Wow, current PS2 games only use 25% of PS2 power!

[bubba]

Wow, it looks like there will be good things in store for the PS2 and future games:


<< You probably read about the fact that we have a program analyser - it's a device that analyses the efficiency of programs. On PSone it took us about four years to get one of those things, and now we have a couple next door and people come and put their games through it. It's very revealing that even a game like GT3, which everybody said, "wow, that's what PS2's about" only uses about 25 percent of the capacity. What it says is that as people learn to get more out of the various elements, the chips and the BUS, etc, that you're going to see some really exciting stuff. >>



From: Computer & Video Games Interview of Chris Deering, Sony Europe's computing president


(P.S. don't even bother trying to turn this into a PS2 vs. Xbox vs. GameCube thread, it is only intended to talk about the PS2 itself)

 

[Goldfish]

People calling the XBox an investment in the future. Pshht. What out our nice PS2's?

 

[BlvdKing]

Anyone know when Sony is going to lower the price on the PS2? I am waiting for them to go down to $239 or lower before picking one up.

 

[acebathound]

If Sony wouldn't have made the PS2 so hard to program for.. you'd be seeing better looking graphics now and not in 2 years Though I guess it's kinda nice to know games will improve once some of the developers learn Sony's development kit (I'm guessing they have one for the PS2) or write their own development kits for the PS2. But there's also some limitations of the PS2 hardware itself that probably won't allow the developers to fully utilize the power -- I think I read an article over at videogames.com about the different systems and their true potential considering hardware limitations. Anyway.. might look good on paper and sure the company reps are going to boast about it.. this goes for any system, not just the PS2. I personally don't own any of the newer consoles (just a Playstation 1 and a Dreamcast), so I'm not being biased toward any one system here, just telling it as it is. I can say I always thought that way after purchasing the PS1.. and they were able to kick some more power out of the console, but who knows if they ever actually utilized more than 80% of what it was capable of on paper (anyone? maybe someone wrote an article on it.. I don't know).

 

[DamienVorlion]

More crap that people have no problem swallowing since it makes them reassured about their PS2 purchase. The PS2 has been out for a year and no games make use of the system to more than 25%!!! LOL. And what exactly does this garage hack, I mean "analyzer", analyze?

 

[KrispyKremer]

I wouldn't be surprised if Sony releases the PS2 with the hard drive and network adaptor bundle at the $299 price, then drop the price of the system itself to $199.

 

[BlakkIce]

hey guys i work for sony gallery in chicago and ill tell u there is no word on a price drop on the PS2 they stores only make 6 bucks off each PS2 but i will tell u there is a rummor of a release of a PS2 with the 40gig hard drive

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

1) I think the 25% efficiency figure is probably a worst case scenario or near it. the figure they used as 100% is very, very probably theoretical (much in the same way your GeForce hardly gets anywhere near it's theoretical fill rate.

2) I don't think too many people realize that the PS2's emotion engine uses something like 16 (!) parallel pipelines. It can be difficult to keep all those pipelines full.

All in all, I highly doubt they'll ever reach near-100% efficiency

-Ice

 

[spaceman]

persoanlly im fine with the ps2 gfx...sure id like to seesome better texturing ,but in games like ffx which is such a creative spectacle...i dont find myself caring about what it could be..same with gt3,ace combat 4 etc.
the gfx are very good on the ps2.FFX and MGS2 show that the ps2 can certainly compete with the xbox and gamecube.

 

[Goldfish]

<< More crap that people have no problem swallowing since it makes them reassured about their PS2 purchase. The PS2 has been out for a year and no games make use of the system to more than 25%!!! LOL. And what exactly does this garage hack, I mean "analyzer", analyze? >>

I smell fanboy.... and it smells bad.

 

[BeauJangles]

Wow, that surprises me! Cool!

 

[cuteybunny]

i think more like 149.95 and it be a hot seller


<< Anyone know when Sony is going to lower the price on the PS2? I am waiting for them to go down to $239 or lower before picking one up. >>

 

[Doomguy]

What's funny is that some of you actually believe this

 

[SiLEighTy]

anyone know which game for the PS1 that uses 100% or close to 100% of the PS1's power?

