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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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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
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!"
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
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
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"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
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.
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
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?
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
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?
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.
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".
[
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.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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
________
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.
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 $$$$.
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
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.
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.
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...
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...
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
...it was totally proprietary! :]
PS: I'm making fun of the typo in the article subject, in case you don't get it.
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...
As for console titles costing alsmot a hundred bucks... well, I'd like to know where you're seeing these prices. Granted that aisde from my NES, I haven't really bought any console titles in years, I still visit the console sections of stores and haven't seen any games going for that much. I mostly see $60 tops. Which is also about how much I've seen some PC games start going for.
Granted, for those of us who already own PCs, and many times high-end PCs at that, a PS2 might not make the best purchase. However, they do have their nich(sp?), so we shouldn't knock them.
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If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
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 primary advantage to consoles is that they allow you to play games without having to worry about whether your graphics card is good enough, whether your drivers are up to date, whether it'll randomly crash for other reasons entirely and all the rest of the hassle you have to go through to get games working on PCs. Put game in. Switch on. Play. That's the advantage of consoles.
>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.
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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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
The PS2 (like every other gaming console) doesn't offer anything that my PC's don't, other than perhaps a few game titles.
How about stability, 100% compatibility with every game on the shelf, and the fact that consoles give the developers a chance to tighten up their code by giving them specific hardware to write for. The Gran Tourismo games are some of the best examples. They use assembly.
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.
Well, that's _ONE_ advantage. The MAC advocates might point out that they tout the same story. In fact, however, if you don't skimp out on the price tag of a PC, you shouldn't have any difficulty. Since win95's Direct X came out, I haven't had a compatibility problem for my main desktop... True, I choose my hardware with a mircro-scope, but I chose name-brands, which are typical of more expensive vendors.
A _big_ advantage of console games is that programmers have a common target platform. For the longest time, this was the biggest problem for PC's.. Recently, again, with Direct X, this pretty much goes away. Others that wish to take the more difficult road use GL, etc, but the trend is towards convergence and compatibility. Still consoles have the edge (as long as you're not trying to port to every console out there).
As for reliability, I've never seen a reliable console. Even my old Atari would crash on occasion. It's a computer, it isn't infallible, or immune to bad code.. And as the programs get more complex, the likelyhood increases. I snicker under my breath when my friend says he has to "reboot" his N64 periodically.
Heck, one Sega machine had dual procs, but few progammers used it becuase race condition management just throw you out the window.
The MAIN reason why consoles are so popular is content.. They simply have a great wealth of games. I don't know what the cost is for a PC game verses a console game, but it's just been the trend for most of history. Granted, I find many of the games on consoles dumbed up versions of their PC counterparts, mainly because the limited control "buttons", but also because of the appauling resolution and interlacing inherent in a console setup.
We were taught when I was young to not sit too close to the TV because of the radiation.. But consoles do the exact opposite.. They place you right in front of a heavily flickering monitor with interlacing to mess with your built in motion sensing.
Back to the original point, consoles definately have simplicity going for them, but PC's are slowly catching up. You already have to know how to turn the computer on and off if you do any sort of productivity. Now you just pop the CD in, and it'll automatically install and or RUN. Aside from the million and one things a user can do to screw this up, that's pretty straight forward. Consoles win by utilizing the AOL syndrom (that I herefore coin). Reduce the number of options your customer has, and you simplify their life, and can claim that they're happier humans. The gamble works because the vast majority of people accept this, and new-commers can always initially appretiate it. Also, even experienced uses might enjoy this, so long as they can do what-ever they like (the only explanation I can offer towards Mac Power Users). The small minority that feel closterphobic in such restricted environments will simply opt NOT to choose that platform.
Personally, Sony's dream scares me.. They wish to produce the most powerful hardware on earth, and sell at a loss so that they can lock you into their accessories (like games, or home entertainment). Of course you'll be able to control your Sony TV, stereo, VCR, Sony internet connection, etc. Why need a PC at all when you can do all the basic Home operations from your living room. Heck, put a PSX next to every TV in your house.
It's not a real danger, but you never know.
-Michael
-Michael
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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?