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Crossplatform Titles Shortchanging PlayStation 2's Performance?
Thanks to GamerFeed for their new story noting that Sony Europe's research, using their 'performance analyzer', on the latest PS2 games. According to the piece: "The secret (or not so secret) way to unleash the PS2's power is to use its vector units (VUs)... of course, the games that used the VUs fared much better, and the game that scored highest did indeed use the VUs the most." An previous AnandTech analysis of the PS2's hardware explains a little further: "The power of the two VUs exists in the proper use of them as serial counterparts in handling the T&L calculations necessary during 3D rendering, but with the PS2 being... dramatically different from what most developers had seen in the past, getting the most out of the host CPU was quite difficult." The original article, in UK magazine PSM, concludes by pointing out: "A lot of the games that don't really use vector units are ports from other systems."
The more eclectic you make your system, the more you limit who will spend the time maximizing its performance. If you remember the Dreamcast, they decided to go with a PowerVR type tile based architecture. It caused problems with ports and some of them required quite some rewriting before they would work properly. End result? Limited third party support, and part of why the console did so poorly.
The PS2 is the 800 lb gorilla so of course it's not going to miss out on any ports. That being said, when Sony chose to get cute with their architecture, they also chose to limit the amount of people that would maximize its power. Was it worth the (hypothetical) 5-10% speed increase in highly specialized apps if non-optimized code runs 20% slower? I'd say no, but for that answer you'd have to ask Sony.
I get asked all the time which machine is most powerful. It is easy to answer that it is the Xbox because it has a 733Mhz processor and NVidia GPU but in reality that is missing the point. When Sony designed the PS2 they were a couple of years earlier than the Xbox so clock speeds were lower, the 300Mhz MIPS RISC processor was very fast for the time, much faster than any available Intel chip, they were still being used in SGI workstations for example and those are beefy pieces of kit. The problem for Sony was to increase the grunt while being limited by clock speed and the best solution is to introduce parallel processing. The VUs are no different to SSE and SSE2 that Intel introduced in the PIII and P4 line but you don't hear people throwing stones at Intel for doing that.
The problem Sony has is convincing programmers to look beyond the capabilities of the basic MIPS processor and getting them to use the VUs but just as it is difficult to really make SSE kick arse it is difficult to get VUs working well. I used to program massively parallel computers (look up MasPar) for a living and they were hard, one of the reasons the company eventually failed in fact. However, the techniques used to program that beast are the same as used to write code on the VUs and SSE. I have seen applications that increased in speed by a factor of 20 (not 20%, 20x!) through the use of SSE on Pentium chips so when Sony gets annoyed that people are not using the VUs and so making the PS2 look like it isn't very powerful, well, you can see their point.
As for the relative power of the PS2 versus the other hardware, have a look at Gran Tourismo 4, or Killzone and reconsider your position if you blindly believe that power is all about clock speed and DirectX.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Usually, a 3rd party is responsible for porting games. Unless it is a big development company or part of a bigger publisher, it just isn't feasible or worth it for one company to port the game to all platforms. Another company which only does porting is usually responsible for the port.
Word. Dunno what the parent poster was talking about, but clearly he/she lacks real game dev experience, as neither the PS2 nor the GC use OpenGL.