PC hardware vs PS2 at launch

[Frisbee566]

How you experts view on this now in 2017? If lets say a pc of the time the PS2 launched in march 2000, about a Geforce 2 GTS, a 1Ghz coppermine P3, 256mb ram, soundblaster live card.
A build like that, did/has that more potentional then PS2 if both utilised to the max, or has the PS2 the edge?

Nowadays consoles dont even come close, wonder how that was with the PS2. I know they are very hard to compare cause the emotion engine and the GS are rather complex. I find alot of discussions here on anandtech but most are very old (from ps2's time frame). Maybe its easier to gauge now?

People were always defending the PS2 with things like 32bit z-buffering, wider bus, 128bits and VU1 and VU0.
Are there any experts on this who can share their views on this?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

The PS2 was a good system, with some great titles, and backwards-compatibility with the Playstation 1 library.

But the original xbox out-muscled it, and that was weaker than your theoretical March 2000 PC system. So in terms of raw grunt, the PC would win. Although it's not just raw grunt, it's how you use it. Maybe the PS2 was easier to program for, etc.?

 

[Frisbee566]

Original xbox had a much more powerful GPU then the PC when PS2 launched. modified Geforce 3 in xbox vs Geforce 2.
Thinking of that, if the xbox was just merely more powerfull then the PS2, and xbox had P3 733mhz with a faster card then GF3, that would mean PS2 was faster then a pc when it launched (P3 with GF2).

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Original xbox had a much more powerful GPU then the PC when PS2 launched. modified Geforce 3 in xbox vs Geforce 2.

Oh, right you are. (I thought the XBox had a GeForce 2 equivalent.)

Thinking of that, if the xbox was just merely more powerfull then the PS2, and xbox had P3 733mhz with a faster card then GF3, that would mean PS2 was faster then a pc when it launched (P3 with GF2).

That doesn't logically follow. The PS2 isn't necessarily more powerful than the PC just because the XBox is more powerful than them both.

 

[sm625]

You dont need to be an expert to know that it is far easier to optimize the code for a static piece of hardware, when you know the exact size of every memory space, the exact bandwidth of every interface, It is just so much easier. There is so much code that you can cut out. You could really see the effects of this in 2005. PS2 games from 2004-2005 were unquestionably far more advanced than anything that could ever dream of running on a 1GHz Pentium 3 PC with a Geforce 2. That is the key difference between console games and PC games. Console games run better after 4 years on the same hardware, hardware that is effectively 4 years old. But PC games almost universally run worse on 4 year old hardware compared to games from 4 years ago.

 

[Frisbee566]

Thats well known, but i asked based purely on hardware. Granted software is going to be better optimized on consoles, but comparing that 1ghz P3/GF2GTS setup to the PS2, if developers focused for a game on both platforms, which would be better?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Thats well known, but i asked based purely on hardware. Granted software is going to be better optimized on consoles, but comparing that 1ghz P3/GF2GTS setup to the PS2, if developers focused for a game on both platforms, which would be better?

It's hard to compare when you have different architectures, etc. but:

PS2 CPU/GPU theoretical performance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_Engine#Theoretical_performance

That 6.2GFLOP/S number includes both CPU and GPU. From what I've read elsewhere, the experiments with clustering Playstation 2s mostly centered around leveraging the GPUs, and ignored the CPUs (which were comparatively pretty weak.)

This doc breaks it down a bit - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.106.6881&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Judging by that, the GPU/VPU units are doing ~5.5 GFLOP/S max, and the "CPU" in the PS2 would then be doing 0.7 max, which is in the range for contemporary CPUs. (Apple and their "1GFLOPS" PowerPC 7400 CPUs ran at 350MHz.)

Comparison of GPU GFLOPS: http://kyokojap.myweb.hinet.net/gpu_gflops/

At 5.5GFLOPS, the GPU would have the raw grunt roughly of a... well... that's hard to answer. I'm not finding a lot of benchmarks for that old stuff. A lot of it's contradictory. But it seems like it'd be somewhere in the GeForce 2 range.

 

[Frisbee566]

Seeing that Geforce 2 Ultra does around 2Gflops
https://videocardz.net/nvidia-geforce2-ultra/

Find it hard it believe the PS2's graphics processing power is almost 3 times stronger then a GF2 Ultra.

Edit:

Geforce 2 GTS actually has 6.4 Gflops (GPU alone more then total PS2)
http://www.hardware-infos.com/grafikkarten-nvidia.html
Scroll to find the GF2 GTS

Intel Pentium 3 1GHZ (released march 2000), 2Gflops
http://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/Computing/Computing_Power.htm
Again scroll down to find the Pentium 3

Seems pc had the edge in atleast theoretical gflops, by a quit large margin. You could also have much more ram then the PS2 (256mb), and a dedicated sound card offloading the CPU, the creative live was good for its time with its EAX.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

#pcmasterrace

 

[Hi-Fi Man]

Almost thought this was a necro.

