Console Hardware

[gpw11]

Basically wht I'm looking for is a non-biased analysis of the PS2 hardware compared to the more developer friendly (and standardized) GCN and Xbox hardware.

I'd like to know how efficient the 16 pipelines, the EE, the GS and the rest of the architecture is.

Is the EE really capable of easily pulling off alpha-blending and radiosity easily due to its large vector instructions?

Finally, which is really (PS2 or x-box) capable of pulling off more impressive graphics in practice (not in theory).


I've all of a sudden become really interested in console hardware, although I don't own or really play any of them. I remember a great thread here a while ago which compared the ps2 and xbox, but can no longer find it (this was over 6 months ago).

Thanks.

 

[klah]

Have you read these?

Hardware Behind the Consoles - Part I: Microsoft's Xbox

Hardware Behind the Consoles - Part II: Nintendo's GameCube

 

[gpw11]

Yeah I have, and found them quite interesting, but I was kind of looking for more opinions and possibly some more indepth information on the performance of the architechtures.

 

[kylebisme]

well i realy cant comment on the technical side of things but i play a lot of videogames and sony efforts seem to be more in marketing than technology. from the games that i have seen on all three the ps2 looks realy bad in comparison. presonaly i think the ps2 immage qualty doesnt look much beter than the psx, though it does push many more polygons. to me, comparing the grapics on the ps2 to the gamecube and xbox is like comparing software render to dx8 accleration.