PS2 Vs Xbox: Contrasting the Two
April 22, 2002, 8:23 PM CST by David_South
Hello everyone, I’m working on the refining the myths with facts.
If you have some information to add please do.
Both sides of the Camps, both Xbox & PS2 have their strengths.
I wish we could talk about the Game cube here, but I think three consoles are too much for one thread. So I will start a second one for it.

My goals are to:
_Refine this article
_Learn more about the Xbox
_Learn more about the PS2
_Hardware strengths (Things of large benefit to running games)
_Hardware weaknesses (Bottlenecks or program challenges)
_Contrast the visual image quality (not just the image management)
_Learn how each system handles the display process
_Identify each claimed system feature (Must know your sources)
_Identify what features are being used (and their details & links)
_Identify each companies policies (Sales, Licensing, Hardware & Software)
_Identify customer complaints and resolutions (I’m only curious)
_Share complaints.
_Share praise.
_Get some clear answers.

While I am a loyal Sony PS2 fan,
I want this to end with the facts being said.
April 22, 2002, 8:24 PM CST by David_South
This is quoted from another forum I like to visit. It's been my home for a while and was written by a friend and fellow Sony fan.
XBox vs. PS2
http://www.cybercrash.be/xboxvsps2h.html

The CPU

Of course, the Central Processing Unit, the heart of every computer or console. Most of the calculations take place here. The XBox has a Intel processor which runs at a clock-speed of 733MHz. That's a lot higher than the 300MHz at which the PS2 CPU is running. But does that make the CPU better? Nope.

Here's why the PS2 CPU (Emotion Engine) is a lot more powerful:
-Data bus, cache memory as well as all registers are 128 bits on the PS2 CPU while the XBox CPU is 32 bits.
-It has a maximum performance of 6.2GFLOPS while the XBox CPU can only do a bit over 3 GFLOPS.
-It incorporates two 64-bit integer units (IU) with a 128-bit SIMD multi-media command unit, two independent floating-point vector calculation units (VU0, VU1), an MPEG 2 decoder circuit (Image Processing Unit/IPU) and high performance DMA controllers. Yes, this is all ON THE EMOTION ENGINE ITSELF.

Okay now what does this mean? It means that the PS2 can handle heavier physics and 3D engines (and can do more accurate realistic visual effects like splashing water and explosions). It also means that the PS2 can handle a lot more sophisticated Artificial Intelligence programming so that you have intelligent human-like opponents. And with a floating-point calculation performance of 6.2GFLOPS/second, the overall calculation performance of this new CPU matches that of a super computer. This is a completely new CPU architecture especially designed for sophisticated graphics and physics while the architecture of the XBox CPU is pretty old and simple and looks a lot like the architecture of the 486 CPU from back in the early '90s. The architecture of the Emotion Engine really is very sophisticated so I'm not going to explain it in detail here. But simply put the main advantage of the PS2 CPU is that it is subdivided into lots of other tiny powerful processors, all of them designed to do a special task and almost all of them can work independently from each other.

And another thing... the processor inside the box does not say "Pentium III" anywhere. It simply reads "Intel". The XBox's processor is NOT an Intel Pentium III, as Microsoft would have you believe, but in fact a Celeron II. It is a 700mhz Celeron, complete with 128kb of L2 cache (P3 coppermines actually have 256kb L2 cache), but overclocked to a 133mhz FSB, resulting in PIII/Celeron hybrid. What makes it a Celeron II is the fact that it is still using a Coppermine Core, with 8 way set associative L2 cache rather than your typical Celeron 4 way set Level 2 cache. What it ultimately comes down to is that this Coppermine core, which allows Microsoft to market the XBox as a PIII Coppermine, is about a 10% speed increase over the Celeron equivalent of this processor. Is the XBox CPU a Celeron? Not really. Is it a Pentium III CPU in the sense that everyone thinks of a PIII Coppermine? Nope. It's somewhere in between.

The Graphics Chip and VRAM

This is where the images are rendered. The XBox uses an Nvidia Graphics Processing Unit running at 250MHz and the PS2 uses the Graphics Synthesizer running at 150MHz. Again, judging by these specs the XBox looks better. The XBox GPU has a few advantages (or maybe not) over the PS2 GS, for example:

-The XBox GPU can do 125 million polygons while the PS2 GS can only do 75million polygons
-The XBox GPU has a max. Resolution of 1920x1080 and the PS2 GS can do 1280x1024 The rest of the graphics chip will be comparable to NV-20 chip, there are a lot of neat effects the XBox GPU can do with its hardware, but all those effects can be done by the Emotion Engine in software too (while the XBox' CPU is not powerful enough to do complex visual effects in software).

But the catch is that these advantages (talking about higher resolutions here) don't make a lot of difference on a TV screen, even on an HDTV screen the difference would be barely noticeable (when the console's hardware is used properly). So, is the XBox Graphics Processing Unit better than the PS2 GS? It doesn't look like it, the architecture of the PS2 GS looks far more advanced. For example, PS2 has a parallel rendering engine that contains a 2,560-bit wide data bus that is 20 times the size of leading PC-based graphics accelerators. The Graphics Synthesizer architecture can execute recursive multi-pass rendering processing and filter operations at a very fast speed without the assistance of the main CPU or main bus access. In the past, this level of real-time performance was only achieved when using very expensive, high performance, dedicated graphics workstations. There is a 48-Gigabyte/sec memory access bandwidth achieved via the integration of the pixel logic and the video memory on a single high performance chip. The quality of the resulting screen image is comparable to high quality pre-rendered 3D graphics. (that is once the game developers have learned how to use it properly) There has also been a misunderstanding about the VideoRAM on the PS2. The VRAM is included in the 32MB of main RAM on the CPU (the developer chooses how much of it he wants to dedicate to VRAM). Everyone thought the 4MB of memory on the GS was the VRAM while that is just a buffer in which all the rendering is done so no external bandwidth is needed (only for texture streaming). Another rumor that's been spread by several gaming sites is that the XBox is capable of texture compression and full scene anti-aliasing while the PS2 isn't. This is simply not true. The PS2 can compress/ decompress textures and do full scene anti-aliasing without causing as much slow-down as on the XBox. And although the XBox GPU can do a lot of effects that are not 'built-in' in the PS2 GS, the PS2 can do all these effects and more in software mode (but at least at the same quality) through the Emotion Engine.

Now let's take a look at how Microsoft got the idea that their graphics chip can do 125 million polygons...

The PS2's Graphics Synthesizer has the highest pixel fill rate of the next generation of consoles. Most remeber the 4.0 GPixels on Microsoft's spec comparence sheet. Well, Microsoft was nice to include a "(anti-aliased)" next to it. What does "4.0 GPixels (anti-aliased)", mean? It's misleading. The Xbox has hardwired 4x FSAA, when this is turned on the actual total of 1.0 GPixels is re-rendered 4 times to remove aliasing. Another possible reason for Microsoft to say Xbox's fill-rate is 4 GPixels per second. Is that the 1 GPixels is with 2 texture layers, if it is NOT used Xbox would not gain any performance and if it is used Xbox wouldn't lose any performance. It remains 1.0 GPixels w/ 2 textures, so what MS possibly did was it doubled the fill rate twice. Trying to compare it to PS2's fill rate w/ no texture. What MS did was it came up with misleading numbers. The Xbox can't go higher than 1 GPixels per second.

The NV2a in the Xbox has 4 pixel units running at 250 MHz, that's 1 billion pixels/second. While the GS in the PS2 has 16 pixel units running at 150 MHz, which is 2.4 billion pixels every second.

Now let's talk about polygons. Right here I'm talking about polygon rendering and not polygon transformations. To calculate polygon rendering performance, you take the pixel fill rate, and write it in millions. So PS2s pixel fill rate is 2400 Million. When Sony says polygons, it is referring to 32 pixel polygons. Divide 2400 Million by 32. You get 75 Million (32-pixel) polygons per second. That is raw and doesn't include textures, they use up pixels also. Now let's take Microsoft's alleged pixel fill rate of 4000 Million, which MS has on it's spec sheet and divide it by 32, you get, yes you guessed it, 125 Million (32 pixel) polygons per second. Here's the problem, the NV2a doesn't have a 4000 M fill rate but a 1000 M fill rate. So it's 31 Million (32 pixel) polygons per second. This isn't raw, since there's also 2 texture units for each pixel unit. So that's 31 million with 2 texture layers, the PS2 is around 38 Million with 1 texture layer and 20 million with 2 texture layers. The Xbox maxes out at 31 MPolygons per second, if textures aren't placed on those polygons- Xbox will not gain a polygon rendering increase in performance. The PS2's Graphic Synthesizer could render 75 MPolygons per second with no texture. The NV2a in the Xbox can't render higher than 31 MPolygons per second at all.

Okay now take that all into account and then check out the following...

"Is the XBox graphics chip the same as a GeForce 3 card? Not quite. The NV2A chip that powers the XBox is quite similar to the GeForce 3, but isn't quite a GeForce 3. The GeForce 3 is a 64mb card with 350mhz RAMDAC. The XBox's NV2A is a card that SHARES it's memory with the XBox's system RAM and has a 250mhz RAMDAC. The NV2A compensates for this by having a Second Vertex Shader, as opposed by the GeForce 3's single vertex shader. However, Microsoft claims that this second vertex shader instantly bumps the XBox's theoretical max poly count from the 31 million that Nvidia lists for the GeForce 3, all the way up to 125 million pps. According to most experts, the area that will actually see the most improvement from this will actually be in Bump Mapping. Microsoft has yet to explain how the second vertex shader yields an additional 94 million polygons per second."

I don't know enough to go more in detail about this but this is definitely an interesting point, and either way you turn it, it doesn't seem like the XBox has the advantage here.

I can understand that this is all a bit confusing if you're not a real tech-freak. It comes down to this: when developers have learned how to use the power of the PS2 GS properly they'll get a lot more out of it than XBox developers will get out of the XBox GPU. The PS2 GS combined with the EE can do a lot more advanced visual effects than the XBox GPU combined with its CPU.
April 22, 2002, 8:24 PM CST by David_South
Here is an article by a well-known & respected Hardware enthusiast. He believes that the Xbox is a little better. (I don't entirely disagree.)

Date: November 21st, 2001
Author: Anand Lal Shimpi
_The easy for the eyes to read, narrow column.
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1561
_Or the easy to search and best way to save.
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.html?i=1561
_Here is his email: anand@anandtech.com
Hardware Behind the Consoles - Part I: Microsoft's Xbox
Date: November 21, 2001
Type: Systems
Manufacturer: Microsoft
Author: Anand Lal Shimpi

Page: 1

Hardware and games go hand in hand; since it is the gaming industry which drives a significant portion of hardware sales, at least for enthusiast users. Companies like NVIDIA wouldn't have a reason to put out $300 and $400 graphics cards if it weren't for gamers. But although PC gamers have taken the lime light recently, every true PC gamer and most PC users in general can trace their roots back to the earliest of computer-entertainment devices: videogame consoles.

There is just something special about videogame consoles that have kept them around even in light of the power of the PC and the incredible multiplayer capabilities offered by the internet. Although ports of various console favorites have been brought to the PC, it's difficult to reproduce the feeling of playing through Mario or a good bout in Street Fighter on the PC. Sports games generally fall victim to that same awkward feeling on the PC; although they may run at much higher resolutions and have more multiplayer options on the PC, you can't cram four friends onto a couch in front of your monitor and really have at it in Madden.

The same can be said for videogame consoles receiving titles that were meant to be played on a PC. Try to be as effective under a fast paced first person shooter like Quake III: Revolution on the Playstation 2 as you would play Quake III Arena on the PC and you'll quickly see the reason why a keyboard and mouse are the tools of choice for PC FPS gamers.

Although we've tried to portray the PC and the console as two separate worlds, there is one aspect in which these two worlds collide: hardware. Now you see the tie-in; at AnandTech we like to deal with the most interesting hardware and technology out there and for years the hardware behind videogame consoles was rarely that interesting. What we ended up finding were platforms that were starved for memory and a useful storage medium; and with the release of cards like the original 3dfx Voodoo and NVIDIA's first TNT line we quickly noticed that videogame consoles like Nintendo's N64 were also deprived of the graphics power we as PC users had been used to.

When Microsoft announced the development of their Xbox gaming platform the specs listed it as a moderately fast PC that would be considered no more than entry-level upon its release in late 2001. The platform did not appear interesting by any means and it has only been within these past few months that our interest has truly piqued as the Xbox has shaped up to be far from a set-top PC.

Microsoft does face competition from the most successful player in the videogame console business: Nintendo. Nintendo's recently released GameCube is also very PC-like in its hardware although Nintendo's approach is much more conventional to the console market than what Microsoft is doing with Xbox.

Leaving no stone unturned we have created a short series of articles entitled the Hardware Behind the Consoles that will detail the hardware that powers consoles such as Microsoft's Xbox, Sony's Playstation 2 and Nintendo's GameCube. AnandTech isn't a gaming site and although a number of our readers (and our staff) are avid gamers we won't focus on reviewing the titles that are shipping for these consoles individually. Instead they will be used, as are games in our video card reviews, as demonstrations of what the hardware is capable of doing.

In this first article we will have a look at Microsoft's Xbox and the underlying hardware that powers the software giant's first entry into the console gaming market.
April 22, 2002, 8:25 PM CST by David_South
Page: 2

Understanding the Hardware – The X-CPU

As PC hardware enthusiasts you already understand quite a bit about the fundamentals of building a high-performance gaming console. You first understand that the concept of "bits" is much more of a marketing tool for videogame consoles than anything else. You'll find uneducated discussions all over the net about the Xbox's inferiority because it is only a "32-bit" console whereas even the N64 was a "64-bit" console. Remember that a 64-bit processor would give developers larger registers and greater memory addressability among other features, most of which are not useful for a gaming console at this time. An understanding of what those bits are in reference to is key to doing what we always like to do, separating the truth from the marketing.

The Xbox does indeed feature a 32-bit CPU; this CPU has actually been the topic of much controversy surrounding the Xbox. Not too long ago, Microsoft was looking for a CPU manufacturer to supply the Xbox with CPUs and of course the top runners were the CPU manufacturers that Microsoft was most friendly to: AMD and Intel. AMD was supposedly offering a K7 derived part while Intel had a Coppermine based solution. Supposedly as a surprise to everyone at AMD, Intel won the bid for the Xbox and was allowed to produce a derivative of the 0.18-micron Coppermine core for the console.

The CPU that powers the Xbox is a Coppermine based Pentium III with only 128KB L2 cache. While this would make many think that the processor is indeed a Celeron, one of the key performance factors of the Pentium III that is lost in the Celeron core was left intact for this core. The Coppermine core was left with an 8-way set associative L2 cache instead of the 4-way set associative cache of the Celeron. Based on what we've seen with the Coppermine and Coppermine128 (Celeron) cores we estimate that the 8-way set associative L2 cache gives this particular core a 10% performance advantage over the Coppermine128 core of the Celeron.

The fact that Intel decided to go with a 128KB version of the Coppermine core indicates that there is a way of disabling half of the L2 cache without modifying the mapping associativity. We fully expect the Xbox's CPUs to be nothing more than Coppermine processors with half of their 256KB L2 cache disabled.

The other aspects of the CPU remain unchanged; the core does not have SSE2 support, only support for Intel's SSE instructions. It still has a 16KB L1 instruction cache and 16KB L1 data-cache and also very important is its 133MHz FSB. We've proved time and time again about how critical a high-speed FSB is to overall system performance, and the situation is no different inside a gaming console.

The 0.18-micron CPU is contained within Intel's mobile FC-BGA package that is soldered directly onto the Xbox's motherboard. This not only prevents anyone from attempting to upgrade the CPU but it also reduces the space necessary for the CPU.

The BGA back of the Xbox CPU. Note the size of the CPU compared to a quarter.

The CPU itself runs at 733MHz which would make you think that Microsoft could have done much better with a solution from AMD. However if AMD had supplied a 200MHz FSB processor with a L2 cache similar in size to the Duron, then the performance of an equivalently clocked solution from AMD wouldn't have outshined this Coppermine-derived processor too much. The other thing to take into consideration is heat and power supply requirements. In order for the Xbox to be taken seriously as a gaming console and not just a PC in a black case it would have to be no louder than a DVD player and put out no more heat than an A/V receiver. It is a widely known fact that the Coppermine core runs significantly cooler and with lower current requirements than the Athlon/Duron cores.

So although on the surface it seems as if Microsoft may have made the wrong decision with the Xbox's CPU (we even thought so at first), if you think about it, the decision isn't all that bad.
April 22, 2002, 8:25 PM CST by David_South
Page: 3

nForce in Action – The X-IGP

Although the chipset made its "debut" at Computex 2001 we are just now seeing NVIDIA's nForce appear on retail boards most of which won't ship for a few more weeks. In spite of NVIDIA's disappointing launch on the PC side, the nForce platform has played a huge role in the development of the Xbox.

Months ago NVIDIA told us that it was the nForce design that won them Xbox; the PC derivative came afterwards. It was no surprise then to find out that the nForce chipset could work just as fine as a Pentium III solution or an Athlon solution. Of course us PC users get to see nForce paired with an Athlon, but because of Microsoft's licensing of the P6 bus from Intel the world is able to see the Pentium III on the nForce platform as well.

