Resident Evil 4: Horror, Reimagined is only going to be exclusively released for the gamecube next year, so I've heard.
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The xbox is a better quality machine.  Design and bulid-wise.  It doesn't have as many games as the ps2 but is has far more high quality ones.  And as for modding....
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PS3 will support PS2 games but not PS1.
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Heh, for each it's own, but I can't think of many good (or, at least, popular) games out exclusively for the XBox other than Halo and DOA3.

And I don't see what's the point of calling the XBox a good machine, design-wise. It's just a basic wintel PC!. And the controller is an atrocity.[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=237411"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Yeah, but Halo is the ONLY game you need!
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and it's also much easier to run Linux on an xbox.

Are you sure? People don't even know yet if the XBox2 will support XBox games, and the amount of detail about the PS3 floating around is still smaller than for XBox2.

Yeah, but Halo is the ONLY game you need!

Because Mircosoft has changed to ATI for graphics chip I wouldn't count on backward compatibility.
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Because Mircosoft has changed to ATI for graphics chip I wouldn't count on backward compatibility.
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Well, that isn't even their biggest problem, but the fact that they are leaving x86 for Power970.

But then again, the PS2 isn't very similar to the PS1 architecture-wise either. To work around that and offer backward compatibility, Sony used the original PS1 CPU (LSI Logic 32bit RISC running at 33mHz) as an IO processor for the PS2. When you load a PS2 game on it, the Emotion Engine (MIPS IV-subset 128bit RISC at 300mHz) takes charge. If you load an older PS1 game, only the IO processor does the bulk work, and the Emotion Engine takes care of small tasks like anti-aliasing and smoothing.

The same approach wouldn't be wise for the XBox, because leaving a Pentium III (32bit CISC at 733mHz) dormant next to a PowerPC (64bit RISC) processor that would only be called when using older games would raise hardware prices quite a lot and make board design nightmarish, not to mention cooling and power consumption issues.

One solution that would probably work for both cases is hardware emulation through software. Whatever CPU the PS3 uses, it'll surely be able to easily emulate the PS1 CPU. The same might probably apply to IBM Power970 emulating the Pentium III.

Regards;

Roberto.
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Very interesting, so as far as I understand (dumb) the PS2 uses a LSI Logic 32bit RISC processor running at 33mHz (PS1 CPU) as a co-processor for in/out devices?
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Which do you prefer, and why?

(I'd love the Gamecube if it came close to matching in software development.)
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My PS2 is less than a year old so it also has the Progressive-scan DVD playback and built in IR receiver for remote.
I got it with the network interface as well. All in all a sweet deal.
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You do know, that progressive scan doesn't have any benefit for interlaced TV's, right?

ALL titles are fun and NONE crash.
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if we talk power the GC/XBOX are head to head ... PS2 is really behind both of them HW wise ...

and lets hoppe that SEGA comes back from the dead in the next gen ... we should all be buying Dreamcast 2
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if we talk power the GC/XBOX are head to head ... PS2 is really behind both of them HW wise ...

I believe that's very arguable, specially if you know in depth about the hardware specs and the story behind each design.

A nice place to gather information:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/playstation2/ee-1.html

To put that very long article shortly, the PS2 is the only system built from the ground up with gaming and, more abrangently, multimedia applications in mind. That is noticeable when you compare CPUs. The EmotionEngine was designed for gaming, and basically only that. The GC uses a standard IBM PowerPC CPU, and as we all know, the XBox uses a Pentium 733.

The article at ArsTechnica also points out that the system still have lots and lots of potential, graphically-wise. The reason all that potential hasn't been used already is that the developers are still learning how to take the most out of the console. The EmotionEngine is so essentially different than previous console CPUs that the programmers nearly have to re-learn how to use the resources, specially the new cache paradigm (few memory, lots of bandwidth) and the double vector units.

PS2 Vs. DC

I remember when the PS2 was first announced and the technical specifications that were bandied about at that time: 75 million polygons/second, unlimited streaming texture potential, 48GB/s of memory bandwidth, and so on. It wasn't long after this that technology analysts began to question Sony's numbers.