Anyways, comparisons with the PS2s "GPU" (more like a rasterizer or graphics accelerator) and a GeForce 2 are misleading. The Graphics Synthesizer (PS2 graphics chip) didn't support TnL and it was completely fixed function and only really did texturing, blitting, and rasterizing. However, it did have a lot of pixel pipelines, 16 in fact, which is far more than any contemporary graphics accelerator at the time; The GeForce 2 only had up to 4 pipes. So when it came to multi-pass rendering the GS had no competition because it had a high fillrate and lots of memory bandwidth (4MiB of eDRAM on a 4096 bit internal bus). The GF2 was a more modern design though. It supported TnL, primitive programmability (like shaders), better texture compression, separate texturing units, per pixel accuracy, better AA, better texture filtering, and more RAM.

So how does the PS2 handle geometry then?
Just like any other PC without TnL, on the CPU but with one exception. The PS2's CPU (Emotion Engine) had two 128 bit SIMD vector units (VU0 and VU1) attached to the CPU on package that were considered co-processors to the main MIPS R5900 processor. VU1 is the vector unit that deals with geometry as it was specially designed for that task. The VUs were also programmable with ucode which allowed them to be very flexible.

So how does this all compare to a 1GHz P3 and GF2? Well the PS2 loses in some ways and wins in others. The CPU was clocked too low (299MHz) to be competitive with a high clocked x86 CPU of the time especially since the P3 had SSE and K7 had 3DNow! but when you look at the GF2 and GS things get more interesting. The GF2 could render at higher resolutions far better than the GS and had better rendering quality however, the GS had the ability to do some very interesting effects that a GF2 couldn't do by utilizing the high fillrate design of the GS and VU1's ucode programmability (which was designed and used to mimic shaders and more complex than GF2's NSR).

A fair comparison would be to take Metal Gear Solid 2 on PC and see how it runs on a GF2 compared to the PS2.

Now if this hypothetical PC had a GeForce 3 it would be a complete wash in favor of the PC because of the GF3's programmable pipeline. I should mention the PS2's architecture was and is extremely complex so programming for it was hell. A design more like the GameCube's would have been far better as it was easily the best designed console of that generation if you look at price/performance, performance/watt, and complexity.

 

[Frisbee566]

That was some good/informative explanation. MGS2 on pc wasnt nowhere near aswell optimized as for PS2, thought it was actually a pretty bad port. Gamecube was the better console if you compare to PS2, it had the edge in most games that where multiplat, and rouge one showed what it was capable off.

As for the march 2000 pc, reading what you said, the p3/gf2 combo seems like having the edge considering the GS's only advantage being the 16 pipes, the GF2 not having that many but have other important features the GS didnt have, perhaps outweighing the GS as a whole.

Didnt the PS2 have 2560 bit bus? cant recall the 4096 bit bus number.

 

[Hi-Fi Man]

That was some good/informative explanation. MGS2 on pc wasnt nowhere near aswell optimized as for PS2, thought it was actually a pretty bad port. Gamecube was the better console if you compare to PS2, it had the edge in most games that where multiplat, and rouge one showed what it was capable off.

As for the march 2000 pc, reading what you said, the p3/gf2 combo seems like having the edge considering the GS's only advantage being the 16 pipes, the GF2 not having that many but have other important features the GS didnt have, perhaps outweighing the GS as a whole.

Didnt the PS2 have 2560 bit bus? cant recall the 4096 bit bus number.

Probably 2560 bit bus, it's been awhile.

The GS could do some interesting effects because it relied so heavily on VU1. With that said, I'm sure most would take the higher render quality and higher resolution of the GF2 over the GS/EE's few additional effects it could do.

MGS2 on PC wasn't too bad, they even included an SSE exe if I remember right. Another game to check might be Beyond Good and Evil as that PC port wasn't as bad as MGS2.

 

[HutchinsonJC]

Maybe the PS2 was easier to program for, etc.?

My understanding was that the PS2 was definitely not easier to program for. It was a pretty dramatic change from what anyone was used to with the emotion engine and its vector units VPU0, VPU1.

I don't think it's not fair to say that PS2 intro titles and latter year PS2 titles show a pretty *dramatic* difference in what programmers were able to squeeze out of the console. I mean beyond what would typically be seen from the beginning to the end of a console's life.