The chipset behind the Xbox does veer slightly from the nForce 420-D design for the PC. The Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP) still functions as the effective North Bridge for the platform however it features a much more powerful graphics core than the PC's nForce IGP. Whereas the nForce IGP on the PC features a GeForce2 MX (NV11) core, the Xbox IGP features a custom designed core internally known as the NV2A. You can take the codename to mean that the integrated graphics offers performance and features somewhere in-between the currently available NV20 (GeForce3) core and the upcoming NV25 core.

The NV2A features the same 4 pixel pipelines of the GeForce3 core and operates at 233MHz. This puts the fill rate of the NV2A in between that of the GeForce3 and the GeForce3 Ti 500. Naturally the NV2A features the same DirectX 8.1 pixel and vertex shader support that was introduced with the GeForce3 with one major modification – the NV2A has two vertex shaders. The addition of a second vertex shader is a huge performance gain for games the reason being that most instructions that will be sent to the vertex shader require at least two instructions to execute. Providing the GPU with dual vertex shaders will tremendously increase the throughput of these vertex programs allowing some operations to be completed in a single clock cycle. Considering that a very impressive feature of the vertex shader is the ability to do the setup for DOT3 bump-mapping, the dual vertex shaders will definitely help performance tremendously in titles that make extensive use of per-pixel DOT3 bump-mapping.

The core also supports the same multisampling AA formats as the GeForce3 including Quincunx. This is actually a very important feature since most games are rendered and displayed at 640 x 480 where aliasing is especially bad.

There is no doubt that the NV2A GPU is much more powerful than Sony's Graphics Synthesizer which is the graphics processor contained within the Playstation 2. The GS does not feature any of the pixel or vertex shading capabilities of the NV2A and it derives most of its power from extreme parallelism. While the NV2A has four parallel pixel pipelines, the GS has a total of 16. Not only does that waste die space on the chip itself making it more expensive to manufacture, but it also places all bets on each pipeline being fed regularly with data in order to extract the most performance out of the processor. The GS also has no T&L unit which means that the host CPU handles all of the transform and lighting calculations whereas in the Xbox, the 733MHz host CPU can be freed up from any T&L and vertex setup calculations. We'll talk more about how the Xbox architecture compares to the PS2 later in this article however.

The rest of the features of the Xbox IGP are identical to that of the nForce IGP which we've covered extensively here.
April 22, 2002, 8:26 PM CST by David_South
Page: 4

nForce in Action (continued) – The MCP-X

In spite of the Xbox's host CPU being an Intel processor, the IGP and MCP of the platform are still connected by AMD's HyperTransport bus. The bus is of course processor independent and is still just as important in Xbox as it is on nForce. The characteristics of this HyperTransport link are unchanged from the nForce platform; it still offers 800MB/s of bidirectional bandwidth between the IGP and MCP along with isochronous virtual channels that offer dedicated bandwidth to memory for things like the network controller and APU. Again, we've already covered this in great detail here.

The Xbox Media & Communications Processor (MCP) is identical to the nForce's MCP-D with Dolby Digital encoding support. The ability to do real time Dolby Digital encoding is very important on a console for many reasons including one of the most basic – it would be a pain to feature 6 analog outputs on the Xbox console itself as well as expect gamers to have a free set of 6 channel inputs on their receivers. Xbox was designed to bring 5.1 channel gaming to the mainstream market and with Dolby Digital encoding and a single toslink optical audio cable coming out of the optional Advanced or HD A/V boxes, it has the hardware to do it.

While 5.1 audio solutions have been around on the PC for years, games have yet to take full use of the capabilities. However on Xbox, even the launch titles are making use of some of the 5.1 capabilities of the platform. It is clear that there is much room to improve as titles such as Halo don't make proper use of the center channel in a 5.1 setup.

The integrated 10/100 Ethernet controller of the MCP-D makes the Xbox very internet-ready as it ships with a built in 10/100 Ethernet port. Microsoft has yet to announce their official plans for taking the Xbox online and unfortunately by default the Xbox's Ethernet port is not set to receive an IP from a DHCP server so for now the only use for the Ethernet port on the unit is to link multiple Xbox systems together. This is done through the use of conventional CAT5 crossover cables when going from system to system; Microsoft sells a system link cable for $15 that is nothing more than a conventional CAT5 crossover cable. It's very interesting to note that Microsoft isn't charging a much higher price for the link cable considering that they could claim much higher profit margins on the relatively cheap part.
April 22, 2002, 8:26 PM CST by David_South
Page: 5

nForce in Action (continued) - The X-Motherboard

The motherboard itself is manufactured by Intel and is a 4 layer design. Intel's trademark debug pins are also present on the motherboard although the pins themselves are missing. For those of you that have never used an Intel motherboard before, shorting the debug pins allows you to enter the BIOS configuration utility. We have yet to try shorting the debug pins on our unit but we'd be surprised if doing so didn't have a similar effect. You shouldn't expect too much to be contained within the Xbox BIOS but it'd be something interesting to toy around with in any case.

The power connector on the board is reminiscent of an AT style connector in that it is a single row of 10 pins however it's clearly a proprietary power interface. The power supply is not covered (the same is true for the PS2 PSU, it's done to save space) so you should exercise much caution when working on the inside of the Xbox.
April 22, 2002, 8:27 PM CST by David_South
Page: 6

Memory Bandwidth Galore

The Xbox features a 64MB memory subsystem made up of four 4x32Mb DDR SDRAM chips. Our unit featured Samsung chips but as time goes on Microsoft may choose to explore other DRAM manufacturers for memory. The memory used on the Xbox is very fast by PC memory standards but only decent by video memory standards. The Samsung chips used on our unit are 5ns parts that run at 200MHz DDR offering the effective bandwidth of a 400MHz solution. When combined with NVIDIA's 128-bit TwinBank memory architecture this offers a total of 6.4GB/s of memory bandwidth that is to be shared between the IGP and the CPU.

The 133MHz FSB path to the CPU limits the maximum amount that the CPU can ever use of that bandwidth to 1.06GB/s, leaving a minimum of 5.34GB/s to be used by the rest of the system. However you also must realize that these are peak theoretical bandwidth numbers which will really never be reached in a real-world scenario. In the end you're looking at a graphics solution that falls between a GeForce2 GTS and a GeForce3 Ti 200 in terms of memory bandwidth. However as we showed in our original review of the GeForce3, that is more than enough memory bandwidth when running at 640 x 480 x 32 which is what the vast majority of Xbox titles (at least for now) will be rendered at internally. Only when AA is enabled will memory bandwidth constraints have to be taken into account and as you'll see later on, there is unfortunately very little use of the GPU's AA capabilities in current games.

With NVIDIA's GeForce3 Ti 500 shipping with 250MHz DDR memory thus offering 25% more memory bandwidth we would have preferred to see that memory used on the Xbox; after all, this system is expected to last for the next couple of years so it would have been nice for it to feature a little more time-enduring memory.

Then there is the issue of memory size; if the 64MB the Xbox is equipped with was only to be used as the framebuffer for the GPU then it would be more than enough, but this memory is also used for keeping a running copy of the game code to be executed as well as any other pertinent data. For this reason we felt that it would also make sense for the Xbox to have a full 128MB of memory since it would make the job of the developers somewhat easier. While the 64MB the system does have is much more than any competing console (Sony's PS2 has 32MB and Nintendo's GameCube has 40MB), we're always wanting more and having to use that 64MB as a frame buffer and as execution data storage can force developers to make some sacrifices going forward.

There are 8 solder pads for DDR SDRAM chips, only 4 are populated.

Looking at the Xbox motherboard itself you'll see solder pads for the additional 64MB of DDR SDRAM. Although you could theoretically solder on an additional 64MB of memory, with games already written with 64MB of memory in mind there wouldn't be any performance improvement.
April 22, 2002, 8:27 PM CST by David_South
Page: 7

A true PC – The X-Hard Drive

The decision to include a hard drive with the Xbox was a very good decision on Microsoft's part, as consoles (especially CD/DVD based systems) are in dire need of a faster mass-storage medium. The role of the hard drive in the Xbox isn't to receive game installations, rather it is used to store save games, user profiles, and act as a cache for the DVD drive to store frequently used data that must be available quicker than the DVD drive can deliver it.

Microsoft elected Seagate and Western Digital to provide drives for the Xbox so if you open a unit up you're likely to find either a Seagate U Series 5 or a Western Digital Protégé WD80EB drive. Both are very slow (by PC standards) 5400 RPM drives that are also extremely quiet. Both drives are single platter designs meaning that they inherently run quieter and cooler than multiplatter drives.

In the case of the U Series 5 drive there is a single 20GB platter in the drive of which only one side is used. The remaining platter side is not tested for defects so it could very well be fully functional or completely worthless; in either case the size of the Seagate U Series 5 drive is 10GB which was Microsoft's original spec for the Xbox. Whether all of that 10GB is usable is another question, but that's how large the drive is. In theory it would not cost any more for Seagate to supply Microsoft with drives that have both sides of the platter enabled thus making it a 20GB drive.

The Western Digital WD80EB drive isn't one that is publicly available, unlike the U Series 5. The closest drive WD manufactures for the mass public is the WD84EB which is very similar in specifications to the WD80EB. This is indeed an 8GB drive and is again composed of only a single platter.

In terms of specifications, as we mentioned earlier both drives are extremely slow which was a necessary sacrifice in order to get the cool and quiet operation. In terms of performance, the U Series 5 does have faster overall specs especially in terms of seek performance. Since the Xbox will primarily be writing small amounts of data, sustained transfer rate should not matter. The average seek time (the time it takes to get from one track to another random track) of the Seagate drive is 8.9ms while on the WD drive it is 12.1ms. We would be surprised if the 35% increase in seek time was not noticeable unfortunately our unit was equipped with the WD drive. While both drives do have a 2MB buffer, the Seagate drive does have a faster platter-to-buffer transfer rate; in this case the Seagate drive is around 18% faster but in real world scenarios we'd be very surprised if the performance difference was any more than 1 – 2%.
April 22, 2002, 8:28 PM CST by David_South
Page: 8

Begging for a faster drive

Case in point of how slow the hard drive is can be seen under the titles Project Gotham Racing (PGR) and Dead or Alive 3 (DOA3). In PGR's car select screen and in DOA3's character select screen there is a delay between the time when you select a car/character and when the picture actually appears on the screen. Originally we assumed that this delay was because the system was reading off of the DVD, but upon closer inspection it's clear that the delay was in accessing the hard drive. What's even more interesting is that the delay continues to exist regardless of how many times the car or character is selected in succession, indicating that the data isn't being cached to main memory. With a larger 128MB memory subsystem, it is quite possible that developers would have been able to circumvent this small but noticeable delay by caching the models to memory.

In the DOA3 Character Select screen we've selected the character but his model has yet to appear as it is still searching for it on the hard drive. This delay is usually around 1 - 2 seconds at most.

Here in Project Gotham, we've selected the Boxster S but the car on the screen is still the Audi TT coupe. It will be another couple of seconds before the car model switches as the slow hard drive must send data off to memory. With a faster hard drive this process wouldn't take as long, and with more system memory this type of information would be cached in RAM.

In terms of hacking potential to improve performance, soldering on another 64MB of DDR SDRAM wouldn't help since the games are already only expecting 64MB of memory. What would help however is a faster hard drive, but there are numerous problems associated with performing a hard drive upgrade:

1) Getting the Xbox image onto the hard drive. Without modification, no OS will let you access the Xbox hard drive making it very difficult to create a ghosted image of the drive.

2) Getting the Xbox to recognize the hard drive. Currently no hard drive will be recognized by the Xbox. Instead of booting it will spit out a service error. It is still unknown whether or not simply putting the image on the drive would solve this issue.

3) Getting a fast but cool running hard drive. There is no flow of air over the hard drive in the Xbox. In fact, it is mounted on a plastic tray over the CPU and IGP meaning that if anything, it's in the worst possible place from a cooling standpoint. Replacing the drive with a 7200RPM IDE drive would raise many cooling issues which could lead to a reduction in stability or accelerate component failure.

The plastic hard drive tray.

Another thing to note is that there is no shock protection on the hard drive itself. Although the use of only a single platter can arguably reduce the damage incurred by dropping the system, the fact remains that the plastic tray that holds the hard drive does not do a very good job of absorbing shocks. In other words don't drop your Xbox.
April 22, 2002, 8:28 PM CST by David_South
Page: 9

Also a DVD player

The Xbox marks Microsoft's entry into the living room; a place normally reserved for TVs, VCRs and not computers. With the NV2A able to handle DVD output and the 733MHz processor more than fast enough to perform the majority of the MPEG-2 decoding, it's no wonder that the Xbox ships with DVD playback support. The Xbox games themselves are stored on DVD-9 (9GB single sided, double layer) formatted discs and are actually written in a very interesting fashion. The games are written from the outside of the DVD-9 discs to the inside, meaning that most discs will actually have the majority of their data stored around the outer perimeter of the disc. Since the DVD drive in the Xbox is a Constant Angular Velocity (CAV) drive, it can read more data per second off of the outermost tracks making this a highly optimized way of storing data on the DVDs to reduce load times. Obviously the drive can also read regular CDs and DVDs as well.

Aside from the faceplate, this is a regular PC DVD-ROM drive.

The DVD drive itself is no more than a PC DVD drive capable of reading at 2X off the innermost tracks and 5X off the outermost tracks. Remember that when dealing with DVD drives, 1X = 1250KBps of data which is a little more than what an 8X CD-ROM drive can deliver. With the majority of information stored on the outer portion of the Xbox game DVDs that means that most of the time the drive will be reading at 4 – 5X. Only when dealing with movie DVDs and audio CDs as well as game discs that use the entire 9GB (no game currently meets this requirement) will the drive receive data at the lower speeds. Obviously for movie/audio discs it doesn't matter and it will be a while before games hit 9GB in size (hopefully a very long while). For comparison, the PS2 DVD player is a 4X CAV unit with an inner track speed of around 1 - 2X.

DVD-ROM: Power is supplied by the custom connector to the left and you'll recognize the IDE cable to the right.

The drive is manufactured by Thomson Multimedia and only deviates from a standard PC DVD-ROM drive in its back panel connectors. Of course there is the standard 40-pin IDE connector which accepts the slave position on the IDE cable going from the motherboard to the hard drive. Instead of a conventional power connector however there is a proprietary 12-pin cable that powers the drive directly from the motherboard. This is the only barrier that stands between you and upgrading the DVD drive in the Xbox to a faster 10X unit. Of course if you want to keep the sleek front look of the Xbox you'll want to open up the replacement DVD drive and swap trays with the Xbox DVD drive. In order to power the drive you could always attach a y-splitter to the power cable going to the hard drive and use that to power the new DVD drive which is adjacent to the hard drive; just some food for thought.

Unfortunately in order to enable DVD movie playback Microsoft forces you to purchase their $30 DVD playback kit which consists of nothing more than a remote and an IR receiver for the remote that plugs into a controller port. The quality of the DVD playback is definitely respectable. We compared it to a Sony DVP-NS700P and in interlaced (480i) mode the quality of the Xbox DVD output through component video cables was respectable. True home theater enthusiasts will scoff at the output resolution limitation of the Xbox's DVD playback as it cannot output a 480p or progressive scan DVD movie signal. This isn't because of a hardware limitation rather that it does not support Macrovision in 480p mode. It shouldn't be too hard for a few skilled individuals to get around this limitation however.

Compared to the 480p output of the NS700P, the Xbox's DVD output is definitely not as sharp but it is easily competitive with most entry level players. Compared to the initial DVD playback of the Playstation 2, the Xbox is considerably better however we will be upgrading the DVD software on our PS2 unit later this week and performing another comparison to see how things have changed with the latest revision of the DVD software. In the version of the software our PS2 is currently running there are some serious issues with image quality apparently caused by poorly done 3:2 pulldown conversion. The bottom line is that the Xbox's DVD player functions very well as a entry level to mid-range solution but without 480p support is far from a higher end player.

We also have a few quibbles with the $30 DVD remote itself. First of all there is no way to remotely power or shut down the Xbox which may be a limitation of the hardware itself. Secondly there is no remote eject button which again may be a limitation of the Xbox hardware. The remote is very easy to use and the display options during the playback of a movie are very easily accessible including a very easy to use zoom feature. In terms of ease of use the Xbox remote gets an A+ however in terms of features for the DVD savvy user, the Xbox remote falls behind. We'd expect better for one of the more expensive Xbox accessories.

It's clear that the remote is made for the mainstream population and not the more savvy home theater enthusiasts.
April 22, 2002, 8:28 PM CST by David_South
Page: 10

The Resolution Game

One of the biggest debates that raged on among hardware enthusiasts before the Xbox's launch was in regards to what resolutions we could expect games to run at. You must first understand that interlaced NTSC television offers an effective resolution of close to 640 x 480 meaning that there would be no reason to render at above that resolution for the vast majority of the population. Because of the interlaced nature of NTSC video it is only necessary to have half of the horizontal resolution lines in the frame buffer at any given time which is why some PS2 games actually only store 640 x 240 images in the frame buffer. This unfortunately ruins the potential of the PS2 having any reasonable HD output at resolutions higher than 640 x 480 or what is known as 480i. The Xbox however was designed with support for so called high-definition (HD) resolutions in mind.

