PS2 vs XBox, very interesting read of who has the better hardware

[Chad]

Gomce, you post a link to an absolute farce of an article and claim it an interesting read. When in fact, it's obvious fanboy dribble with absolutely utter nonsense for reasoning and just plain out and out lies.

Then, you try to claim Anand's article is biased because it doesn't represent the view your wanting everyone to believe... that the PS2 is as good as the Xbox from a hardware standpoint. Well, guess what... IT IS NOT!

But there is nothing for the PS2 to be ashamed of, it's older technology. Whoopee. It has great games, what else matters? Ever wonder why cross platform games look and run better on the Xbox, even though most were designed specifically for the PS2? That speaks VOLUMES!

Every single game on the Xbox is rendered out in progressive scan (if you have the capabilities to display this is a different story). The PS2 simply doesn't have the fillrate capabilities to do this, which is why you don't see ANY games on the PS2 that do so. Also, games like Ico had to run in even lower resolutions than 640x480 to meet it's fillrate needs... even though the game is somewhat slow with hardly much action on the screen at any one time. It just can't do the things the Xbox can do.

Looking at the PS2's textures on ANY game and you will quickly see the blurry, low res, bleh textures the system has to use. I'm sorry, you just are kind of coming of as fanboy'ish with this whole argument of yours.

If your arguments was about "great games" then you'd win... the PS2 simply destroys the Xbox right now in that category. I love all of my PS2 games, because they are great "games". But sitting here trying to convince everyone that the PS2 is as capable as the Xbox from a hardware point of view just makes you come off like one of those fanboys. One can look at 3rd generation PS2 games and they still don't hold a candle to some of the 1st generation Xbox games (DOA3, Amped, Halo, Rallisport etc...). Even the highest touted graphical game on the PS2 (MGS 2) just has some of the ugliest textures I can remember in a game.

I'll take Anand's word over the idiot who wrote that article any day of the week, and MY OWN EYES don't deceive me. Xbox games simply look and sound better than the PS2 games at this point (not speaking artistically here).

Blood Omen 2 and Max Payne are great examples of the superiority of the Xbox. Both games on PS2 suffer from very poor framerates, studders, INSANELY long loading times, lower resolution textures and other discrepancies that simply do not exist on the Xbox versions.

 

[Pariah]

"Every single game on the Xbox is rendered out in progressive scan (if you have the capabilities to display this is a different story). The PS2 simply doesn't have the fillrate capabilities to do this, which is why you don't see ANY games on the PS2 that do so."

Do you know what progressive scan is or are you just throwing out buzz words to try and make your arguement look more convincing? Progressive is more or less a fancy word for noninterlaced image, it is not rendered and has nothing to do with console fillrate. The Atari 2600 could output a progressive image if anyone cared to add the capability. Consoles render full frames just like a video camera captures full frames. From there what determines progressive or interlaced is how that original full frame of video is scanned for output. If it is scanned all at once and output to a TV it is progressive, if it is scanned twice and split into 2 fields it is interlaced. The method of output has zero affect on the actual rendering of the graphics.

Also, any HDTV capable TV should have a line doubler which will create a progressive like image regardless of what is sent to the TV negating any real advantage of native progressive output.

"But sitting here trying to convince everyone that the PS2 is as capable as the Xbox from a hardware point of view just makes you come off like one of those fanboys."

Who exactly said this and where? You're arguing against yourself. No one in this thread, that I have seen, has made any claims of the PS2 being a technical equal to the XBox, it isn't. No is saying that stop claiming otherwise. That being said, being technically superior does not guarantee better looking games. Saying the best of XBox is vastly better looking than the best of the PS2 would be fairytale. If you're basing your comparison on playing XBox games on a 60" HDTV vs PS2 on a 27" standard TV, then no wonder. On equal setups the current best of XBox is not notably better, and in some cases isn't any better at all.

 

[FishTankX]

Pariah😛rogressive or not depends on how you buffer it.

The PS2 stores the information in it's framebuffer as interlaced. As in 640X240 for most games. It saves on the pathetically small space for textures and such and can give you an extra boost in max textures. The PS2 has cramped RAM and sometimes it has to run interlaced. It could run progressive, if you were willing to make it work that way. but I've never seen a PS2 game run progressive. Then again, i've only played 2, so I wouldn't know.

The PS2 games actually usually utilize an interlaced double buffer for a total of some 600K of frame buffer. Then add 400K for the Z-buffer. Then you have 3 megs left for textures.

Looks really sad, but it aint that bad. The total amount of textures on a typical PS2 scene never exceeds 3 megs. Progress later into the level and you load textures into EDRAM Via the RAMBUS memory pool. But as i've said *again* and *again* and *again*.... the PS2 *needs* texture compression to have decent looking textures!!! Texture compression could allow the PS2 to have nearly 24 megs of texture memory, plenty for most games. The X-box can have 256 megs of non compressed textures if it wanted to, seeing it supports texture compression (8:1). The PS2, if it had texture compression, could do *so* much better.

