time to flush, and store more data. By the third in the series, they had figured out ways to stream the data from the CD while in the game, so the average nonstop level had enough data to require a system with 6-8 megs of memory.
I also recall that games such a fear effect used the same technology to lower loadtime and to have higher quality textures. things such as torches, and other various thing were streamed from the cd in realtime, and data was always being flushed from memory during the game to prevent loadtime during area changes.
Is the PS/2 A Disappointment?
I think a better question would have been "Can we tell if the PS/2 is A Disappointment seen as very few people own one?" or perhaps "Do any slashdot readers own PS/2s yet?" or even "Why do people insist on writing PS/2 instead of PS2, even though the PS2 acronym is unused, but PS/2 refers to the mouse/keyboard interface ports present on most PCs?"
This post has been a joke.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
I'll say. Other graphics chips must texture the backs of polygons as well as the front facing polygons. Who the hell sends those polys to the renderer?
The article makes a lot of good points. However, a few things bugged me:
* They used the plainest looking shots from GT3 I've ever seen - not to mention that I think it's unfair to compare shots from a game still in development against one completed.
* From the reviews I've seen, DOA2:Hardcore looks somewhat better than the Dreamcast version, though the review says it's the other way around.
* The fact is that while the Dreamcast might be a great console, there are simply a lot more developers working on PS2 stuff right now.
* I think they dismissed the vector processors rather lightly. After all, the whole point of the game machines is to make the best games possible - while part of that lies in the graphics, a big, big part lies in the AI and dynamics a game offers. Having a whole bunch of extra processor power around to devote to such things should, I think, translate to the possibility of some amazing games with equally amazing graphics.
* I also question why they didn't compare games of the same genre. For instance, the polygon count comparison was done with Madden 2001 vs. a racing game (sorry, the name escapes me). It seems to me that within particular genres you can pull some tricks to get a better poly count for the framerate than you can in others (racing being an exreme example for predictability of movmement and camera angles).
* In the action category, they list QuakeIII for the Dreamcast, but they left off Timesplitters for the PS2 - I'd say the level editing there is pretty compelling if you like mutliplayer action games.
* As far as anti-aliasing goes, I had thought Sony did have some kind of library now that developers could use - but I'm not sure about that at all. It would be interesting to hear if the description of the TTT anti-aliasing is correct.
The article made a number of good points. However, I would have liked to se an article with a lot less bias to it, as it would make it a lot easier to trust. I think that really, only time will tell - it will be interesting to look at how things look at the end of next year. No matter how you look at it though, the real winner of this brutal console war is the consumer!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sony won't come out with a broadband adapter, just like they never came out with the modem for the Playstation.
Sony has already said they won't come out with a modem. A broadband adapter would only sell a few thousand units. It wouldn't recoup the development costs.
PS2 looks fun as a Dreamcast alternative, but don't believe you'll be playing networked games on it.
Let's face it, a video game machine ain't worth that kind of money.
I am,
I am,
Fine
Agreed.
There are marked advantages to console systems, like fighting / puzzle games, which have never achieved success on the PC. Just as RTS, and FPS will probably never be serious on the consoles. I have yet to see a viable version of Street Fighter, or Tekken appear on my PC. Also, console games rarely have bugs. How many Quake 3, UT, Half-Life, Diablo, Starcraft patches have you downloaded? Its nice and simple.
Second, consoles use your tv. Saves your computer for real work, and its usually easier to get some dudes around a TV then around your computer.
Finally, the PS2 plays DVDs. Granted I can watch DVDs on my computer, and it will probably look better, but I have a bigger TV, so when I have people over, it would be grand it we could all watch it on the TV. Given that the PS2 costs roughly as much as a decent DVD player, how can you resist?
Captain_Frisk
I mean, sure, they were fast computers back in the late 80's and early 90's, but that Microchannel architecture was to limiting. I mean, it was almost impossible to find MC versions of adapter cards, and even when you did, they were twice as much as the ISA equivilent. Sure, they were 32-bit, but since the OS was still 16-bit, I'm not sure that made a big difference... so...
what?
Oh... what do you mean they're not talking about THAT PS/2? What would they be...
Who makes it?
Ne-ver mind....
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Daily Radar are the assholes that destroyed& lt;/A> a PS2 to gain hits on their Website. I think it was one of the Sega zealots that actually did the dirty work. What a moron, he should have just sold it on eBay.