Most PC users are used to resolutions such as 1024 x 768 but in the world of HDTVs, resolutions are measured in the number of horizontal scan lines. For example, on a 4:3 aspect ratio (width:height) TV, the resolution 1024 x 768 would be represented as 768p since the signal is non-interlaced or progressive scan (at any given time there are 768 horizontal resolution lines). The HD standards do not offer any 768p standard; rather the most popular are 720p and 1080i - both of which are 16:9 standards. The equivalent in terms of resolutions you're used to seeing would be 1280 x 720 and 1920 x 1080; the latter would be interlaced because currently no TVs have enough available bandwidth to offer a true 1920x 1080 resolution.

The Xbox features a Conexant video encoder chip that supports the following TV output resolutions: 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i. However the input of that chip is governed to a maximum (according to Conexant's tech-docs) of 1024 x 768. Note that the input resolution and the resolution outputted to your TV don't have to be the same, but if they are not the same you're just going to be scaling or shrinking the image and won't get any additional quality out of it.

HD support is enabled through the $20 HD A/V pack. The pack comes with RCA audio and component video cables. The connectors are as follows (from left to right): digital audio out (toslink/optical), analog audio out L/R, component video out (Y Pr Pb).

All currently shipping Xbox games, as far as we know, are rendered internally at 640 x 480 and then sent to the Conexant chip which either interlaces the frames for output to a regular 480i or HD 1080i display or leaves the full resolution lines intact for every frame when being sent to a 480p or 720p output. This means that even for HDTV owners, 480p is the best you're going to get for now. Because of the sheer memory bandwidth requirements, 1080i doesn't make much sense for game developers. At 1920 x 1080 there are 153,600 more pixels (8% more) to be rendered than at 1600 x 1200 and we already know how memory bandwidth intensive 1600 x 1200 can be. Considering that the Xbox only has 6.4GB/s of memory bandwidth to work with, only in games with relatively small textures and low detail can we expect 1080i to be a reality. The much more desirable option is 720p.

In 720p mode there are 135,168 more pixels to be rendered than at 1024 x 768 which is very easily done at above 60 fps by every card since the GeForce2 GTS. The problem you run into next is that most HDTVs don't support 720p but instead support 1080i. This isn't as big of a problem since the conexant chip can scale the output to 1080i and most TVs even scale unsupported inputs to resolutions they do support. This then becomes a question of what is a better scaler, the conexant chip or your HDTV. In the future we hope to see more use of 720p in games because currently even 480p without AA enabled does result in quite a few jagged edges.

This brings us to the next issue which is the lack of AA use in current games. None of the titles we've played with (DOA3, Halo, NFL Fever or Project Gotham) enable any of the multisample AA modes supported by the NV2A GPU. The games inherently look very good because of their higher resolution textures and use of pixel and vertex shader programs however aliasing is still present at varying degrees among these titles. Because of the benefits of multisampled AA, enabling NVIDIA's Quincunx mode would not hurt performance all that much, especially at 640 x 480. The only problem that would occur would be an increased blurriness and a blurring of text which would require some workarounds to reduce but it's definitely possible. The use of a higher render resolution such as 960 x 720 (720p) would tremendously reduce the amount of aliasing; for non-HD users, who make up the majority of the Xbox buying population, it would make much more sense to render at 640 x 480 and enable some form of AA whether it be Quincunx, 2X or 4X mode depending on the memory bandwidth usage patterns of the game itself. While all hope is lost of AA to be enabled in this first generation of titles, hopefully we'll see more use of the technology as developers learn from the mistakes of those before them.
April 22, 2002, 8:29 PM CST by David_South
Page: 11

USB Controllers? We think so.

Conflicting opinions have surrounded the release of the US Xbox's controllers mainly because of the controller's incredible size. Holding the controller is not as bad as it seems however this is one area where the Xbox, in our opinion, falls significantly behind the GameCube. Nintendo's controller just feels much more natural than the US Xbox controller. The reason we specifically mention the US Xbox controller is because Mcirosoft will be releasing a smaller controller in Japan that should retain all of the functionality of the US controller but with a smaller overall footprint for the demands of that market. Due out in February, you can expect the controller to be an import favorite because of its smaller size.

Breakaway connector

The controllers have a generously long 9 ft cable that features two connectors. The first connector is a breakaway connector that is located at the very end of the cable. This connector will detach from the rest of the cable should the wire be tugged on.

This end plugs into the Xbox

The second and final connector plugs directly into the Xbox system and is a much stronger connection than the breakaway connector. The reason for the breakaway connector is obviously to improve the ruggedness of the Xbox but even more importantly it will prevent someone from tugging too hard on the controller to cause the Xbox itself to fall. Remember that there is a spinning hard drive in there.

The USB controllerboard on the inside of the Xbox. Each one of the white ports drives two controller ports.

Looking at the controller connector itself it just screams USB. We originally hypothesized that the controllers would be USB derived with maybe an additional power line to drive the rumble motors inside of the controller since they would eat up a significant amount of power; potentially more than the USB spec would provide. On the inside of the Xbox the four controller ports plug into a controller board that then plugs into the Xbox motherboard.

The 4-port USB hubby Texas Instruments

On this controller board there is a very small USB chip-hub that obviously drives the controllers. We're not yet sure why the hub is necessary considering that the MCP-D should be capable of driving 6 USB ports. The hub is a 4 port hub manufactured by Texas Instruments and drives the four controller ports on the front of the Xbox.
April 22, 2002, 8:29 PM CST by David_South
Page: 12

Disassembling the Unit

Taking apart the Xbox is actually not all that difficult, provided that you have an Allen wrench set in order to unscrew the torque screws. As usual, we accept no responsibility for any harm this causes to your Xbox. Opening up the unit will void your warranty.

1) First remove all of the external screws. There is a single screw located under each one of the feet of the unit as well as two hidden screws. One is under the FCC sticker and the other is under the serial number label.

2) Flip the Xbox back over and you should be able to pull the cover straight off, this is what you will see:

3) Unplug the IDE cable and power cable from the hard drive. There is one screw holding the hard drive tray in place, remove it. This will allow you to remove the hard drive tray. Be sure to untangle the power cord from its guides on the hard drive tray.

4) There are two screws holding the DVD-ROM drive in place, both are at the very front of the system; one on each side. Remove those and be sure to disconnect the yellow power and IDE cables going to the drive before pulling it out of its resting place.

5) Now you should have access to everything. If you wish to take out the motherboard, it is held in by screws just like any other motherboard would. Be sure to handle it with care and please wear static protection when doing so.
April 22, 2002, 8:30 PM CST by David_South
Page: 13

Challenging the Playstation 2

In part 2 of this series we'll focus on Nintendo's GameCube but for now it's time to talk about how the hardware stacks up to the Playstation 2, the current hardware champ in the console market.

PS2 vs. Xbox: CPUs

Let's start off with host CPUs; the PS2 is driven by what Sony likes to call their Emotion Engine. The Emotion Engine (EE) is a 128-bit MIPS processor that operates at 300MHz. The idea of the EE being a 128-bit processor came about because it features 128-bit general purpose and SIMD registers as well as dual 64-bit integer units. The MIPS ISA gives the EE a bit of an advantage from the standpoint of having more general purpose registers (GPRs) and not having to undergo any significant decoding stages just to reduce instructions to more manageable RISC operations.

Sony also claims that the EE has a dedicated MPEG-2 decoding block which should help in DVD playback however this is offset by the hardware motion compensation features of the NV2A GPU in the Xbox and shouldn't be blown out of proportion as a feature.

The biggest issue with the EE is that it has a very small on-die cache and relies on having a very high-speed memory bus, more on that later though. A 16KB instruction cache is more than enough for the processor however the 32KB data cache leaves much to be desired. During its design phase the idea of having a fast 3.2GB/s bus to main memory may have been impressive but you are all very aware of how important a fast, high-bandwidth L2 cache is to performance.

The true power of the EE comes from its two vector units which are known as VU0 and VU1. These are referred to by Sony as two additional floating point units and aid the basic FPU in 3D T&L calculations. The power provided by these vector units is tremendous however their downfall is in their implementation. The power of the two VUs exists in the proper use of them as serial counterparts in handling the T&L calculations necessary during 3D rendering, but with the PS2 being relatively new architecture and dramatically different from what most developers had seen in the past, getting the most out of the host CPU was quite difficult. This is where the majority of the learning curve for developers came from when dealing with the PS2, especially considering that the PS2 shipped to developers without any C libraries. Writing assembly to control the interaction between these two units and the rest of the CPU is not an easy task to say the least and led to many frustrated PS2 developers. Internally to the CPU, the VUs and the rest of the CPU are connected by 128-bit pathways meaning that moving data around the CPU from VU to VU isn't done as easily as possible.

The Xbox host CPU however is the very well known Coppermine derived core which although has the unfortunate limitations of the x86 ISA, also carries the benefits of being a very well known architecture with much ISV support. The processor runs at a higher clock rate than the EE but we all know the meaninglessness of clock rate as a single performance metric. What is important to note is the 128KB L2 cache with a 256-bit data bus comes in quite handy in keeping the execution units of the processor busy and even more important is that the CPU does not have to handle any of the T&L calculations. If games are written properly the host CPU should only be used for AI, physics and other such calculations, leaving the GPU to handle all of the T&L and actual 3D rendering. Removing developers from the mindset of the host CPU handling T&L has apparently proved somewhat difficult but the better looking games are testament to the potential of the Xbox GPU when utilized properly.
April 22, 2002, 8:30 PM CST by David_South
Page: 14

PS2 vs. Xbox: Graphics Processors

Here is where the PS2 and Xbox differ tremendously in approaches to graphics processor design. Again we'll start out with the PS2 first. The task of rendering is left to the Graphics Synthesizer (GS) which is a massively parallel graphics core running at 150MHz. The low clock speed of the core is theoretically made up for by the fact that it has 16 pixel pipelines giving a theoretical pixel fill rate of 2.4 gigapixels/s and a peak theoretical texel fill rate of 1.2 gigatexels/s for single textured games. We all know how reliable theoretical fill rates are so we'll leave the specs at that, but it is pertinent to point out that these fill rates are entirely dependent on 100% utilization of the 16 pixel pipelines of the GS. As we know from our experience with execution units in CPUs, that sort of assumption should never be made.

In order to keep those pipelines filled, Sony designed the GS around 4MB of embedded DRAM on the die of the GS and connected to the pixel pipelines by a 2560-bit (that's not a typo) bus. When operating at 150MHz this gives the GS a 48GB/s path to its 4MB of eDRAM. The theory behind this is that with that much bandwidth, keeping all 16 pixel pipes filled should not be a problem. This is one of the strong points of the GS design although it is highly unconventional due to the sheer die space and bandwidth requirements of the massively parallel pixel pipeline design.

The problem is that as you very well know, 4MB is not enough to store all of the information necessary to render frames that are supposed to be displayed at 60 fps. Thus the GS is in need of a high speed external memory bus. As with all consoles, the graphics processor and host CPU share the same memory space and bus. In the case of the PS2, Sony decided to go the Rambus route and outfitted the PS2 with 32MB of dual channel PC800 RDRAM. This is the same memory bus configuration as the Pentium 4 and thus offers 3.2GB/s of memory bandwidth to be shared between the EE and GS. This is hardly enough memory bandwidth and hardly enough memory storage for game execution code as well as high resolution textures. This is generally why most PS2 games are limited to relatively low resolution textures compared to what we're used to seeing on PCs. While the embedded DRAM of the GS core definitely helps out, there is still room for improvement.

Anti-aliasing can be done by the GS however memory bandwidth and fill rate constraints are very present since as far as we know, the GS was not designed around a multisampling AA algorithm in mind. The culmination of all of this is that PS2 games have been branded as being very aliased and poor in image quality mostly because of the lower resolution and lower detail levels that game developers are forced to use for textures combined with the usual aliasing issues.

We've already discussed the merits of the Xbox GPU as it is undoubtedly the most powerful GPU on the market today. It's a tried and true solution that is a direct derivative of the NV20/NV25 cores and is given twice the memory bandwidth of the PS2's GS. In fact, the only area in which the NV2A core falls behind is in the lack of any embedded DRAM. What is quite important is that developers are currently taking advantage of the NV2A's pixel and vertex shaders which bodes very well for the PC gaming market since it will hopefully show PC developers how easy these programs are to implement and how stunning the after effects can be.

The AA support provided for by the GPU also makes a lot of sense however developers do need to enable it in order for gamers to realize its benefits. Another limitation is that most developers are used to having the host CPU handle the T&L calculations while with the Xbox they must get used to using the GPU and its programmable T&L pipeline for all of that.
April 22, 2002, 8:31 PM CST by David_South
Page: 15

PS2 vs. Xbox: Audio & I/O

Although the PS2 features an integrated toslink optical audio output on the console itself, it is only used for AC-3 and DTS passthrough as the console itself does not support any form of Dolby Digital encoding. With the release of SSX Tricky and NHL 2002 both by EA Sports, the second vector unit of the EE has actually been put to use in generating DTS sound effects for in-game 5.1 audio. This gives you an idea of the power of the VUs and now that EA has done it you can expect game developers to attempt to duplicate EA's success in future titles. The unfortunate downside to this is that it takes a decent amount of power to enable DTS encoding through one of the VUs which is power taken away from physics, AI or a 3D setup engine.

The Xbox's MCP-D has an extremely powerful DSP from Parthus that enables real-time Dolby Digital encoding which makes high quality DD5.1 gaming a reality provided that developers take advantage of it. We've seen mediocre to decent support for 5.1 gaming on the currently shipping titles for Xbox but what we have seen makes it clear that 5.1 audio in games should not only be limited to Xbox but also available on PC games. Gaming, after all, is about putting the gamer in the position of the character they're playing; true 5.1 audio tracks definitely help accomplish this.

From an I/O processing standpoint, Sony actually made a very good decision with the PS2's I/O processor in that the processor is capable of running any original Playstation (PSX) games because of its 2MB of embedded DRAM. While the graphics of those original PSX titles are slightly improved the main benefit is that the PSX user base can easily migrate over to the new platform.

Upon the PS2's release Sony should have outfitted the system with a hard drive since the memory cards are not only very expensive but also very slow to access. The PS2's expansion bay is actually the perfect size for a hard drive add-on which Sony has been planning for a while now but with the release of the Xbox and GameCube it may be too little, too late for the platform.

The USB and i.Link (IEEE-1394) support of the PS2 has gone relatively unused and with online gaming as the clear future for consoles, the platform is in dire need of an Ethernet controller as well. Luckily with USB support it shouldn't be too hard for Sony to release a 10BaseT Ethernet to USB adapter but judging by Sony's history of overcharging for accessories, you shouldn't expect to see something like that for under $50.

Microsoft on the other hand has been very strict with what expansion options they wish to offer for the Xbox. With the job of diffusing the public opinion that the Xbox is nothing more than a PC, Microsoft has been extra careful to remove any notion of its PC roots from the console including not releasing a keyboard/mouse for the console, as well as not including any ports outside of the A/V and Ethernet ports on the system itself.
April 22, 2002, 8:31 PM CST by David_South
Page: 16

Final Words: On to Part II...

Overall we've been extremely impressed with the Xbox from a hardware standpoint but as any gamer would understand, it's not the hardware that makes the console, it's the games that do. The hardware behind this console has the ability to give developers more than any other manufacturer has in the past; the real question is whether developers will catch on.

The first wave of Xbox titles have been met with overwhelmingly positive response. Titles such as Tecmo's Dead or Alive 3 even outshine the best looking PC games despite its 640 x 480 native resolution. Microsoft's first party FPS, Halo has also been the center of attention as it brings gamers back to the feeling we all had after playing through games that actually involved you like Half-Life. The trend must continue in order for the platform to succeed, but what if developers don't support the Xbox? What other option do they have?

It's that other option that we'll be looking at in Part II of this series as we focus on Nintendo's GameCube.
April 22, 2002, 11:07 PM CST by Kolgar
>>>The PS2 GS combined with the EE can do a lot more advanced visual effects than the XBox GPU combined with its CPU.<<<

Oooh. *wince* Ouch. Erm, I'm sure PS2 has a lot of tricks up its sleek black sleeves, but the Xbox GPU has some built-in features - most notably the pixel and vertex shaders - that really do make a difference.

Those, plus the extra RAM, certainly explain why a couple of Xbox games (DOA3, Wreckless, and some upcoming titles) look as good as anything on the market. (Rogue Leader excepted - damn, that's a great-looking game!)

In any case, a few first-wave Xbox games do indeed look better than most anything I've seen on PS2, which certainly points to Xbox having the more powerful hardware.

PS2 will improve greatly with time, I think, but Xbox games will continue to improve as well.

And anyway, great hardware isn't so great if developers aren't able to come to grips with it quickly. By most accounts, PS2 development is tricky. It's a lot harder for developers to extract performance from. That's a black mark against it right there - regardless of specs.

Kolgar
April 22, 2002, 11:50 PM CST by Gman
I think they are both great systems with great games.I only wish that they would make more pc titles for my xbox.My operation flashpoint wish did come true.so i hope My next wish comes true.BRING ON DEUS EX TO XBOX!!!!!
April 22, 2002, 11:51 PM CST by chairmansteve
OK, I'll start from top.

Of course, the Central Processing Unit, the heart of every computer or console. Most of the calculations take place here.

Perhaps on PS2 most of the calculations take place on the CPU, but on Xbox most of the calculations take place on the XGPU.

Data bus, cache memory as well as all registers are 128 bits on the PS2 CPU while the XBox CPU is 32 bits.