Polygon Performance

The 75 million number was reduced to 66 million. Afterwards, it was admitted that these PS2 numbers were a peak performance figure for flat-shaded, identically shaped polygons. Unfortunately, the image of the PS2 as some sort of polygon monster had already become firmly entrenched in the minds of the mainstream media.

Sega chose a more conservative approach, which is in keeping with their new business philosophy - to regain the trust and confidence of gamers. Since its introduction two years ago, Sega has never mislead gamers about the Dreamcast's power. 3+ million polygons is all that Sega ever claims, even though new games like Test Drive: LeMans push closer to five million in 3D scenes loaded with effects.

The truth is that the PS2 has never displayed more than 2-3 million polys in a game. The main problem is a memory one. With only a 4MB VRAM cache on its GS graphics processor, the PS2 is severely limited in what it can achieve on screen. While it's true that 32MB of main memory and the fairly powerful Emotion Engine processor are capable of producing in the neighborhood of 10-12 million textured and lit polygons/second, the poor design of the GS and its small pipeline to main memory restrict the final number to roughly half of that.

What? You mean, regardless of the power of the EE processor and the large amount of available memory, the PS2 is still only capable of displaying 5-6 million on-screen polygons? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. By contrast, the Dreamcast has only 16 MB of main memory and a processor that is only capable of one-half the number of polygons/second - ie. 5- 6 million - but the whole point of the exercise is to get these onto your television. An intelligent memory saving technique known as differed rendering, coupled with the PowerVR2DC graphics chip's hardware texture compression abilities, allow the Dreamcast to display all of its generated polygons.

To better understand the PS2's limitations and the Dreamcast's strengths, you need only look at the available video memory for your answer. While the DC has 8MB of VRAM, the PS2 has only 4MB of VRAM. The main problem arises because a polygon takes up roughly 40 bytes of RAM. When you have 5 million of them in a given second, this amounts to 5 million/60fps = 83,333 polygons in a give frame of animation. If each of these polygons uses 40 bytes of VRAM, you will use 3.33 MB displaying these 5 million PPS. This doesn't leave the PS2 much room for it's framebuffer which uses around 1.2MB just to display the end data, not to mention that you still need to leave room for textures to put on those polygons.

Now, there are a few tricks which will allow the PS2 to display 5-6 million PPS, even though it only has a 4MB VRAM cache. One of them is to update the cache more frequently than once a second. But, there are other bandwidth limitations that prevent this from happening more than two or three times per second and the net result is that the PS2 is still limited to 5- 6 million PPS.

Here is a table which summarizes the polygon performance of both next-generation machines:

System Processor Stage Graphics Stage Best Example. All polygons are textured and lit and represent peak performance:

PS2 EE + 32MB
12 million PPS GS + 4MB
6 million PPS Madden NFL 2001
2 million PPS

DC SH4 + 16MB
6 million PPS PVR2DC + 8MB
5 million PPS Ferrari F355 Challenge
3 million PPS

Unfortunately, this isn't the PS2's only shortcoming. The reason I emphasize polygon performance at all is because these number have become the defacto standard for judging a console's power, when in fact they tell less than half the story. The main disadvantage of this expensive architecture is it's poor texturing ability.


Texturing Performance

The way texturing works is simple. Polygons and texture data arrive into video memory, textures are applied to the polygons and the result is displayed on screen. Most PC users are used to games with 16MB or more of texture data. A diehard Quake III player might have a setup capable of delivering 32MB of textures during the game. 32MB? But the PS2 and DC only have 4MB and 8MB of VRAM respectively. How can they hope to compete? The answer is that consoles do not hold all of a scene's texture data in memory at once. Usually, the data is streamed over the bus from main memory in a continuous manner.

The Dreamcast is a wonderful texturing beast, due in large part to the efficiency of the PVR2DC's graphics methodology. Two things help the PVR2DC - hardware texture decompression and infinite planes deferred rendering. Unlike the PS2's GS graphics processor, the PVR2DC is capable of decompressing textures on the fly. Thus, DC programmers usually take 20-25MB of texture data and compress it at a 5:1 (sometimes 8:1) ratio to reduce the amount of texture data to only 4 or 5MB. Then, the texture data is sent over the bus to the PVR2DC which simply decompresses the data at the moment of rendering into it's original huge size.