 

[mithrandir2001]

It's 25% because of the difficulty of the development kit and the screwy hardware architecture. The PS2 is a system of high theoretical performance and relatively ho-hum realized performance. It's like pairing 3.2Gb/sec RAMBUS with a Celeron...lots of potential, but you can't tap it all.

 

[CBone]

That's what I'm talkin' about, Doomguy.

WTH? If this "anal-yser" only analyses the efficiency of the programs you can interpret that however you want. I see that as their code is sloppy. Impartial Sony Europe guy sees that as the PS2 is only 25% used.

CBone

 

[bonkers325]

intersting
just waiting for the price drop

 

[neuralfx]

well im just wondering ... what is this based on



<< wow, that's what PS2's about" only uses about 25 percent of the capacity. >>



was this number pulled out of a hat? .. to me this "25%" sounds like a completely arbitrary number pulled out of thin air .. im not saying anything bad or good about the ps2.. its just the statement about this "25%" is kinda ridiculous .. just my thoughts ..
-neural

 

[bubba]

It is based on some figure that is arrived at from Sony's "program analyzer". I wonder if this 25% is 25% of the theoretical performance, or 25% of the maximum that the program analyzer can push through.

I have also heard that the PS2 is difficult to program for, they even talk about it in the review (shows that most of you did not read the source):



<< Developers are still having trouble getting used to working with the architecture and the hardware. Would you say in hindsight that you could have machine PlayStation 2 more user friendly?

You can say anything in hindsight. If you want to get really into that subject, we have some people in the tech support group next door that can take you through the B1 and the N1 [two of PS2's chips ? Ed]... Yes, there are a lot of ways that the architecture could have been done to make it easier at the beginning, but this is the only way to get an architecture that can have a five year life where the games constantly improve. I mean, look at GT2 compared to Ridge Racer 1. PSone made heavy use of a PC dev kit. PS2 is a new approach so that we get maximum flexibility and huge bus width... The difference between PlayStation 2 and the other machines coming out is that the various components can do different things at the same time, they can share workloads, there's no downtime, it's not sequential. It's kind of multi tasking, you can create graphics from here from there, you can make sound from here from there, so it's very flexible, a very powerful combination of engine and transmission. This is designed to get maximum geometric compression, and the people that have learned it, the very sharp programmers are not having any more problems, and the number of games are about 300 in the US already. >>



I have heard that Sony has updated their PS2 SDK, with greater optimizations for the parallel pipelines, etc.

 

[BlvdKing]

$300 for a PS2 with a hard drive and a network adapter might be worth it, but $300 in it's current state is a complete rip off. I would rather get an XBox for $300. Anyways, hopefully Sony will drop the price soon; I know Sony was trying to make more $$$ during the holidays by keeping the price at $300.

 

[spaceman]

how $300 for ps2 a rip off?
You are basically getting a psx,a dvd player,and a "next gen" console for $300
which has the biggest userbase by far,the most 3rd party support....and people may argue this...the best selection of titles people actually want to play.

 

[bubba]

Do not degenerate this into a battle of the consoles, like I said in the beginning, this is only about the PS2.

 

[Phuz]

<< is no word on a price drop on the PS2 they stores only make 6 bucks off each PS2 >>



Thats funny. $6/unit profit for resellers? BS BS BS!

 

[christoph83]

Heres part of a review for madden 2002 on the xbox:

Extremely solid graphics even though they're obviously only tweaks to the basic PS2 engine. But on Xbox you won't notice any slowdown during the big dogpiles like you saw on PS2.

So why is PS2 having slowdowns if its only using 25% of its power? The CEO must be mentioning that at some points during a game the PS2 is only at 25% capacity. This is a pretty vague statement.

 

[bubba]

I doubt he means that the PS2 is at 25% capacity by design. I assume that it means that the SDK isn't perfected and developers haven't fully optimized their code for the PS2.

I am sure that programming for 16 pipelines is quite difficult. I would guess that the more that Sony can fine tune the optimizer in their compilers, the more gain we will see.

However, in addition to that, the programmers likely need to think more in a parallel fashion, so that the optimization can split up the rendering/physics/etc into separate pipelines.

So, I think that improving the SDK will help all development to some extent, but developers will need to code more for the parallel environment in order to maximize the performance of the PS2.

Think about this... The PS1 has been out for 6 years and I assume that people have long since perfected how to code for it and how to get every drop of performance out of it.