Yep, EE has 128-bit registers and data bus. Xbox CPU has 32-bit, 80-bit (shared registers: 80-bit for FPU and 64-bit for MMX), and 128-bit registers. It’s not only 32-bit. The Coppermine cache memory has a 256-bit wide data path.

It has a maximum performance of 6.2GFLOPS while the XBox CPU can only do a bit over 3 GFLOPS.

Actually, it’s a bit under 3 GFLOPS.

It incorporates two 64-bit integer units (IU) with a 128-bit SIMD multi-media command unit, two independent floating-point vector calculation units (VU0, VU1), an MPEG 2 decoder circuit (Image Processing Unit/IPU) and high performance DMA controllers. Yes, this is all ON THE EMOTION ENGINE ITSELF.

Yep, looks right for EE stuff. Xbox CPU also has integer SIMD (called MMX; 2x32bit or 4x16bit) and vector calculations unit (called SSE; 4x32bit). These aren’t as parallel and independent as parts of the Emotion Engine (FPU, VU0, VU1), but they do run at a higher clock speed and use 64-bit and 128-bit registers. Memory controller and video processing is on XGPU.

It also means that the PS2 can handle a lot more sophisticated Artificial Intelligence programming so that you have intelligent human-like opponents.

AI requires strong integer performance, and EE isn't spectacular at integer, as it's designed mainly for parallel vector processing (floating-point). Integer performance = MIPS (or perhaps better would be SPECint). AI also demands some floating-point (not as much as integer), but not always the type that's very friendly to vector processing (a.k.a. SIMD or parallel processing). Vertex transformations = super duper friendly to vector processing. Also some physics calculations work well with vector processing.

And with a floating-point calculation performance of 6.2GFLOPS/second, the overall calculation performance of this new CPU matches that of a super computer.

Yes, supercomputer from many years ago. Modern supercomputers are in several teraflops (TFLOPS). This is same marketing talk that Apple likes to use for G4. I think the fastest supercomputer at the moment does 40 TFLOPS (or 40,000 GFLOPS). It'll take 6450 Emotion Engines to match that -- not what I'd call a supercomputer. Then you can consider how efficient each machine is -- true supercomputers normally get closer to peak performance than low-end machines do (i.e. less bottlenecks in supercomputers -- per chip and for entire system).

http://www.pcvsconsole.com/news.php?nid=1232

This is a completely new CPU architecture especially designed for sophisticated graphics and physics while the architecture of the XBox CPU is pretty old and simple and looks a lot like the architecture of the 486 CPU from back in the early '90s.

Xbox CPU and 486 both use 32-bit x86 code, but they are very different in execution. Xbox has XGPU that’s even more specially designed for sophisticated graphics, so the CPU doesn’t have to be.

Well, that's enough for one session (might take a while to go through everything you posted). :) If you like, you can search around the Net to check if what I mentioned is accurate. Of course, you'll have to make sure the source you use is also accurate. :)
April 22, 2002, 11:59 PM CST by Pichu
Yes, here's another example of a super computer at 8.3 Teraflops:
HP will supply the supercomputer, consisting of 1,400 of Intel's next-generation Itanium processors, code named McKinley and Madison. The computer will have 1.8TB of memory and 170TB of disk space, the statement said. One terabyte is one million megabytes.

The computer should reach processing speeds of 8.3T flops (8.3 trillion floating point operations per second) at peak performance, making it the most powerful Linux computer in the world, HP said. It will also be among the most powerful supercomputers in the world.


http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/industry/04/18/doe.linux.idg/index.html
You have to remember also that the geometric calculations in XBOX are all off loaded to XGPU (nVidia NV2A), which is over 100Gigaflops in comparison to the weaker Emotion Engine(TM) FPU. It doesn't really matter about how powerful is the general processor. It's the overall ability.
April 23, 2002, 1:06 PM CST by chairmansteve
Session Two will involve this paragraph:
And another thing... the processor inside the box does not say "Pentium III" anywhere. It simply reads "Intel". The XBox's processor is NOT an Intel Pentium III, as Microsoft would have you believe, but in fact a Celeron II. It is a 700mhz Celeron, complete with 128kb of L2 cache (P3 coppermines actually have 256kb L2 cache), but overclocked to a 133mhz FSB, resulting in PIII/Celeron hybrid. What makes it a Celeron II is the fact that it is still using a Coppermine Core, with 8 way set associative L2 cache rather than your typical Celeron 4 way set Level 2 cache. What it ultimately comes down to is that this Coppermine core, which allows Microsoft to market the XBox as a PIII Coppermine, is about a 10% speed increase over the Celeron equivalent of this processor. Is the XBox CPU a Celeron? Not really. Is it a Pentium III CPU in the sense that everyone thinks of a PIII Coppermine? Nope. It's somewhere in between.
Think the writer should make up his/her mind on whether it's a Celeron or not? :)

Regardless, the name doesn't matter. It's an Intel IA32 CPU with Coppermine (0.18u) core running at 733MHz with 133MHz FSB and 128KB L2 cache. The FSB is not overclocked. Pentium III and Celeron processors are not very different as they share the same core and general design.

Based on the model number on the Xbox CPU, the closest match in the PC world is a mobile Celeron 733/133, but that (the model number) is not a perfect match either.
April 23, 2002, 1:58 PM CST by Pichu
David_South - Session 3: Graphics part
But the catch is that these advantages (talking about higher resolutions here) don't make a lot of difference on a TV screen, even on an HDTV screen the difference would be barely noticeable (when the console's hardware is used properly). So, is the XBox Graphics Processing Unit better than the PS2 GS? It doesn't look like it, the architecture of the PS2 GS looks far more advanced.
Who says anything about HDTV and NTSC support? The fact is XBOX added 1920 X 1080i resolution support whereas PS2 only has 1280X1024 support, whereby they are both still HDTV but XBOX can do 16:10 ratio while PS2 can do 5:4 ratio. The writer probably can't tell the difference between HDTV and NTSC displays. From what I've seen, HDTV videos are so much crispier than NTSC format, and that bigger resolution means more display area. This will make an excellent display for RTS games and possibly FPS games for fragging components at a distance.

For example, PS2 has a parallel rendering engine that contains a 2,560-bit wide data bus that is 20 times the size of leading PC-based graphics accelerators.

Yes, that's in fact is 20 times wider than XGPU's 128 bit. As you also understand, wider path may have a discrepancy factors in the following way:

1. Each time the data is needed to be written in 512bits at a time whereas XGPU only needs to be written and read at 64 bits at a time. This is critical if your video memory is low (i.e. 4MB in GS internal eDRAM) because you'll be wasting more space than needed.

2. Larger data path means more faults thus will worsen the memory performance. This is what I understand from the paging system (which is similar to the data address path but in software simulation). As data bit increase, more faults will be introduced because it takes longer to correct these faults than smaller data path. By faults, it means that the same data is overwritten and so forth.

The Graphics Synthesizer architecture can execute recursive multi-pass rendering processing and filter operations at a very fast speed without the assistance of the main CPU or main bus access.

In the case of XGPU, it does have pixel pipelining, you break the rendering of four pixels into sections so that they will be rendered nearly simultaneously.

In the past, this level of real-time performance was only achieved when using very expensive, high performance, dedicated graphics workstations. There is a 48-Gigabyte/sec memory access bandwidth achieved via the integration of the pixel logic and the video memory on a single high performance chip. The quality of the resulting screen image is comparable to high quality pre-rendered 3D graphics. (that is once the game developers have learned how to use it properly) There has also been a misunderstanding about the VideoRAM on the PS2. The VRAM is included in the 32MB of main RAM on the CPU (the developer chooses how much of it he wants to dedicate to VRAM). Everyone thought the 4MB of memory on the GS was the VRAM while that is just a buffer in which all the rendering is done so no external bandwidth is needed (only for texture streaming). Another rumor that's been spread by several gaming sites is that the XBox is capable of texture compression and full scene anti-aliasing while the PS2 isn't. This is simply not true. The PS2 can compress/ decompress textures and do full scene anti-aliasing without causing as much slow-down as on the XBox. And although the XBox GPU can do a lot of effects that are not 'built-in' in the PS2 GS, the PS2 can do all these effects and more in software mode (but at least at the same quality) through the Emotion Engine.

These high powered workstations use faster cache algorithms and a lot of SRAM cache so forth. The eDRAM is slow compare to SRAM (can go at terabytes per second transfer rate or just so instantly because there's no need to refresh the capacitors in the case of DRAM).

The 4MB eDRAM will be useful as a buffer if the texture is used over and over again and is very small even though texture compression is presented. It's not very useful if you want high quality textures and unique sceneries. Upon doing FSAA, the graphics is re-rendered into the memory, so faster memory does serve that purpose of not slowing down the FSAA. However, didn't the writer just say that the eDRAM is used for buffering, mostly textures? Thus, the FSAA can never be involved in the eDRAM, so the rendering has to be taken place in the slower system memory instead. His argument has a discrepancy to how much data can be stored on a 4MB basis.

Speaking of EE, it only uses a 128bit MIPS 3 architecture. I checked on the specs for MIPS 3 R4000 (SGI MIPS if you just wonder - gee, I can't believe that you never heard of SGI before and you're such an emotion engine fan!!!!) CPU. Although the FP performance is astounding, the MIPS (Megainstructions per seconds) is just very low, i.e. take 250MHz MIPS3, it only has 275 mips (300MHz EE will only have 330mips which is the same as P3-500 while Pentium-III 733 MHz has about 500mips. The mips is extremely important for AI calculations where floating point process is not very important at all. It depends heavily on ALU (integer add, etc). Therefore, EE at 300MHz may not be a good processor for doing AI calculations. If it were busy doing the software emulation of graphics, think of how slowly it can do in terms of AI calculations.
April 23, 2002, 3:32 PM CST by chairmansteve
This post will be a reference of SPECint benchmark (SPECint2000 to be specific) for several processors, since MIPS (the benchmark, not the company) can be more dependent on the specific architectures.

SGI MIPS R12000 350MHz
32KB(I) + 32KB(D) L1
off-die 4MB L2
Peak: 289
Base: 280

Intel Pentium III 733MHz (similar to Xbox CPU)
16KB(I) + 16KB(D) L1
on-die 256KB L2
Peak: 374
Base: 368

SGI MIPS R14000 600MHz
32KB(I) + 32KB(D) L1
off-die 8MB L2
Peak: 500
Base: 483

AMD Athlon XP 1.33GHz (Athlon XP 1500+)
64KB(I) + 64KB(D) L1
on-die 256KB L2
Peak: 577
Base: 556

Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz (Northwood)
12K(I) micro-ops + 8KB(D) L1
on-die 512KB L2
Peak: 811
Base: 790

SGI MIPS R12000 350MHz is most likely stronger at integer processing than the Emotion Engine, even if they were at the same MHz (i.e. both at 300MHz).

Anyone got SPECint2000 on a MIPS R4000 300MHz? EE has R4000 ALU, yes?
April 23, 2002, 4:03 PM CST by Pichu
Yeah, I forgot to check the http://www.spec.org to state the specs for P3-733. Regardless, I did find a site (can't remember the link) with R4000 250MHz datasheet with mips representation.

It's 250MHz R4000 at 275 mips. If you divide and multiply, you'll get 330 mips (considering that R4000 architecture is old - back in 1992 - so I think this doesn't look right) for R4000 300MHz. However, this number is still slower than P3-733 (368-374 mips).
April 23, 2002, 4:07 PM CST by chairmansteve
SPECint doesn't use MIPS (mega-instructions per sec). It's its own rating -- combination of several integer-tests (actual benchmarks, not theoretical).

P3 733 should be around 733 MIPS -- when speaking of x86 instructions per second. But perhaps closer to 2000 MIPS -- when dealing with Dhrystone 2.1 MIPS (like in Sandra ALU test).

Is EE only R3000 ALU? Look at this:
PlayStation2 Computer Entertainment System Emotion Engine R3000
http://www.mips.com/coolApps/s3p3.html
Most sources say based on R4000 with 128-bit integer SIMD instructions added. R4000 is a 64-bit processor (as in it uses a 64-bit ISA) -- same CPU series N64 is based on (R4300i).
The CPU, known as the Emotion Engine, upsets the traditional notion of an embedded game processor. Whereas game CPUs have typically been cheap and wimpy compared to those in PCs, the Emotion Engine is neither. At a whopping 240 square millimeters in a 0.25-micron process, the 10.5-million-transistor chip will cost more than $100 to manufacture, according to the MDR cost model. The companion rendering chip measures 279 square millimeters, and a third processor contains a complete first-generation PlayStation CPU for backward compatibility. All told, the silicon in this game machine might cost more than the product's street price -- indicative of a business strategy that emphasizes razor blades (video games) over razors.

...

While the Emotion Engine is not cheap, neither is it wimpy. It's based on a superscalar MIPS R4000 core, but it has a new set of 128-bit integer SIMD instructions. At its target frequency of 300 MHz, it packs a floating-point punch of 6.2 GFLOPS, three times that of Intel's 500-MHz Pentium III with SSE and 15 times that of a Celeron-400 (which lacks SSE).

http://www.mdronline.com/publications/epw/issues/epw_48.html
Take note that the 6.2 GFLOPS is based on the FPU + the 2 vector units. It's not based on the general CPU integer processing. (for those who are unsure of what GFLOPS are)
April 23, 2002, 4:56 PM CST by Pichu
i saw one person saying that EE is a dual R4000 thus R8000. Maybe that's a mistake in the MIPS site?
April 23, 2002, 5:36 PM CST by chairmansteve
R4000 = single-issue
R8000 = 2-way superscalar
R10000 = 4-way superscalar
R12000 = 4-way superscalar

So dual R4000 makes EE 2-way superscalar, eh? So similar ALU performance to R8000 -- thus less than R12000.
April 23, 2002, 10:46 PM CST by cd36
first of all the X-Box doesn't do FSAA AFAIK it just does MSAA which i don't consider FSAA since it doesn't touch textures. And if it doesn't touch textures its not AAing the full scene. Also why does the RAMDAC matter? ALl its doing is converting the Analog to Digital. When it runs faster all thats doing is allowing it to run at a higher resolution with a higher refresh rate and since the resolution doesn't matter a whole lot on consoles they could lower it a bit.
April 23, 2002, 11:22 PM CST by CriTioN
Think the writer should make up his/her mind on whether it's a Celeron or not? :)

Regardless, the name doesn't matter. It's an Intel IA32 CPU with Coppermine (0.18u) core running at 733MHz with 133MHz FSB and 128KB L2 cache. The FSB is not overclocked. Pentium III and Celeron processors are not very different as they share the same core and general design.

Based on the model number on the Xbox CPU, the closest match in the PC world is a mobile Celeron 733/133, but that (the model number) is not a perfect match either.
That's true, but Intel is classing it as a PIII. I was looking at Intel's quarterly earnings and they had PIII's as high sales/profit because of the Xbox. I'm not correcting you just thought you might want to know, still could go either way. :)
April 24, 2002, 9:59 AM CST by David_South
Kolgar

Doesn't the PS2 have two Vertex shaders & One pixel Shader on the EE?
Aren't vector and vertex the same?

I still don't know how or where the extra ram would benefit it.
Would someone explain where and how?
Please include an honest minumum for it's task (If you think you know).

chairmansteve

All Very True.
All of the PS2 is 128 rather then smaller 32, 64, 80, 128 steps.
The PS2 cache memory is like ****-something bits long vs. Xbox 256bit !!!
Though Coppermine (& other terms) may be over hyped (isn't it Aluminum?).
There is way more to be added about the PS2. (If I see it I'll add it here.)

Agreed.

It would be great if someone explained how all of this works.
(or what they do.)

The PS2 A. I. quote may be performance hype.
There isn't a clear direct link to a programming result.
Is there?

The better than a Super computer thing may be true.
SupC's use more than one chip. On a per-chip-basis it may be good marketing.

(EE=Emotion Engine)
(GS=Graphics Synthesizer)
April 24, 2002, 12:18 PM CST by Kolgar
Simplistically, the 64MB of unified RAM in the Xbox allows developers more room and flexibility to do what they want. If they decide to use the RAM on the video end, for example, they can probably achieve some very detailed polygon models with incredibly detailed textures.

Kolgar
April 24, 2002, 12:23 PM CST by David_South
I agree.

But what I'm really looking for is a memory bottleneck.

The developer say there isn't enough. Where isn't there enough?
April 24, 2002, 12:27 PM CST by David_South
I basically asking is it that there isn't enough or are they not able to figure out how to keep the memory flowing.

I understand stored info is faster. But then it's only a challenge of learning to stream information thru the machine like was done with the later games on the PSX.

If that thinking is right, then there should definitely be room to get where Sony said, the PS2 was going.
April 24, 2002, 12:37 PM CST by cd36
even if the PS2 is capable of these great graphics it will take a while for it to get there because it is so hard to develop for. I think the GCN will reach its limits first since it is the easiest to develope for. Then the X-Box then the PS2.
April 24, 2002, 12:43 PM CST by Hien
but thats what makes ps2 so great..
Xbox and gamecube may beat it in power..
but ps always has that quality of making a huge combination of different type of games, which means lots of differnt kinds of gameplay.
As long as Ps2 has better games, i Believe it'll stay as the better system and actaully stay alive even after ps3..

It isn't smart on Sonys side to pull the launch date of the PS3 even closer.
if PS3 is to make a system thats better quality than the Xbox 2 (?), i'd say it would be smart for them to back off for a bit . . . then release the ps3.
(will go babbling on more later)
---
Hien
April 24, 2002, 1:13 PM CST by chairmansteve
All of the PS2 is 128 rather then smaller 32, 64, 80, 128 steps.