The PS2's strentgh is it's monstrous CPU. Beats the living daylights out of the X-box's CPU. And you AMD hawkers should be proud. The EE has a monstrous IPC rating of around 20 floating point operations per clock. The Athlon does... 3? The P4 does.. 1? So game makers can balance between physics, graphics, and AI in the future to create a more optimal experience rather than just flat out graphics and sorta lacking on physics (Example:Blow up the wall! Blast through the ceiling! Actually have things deform upon being shot. The P3733 just don't have that kinda horsepower) plus the PS2's architecture is much cleaner. They can have *mad* fast decompression schemes that can cut bus utilization in like... 1/2. The developers can write their own drivers to exploit the grapihc's synthesizer's rediclous bandwidth (48GB/s, 10X the X-box's max) and fillrate (16 pipes! OMG!! it has more untextured fillrate than the X-box). The PS2 has a cleaner architecture overall and despite the latency of dual channel rambus I think the PS2 has more end potential on the CPU side and that makes up for the lack of pixel/vertex shaders (sorta) and in the end it's just simply a more flexible machine. Don't need such pretty grahpics? Cut some out and put in some weird physics like variable friction water, or something...

The PS2 is just as strong on the X-box on the hardware side because despite it's display subsystem problems (I know them all too well.. *sigh*) it's monstrous CPU sorta makes up for it. Plus, you don't need textures for everything. Example? If someone is wearing a solid red shirt, you can have a 1X1 8 bit color texture to cover the shirt. It's solid red, who needs a fancy texture? Hah.. 1/2 byte texture size.. that's a first. Ever think about it that way? The PS2 has some other tricks. Like instead of making a tree just a couple of flat polygons with leaf textures, they could have a null texture, just assign the polygons for the leaves a green color and flesh them out by making them individual polygons instead of this textured crap. Saves on texture RAM. Don't believe the PS2 has the power? Well, I haven't seen a single game that doesn't run allright on an AthlonXP 1800+ and a Kyro2, and the Kyro2 has no T&L unit meaning that the AthlonXP gets saddled with all the work, despite the fact that it has to handle physics, AI, T&L, and it's got *half* to *one third* the nominal floating point power of a normal AthlonXP, and it doesn't have to deal with all this API Sh!t. Don't like directX? Code your own custom drivers and API and have it run circles around DirectX. You PC gamers are too dependent on textures, man.. poygons can do anything a texture can. And the PS2 has a faster than lightning FPU...

What people like Gomce understand is that despite the huge flaws of the PS2 it's workable. it's console architecture and custom OS
s and API's make it workable. Now there's a good reason for the extreme crap games that came out at first.

How many people here know assembler? *few raise their hands* How many people know how much of a pain in the ass assembler is to code? *few raise their hands, mostly the same people* how many people actually *know* what assembler is? Lemme give you an example

A+B=C
D+E=F
Compare C & F

Not so familiar compared to C++ and the ubersimple VB, is it?

The PS2 shipped with few if any C libraries. Imagine having to code an entire game world in... assembler? OMG! NO! STAY AWAY FROM ME! AIIIIIEIEIEIEIEIEIEIEI!!!EIEI!

It was a nightmare for game developers. Then you've got to take into account that the PS2 has 1CPU and 2 Vertex units instead of just 1 CPU. OUCH! Again, code in assembler for that. Figure out how to get all of your textures crammed into EDRAM..

Consoles age like wine. The older they get, the better people master them, and the better games get.

Now, this rant has gone on long enough. But I would like to close in saying that I don't like the PS2 more than the X-box. I like the PS2's controller more than the X-box! 😛 I love sony's controller. But both consoles have strentghs and weaknesses. The X-box's weakness is it's slow as hell harddisk drive and it's limited in power CPU. The PS2's weakness is the dam graphics synthesizer, EDRAM and all.

What matters in the end of the day? Developers, fan base, games, and friends and a good beer or two to share. Can I get an Amen?

I admire both console's, and on the Hardware side, unlike Chad thinks, the X-box doesn't destroy the PS2. Nope, no siree..

The EE is simply too powerful of an oponent. A friggin 20 FP operations per clock? WHEW!!!

For comparison, a P4 would have to be running at 6.5GHZ to have the floating point power of the EE.

Then the EE would win anyways because in games everything is controlled by bloated windows which sucks anyways.

What I do think is that X-box games will look better and PS2 games will have more depth (By nature, Japanese games have more depth than american ones...)

FishtankX, signing out.

 

[mchammer187]

assembly is pretty fun IMHO i wouldnt want to debug 6000+ lines of it though that would be a nightmare the most complicated thing we did with it was connect to EVB motorola 68HC11 boards together via serial communication and when u hit a switch on one the LED's on the other would flash 😀

Im sure you comp engs and elec engs know what i'm talking about

yeah assembly is a huge pain in the ass if you want to do a simple thing like a switch statement would an insane amount of assembly code but it sure runs faster than if it were done in C / c++

i wonder what sony has up their sleeve with CELL

 

[Degenerate]

Without reading. Xbox obviously has better hardware.

 

[Woodchuck2000]

That has to be the biggest pile of bulls**t I've ever encountered...
This bit made me laugh in particular:



<< The P III of the Xbox took 00:00:35 seconds to render the image used, obtaining a POVmark of 422.86
The "Emotion Engine" did it in just 00:00:05 seconds to get one hell of a POVmark...2960
Alright so its clear, the PS2 GPU beats the one in the Xbox. The P III processor may be good in other tasks that do not involve graphics. >>



Which begs the question: "Since when is the PIII in the Xbox the GPU?" The PIII goes no-where near the graphics - thats what T&L and vertex shaders on the NV2A are for...