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."

Comments

Not an attempt at trolling...

[orthancstone]

Perhaps this is a sign to Sony that the next console should be less complicated with its graphics. The Xbox is probably easy enough consider its DirectX basis and the Gamecube architecture uses one graphics chip rather than a convoluted parallized two chip system.

While the PS 2 may have a powerful, robust graphics core because of this design, as has been pointed out: Does every company have the time to make use of the specifics, or are they going to do the least amount of work possible when porting to make a game playable and not horrendous looking?

If cross-platform gaming continues to become a huge trend, it would be in Sony's best interest to try and simplify some parts of its graphics to make the best parts of it more accessible to developers that perhaps don't have all the time they need to port the game as well as they should.

In the meantime, though, Sony has a large amount of exclusive content...so they shouldn't be too worried about whether or not they are getting optimization for cross-platform games. People are sure to still buy them but they most likely will definitely pay attention to kick ass exclusive games for being even better.

(PS-If that sounded like complete crap, eh, oh well :/ )

VU Useage == Good Game

[MBCook]

It's the magic formula to success! No wonder the XBox is terrible, it has no VUs! OK, in all seriousness the VUs don't magicaly make games better, that is a result of the reason, not the cause.

This makes perfect sense. The developers who use the VU are the ones that take the time. Quick and dirty ports wouldn't use it, but if you take the time to optomize for the VU and such, then chances are you'll take the time to optomize other things. You'll make the sound work well, get rid of the logic glitches, adjust the diffuculty so people don't get stuck because you left out some clues to where the key is hidden, etc. The publishers and developers that take time to make great games spend some of that time one the VUs.

So, indirectly, it makes perfect sense that VUs make a good judge of quality. Now if only other publishers would stop making so much shovelware. The PS2 (and other consoles too, but especially the PS2) has a LOT of great games. But for every great game the PS2 has, it has TONS of shovelware. Unfortunatly, often the shovelware gets great marketing (Finding Nemo, The Matrix: Reloaded, BMX-XXX) and great games (Amplitude, Ico, etc) don't get nearly as much and so they don't do nearly as well, because a large number of games are bought by parents who don't know what games are worth money, or what aren't worth their weight in dust.

Performance Analyzer presentation

[antime]

I'm not sure it's this the article is referring to, but here's lecture slides on the performance analyzer from the Game Developer's Conference 2003 that includes some case studies.

For more info, look at the other docs on SCEA's R&D site and SCEE Technology Group's site.

Relative power of machines

[GreatDrok]

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.