Yes, but the PS2 fanboy who wrote the article put it in a way to say Xbox CPU registers are only 32-bit. I was only making the correction.

The PS2 cache memory is like ****-something bits long vs. Xbox 256bit !!!

That big eh? Are you referring to the embedded DRAM on GS? I'll look up EE cache(s) to see the interface size; it may be 128-bit.

Though Coppermine (& other terms) may be over hyped (isn't it Aluminum?).

Intel uses names of rivers for chip codenames. Coppermine is a river in Canada. No hype here. It has nothing to do with being a copper chip. Plus, being copper or aluminum is irrelevant in this comparison. What other terms?

Doesn't the PS2 have two Vertex shaders & One pixel Shader on the EE?

No.

The better than a Super computer thing may be true. SupC's use more than one chip. On a per-chip-basis it may be good marketing.

On a per-chip-basis, Emotion Engine doesn't have enough cache to consider being in a supercomputer. Was that article for marketing the PS2, or was it for describing the actual abilities of the PS2?

Well, this post was just to reply to these above. I'll get back to the article at hand in a while (couple hours perhaps) for a next session -- probably something with graphics.
April 24, 2002, 1:57 PM CST by Traderx25
While I love to argue which hardware is more exotic and powerful.

The main problem again with PS2 is development tools. Programmers can't exploit any hardware without powerful toolkits, this is where M$ makes their money on the Visual Studio interface.

I'm sure Sony PS2 toolkits are not even close.

A heck together game is pretty much how developers got PS2 games to work in the early days.

So you can compare and contrast all you want, the PS2 won't shine until somebody has the toolkit to make use of the hardware and the knowledge to use it efficiently.
April 24, 2002, 6:33 PM CST by Kolgar
Point taken, Trader. Perhaps, if Sony's Performance Analyzer does its job, (the more ambitious) developers will eventually discover ways to take advantage of any untapped power.

Kolgar
April 25, 2002, 10:58 AM CST by Traderx25
What you have right now is some big houses like Capcom, Konami, and SQuaresoft with their own in house built toolkit made for their own purposes. They are going to get the better results than a small company that cannot afford a big team of programmers to build tools.

I'm familar with how programming teams work and big houses always have a team of tool programmers that creates tools for other groups to use.

In the case of PS2, it tool many companies months to build solid tools to use, now we get an influx of PS2 games because the toolkits matured and making games got easier.

Right now you see Xbox games coming out probably the fastest of all the consoles, thats due to the fact that M$ has the best toolkits, any little guy can learn to use these toolkits and bang out games.

In fact, there are companies already prepping games that will use Halo's engine. Faster development time.
April 25, 2002, 12:41 PM CST by Hien
faster development of similar games...
all those games that use taht engine will be like halo, cept its gunna have a different storyline.
hows that gunna be fun?
at least the companies that stay with PS2 will get the quality of good gameplay even if it is harder to make games for the platform.
That also means lots of crappy, quick games will come out for xbox.. they'll have good graphics and thats about it.
Companies want money & i'm sure they'll rip you off any way possible just to get $.
BTW, Xbox launch games were good 'cause most of those games were also out on ps2..... (around the time ps2 was getting better games.)
---
Hien
April 25, 2002, 7:13 PM CST by chairmansteve
Session Three-B (since Pichu did one before):

I'll leave out stuff that Pichu already discussed (i.e. memory page faults).

The XBox GPU can do 125 million polygons while the PS2 GS can only do 75million polygons

Specifically, these are 32-pixel polygons draw rates without texture. These aren’t necessarily how many polygons can be processed and drawn. Plus, they are misleading and have no real meaning as is -- more on this in the next session.

The XBox GPU has a max. Resolution of 1920x1080 and the PS2 GS can do 1280x1024

Neither system has the resources to make use of rendering at such high resolutions in modern 3D games. Also, PS2 doesn’t have room in its 4MB buffer for double-buffered graphics at 1280x1024 (unless it’s double-buffered 8-bit). Maybe 2D applications can use such resolutions.

The rest of the graphics chip will be comparable to NV-20 chip, there are a lot of neat effects the XBox GPU can do with its hardware, but all those effects can be done by the Emotion Engine in software too.

Any general-purpose microprocessor can do any effect in software, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be done as well or as efficiently as dedicated hardware. If it can’t be done in real-time, it won’t be used (i.e. it can’t be done).

The Graphics Synthesizer architecture can execute recursive multi-pass rendering processing and filter operations at a very fast speed without the assistance of the main CPU or main bus access.

Xbox can also execute recursive multi-pass rendering processing and filter operations at a very fast speed without the assistance of the main CPU or main bus access. But can the GS execute single-pass multi-texturing? No, while the Xbox can with up to 4 texture layers.

There has also been a misunderstanding about the VideoRAM on the PS2. The VRAM is included in the 32MB of main RAM on the CPU (the developer chooses how much of it he wants to dedicate to VRAM). Everyone thought the 4MB of memory on the GS was the VRAM while that is just a buffer in which all the rendering is done so no external bandwidth is needed (only for texture streaming).

VRAM = a buffer in which all the rendering is done so no external bandwidth is needed

The 4MB eDRAM on GS is for rendering buffers (i.e. frame buffers) and for texture caching (while rendering to the render buffers). Part of the 32MB system RAM is used for storing additional textures, while those wait to be needed for rendering.

Seems this writer may not know what video memory is, but do naming conventions really matter here? Does it matter if it’s just called video memory or video rendering memory buffer? No, it doesn’t really matter. The RAM does what it does regardless of what it’s named.

Also, that 32MB RDRAM is not on the CPU; it's separate (or external/off-die -- in other words, not embedded) just like the system memory on Xbox, GameCube, or a PC.

Another rumor that's been spread by several gaming sites is that the XBox is capable of texture…while the PS2 isn't.

XGPU = DXTC / S3TC (16-bit and 32-bit TC with or without alpha)

PS2 GS = 8-bit palletized textures (if GS is to be doing the “decompression”) -- normally no alpha channel in 8-bit textures, since room is limited.

The PS2 can compress/ decompress textures and do full scene anti-aliasing without causing as much slow-down as on the XBox. And although the XBox GPU can do a lot of effects that are not 'built-in' in the PS2 GS, the PS2 can do all these effects and more in software mode (but at least at the same quality) through the Emotion Engine.

If texture compression is done through software on EE, then it’ll have to be decompressed before it’s sent to GS for rendering. Thus, no bandwidth is saved (going from EE to GS), but only memory space in system RAM is saved.

I’ll leave out a FSAA discussion. One can just go look at the PS2 and Xbox games and judge that for oneself.

Next session will still be on graphics and include bunch of numbers.
April 25, 2002, 7:52 PM CST by David_South
Wow! Welcome everyone and good comments.
Chairmansteve, your awesome.
You know your tech stuff way better and are much appreciated.
Pichu that goes for you too. This is shaping up to be a great place for an honest comparison.

P.S. The **** thing was to replce what I was going to say.
I remember somewhere on the system there being near a 9,260-bit flow (or in the thousands).
After typing that I realized, I might be thinking VideoRAM. I was likely thinking of this.
April 25, 2002, 7:56 PM CST by David_South
The GS 8bit channels are in parallel.
Think there were 16 channels.

I've sent a request to IGN for some of the articles they wrote.
I don't think they will respond. =<<<

Even though they are a great site, they don't often reply.
April 26, 2002, 2:23 AM CST by kenneth9265
this is the best information forum yet! you people sure know your stuff!
I have a question? how much processing power have the lastest batch of game for the PS2 and the XBOX have used so far and how much better do you think the game are going to get visually by the time the PS3 comes out?
April 26, 2002, 11:08 AM CST by Traderx25
>>>faster development of similar games...
all those games that use taht engine will be like halo, cept its gunna have a different storyline.
hows that gunna be fun? <<<

Hey hein, I smell bias in your words again..

Q: how can a game be fun using the same engine..

A: Look at Deus Ex was built on the Unreal engine, castle wolfenstein uses Quake3 engine as well as medal of honor
Counterstrike on old Quake2 modified engine.

So using existing engines and technology is great.

You need to understand why companies shop around for good technology such as game engines.

Why waste all the time developing different game engines when you should be busy working on gameplay.
April 26, 2002, 11:20 AM CST by Traderx25
Here we go again with the FSAA done on hardware on the PS2 again.

Before I find the resources, I can tell you, if FSAA can be done for free on the PS2, PS2 would've killed the Xbox on the graphics dept.

You can't go around saying PS2's EE can do FSAA on hardware unless you've got proof. So far, there's no proof of any.. from the games on the PS2 I've seen.

In order for FSAA to be fully utilized, that requires no latency on the texture memory. We all know that Rambus memory is known to have memory latency issues, to fix that, you would store as much of the textures to be processed to memory and swap out when it's fully FSAA or processed.

with so little room in that 4MB to be used, this is why many PS2 games slowdown when heavy AA is used in the games.

Just go play Blood Omen 2 and you'll see why PS2's hardware is not adequet for FSAA, full-scene not just sprites.
April 26, 2002, 11:22 AM CST by Traderx25
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1561&p=14

Read this article above and find out why Sony's EE design was beautiful but poorly executed in thinking.
April 26, 2002, 4:46 PM CST by chairmansteve
Session Four will attempt a clearer explanation of this section regarding fill rate:
Now let's take a look at how Microsoft got the idea that their graphics chip can do 125 million polygons...

The PS2's Graphics Synthesizer has the highest pixel fill rate of the next generation of consoles. Most remeber the 4.0 GPixels on Microsoft's spec comparence sheet. Well, Microsoft was nice to include a "(anti-aliased)" next to it. What does "4.0 GPixels (anti-aliased)", mean? It's misleading. The Xbox has hardwired 4x FSAA, when this is turned on the actual total of 1.0 GPixels is re-rendered 4 times to remove aliasing. Another possible reason for Microsoft to say Xbox's fill-rate is 4 GPixels per second. Is that the 1 GPixels is with 2 texture layers, if it is NOT used Xbox would not gain any performance and if it is used Xbox wouldn't lose any performance. It remains 1.0 GPixels w/ 2 textures, so what MS possibly did was it doubled the fill rate twice. Trying to compare it to PS2's fill rate w/ no texture. What MS did was it came up with misleading numbers. The Xbox can't go higher than 1 GPixels per second.
It’s NVIDIA’s new method to specify fill rate using AA Samples instead of Pixels or Texels per second, since the NV20 and above feature multi-sampled AA.

The following are all in billion pixels per second:

0 texture layers (Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter 1)
XGPU = 1.0
GS = 2.4

1 texture layer (most early texture-mapped 3D games)
XGPU = 1.0
GS = 1.2

2 texture layers (even Quake I uses 2 layers)
XGPU = 1.0
GS = 0.6

4 texture layers (common in modern 3D games)
XGPU = 0.5
GS = 0.3

These numbers are maximum pixel fill rates without considering Z-occlusion. If the visibility subsystem from NVIDIA’s Lightspeed Memory Architecture can improve fill rate by at least 20%, then XGPU effective fill rate comes to 1.2 billion pixels per second with 2 texture layers and 0.6 billion with 4 texture layers. That’s 2x the fill rate of Sony GS.

On top of having a larger fill rate, the XGPU contains a hardware pixel shader that allows “smarter” pixels -- as in developers have greater potential for combining and blending pixels to generate nice visual effects. For example, some effect that can be done using 4 textures with a programmable hardware pixel shader may take 5 or 6 textures on a fixed-function pixel pipeline. Thus, the resulting effect may be similar (or the pixel shaded one may look better, but we’ll assume they are similar), but using 4 texture layers requires less fill rate than 5 or 6 -- providing greater efficiency or “smarter” pixels.

If NVIDIA's multi-sampled AA is accounted for, the fill rate on XGPU doubles compared to AA being done without such a feature. However, we can leave this part out and just consider the parts mentioned above.
April 27, 2002, 8:48 PM CST by chairmansteve
Session Five: RAMDAC and Vertex Processing

"Is the XBox graphics chip the same as a GeForce 3 card? Not quite. The NV2A chip that powers the XBox is quite similar to the GeForce 3, but isn't quite a GeForce 3. The GeForce 3 is a 64mb card with 350mhz RAMDAC. The XBox's NV2A is a card that SHARES it's memory with the XBox's system RAM and has a 250mhz RAMDAC.

Yes, GeForce3 has dedicated video memory, while Xbox shares video memory with system memory (a.k.a. unified memory architecture or UMA).

A 250MHz RAMDAC should already be enough for 1920 x 1080 (1080p) HDTV resolution at 60 frames per second. So there is no need for anything higher on a console for HDTV. For 640 x 480 (480p), it’s got plenty of room to spare.

It’s possible that the writer does not know the function of a RAMDAC.

The NV2A compensates for this by having a Second Vertex Shader, as opposed by the GeForce 3's single vertex shader. However, Microsoft claims that this second vertex shader instantly bumps the XBox's theoretical max poly count from the 31 million that Nvidia lists for the GeForce 3, all the way up to 125 million pps.

Vertex shaders process vertices; they do not draw polygons directly. Apples and oranges. The max vertex rate for GeForce3 might be around 50 million per second.

According to most experts, the area that will actually see the most improvement from this will actually be in Bump Mapping.

I’m curious to know which experts these are. Bump mapping is a per-pixel effect -- thus done by the pixel shader and not directly involved with the vertex shaders (they do generate texture coordinates, but that's not part of the actual bump mapping).

Microsoft has yet to explain how the second vertex shader yields an additional 94 million polygons per second."

Vertex shader performance is measured usually by vertices per second, and GeForce3 is somewhere around 40M verts/sec. If someone can find the number (I didn’t see it on NVIDIA’s website), we can have an official spec for GeForce3 vertices/sec.

GeForce3 = 200MHz with 1 vertex shader
NV2A = 250MHz with 2 vertex shaders

If we assume zero improvements to efficiency of the vertex shaders and overall architecture of vertex processing from NV20 to NV2A, then NV2A could process 40M * 1.25 (clock speed increase) * 2 (2nd vertex shader) = 100 million vertices per second. Add some design improvements (besides higher clock speed and 2nd vertex shader) from NV20 to NV2A, and that may increase up to 125 million vertices per second.

BTW, if XGPU is only 233MHz, then all the numbers based on XGPU decrease slightly (by 6.67%). Some sources say 233MHz, and others say 250MHz. For the record, the original speed was to be 300MHz.

Does that conclude the step-through of the first article? I suppose I can add some more in a next post that's not commenting on any passage, but attempting a summary of Xbox Vs PS2 hardware -- then onto the other sections.
April 28, 2002, 12:12 AM CST by CriTioN
GeForce3 47M vertices/sec
GeForce4 136M vertices/sec
April 28, 2002, 9:10 PM CST by David_South
Wow CS,
I am a little busy with school for another week.
But, I will return for a true fact finding mission.

In order for me to state things on your level I have to read.
Just finding what to read takes time. ~ lol
April 28, 2002, 9:24 PM CST by Numone
Just a little tidbit as far as the 2 cpus are concerned.

1.Intel(I believe) and AMD(I am positive) ore actually 64 bit chips. In there current settings thay operate on 2 simultanious 32 bit words per clock.

2. Whe you folks talk about the emotion engine as being 128bit (it isn't) the 128 bit refers to it's SIMD. SSE and 3dnow are also 128bit SIMD single instruction multiple data. An example. AMDs 3dnow yields 4 simultainous 32bit results per 1 3dnow instruction. I believe SSE is simular.
hence 128 bits

You can download the CPU whitepapers directly from their websites:

www.amd.com
www.intel.com
April 28, 2002, 9:36 PM CST by Pichu
hmm...

All x86 architectures are 32 bit because their instructions are 32-bit. The registers in these CPUs, i.e. MMX, SSE, SSE2, 3DNow! may be wider than 64 bit, which follows in your claim #2, yet the general regs may still be 32 bit. In addition, SSE, MMX, SSE2, 3DNow instruction is still 32 bit, regardless.

In there current settings thay operate on 2 simultanious 32 bit words per clock.

You mean pipelining? In Pentium-4, there is a twenty stage pipelining, so you'll be breaking these instructions up for them to call simultaneously. Now, how about hyperthreading and multiprocessors? Hyperthreading can allow you to virtually create multiprocessors by calling several instructions (32-bit) in a clock cycle. MP (multiprocessor) can do so without slowing down the system. Now, if you have 8 CPUs, and each of them are Intel XEON, or if eight-way Hyperthreaded Prescott is used, do you think that it's 256 bit (8X32=256) processor because you can call eight 32 bit wide word in a clock cycle? No. They are still 32-bit processors because the instructions are all 32-bit.
April 28, 2002, 11:46 PM CST by CriTioN
Pichu knows too much about CPU's!!! :)
first of all the X-Box doesn't do FSAA AFAIK it just does MSAA which i don't consider FSAA since it doesn't touch textures.
Doesn't the Xbox have Quincunx AA and HRAA? Does Xbox also have 4xS Quincunx AA? Also does the Xbox use LMA (Lightspeed Memory Architecture) 1 or 2?
April 29, 2002, 3:48 PM CST by dustin11
whick do you think produces better grapchis, an Xbox, a good pc, or a state of the art Arcade system?
April 29, 2002, 3:50 PM CST by Chipaku
theoretically the arcade machine should have the best graphcs, since it can have the most expensive and speciallized hardware.
April 29, 2002, 7:21 PM CST by 1withxbox
Yep, if they come out with a killer cpu or vid. card, all they have to do in arcade machine's is run a couple in parallel,and viola, it's the most powerful game machine!
April 29, 2002, 10:20 PM CST by David_South
theoretically the arcade machine should have the best graphcs, since it can have the most expensive and speciallized hardware
Total non-agreement is my name.