By contrast, the PS2's GS processor has no ability to decompress textures on the fly. This means that all texture data must flow over the relatively small pipeline between main memory and the GS 4MB VRAM cache, at it's original large size. Currently, this fact has limited PS2 games to only around 10 MB of texture data/frame, and this is why the buildings look so similar in Ridge Racer 5. Lack of variety in texturing has made most PS2 games look extremely plain when compared to Dreamcast games like Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, and even Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm.

Moreover, the PVR2DC belongs to the only processor family on the market that uses deferred rendering to texture only those polygons which are facing the gamer in any given frame. Other graphics chips must texture the backs of polygons as well as the front facing polygons. The net effect is to reduce the amount of texturing that the DC has to perform in a given scene by a factor of two or three depending on the complexity of the scene. The greater the scene complexity, the more you see the benefits of deferred rendering. This is why you never see any really large free-roaming 3D games on the PS2. Crazy Taxi, Ecco the Dolphin, and Shenmue are simply not possible on the PS2, because it doesn't have deferred rendering.

Test Drive LeMans on the Dreamcast.

GT3 on the PS2.

Here is another table which summarizes texturing performance for bother machines:

Texture Data Streaming Capacity System Capacity Decompressed Texturing Ability Best Example
PS2   10MB/frame   (Main Memory -> GS Memory)   10MB/frame on screen: Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore
DC   5MB/frame   (Main Memory -> VRAM)  25MB/frame on screen: Shenmue, Ecco the Dolphin

These two performance measure give you a pretty good idea of why the PS2 is, technically-speaking, a poor hardware design. The biggest problem of all with this architecture, however, is the difficulty that development houses are having extracting reasonable performance out of the machine. All the power in the world under the hood, doesn't do anyone much good if the games don't look good.


Development Environment

The PS2 shipped to developers with incomplete kits last year. By contrast, Sega has been giving excellent support to developers both large and small. Most DC developers are using 5th generation development kits, known as Set 5 Dev Kits. Sony mistakenly made the assumption that third-party PS2 developers would want bare bones development kits so they could program the hardware directly like they have during the last days of the PSX. Unfortunately, key features that are very hard to implement, like anti-aliasing to remove jagged edges from on-screen polygons have not yet surfaced.

Developers have responded to these PS2 programming challenges in a number of ways. Some developers like THQ (Summoner) have used a form of CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) blending to fake the effects that true anti-aliasing would offer. This is something which the DC has had for over two years, but unlike the DC CRT method, the PS2 method results in washed out, blurry textures. Tekken Tag Tournament is the perfect US launch title example. While they have eliminated the jagged edges which plague the Japanese version, the end result is that all of the textures in the game seem blurry or washed out. Hardly what I would call revolutionary for a next-generation console.

Another developmental problem, which is the reason for the jaggies in the first place, is serious lack of kit functions that will intelligently enable developers to overcome some of the limitations of the small size of the GS VRAM cache. While all Dreamcast games run at 640x480 resolution, many PS2 games only utilitize a 640x240 field-rendered display which fakes a 640x480 display. Bad jaggies are the result, and these need to be hidden through some form of anti-aliasing (AA, not yet available), or by using the CRT method described above, with all its unintended consequences.

Moreover, the EE processor is actually three separate CPUs in one core. Most developers, for lack of proper tools, are using only one third of the EE's processing ability, because both vector units (VP1 & VP2) are too hard to program. Certainly future games will take advantage of these units, thereby freeing the main CPU to implement some fairly nice AI routines, but the cost of developing these techniques has become enormous - something which I will outline in the next article.

The sad fact is that only a few development houses like EA have been able to extract reasonable next-generation performance out of the PS2 architecture. Even Namco and Konami, the kings of PSX development during the 32 bit era, are having a hard time getting more than 2-3 million PPS out of what is supposed to be the end-all of gaming machines. The fact of the matter is that Namco's 18 month old Soul Calibur on Dreamcast looks worlds better than the newly released Tekken Tag Tournament on PS2. Not very impressive compared to the promises that have been made by Sony and it's cabal of industry sycophants.