Just to let you know I'm not biased... a Dreamcast is my current console of choice.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
The Sony guy said that it was not really a limitation. Portions of the main memory can be mapped to video memory. The video system will then DMA the textures over the (2048 bit wide!) bus and you don't notice that they aren't really in the video memory.
It'll always be slower to go to the main bus, but given that the guy also said the PS2 had more bus bandwith than a big SGI, its probably not much slower.
As one of the 500k in the US that actually got one of these things, I can say I'm not 'overwhelmed' I mean when I got my dreamcast, it blew me away. NFL 2000 was just totally amazing graphic wise. Madden 2001 is just a better designed game (play-wise) but the graphics aren't that much spectactular. Dead or Alive vs. Dead or Alive Hardcore - the only difference is the scantily clad clothing the girls wear. Gotta love that Tina in her catsuit! I don't know, if it weren't for the 'platformers' like Grand Turismo, and a few others, I'd have passed on the PS2.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I love when a console-related news post comes up on Slashdot. A community of normally intelligent people suddenly reverts to little 14 year old advocacy zealots.
I find myself wanting to buy a PS2 simply because of the 'new' factor. Seems like there's pleanty of decent games, but really the only games I want badly on PS2 is Metal Gear Solid 2 and Klonoa 2. I can wait until then.
And I never could figure out how people could only play PC games. PC games always seem to get boring real fast. Makes them great for warez I guess.
Okay, so I'm a 14 year old zealot too...
The bit about deferred rendering is just wrong, at least as the author explained it. All 3d polygon based systems from the beginning of time do backface culling. It simply isn't possible to be in a position to see both sides of a polygon from a single camera position unless you are doing ray-tracing type reflections. No system 'textures both sides of the polygons'.
What the author probably meant is that the DC graphics libraries are smart enough to not do texturing for polygons which are completely occluded by other polygons, but that is a software function, not a hardware function. Z-buffer algorithms have been doing that in 3d graphics systems for years as well.
I suspect the author read about some cool rendering thing the DC did and didn't understand it, but felt motivated nonetheless to beat up on the PS2 about it.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/2q00/ps2/ps2vspc-1.html
Yes, it plays DVDs. But if you want a wireless remote, you have to go third-party. And it doesn't play VCDs, SVCDs and the like, unlike most $170 DVD players nowadays.
And right now, a PS2 runs $300. For about $260, you can get a 5-disc DVD changer(!) that will play DVDs, VCDs and SVCDs, both commercial discs and homemade ones burned to CD-R and CD-RW.
Point is, without at least the VCD support, I still need a real DVD player anyway. So the only good reason to get a PS2 anytime soon is for the (you guessed it) games.
I'm a game developer, currently working on the Playstation 2. I'm under NDA and can't say much.
What I can say is that the portion quoted at the head of the Slashdot article alone shows that the author is full of it. VRAM on the Playstation 2 is used for storing textures and the final image, and nothing more. This has nothing to do with triangle sizes.
Further, the PS2 supports a number of compressed vertex formats and types of rapid transforms in hardware which no other system currently supports, making any amateur comparison along these lines laughable at best.
In games, the same instructions are made over and over on different data (i.e. rendering). This data is constantly changing, and it takes a lot of memory bandwidth to support this. By designing the PS2 with small amounts of memory and a lot of bandwidth, it is more difficult to program for, because using the PC mentality (Load all data into memory and pull out what you need when you need it) does not work. The PS2 does not have the memory to do so. Instead, you need to load the data into memory more dynamically, so over the course of generating a frame of graphics on screen the whole 4MB of video ram may be used several times over, instead of trying to do everything in it.
The bottom line is that programming for the PS2 requires much more dynamic memory managment, whereas programming on the PC utilizes a more static style.
Ars Technica recently had a very interesting article on the two completely different architectures somewhere (I can't seem to find it).
Only those who dream can grasp reality.
You don't store polygons into vram. You store textures. Polygons are drawn by sending commands to the Graphics Synthesizer via DMA. The entire reasoning behind this article is based on a huge technical error.
I don't insist on being referred to as "Irish-American." I don't bitch about my ancestors being discriminated against when they were poor immigrants. I live *my* life, I don't live in the past, and I don't try to get something that's not my due.
If I were a practicing, faithful Christian, I could, by extension of your philosophy, condemn all women as evil and lead a campaign to sue them for damages back in the Garden of Eden. $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 punitive damages for getting us kicked out of Paradise.
Duh. Is anyone swallowing his tripe?
Hear, Hear! My feelings exactly!