Answer: Dreamcast!
Does anyone remember how improved the game "Soul Caliber" was?
PS2 is even licencing it's hardware to arcade venders. Sega Did the same thing.
Neo'Geo? All of those games were as good or better than the arcade ones.
Ever heard the lies about rental VHS prices?
It's not that they are made of better quality stuff, it the business licencing charge tagged on.
Same thing with arcade machines. They cost a lot because there is the expectation that you will use it for business purposes.

My answer world be the high-end PC with a large screen (Hybrid HDTV Monitor! availible now.), on the condition that the software is designed to make use of it.
Arcade machines do have specialized boards. Just that by the time a game gets popular, some arcade machines lack the power of a ported conterpart.
April 30, 2002, 12:39 AM CST by dustin11
I agree with the people who say that the arcade is the most power full because it is just a giant super powered modem. now if they could just fix the screen with a plasma screen or a HDTV screen. Any one have the technical specs of a newer arcade machine? Like a tri-force, or anything else.
April 30, 2002, 1:34 AM CST by chairmansteve
In a high-end arcade machine, you could whip up an SGI Onyx machine. Perhaps an Onyx 3800, since I believe that's the top-of-the-line at the moment.

512 CPUs
716 GB/sec
1 Terabyte RAM
16 graphics pipelines
283 million triangles per second
7.7 billion pixels per second
48-bit color (12 bits per channel RGBA)
IRIX 6.5.16 operating system
Full OpenGL acceleration

But it probably costs 7 figures.

http://www.sgi.com/visualization/onyx/3000/ip/

If that's out of your budget range, how about 32 Obsidian nV systems in a cluster, using Quantum3D's patent-pending nVSync™ technology to sync all 32 channels.
Applications that may use nVSync include realtime scene management software or any OpenGL® or DirectX™ application that has been coded for multi-channel operation. The nVSync API uses Ethernet/UDP to establish communications between one Obsidian® nV system designated as the "master" and up to 31 "slaves". Once all participating systems have established their runtime video modes, nVSync allows the applications to rendezvous with each other and synchronize the video clocks of their nVSync-equipped Obsidian video subsystems.

http://www.quantum3d.com/product%20pages/nvsync.htm
Per Channel (32 total):
Dual Pentium III
Quadro DCC (pro version of GeForce3)
4GB system RAM
Windows 2000 or Linux
OpenGL 1.2 and DirectX 8 support

32 of these bastids should be able to play DOOM III at an acceptable speed, yes?

http://www.quantum3d.com/pdf/obsidiannvdatasheet.pdf

Too bad 3dfx isn't around anymore to provide new chips for Quantum3D's AAlchemy system. The newest one still uses 16 VSA-100 processors (same as used in Voodoo5, but only 2 there). With 32 3dfx Mosaic chips (the chip following Rampage), we'd be blasting away at uncountable triangles and pixels per second.
April 30, 2002, 6:08 AM CST by chairmansteve
How about a hardware ability recap and a floating-point comparison to get back on subject?

Integer Performance: EE Vs XCPU
(based on SPECint2000) Peak / Base
XCPU: 374 / 368 (Pentium III 733)
EE: 289 / 280 (R12000 350MHz)*

That's 1.3x better general integer performance, which includes the following types of calculations:
- compression
- compiling and interpreting
- game artificial intelligence
- text processing
- database
- conditionals and loops
- searching and sorting

*An R12000 350MHz is likely more powerful than an Emotion Engine at integer processing, so Xbox should have greater than 1.3x lead. Perhaps XCPU is around 2x that of EE at integer.

Floating-Point: physics, vertex processing, and multimedia compression methods - EE Vs XCPU/XGPU/MCPX, since Xbox splits these tasks among the three chips.

Emotion Engine
Floating Point Performance: 6.2 GFLOPS
Geometry (million polygons per second), based on Sony's claims
- only Perspective Transformation: 66
- with Lighting: 38
- with Fog: 36
- with Bezier Curved Surface Generation: 16
Image Processing Unit (IPU): MPEG2 Macroblock Layer Decoder

For geometry, are these considering texturing? We know that Sony GS requires multi-pass rendering for texture mapping. Thus, for every pass, it may require repeated vertex processing by EE, eating away at that geometry performance. Can someone find a reliable source to confirm this? With lighting, fog, and a few texture layers, geometry performance could be down to low single digits (millions). GS can only draw 9.375 million 32-pixel polygons with 4 texture layers anyhow. An actual game with a few texture layers may hit in the 5-million polygons per second range with good programming. To free up some resources, games may lower texture layer usage. VU1 does geometry, while FPU + VU0 is for other floating-point processing: game physics, 3D sound, etc. So roughly half of the GFLOPS is for geometry.

Xbox CPU
FP Performance: 2.9 GFLOPS
- all goes to game physics and general FP tasks; no vertex transformations or lighting required on CPU, and 3D sound processing is done by MCPX

Xbox GPU: > 75 GFLOPS (or GnvidiaFLOPS perhaps), based on NVIDIA's claim of 80 GFLOPS for Xbox
- dual vertex shaders dedicated to vertex processing
- greater than 100 million vertices per second
- 4 texture layers per rendering pass, so vertices are not wasted unless more than 4 texture layers are required
- texture decompression handled by GPU while texturing

With efficient vertex storage (use of triangle strips and indexing), it could be possible to make use of entire 31 million polygon drawing performance -- but maybe 20 something million is doable in many cases.

Xbox MCPX:
- dedicated to dolby digital encoding and 2D/3D sound processing

EE can do almost everything Xbox can do in these floating-point areas, but not as elegantly, efficiently, or quickly, giving Xbox perhaps 2x to 3x as much power in this area. Given that there aren't any benchmarks, it's hard to make a solid comparison of how many times more powerful. For a benchmark, all we can do is just look at the games and see how well various sorts of scenes and games run.

Memory and Data Paths:
Xbox
- 64MB UMA DDR
- 6.4 GB/sec from XGPU to memory
- 1 GB/sec from XGPU to XCPU
- 800 MB/sec from XGPU to MCPX

That's plenty of bandwidth and space for games this generation at 480p on a TV. XGPU does the majority of the processing, so it has the best connection to memory.

PS2
- 32MB main RDRAM
- 3.2 GB/sec from EE to RDRAM
- 2.4 GB/sec within EE (among VU0, VU1, IPU, etc.)
- 1.2 GB/sec from EE to GS
- 150 MB/sec from EE to I/0 and Sound
- 4MB eDRAM on GS @ 48 GB/sec

One might assume that's 36MB total for PS2, but part of that 4MB that's used for texture caching is duplicated in main memory, so it's more like 34MB or 35MB total -- anyhow, not too important.

That 1.2 GB/sec is a major bottleneck. That's not much faster than AGP 4x, and textures will be going through that path many times uncompressed each frame. The solution? Reduce memory texture usage (size, count, and color depth). The result? Plain looking graphics with repetitive textures.

That 48 GB/sec eDRAM is certainly fast at texture processing and pixel rendering once textures are in that cache (or with non-textured pixels), but how will large amounts of textures be used when they must go through that 1.2 GB/sec path? Developers have to use a combination of 8-bit color textures, small textures, repeating textures, and some non-textured polygons to make the most out of the strong areas of PS2 (and minimize penalties from bottlenecks).

Overall, the Xbox design is great for real-time graphics and games (mainly because of the NVIDIA chips, XGPU and MCPX), while the Intel CPU is good enough for what it has to do (AI, physics, and general tasks). The PS2 is designed for...well, maybe marketing? 128-bit and 48 GB/sec are good for tossing around in the specs. PS2 can manage decent visuals, sound, and game environments with good programming, but it's no match for Xbox (especially if good programming is used with Xbox too).

Anyhow, the best overall test may be to look at the games (and after Xbox has had time for 2nd and 3rd gen games to come out).

Any thoughts and/or questions? Was anything important left out?

What's next? Development tools discussion? Business strategies? Online gaming?
April 30, 2002, 11:24 PM CST by chairmansteve
How about a transistor comparison? Those are always fun, no?

PlayStation 2
Emotion Engine
- 13 million transistors total
- 4.3 million cache
Graphics Synthesizer
- 43 million total
- 33.6 million embedded DRAM
I/O Processor (PSX chip)
- under 0.3 million (based on R3000) -- can anyone confirm actual count?
TOTAL = 56.3 million (22.7 without eDRAM)

Xbox
Intel CPU
- 21.8 million transistors total (28.1M in P3 Coppermine)
- 6.3 million L2 cache + 1.6M L1 cache (7.9M total cache)
XGPU
- 60 million (more than total PS2)
MCPX
- 6 million
TOTAL = 87.8 million
May 1, 2002, 12:02 AM CST by David_South
I can't find that PS2 VideoRam thing I thouhgt I remembered.
But Sony's PS2 spec's say that the GS DRAM is 2,560 bit operation.

PlayStation® 2 Technical Specification

CPU 128 bit custom multi-media chip

System Clock Frequency: 294MHz
Cache Memory Instruction 16KB, Data 8KB + 16KB (ScrP)
Main Memory: 32MB RDRAM
Memory Bus: 128bit DMA
Co-processor: 2 Parallel Vector Operation Units
Floating Point Performance: 6.2 GFLOPS
3D CG Geometric Transformation: 66 Million Polygons per second
Compressed Image Decoder: MPEG2

Graphics Synthesizer:
System Clock Frequency: def - 147MHz
On chip Memory: def - 4MB DRAM
Frame buffer Bandwidth: 38.4Gbytes/sec
Pixel write speed: 2.4Gpixels/s

I/O processor
CPU Core: PlayStation (current) CPU
Clock Frequency: 33.8688MHz (+3% available)
IOP Memory: 2MB
Sub Bus: 32-bit

Sound:
Number of Voices: ADPCM: 48channels, with 3D surround sound
Sound of Memory: 2MB
Output Frequency: Up to 48 KHz (DAT quality)

DVD:
Maximum size: Dual layer 9GB
DVD-ROM - 4 times speed.
CD-ROM - 24 times speed.

Interface Types:
IEEE1394 i.LINK®
Universal Serial Bus (USB) x 2
Controller Port x 2, MEMORY CARD slot x 2
Optical Digital Output
Network adaptor
May 1, 2002, 12:13 AM CST by chairmansteve
"But Sony's PS2 spec's say that the GS DRAM is 2,560 bit operation."

Yep, that's where the 48 GB/sec eDRAM bandwidth comes from.

At 150 MHz:
1024-bit frame buffer read = 19.2 GB/sec
1024-bit frame buffer write = 19.2 GB/sec
512-bit texture = 9.6 GB/sec

1024 + 1024 + 512 = 2560

All 3 ports (or interfaces) run in parallel (hence, multi-ported eDRAM).

I suppose texture writing can't be done on GS (thus, no dynamic reflections and some other dynamic texturing features that are available on Xbox). Anyone can confirm that?
May 2, 2002, 3:46 PM CST by dustin11
Are those specs really for an arcade? that thing looks alot like a giant server with a flat screen moniter attached. can you turn that into an arcade or something?
May 2, 2002, 4:21 PM CST by chairmansteve
I doubt any arcade uses Onyx systems for games. It would be too expensive. It's used in other industries that require high-end visualization.

The Obsidian system could be used in arcades. Those are $12K per unit ($384K for 32 in a cluster). Some of the past arcade games that ran on 3dfx Voodoo hardware may have used systems from Quantum3D -- but not the same Obsidian nV.

There are some cheaper solutions that could give good performance, but not any better than a high-end PC.
May 2, 2002, 4:44 PM CST by Pichu
you mean SGI Onyx? Those machines are quite impressive, but I don't think they can even match the speed of a PC with Geforce 3 in gaming.
May 2, 2002, 5:45 PM CST by Chipaku
you mean SGI Onyx? Those machines are quite impressive, but I don't think they can even match the speed of a PC with Geforce 3 in gaming.

well you have to account for the fact that it can do 48-bit color with 716 GB/sec bandwidth,
at 238 million triangles per second with 7.7 billion pixels per second.

so, in that sense, if you were to try and run 48-bit color on a geForce 3 then the Onyx would crush it easily.
but perhaps the geforce can whip the onyx when running 320x240 16-bit.

but $384k for that 32-channel nv system actually sounds like a good deal. if I had a game company I would definitely buy that for a development machine.
May 2, 2002, 6:05 PM CST by Pichu
yeah, but last time I checked 3dLabs GLINT (Wildcat III?) gaming benchmarks and it can't even beat TNT2 series card, which is around 20 times slower than Geforce4 Ti4600. If it takes GLINT to process about 33million triangles/sec and multiply that factor by 20, you'll only get 660 million triangles per second, which is a lot faster than the one bundle with Onyx. Therefore, I'd say Geforce3 will beat InfinitePerformance in gaming!
May 2, 2002, 6:17 PM CST by chairmansteve
Those 3Dlabs cards don't have much fill rate. Something like 400 megapixels?
May 2, 2002, 6:39 PM CST by Pichu
Yeah, it's 400million trilinear/textured fillrate, not very less than that of a Geforce 3. I mean that it's only 20 times less fillrate than the SGI one. If the very same calculation is taken into consideratoin, then isn't my prediction valid?
May 2, 2002, 6:52 PM CST by chairmansteve
Sure, it's possible, but that's not enough to make a determination.

1) SGI and Wildcat III are not the same.
2) Can you provide source for that Wildcat III Vs TNT2?
3) Besides fill rate, memory bandwidth is not huge on Wildcat either. SGI system can have 716 GB/sec -- 68.8 times larger than GeForce4 Ti 4600, and that 716 is not for graphics only; it's for whole system (I think).
4) Does it matter, you stinky rat!? hehe :)
May 2, 2002, 7:14 PM CST by Pichu
I couldn't remember, but I'm sure I saw a review on Wildcat II, which is so much inferior than TNT a long time ago. By the way, are those numbers obtained using multiple GPUs? I would think it has to be Multiprocessors. It's always true for 3DLabs professional chip to perform so much slower (a factor of 20) in gaming than a similar specs gaming chip, which is not true for Quadro and FireGL (Radeon). So, maybe it will be the case for SGI. Oh, I don't think the multiple GPU works the same way in gaming as with professional graphics when real-time rendering is not the requirement.

hey! I just showered.
May 3, 2002, 12:10 AM CST by dustin11
Alright. does anyone have the specs on a top of the line ARCADE machine?
May 3, 2002, 1:14 PM CST by Iceg0d
1 gb/per second, no way!!!!
you wont have any picture anymore, it isnt possible, i dont know where this rumuor is from, but it is not true, i am not a fanboy, its not true!!!!
May 3, 2002, 1:34 PM CST by Iceg0d
and, if the ps2 so powerful, why are the graphics trimmed back????......
its a hard tech......... and.......
And in those 2 years the graphics didnt change a little bit, not much anyway.
May 3, 2002, 2:24 PM CST by chairmansteve
Iceg0d, 1 GB/s from where to where?

And, what are you referring to when you say if the ps2 so powerful?

With those two pieces of information, I'll try to give some answers.
May 3, 2002, 8:45 PM CST by CriTioN
Hey Steve, found this guide about the three new consoles over at Firing Squad. There's some nice info in there, not sure if you seen it before.

http://firingsquad.gamers.com/guides/consoles2k2-1/

Still looking for the loopback stuff...I shall not stop till I am victorious!
May 6, 2002, 10:15 AM CST by Phil
The 66 MPolygons are only taking VU1 into account. I don't have any links to back this statement up, but I'm in contact with various PS2 developers (most noticably, one from SquareSoft) who confirmed this.

Also, the console comparasment between Xbox and PS2 from amandtech is not very accurate as far as I can judge. There were quite some things wrong in that article - I believe a PS2 developer already took care of it quite niceley. Here's the link:

http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?q=Y&a=tpc&s=50009562&f=39309975&m=5050993713&p=1
May 6, 2002, 11:41 AM CST by Jeremiah_W
This all very informative but you forgot about the one feature that the Xbox has that the playstation doesn't have
,well not yet any way, The Hard Disk. Which you can use for game save rip music from CD's. but the real deal is
it's ability to cache data for quicker load times. And the PS2 can't even save game files.
May 6, 2002, 12:13 PM CST by Phil
The HD is a joke IMO at the moment and is one big gimmick. The only real advantage of the HD I see is when online gaming comes into play. Ripping music, yeah what ever - nice feature, but not necessary and IMO not worth the price it comes. Faster loading times? Not really, you can achieve the same through smart programming. If you'd use a HD on the PS2 for "faster loading times" you'd put the PS2's architecture to shame by ignoring its distinct advantages. One brilliant example is Jak and Daxter. Name me one game that features one giant island witout even one loading screen during gameplay... not even Xbox has this (eventhough it could achieve the same through the use of a harddrive) yet. So IMO, it's one big gimmick and leads to sloppy programming.

WTF? If you think games such as Jak and Daxter, MGS2 look graphically the same to Ridge Racer V, TimeSplitters..

