[Subscribe to Daily Digest] |
 | [Main General Bulletin Board | BBFAQ |
Prev by Date | Next by Date | Post Followup ]
Member Login / Signup - Members see fewer ads. - Latest Member Gallery Photos
Re: On games ported over from the PC, XBox... Posted by AdamB [Email]  (#3)  [Profile/Gallery]
(more from AdamB) on Tue, 20 Jan 2004 02:26:36
In Reply to: On games ported over from the PC, XBox..., Street, Mon, 19 Jan 2004 09:08:49 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
Even games made for the PS2 look rather primitive compared to current PC games, and I still think most games look better on the Xbox than on the PS2.
You're right though that the Emotion Engine does have 128bit SIMD. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the PS2 is super fast. It is hampered by among other things; a very small on-die cache for the EE, and only 4 MB embedded DRAM to keep the 16 pixel pipelines of the Graphics Syntheziser filled. 4 MB is not nearly enough, so it has to be supplied through the 3.2 GB/s memory bus to the 32MB main RAM. 3.2 GB/s is hardly enough bandwidth and 32MB is not enough storage for game execution code as well as high resolution textures (compared to 6.4 GB/s and 64 MB RAM for the Xbox).
This means PS2 games are generally limited to low resolution textures. Also the PS2 is not good at Anti-Aliasing, but the Xbox is. At the low resolutions consoles run at, AA makes a lot of difference in graphics quality. Another weak point of the PS2 vs. Xbox is with regards to pixel and vertex shaders.
The biggest power of the PS2's 128 bits is as a marketing buzz word. Just like the PR claims of the next Sony console being "1000 times more powerful than a PC".
The PS2 was a pretty revolutionary design when it came out, but it looks like the very nature of the design, made it so hard to code games for it that by the time programmers begin to really program well for the PS2, it'll be obsolete and even very efficiently coded games will have sub-par gfx quality.
As for the Xbox graphics, I know it well. The motherboard uses a modified Nforce1 chipset with a graphics core that is derived from the Geforce3 (which is obsolete already).
Again, If I had to choose a console, I would buy the PS2 instead of the Xbox, for the simple reason that none of the Xbox games attract me, but Gran Tourismo 3 does. Gameplay is more important than graphics quality to me :)
With regards to PCI-express and using the gfx card as co-processor, I don't think that will be relevant in the forseable future besides for rendering, although it would be cool. PCI-express has miniscule bandwidth compared to the memory bus between GPU and onboard RAM. It's far more efficient to keep the textures in the onboard RAM instead of having to transfer it to the system RAM. This explains why there is no performance difference worth mentioning between AGP 4X and 8X. The bandwidth just isn't used. All the textures are kept on the graphics card. I don't see this changing as long as the bandwidth between GPU and onboard RAM is considerably higher than between the GPU and system RAM.
In my opinion the biggest benefit of PCI-express is increased bandwidth for other expansion cards, especially RAID- and high speed LAN-adapters.
posted by 194.255.11...
, Sat, 17 Jan 2004 23:37:33, Tue, 20 Jan 2004 02:26:36 <-- Viewing This Message
, Thu, 15 Jan 2004 17:44:41
No Site Registration is Required to Post - Site Membership is optional (Member Features List), but helps to keep the site online
for all Saabers. If the site helps you, please consider helping the site by becoming a member.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