As an avid gamer with a reasonable & somewhat steady income, I have purchased almost every console worth its weight in silicon. Not that I have money to throw around, but with these systems costing anyhere between $150-$300, having your many cakes & eating them too, is not entirely out of the question.
I purchased my DC last year @ launch, and have been extremely happy with the purchase. My PS2 just arrived this past Thursday & I'm very happy with it as well (I'm also glad I pre-ordered in February). I'm also looking forward to the Tribes2 release later this year as the original one of my favorite PC games.
Bottom line, there's plenty of room in the toy chest for all of these systems. And if your funds are limited, buy the one that has most enticing set of games/features for yourself. Either way, your purchase will be a good one.
ILL Robinson
The ILL Clan
Makers of Machinima shorts,
Apartment Huntin' & Hardly Workin'
--
No matter how much truth there is to it...
So... a sega-centric website (segaweb) has an article saying that Sony's new product is a disappointment.
Wow. That's really news.
The author of the quote cited has no idea what he's talking about... Polygons get rasterized into video ram, not stored there! They get written/blended into pixels that are already holding other polygons. He further harps on what everyone seems to think is the PS2's major drawback, a smaller amount of VRAM. Well yes, you can store fewer/smaller textures in it at any given time... but the rate to transfer textures into VRAM is something like TEN TIMES the transfer rate for the DC and PCs! People, you can't do an apples to apples comparison between the PS2 and other systems based strictly on the sizes, because the system is put together completely differently. The PS2 is built to move massive amounts of data around without the bus bottlenecks that traditional architectures have had. The complaints about how hard it is to program are unfounded. It is a very different, unfamiliar architecture. However, once you learn the ground rules, it's really no harder to actually program for than any other console. People who are bitching are doing so because they're just a bit too lazy to learn something new... Yet this architecture is much better suited to doing hardcore 3d than a PC architecture has ever been. Don't believe the hype... The word-of-mouth impression is inaccurate, yet repeated from person to person with no firsthand experience. Let it stop with you! I'm an experienced game programmer, but you don't have to believe me; either shut up, or get ahold of one and try coding for it yourself.
What's scarier, you can even plug them in backwards and have the system work perfectly. Seems the PS/2 bus really is a bus.
I read the internet for the articles.
Ah but the typical kid will, at best, manage to coax his parents into buying him one or the other console. The kid is actually insecure about his choice and fears having made teh wrong one (just ask Jaguar owners). So he pumps up his confidence in choosing his system by slamming all the other systems. Standard 12 year old logic.
The math seems right, but why must polygons be stored and manipulated within 4 megs of VRAM? I would think that the Playstation 2 would have seperate vector processors that could operate on the data set in main memory (of which it has 32MB).
I would guess that from there, you would perform functions that convert these coordinates from 3d worldspace to 2d visual/screen space, and that is what gets drawn into the 4 megs of VRAM, which is probably actually a framebuffer.
This doesn't leave the PS2 much room for its framebuffer which uses around 1.2MB just to display the end data, not to mention that you still need to leave room for textures to put on those polygons.
Again, I would not expect a console to have layouts similar to PC memory. There's no reason to design the PS2 so that you cannot perform hardware tranformations/manipulations on data sitting in main memory. On something like the PC, VRAM is the only domain for this because only the video adapter is really good at these operations. I would wager much differently for the PS2.
There are exceptions to this of course, such as media extensions to the main processor (MMX, 3DNow!) and video adapter DMA to main memory, but a dedicated game system has room to do so much more.
A television can draw 240 scanlines per frame (60 fps) or 480 scanlines per frame (30 fps) due to interlacing; odd scanlines are drawn in odd frames and vice versa. If you render the odd scanlines while the even scanlines are being displayed (as Squaresoft's PS1 games Tobal No.1 and Ehrgeiz do), you get pseudo-512x480 at a 512x240 fillrate.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I know many, many people who abandoned their lives for a day to hopefully get a PS2, and then spend an entire day playing it. The limited supply set a buzz in the air, as those who actually did get their hands on this console were the lucky few... and if you didn't, there was always eBay... assuming you wanted to pay a grand for your gaming console.
But with all of the buzz, and the chaos that followed, few people have realized that ITS ONLY A TOY. Sure, video games are fun, but it's not like Jesus is back and ready for revenge.
Of the people I know who managed to get a PS2, most of them wish they hadn't opened the box so they could have sold it on eBay... pretty much for the reason that they realized that it's only a gaming console, they can get another in the not-too-distant future, and in the meantime, they could have made a bundle off of some poor sap.
-agent oranje
-agent oranje.