You should also take into account how much different PS2 development is from the other consoles. It's what you call a "learning curve" - go figure...
May 6, 2002, 3:22 PM CST by cd36
i notice in lots of games on the PS2 that they don't even use textures or they use basic textures or not much variation. Also the HDD doesn't do much for loading times since the GCN has less loading times.
May 6, 2002, 3:50 PM CST by Inane_Dork
So...

If the hard drive still requires programming skill to eliminate load times, why do you say that it leads to sloppy programming?

I'm not saying the hard drive is all that, but it is a nice thing to have. Azurik uses it to eliminate load times everywhere. Halo uses it after the initial load to lengthen levels (I think). And the up-and-coming Project Ego will use collapsible AI and time simulations combined with the world data stored on the disk to make the whole world of Albion fully persistent.

Oh, and the music ripping feature is sort of a gimmick, but I sure as heck would like to have that gimmick with all of my PC games. Just because it's a little bonus feature doesn't mean that gamers in general don't use it. I think MS went on record as saying that many gamers actually did use it.
May 6, 2002, 3:56 PM CST by Chipaku
yea I noticed that GC games load much quicker than Xbox, which is woerd cuz I thought Xbox's DVD drive had a faster transfer rate.

Halo, OMG takes frickin forever and a day to load each level, I could take a nap and wake up and it will still be loading.

Crash Bandicoot on PS2, jeez I can take 2 naps in between levels!!
May 6, 2002, 4:03 PM CST by OG10
chip you why do you lie so much, is it cuz you cant afford a xbox... halo take like 10 seconds max to load and in game there is hardly any load time. i know that you have a gamcube and you love it i do mine to, but non of the games on the NGC (yet) are as vast as halo so that is a major factor. frikin ages...your dead in the head man...PS: look at doa3 2-3 seconds and wreckless the same. So dont lie.
May 6, 2002, 5:21 PM CST by BoilingPoint
Wow! you guys shure know your stuff.
You've talked about the PS2 and XBOX quite extensively now, even the old PC has had some good stuff wtitten about it. Any chance you're going to talk about the GCN any time soon, as I'd be interested to see how the new pretender stackes up against the other 2.

Keep up the good work guys........... :)

* Oah' and can we keep the fanboy stuff to a minimum please, as it spoils an otherwise excellent debate. (yes OG10 I'm talking about your last post :) )
May 6, 2002, 5:30 PM CST by Chipaku
chip you why do you lie so much, is it cuz you cant afford a xbox... halo take like 10 seconds max to load and in game there is hardly any load time.

you are on major crack if you think Halo loads the levels in only (or even near or around) 10 seconds. it is atleast a minute, closer to 2 minutes. I have timed it before. It takes longer than most PC games.

what its doing while it loads is loading the whole level to the HD as a cache before starting up. then when you are in the game it will use the HD cache as you move about the level. thats why the levels are very large, and you will notice a brief pause every now and then as it loads some of that HD cache.
May 6, 2002, 5:56 PM CST by OG10
chip unless there is a variation in the eruropen xbox compared to the us i cant see how the load times are that long i just measure the last level loading and it took 27 seconds.
May 6, 2002, 6:04 PM CST by Chipaku
how many save game files are you using?
try loading a different level or file, or starting a new game. you may have just loaded a level that was previously loaded and was still in the HD cache.
May 6, 2002, 6:08 PM CST by OG10
I have to admit that some of the guys here know allot on the relavent thread. I don't and that is a fact i am more specialised in the areas which i study, which are mainly social sciences and philosophy. So i am obviously not as computer literate as you guys but where can i learn, i need a boost. Meaning areas where you gain such knowledge from. if you dudes could tell me i would be much obliged.

As for boiling point, you dont know me man. I am one of those people who really hate fanboyism even though i am one when i dont think before i write. so dont judge things that you have no clue about.
May 7, 2002, 6:20 AM CST by Phil
Well, I actually wanted to say that a HD can lead to sloppy programming. It's quite simple to why: If you have a HD with 8 GB of free memory, you won't put much thought on to how you save your data on there (simply because there is enough). On PS2 however, you won't have a HD unless you buy the add on, so developers have to fit their data on a 8 MB card. Compare a replay save from SSX to that of GT3. SSX uses well over 1.5 MB for one save, while GT3 only uses 68 KB in the most cases. This shows how efficiant a save can be. Or simply compare PC game saves to that of a PSX and PS2 game. Amazing what you can achieve, isn't it?

Note that I'm not trying to imply that every platform with a HD leads to sloppy programming, but it can.
I'm not saying the hard drive is all that, but it is a nice thing to have. Azurik uses it to eliminate load times everywhere. Halo uses it after the initial load to lengthen levels (I think). And the up-and-coming Project Ego will use collapsible AI and time simulations combined with the world data stored on the disk to make the whole world of Albion fully persistent.
Yeah I know what you mean. I'm pretty used to Xbox fanboys [no offence, as I see there aren't many (if any) here] which bring up all those great HD features, when in reality, none are really using it probably at the moment.
Halo, OMG takes frickin forever and a day to load each level, I could take a nap and wake up and it will still be loading.

Crash Bandicoot on PS2, jeez I can take 2 naps in between levels!!
Yeah, just like Quake 3 Revolution. Put in Jak and Daxter and you don't have any loading times at all. I think once other developers learn how to stream big amounts of data through the system, games will start to look much better. Jak and Daxter is only the beginning.
May 7, 2002, 6:58 AM CST by chairmansteve
Or simply compare PC game saves to that of a PSX and PS2 game. Amazing what you can achieve, isn't it?
Yes, amazing indeed. PC games can have features not possible on PSX or PS2. ;)

BTW, having hard drive space doesn't lead to sloppy programming. It can lead to saving more data in a game. It's quite simple to just save less, but that would most likely be removing some attributes of the game.
SSX uses well over 1.5 MB for one save, while GT3 only uses 68 KB in the most cases. This shows how efficiant a save can be.
No, it doesn't show that. Those are two different games. There may be other variables in the equations, so it cannot be determined just by the file size that one is more efficient than the other. However, it does show that not all games save the same amount of information.

Example: MPEG2 file of 200MB vs. MP3 file of 10MB

Is the MP3 file format more efficient? It's smaller. Ah! This MPEG2 file contains audio and video, while the MP3 file has no video. Plus, the playing time of each file is not known (unless bit rates are given). So can a comparison of efficiency be done simply by looking at the file sizes?
May 7, 2002, 7:52 AM CST by Phil
I'll give you right on PSX, but not on PS2. I remember playing tomb raider on PC and then later on PSX. A PSX save is roughly 15 KB, a PC save however was much larger in size. And as I pointed out above already, I sad a HD >can< lead to sloppy programming. And I doubt that PS2 developers are "saving" attributes - you'd have to name me a few games that do. And trust me, there's always a way to save the same amount of information using less memory.
No, it doesn't show that. Those are two different games. There may be other variables in the equations, so it cannot be determined just by the file size that one is more efficient than the other. However, it does show that not all games save the same amount of information.
Two different games they are, but not that far appart. In both you control an object (car or snowboarder) and go down a track. SSX boosts with moves it has to save, GT3 with an incredible amount of curves and up to many laps. SSX's replay saves are over 20 times larger than those of GT3. Also, in SSX, all the saved replays have the same size on the memory card which also makes me believe that it doesn't save the data very efficiant. I am sure you could save the same amount of information using less memory.

MPEG2 is radical different to MPEG Layer 3 (MP3). But it goes in that direction; compare a WAV file to a MP3 file - you probably won't hear a difference, yet the MP3 file is much smaller in size. How? By getting rid of information you don't need (like sounds above 20 khz that the human ear doesn't hear, and other compression methods). The information that gets to you is the same, but still uses less space. Or lets compare picture files saved as BMP to JPEG. Those are all different methods to compress data without loosing (or very little) information - you can do the same with any kind of data, it's just a question of time and effort you put into your program. And I'm sorry, but the SSX saves don't seem very efficiant.
May 7, 2002, 9:01 AM CST by 1withxbox
GC load's faster FOR NOW on many game's than xbox for 2 reason's. Not as much detail, and small level's. Try to do Halo on GC, that would be a laugh. How much smaller would the level's have to be? How much detail cut? Think of this, if you ported a GC game to the xbox, how would the load time's be then? OH here is a good example, while you get up out of your chair on GC Resident Evil to change a disk, on XBOX you can remain seated because you have an extra 7 GB of disk space ;) About Halo, I never timed it but it's not that bad, and it's only at the beginning of a level if you start over or go back level's ect. Maybe your xbox is defective Chip, because it no way come's out to one minute!
May 7, 2002, 9:50 AM CST by chairmansteve
Phil, you can't base this on guesses and opinions. To determine file efficiency, you must know what information exactly is being saved.

I remember playing tomb raider on PC and then later on PSX. A PSX save is roughly 15 KB, a PC save however was much larger in size.

Unless you know exactly what information each version is saving, the file size alone has no meaning for determining efficiency. Do you know exactly what each version is saving?

And trust me, there's always a way to save the same amount of information using less memory.

I never said or meant otherwise. I've been referring to more information, not more memory. Using fairly equally efficient compression methods, it'll usually take more memory to store more information.

compare a WAV file to a MP3 file - you probably won't hear a difference, yet the MP3 file is much smaller in size.

I can easily hear a difference, but I don't mind the sound quality of MP3 (as long as it's at least 160kbps -- but still can hear a difference).

Or lets compare picture files saved as BMP to JPEG. Those are all different methods to compress data without loosing (or very little) information

Windows BMP is an uncompressed format (more specifically, BMP RGB is uncompressed, but BMP RLE is lossless compressed). BMP-RGB stores in the original image's n-bits per pixel image format. Compared to reality, 24-bit can be considered compressed, but BMP is not compressing data any further than the precision (color depth) of the data. JPEG is a lossy compression format. It loses some of the original data when compressed (and higher levels of JPEG compression lose more information).
May 7, 2002, 10:28 AM CST by chairmansteve
Think of this, if you ported a GC game to the xbox, how would the load time's be then?

Yep, that's the closest to getting a loading time benchmark, but the Xbox version would have to keep the same amount of data. That means all files are the same (except for the binary executable code) -- so that's the same images, sounds, level files, script files, etc.

Does any game fit that category? Do Xbox versions of the same games use higher-resolution and more data?
May 7, 2002, 11:21 AM CST by cd36
try loading Agent Under Fire on GCN, X-Box, and PS2 and tell me how long it takes.....AFAIK they are all the same.
May 7, 2002, 11:57 AM CST by chairmansteve
If anyone cares for an example situation of a same game on two platforms, using very different amounts of memory for game saves, here ya go:

Let's say Game A (a hypothetical game) exists on PC with very large HDD and on a console with limited memory card save space.

The console version could do something like this to save space. This is an extreme situation (i.e. only save the minimum).

- only allow saves between levels
- save player health, ammo, items, and a few other things
- character state (x/y/z position, direction, animation) is not saved, since those have defaults when starting a level
- other characters are not saved, since they always start with the same state on a level (based on level files)
- bullet holes, burn marks, or other damage are not stored, since it always starts off clean
- objects, items, and other interactive entities are not saved in a level, since those are taken from the level file the same way each time starting that level

For the PC version. This is the extreme opposite (i.e. use up lots of storage).

- save anywhere, anytime, no questions asked
- store player state (location, direction, etc.)
- store state (direction, location, objective, health, thought process for AI, history of movements for backtracking AI, etc., etc.) for all other characters throughout the entire game (not just for that one level)
- store bullet marks, damage, etc. throughout entire game and current level
- store states of items, objects, doors, and other interactive entities throughout the entire game and current level
- save dynamic textures rendered for damage (level and character damage), camera shots (on a virtual camera used by the player for surveillance), graffiti you drew on the enemy base, etc.
- recorded player voices using compressed audio (to playback on in-game answering machine, or used for fooling others of your location, or other purposes)
- thumbnail screenshot of camera view to place next to save listing (or even animated screenshot)
- save in game log files (communications, email, notes, etc.) for player and all other characters/enemies (generated via AI and/or other human players) for entire game time
- for fully dynamic world geometry (you can break walls, tables, bottles, etc. realistically and it's all stored the way you leave it)

This could be something like 60 bytes Vs 600 megabytes (both compressed). Which one is more efficient?

Perhaps the 60 bytes version compressed to 80% of the original file size (75 bytes), while the 600MB file is 40% of the uncompressed (1.5GB).

Hmmm, ya know what? That could be a cool PC game there, but today's hardware isn't ready for all that. But soon...
May 7, 2002, 4:35 PM CST by pvcHH
I think we can argue the potential power and efficiency of all three machines till we're dead, or till the next best thing comes out. All that matters are the results. As far as graphics go, the best PS2 games look awful compared to the best XBox games You don't need to crunch any numbers to know that, just look at your TV. Like someone said before, the first games to come out for XBox rocked the socks off most PS2 "second gen" and "third gen" games; proof that it's easy for developers to get a handle on XBox's hardware, regardless of which one is actually more powerful. To me that's all that matters.
May 7, 2002, 4:46 PM CST by pvcHH
Phil; it may be great to get a saved file down to 20K vs. 800K, but I'm sure from a programmer's perspective you can appreciate not having to worry about it. Wouldn't you rather have complete creative freedom and save as many variables etc. as you want, instead of having to figure out clever ways to compress everything (which though challenging and fun, can hinder the creative process)?
May 7, 2002, 4:57 PM CST by OG10
Surely the xbox's high head room means that it has not achived it potential. It would be so much easier if MS did bench marks on the XGPU then it would make those who are unsure sure. The EE dosent have FSAA i think this will play a big problem for it in the future. It has problems filling particles whilst movement is present. i.e. look at MGS2 with the freeze canister then move the freeze canister whilst on across the screen and then you will see the frame rate drop very heavily.

Now look at DOA3 and the lab sub level, look at how particles are handled. The fog is reactive to the person withing the environment, something the PS2 tried to do with silent hill 2 but failed miserably. As the xbox sports 233million particles per/second it has no problem handling such things. If i am wrong with anything here please comment.
May 7, 2002, 5:07 PM CST by Pichu
MPEG2 is radical different to MPEG Layer 3 (MP3). But it goes in that direction; compare a WAV file to a MP3 file - you probably won't hear a difference, yet the MP3 file is much smaller in size. How? By getting rid of information you don't need (like sounds above 20 khz that the human ear doesn't hear, and other compression methods). The information that gets to you is the same, but still uses less space. Or lets compare picture files saved as BMP to JPEG. Those are all different methods to compress data without loosing (or very little) information - you can do the same with any kind of data, it's just a question of time and effort you put into your program.

I'm sure you are awared how Discrete Cosine Transform work. DCT is actually very similar to DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform) by removing the imaginary part as with the exp(jwt) (w = omega or the frequency component). In other words, DCT is sort of working in time (as with sounds and videos) space (videos and images) frequency (DCT) models.

Anyhow, Waves can play any frequencies up to 44kHz, and so is MP3. No frequencies have been removed. All of these constituents have been transformed (encode) into another domain and transformed (decode) back. The difference is how well it's transformed, thus determining the quality. For lower quality MP3 (64kbit/s), it does a low pass filter to filter out higher frequencies like 16kHz and above. However, for high quality MP3 (160kbit/s), the frequency is not filtered. I think you are confused by downsampling and the how DCT works.

Actually, these advanced codecs all use similar algorithms for compression. Take MP3, WMA, RA as well as RM, WMV, Mpeg-4, Mpeg-2, MJPEG, MOV and also JPG... they all use DCT but some of them use more optimized and improved DCT to "beat" others. All information is lost for transformations because the data is never retained the same as before. Upon transforming back, the desired data can be reconstructed from the transformed data depending on your settings.

Now, back to your first sentence. MP3 applies DCT to transform audio PCM data whilst MPEG-II applies DCT to transform motion pictures based on pixels. Are these radical different from one another? The answer is no because they are based on the very same algorithm.
May 7, 2002, 5:22 PM CST by Chipaku
Try to do Halo on GC, that would be a laugh. How much smaller would the level's have to be? How much detail cut?

how do you know that they would even have to cut any detail? it would most likely be close to the same, except that the mid-level loading pauses would be longer since it is not cached on the HD. so maybe a 10 or 15 second pause instead of a 1 or 2 second pause. as far as the graphics go, Halo is not that revolutionary, it has nice outdoor scenes but Quake 3 still has better indoor scenes.

Think of this, if you ported a GC game to the xbox, how would the load time's be then?

I dunno, maybe I'll rent Spy Hunter for GC and Xbox and see which has faster loading times. Spy Hunter is a good example since it was designed for PS2 and ported to GC and Xbox.

OH here is a good example, while you get up out of your chair on GC Resident Evil to change a disk, on XBOX you can remain seated because you have an extra 7 GB of disk space

actually not. I already mentioned that I cant play Xbox for more than 30 minutes because the controller causes cramps in my hands, so in actuallity I can sit with GameCube much longer :p

Maybe your xbox is defective Chip,

I wouldnt be surprised, I have heard many reports of defective Xbox's, they must use a pretty lame manufacturer.

because it no way come's out to one minute!

well, since it is longer than one minute, you are absolutely correct on that :p
May 7, 2002, 5:37 PM CST by Kolgar
>>>As the xbox sports 233million particles per/second it has no problem handling such things. If i am wrong with anything here please comment.<<<

Actually, particles is perhaps the ONE area where PS2 actually outperforms Xbox. ;P

Kolgar
May 7, 2002, 10:52 PM CST by chairmansteve
Let's see if this image works. It's a diagram of Emotion Engine, so you can look at how the individual sections connect.

http://img2.ranchoweb.com/images/gflop/ps2arc.gif
June 4, 2002, 2:34 AM CST by David_South
Alright I've returned.
Sitting back and hoping things would find their way home doesn't work. :P
(I wanted to erase some of the banter but am not qualified to judge.)

