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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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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".
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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.
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.