Overall

The Dreamcast is the best machine on the market. Tomorrow nothing will have changed. Technically speaking, nothing on the PS2 comes close to the beauty of Shenmue or Ecco, the speed and power of F355 Challenge or Test Drive: LeMans 24, and the sheer elegance and gaming grace of games like Metropolis Street Racer and Jet Grind Radio. If one full motion video demo of Metal Gear Solid 2 has convinced you that the PS2 is the better machine, then you haven't opened your eyes to the reality before you. The best next-generation machine from a technical standpoint is the Sega Dreamcast. Let other less informed individuals buy a machine capable of less, on the promise of one game thirteen months from now. In the meantime, you and I will be enjoying the technically best games for months to come.

you really believe so?

do you think that after more than 6 years, the top developers in de insdustry wouldn't be able to fully understand the PS2 architecture? and even if they were clueless, what would it tell you about the PS2 HW desing then? that it sucks!

lets just read this article ... on PS2 vs DC!

just check here also: http://mypage.bluewin.ch/a-z/dural/DCvsPS2.htm

and here: http://www.the-magicbox.com/forums/archive....php/t-118.html

by the way ... why do you think all 3 consoles would use a PowerPC CPU on the next gen?
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Besides, what good is it now if the dc IS better? There is pratically no more support for it. So why bother bringing this up?

Which do you prefer, and why?
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It's well known that Sony never unlocks all available horse power in their consoles at the very first SDK. they unlock them little by little. That way, there are always surprises awaiting the console owners. Otherwise, they would see everything the console has to offer at the very beginning, and breakthroughs would have to wait for the next generation.

That happened in the PS1 life cycle. You got games with not much refined graphics at the first generation (Xenogears, FF7), better games around the middle of the console's lifetime (Metal Gear Solid), and the very best at the end of it's carreer (Chrono Cross). The same thing is happening now. Silent Hill 4 has much better graphics than Silent Hill 2, and MGS3 will look much better than MGS2 according to trailers.

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lets just read this article ... on PS2 vs DC!

Going back to your original question: Yes, I'd much rather believe an article from a trusted source like ArsTechnica than your source, "http://www.dcemulation.com". BTW, it makes me wonder why didn't you credit their authorship.

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just check here also: http://mypage.bluewin.ch/a-z/dural/DCvsPS2.htm

A hurried port by a crappy and nearly bankrupt game developer that noticed the impending flop of Sega as a hardware manufacturer and wanted to cash as much money as possible before the breakdown? Yeah, I guessed so.

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and here: http://www.the-magicbox.com/forums/archive....php/t-118.html

So you are now trusting forum posters? You seem to have very low standards when choosing what to believe

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by the way ... why do you think all 3 consoles would use a PowerPC CPU on the next gen?
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Haha. Only the CPU for the XBox2 is confirmed so far, and it's not reeeally confirmed - MS can still change specs at any time (they changed specs several times before actually launching the XBox)

I never heard of any official info from Nintendo about what will power their next generation console - if they even reach next generation! GC has been a sales fiasco, Nintendo should focus on handhelds while they can keep that market.

And yes, Sony announced they are working with IBM to produce the next generation CPU. But they never confirmed it would be the Power970. You work for IBM, you should know they dominate several other techniques of CPU design and implementation.

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Besides, what good is it now if the dc IS better? There is pratically no more support for it. So why bother bringing this up?

Indeed. What if it had better graphics (and I strongly believe that's a tendencious article from a site with interest in touting DC's superiority) - it simply flopped. Completely. And now only die-hard fans and some modding nerds have any interest for the DC.

The same can be said about the GC and XBox. They might have better graphics (you can notice I never disputed that in this thread). They are being a failure. The numbers from Japan show how much the Japanese despise the XBox (and that's by far the most lucrative market). Of course it does quite better in the US, but it's second to the PS2 there too neverthless.

Oh, BTW: I do mention the source of my quotes:
[a href="http://dreamcast.planetweb.com/cgi-bin/listmanager.pl/DREAMCAST/archives/110301.archive/Subject/article-94.html]http://dreamcast.planetweb.com/cgi-bin/lis...article-94.html[/url]
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