How many read of you can read? (Not a real question. lol)

I'm reading:
Title: Sony
Author: John Nathan
ISBN: 0-618-12694-5
MSRP: $15
Located in the *Business* section of most bookstores.

Another book you may want to review:
Title: Opening the Xbox
Author: Dean Takahashi
MSRP: $25
Same, located in *Business*.
Here is a link to a review of this book.
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020528S0037
~BTW, this review shares a funny Bill Gates moment.


What I want to do next with this thread is Compare cross-platform games.
But if you have any other ideas to cover go right ahead.
(This Weekend I intend to comb through this thread and try to collect the hardware info under posts 19 & 20.)

Feel free to do anything that at least keeps the thought of this thread in your banter.

Thanks,
David South ;~)
June 7, 2002, 5:26 AM CST by gamerus3
First of all for you wanna be MIT Engineers.Lets get down to comparisons.Stop trying to deffend your lack of education and knowledge on subjects like system hardware etc.Then make biased judgments based on THE GAME system you own .In a simple word stop faking your knowledge of technology you dont know about or briefly read about..HOpe you have a computer science/engineering degree friend??
Im gonna bring a few words THAT mean the whole of technology here..Oh yeah My credentials ,0ver 10 years in Computers a degree in computers,,and very avid gamer.
I love hardware!!!
here are words we need to Memorize FOLKS.
REALWORLD! BENCHMARK! SOFTWARE!MEMORY! MEMORY! AND MEMORY!
PROGRAMMERS, BUDGET, AND LAST THE ACTUAL GAMES!
WITH ALL THE SUPER FAST HARDWARE IN THE WORLD AND ALL YOU GET WITH A CHEAP BUDGET IS CRAP/...,ALL THE SPECS IN THE WORLD AND ALL YOU GET IS cold MACHINE..,LITTLE TINY BITS OF MEMORY AND ALL YOU GET IS SAME OLD PICTURES WITH FLAT BACKGROUNDS! HIRE A BUNCH OF AVERAGE PROGRAMMERS AND THE TECHNOLIGY IS STILL AVERAGE. BUT THE ACTUAL GAMES TEST THE HARDWARE AND THE BEST ALWAYS SHINE THROUGH..
IF YOU TALK OF GRAPHICS AND HARDWARE ITS EASILY NOTICABLE IF YOU TALK OF SHEER GAMEPLAY IS THAT DOES TO..
BUT IN TERMS OF GRAPHICS,,,, THE GAMES SET THE BENCHMARK!
LOOK AT VF 4 ON PS2 (VIRTUA FIGHTER 4)
LOOK AT SHENMUE 2 ON DREAMCAST
LOOK AT DOA3 ON XBOX(DEAD OR ALIVE)
LOOK AT RESIDENT EVIL ON GAMECUBE
VF4 LOOKS LIKE SHENMUE 2 AND DOES DOA3
AND DOES RESIDENT EVIL (LOTS OF TEXTURED POLYS)
BUT THE REAL TEST IS THE PERFORMANCE AND THE ENVORNMENT
PLUS DESIGN THAT PUSHES THE HARDWARE
DOA IS THE WINNER OBVIOUSLY ZERO LOADING HIGH POLY'S,TEXTURES ARE SUPIORIOR !HOWEVER SHENMUE 2 LOOKS JUST LIKE DOA3 IN THE DESIGN OF THE MOUNTAIN AREAS SOMETIMES BETTER.THE OVERAL SIZE OF SHEMUE2 AND THE ATTENTION TO DETAIL MAKES IT SUPIRIOR INTERMS OF GRAPHICS AND DETAIL ENVIORNMENT ..CAN YOU SAY MOST EXPENSIVE GAME EVER MADE!(EVERYTHING IS DETAILED TO A TEE!!NO DEAD PLAIN BACKDROPS HERE!!)HOWEVER
VIRTUA FIGHTER 4 MATCHES THE POLYS IN DOA 3 BUT LACKS MULT TIER ENVIORNMENTS BUT DOES KEEP A BALZING POLYGON RATE.HOWVER TEEXTURES ARE LESS DEFINED ADN JAGGED COMPARED TO DOA3.NOW RESIDENT EVIL TEXTURES ARE GORGUES CLOSE LIKE DOA3 AND POLYGON COUNT IS HIGH AND SMOOTH.
MY POINT IS TEXTURES ARE TEXTURES SYSTEMS WITH THE HIGH MEMORY AND THE COMPRESSION ABILITYS WILL LOOK GORGEOUS PERIOD!JUST LOOK AT THE N64 FOR COMPARISONS TO THE PS1 PS1 WAS BETTER BUT SATURN LOOKED THE SAME.OR DOA3 VERSUS TEKKEN TAG BOTH FIRST GEN GAMES FOR SYSTEMS
THEN LOOK AT THE BUDGET AND LOOK AT SHENMUE2 THE SIZE IS OVERKILL BUT ITS A REAL WORLD PRACTCALLY THAT IS SO DETAILED SO ALIVE!THEN COMPARE TO DOA 3 OR VF4 YOUR JUST A COUPLE OF FIGHTERS THATS IT! .SHENMUE HAS 10O'S OF NPC'S ALL ALIVE DIFFERENT AND BACKGOUNDS THAT CHANGE AND HAVE ACTIVITIES GOING ON BOATS PLAINS ANIMALS BIRDS WATER ETC.....iN VF4 AND DOA3 YOU GET DEAD BACKGROUNDS NO INTERACTIVE LIVES IN THE BACKGROUND ACTING NATURAL OR PEOPLE OR ANIMALS LIVING IN THE BACKGROUND DOING THEIR BUISNESS OR nO PLANES OR CARS JUST DEAD BACK DROPS ,NO LIVE DETAIL!
MORE POLYS EQUAL MORE STAFF MORE WORK MORE BUDGET..JUST LIKE SPECIAL EFFECTS IN A MOVIE FOLKS.
MY POINT IS THAT HARDWARE IS COMPLICATED TO GET THE MOST OUT OF IT..YOU NEED A LOT OF MEMORY ALOT OF TALENT AND LOTS OF MONEY AND THE BOTTOM LINE IS MONEY..JUST THINK ABOUT IT. WHAT IF THE GUY THAT MADE SHENMUE2(MOST EXPENSIVE GAME EVER MADE) YU SUZUKI ,HE ALSO MADE VF4!BY THE WAY/// TOOK THAT TIME AND MONEY AND SAME STAFF (MILLIONS AND OVER 3 YEARS TO MAKE VIRTUA FIGHTER 5 ON THE XBOX AND THE PS2 AND THE GAMECUBE AND THE DREAMCAST.WHICH WOULD BE BEST GRAPHICALLY AND GAMEPLAY WISE, OBVIOUSLY THE ONE WITH THE MOST ROOM TO EXPAND AND DETAIL A REAL WORLD/FIGHTER THAT WAS VIRTUALY ALIVE!.BUT CREATING A REAL FIGHTING WORLD/GAME GENRE, DONT COME CHEAP !
PS XBOX GAMECUBE DREAMCAST,ITS ALL A BOUT MEMORY AND SPEED
SADLY MEMORY IS STILL ALITTLE EXPENSIVE AND THIS LEAVES ALL SYSTEM WITH LIMITATIONS..
IF YOU HAD THE MONEY AND THE RESOURCES THEN THE ONLY THING IN THE WAY IS THE PAGES YOU CAN DRAW THIS WORLD ON..(MEMORY)
MAYBE SEGA MIGHT COME BACK WITH A 256 BIT SYSTEM WITH 500MB DDR VIDEO RAM AND 500MB OF MAIN RAM ,1GHZ GPU AND 2 GHZ CPU..MY POINT IS IN THE RAM! GET IT FOLKS
IMAGINE A FIGHTING GAME WITH GRAPHICS LIKE DOA3 BUT WITH AN AUDIENCE OF LETS SAY 30 PEOPLE IN THE BACKGROUND COMPOSSED OF THE SAME DATAIL AS THE MAIN CHARACTERS..AND CARS AND AIRPALNES LIVING IN REAL LIFE WHILE YOUR FIGHTING.ITS ALL IN MEMORY BABY.AND TIME AND MONEY..THE XBOX HAS 64MB BUT THATS IT! CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR ,I GIVE RESPECTFULL RECOGNITION TO SEGA FOR TRYING THE IMPOSSIBLE WITH SHENMUE EVENTHOUGH IT CAUSE THEM TO LOSS THE HARDWARE BUISNESS..
GAMES ARE FIRST!
NOW IF THEY COULD OF ONLY PUT MORE MEMORY IN THESE DAMN SYSTEMS
XBOX, realistically could use 64 Mb OVERALL(INCLUDING VIDEO RAM) more without price increase!MAKES IT SUPIRIOR UNTOUCHABLE!
GAMECUBE,NEEDS about the same RAM INCREASE as xbox,MAKE IT SERIOUSY CLOSE TO XBOX GRAPHICS
PS2, SONY MADE huge mistake!NEED more about 32MB PLUS HARDWARE COMPRESSION ,WOULD MAKE PS2 GAMES LOOK ALMOST IN THE SAME GENERATION AS XBOX AND GAMECUBE,MINUS POLYGON POWER.BUT MORE CLOSE TO DREAMCAST.
DREAMCAST =NEEDS, MORE MEM ,ABOUT SAME AS PS2 MAKING IT IN THE SAME GRAPHICAL LEGUE AS PS2..MINUS POLYGON POWER
CONCLUSION ,WEAKNESS IS MEMOMORY FROM BOTTOM TO TOP OF LIST
THIS INCLUDES OVERALL WITH VIDEO RAM ..
note THESES ARE REALISTIC CHANGES THAT SHOULD'VE BEEN MADE WITHOUT A PRICE INCREASE..ON ALL SYSTEMS??
IT COULD HAVE BEEN DONE THE RESULTS WOULD HAVE BEEN STELLER HOWEVER TO SHAVE A FEW DOLLARS OFF OF HARDWARE PRICES THE COMPANYS MAKE BIG BLUNDERS AND MEMORY BEEING COSTLY IS ONE OF THEM? SADLY .SONY HAS MADE THIS TECHNICAL MISTAKE IN THE PAST AND DID IT AGAIN. PS21 AND PS2
BUT SONY HAS MARKETED THE SYSTEM WELL AND HAS OUT SOLD THE COMPETITION,DREAMCAST WAS AMAZING STILL IT NEEDED MORE MEMORY TO COMPETE WITH THE RAW PS2'S POWER.NOW WE HAVE NEW SYSTEMS WHOS GONNA INVEST THE TIME NOW TO MAKE THE NEW MOST EXPENSIVE GAME EVER ??? WILL SEGA'S RECORD BE BROKEN!
iTS ALL ABOUT THE GAMES AND DEVELOPERS..GET IT!!
June 7, 2002, 5:49 AM CST by kenneth9265 to gamerus3
You are right, alot of us don't have degrees, but we all enjoy
talking and making our opinions about our favorate systems that
we do our gaming on.
June 7, 2002, 5:50 AM CST by chairmansteve to kenneth9265
I got degree, bubba!
June 7, 2002, 5:55 AM CST by kenneth9265 to chairmansteve
We know you do STEVE.
June 7, 2002, 12:39 PM CST by Knowname to chairmansteve
yeah you and Pichu (recent grad I think) may be the only ones ;-p think OG10 and Kolgar scored a degree too but not in Tech (correct?) anyway I keep a mental note of this stuff ;-p.

GamesRUs (any relation to Geffry?? don't make me kill you!!) thankyou very much for your 'thesis' on how to make it as an aspiring MIT-ist... but for an MIT grad you really gotta work on your grammar dude ;-p (don't worry hust playin ;-p).

Hien you on a Dreamcast or somethin?? Or you just readin out loud... Thas alright he pretty much ceased to make any sense (to a non-fanbouy, educated mind) after his initial statement which was pure genious IMO ;-p.
June 8, 2002, 4:32 PM CST by David_South to gamerus3
Please rewrite your post.
When you organize it I'll give you a full and patient reply.

BTW~I am only a college student at UF.

I have a lot to learn.
(Maybe less than you after that post. ~ LAU)

About your personal claims:
You make a lot of statements like "0ver 10 years in Computers a degree in computers."
_What kind of Degree? There are like ** different graduate degrees and an endless list of fields and certificates?

"Gaming experience."
_What systems? Is it all PC?
_How many games for each or what have you liked for each one?

"REALWORLD! BENCHMARK!"
_Do you have some game benchmarks for these consoles?
Bring it on. I'm sure that most of us would love to read it.
_Do you have a list for cross-platform polys of the same game and how the game functions different for each system?

"SOFTWARE!MEMORY!"
_Do you know how much memory the sofware is using or needs?

That was an early question of mine.
_Is it really the size or is it the speed at which information must be moved for the PS2 that makes it so hard to work on?
_I agree more Memory would have helped many programmers.
_But at the speeds of the VRAM there must be a size limit for it's performance.
_This is moot for now because it won't change, but I'm curious to better understand it.

How much memory and what architectural changes would you make for each system?
_What would be the results and use of the changes?
_Would it have been something you'd have done during the creation of the system or as an after thought?

I don't have any of these answers.
But it's clear that you must be well aware of it all,
to have said the things you say.
June 13, 2002, 12:46 PM CST by gtang
Hi I am a tech guy too. I understand all the numbers that you wrote about the xbox and ps2. BUT.....
Can you answer my questions?

1, The Spiderman game was released on the xbox and ps2. The xbox version has far more graphic detail than the pathetic ps2 visual display. I would like you to put the two systems side by side, compare it and tell me a honest answer: Which one is better? If the ps2 hardware is that powerful, why can’t it compete with the XBox’s intense graphics? Did you miss something?

2. Wreckless is soon to be released for the ps2. Same thing..... The graphics can’t even complete with the xbox version. I wouldn’t even want to waste my time playing the ps2 version after I saw the preview. If the PS2 is such a powerful machine, why doesn’t it have the same quality of games as the XBox. Did you miss something, again? Do the programmers not know how to develop ps2 games properly??? Or you didn’t want to open your eyes?

3. Doom III, the most powerful graphic intense game on the market, is to be only released on the xbox because the xbox is the only one powerful enough to handle the graphics. Why, if ps2 has more power than xbox??? Did you miss something???

In your article. All I can see is a number game. Sure, Bill Gates may be playing the number game, and you are playing the same. Let’s stop throwing out numbers and open your eyes. Maybe eventually you’ll see reality. Stop playing the numbers, let’s play video game!!
June 13, 2002, 12:50 PM CST by pvcHH to gtang
Dude.
The point is the PS2 has the potential, and that it's VERY difficult to program for. Nobody missed anything except you, it seems.
June 13, 2002, 12:51 PM CST by Chipaku to gtang
3. Doom III, the most powerful graphic intense game on the market, is to be only released on the xbox because the xbox is the only one powerful enough to handle the graphics. Why, if ps2 has more power than xbox??? Did you miss something???
1) actually, there has been no plans to port this game to ANY console whatsoever. what you heard is M$ fanboy hype.

2) DOOM 3 is not the mnost graphically intense game on the market, since it is not even on the market. its got about another year to go before its done.
June 13, 2002, 2:40 PM CST by gtang to pvcHH
So I guess no one can uncrack the "potential" of the ps2 as we all can see the same type of games didn't look the same form xbox to ps2. What kind of potential they have if no one can uncrack it? And since they are already been out in the market more than a year why the programers can't uncrack the so call "potential" like you say? exblain it to me.
June 13, 2002, 2:43 PM CST by pvcHH to gtang
Have you played Jak And Daxter? Impressive streaming and graphics. People are figuring out the PS2, and it's impressive.

Think about it like this; when you see a port of some game on the xbox (like blood omen 2 or something) it looks like crap, because it wasn't programmed for the xbox; it was programmed for all 3. Thus, it's pretty weak. All games are like that. Something that was started from the ground up for the xbox will rock, as will something that's started from the ground up for the PS2 (J and D) or for the GCN (Resident Evil) etc. Does that make sense?
June 13, 2002, 2:49 PM CST by chairmansteve
Potential...a lovely word, it is. All systems have various degrees of potential, yes? Which one has the most potential? That's the question with significance.

The dude in Sewer Shark had potential too. :)
June 13, 2002, 2:52 PM CST by gtang to pvcHH
you are right about that. But how do u exbline Spiderman. They all release at the same time. And they all build from ground up. They didn't build you either one of them first. But xbox one has more details.
June 13, 2002, 2:58 PM CST by pvcHH to gtang
I don't know what happened with Spiderman ...

But how do you know they were all built ground up specifically for each console? They don't share ANY code? I find that hard to believe.
June 13, 2002, 6:30 PM CST by David_South to gtang
Hi Gtang, It's great that you like Technology. I'm impressed that you understood all the numbers (because I didn't). Uh Oh...
Is that a question => ?

1. Spiderman was released on all three platforms. Xbox does have a smoother looking Spiderman (watch your pathetic words).
Perhaps you didn't know this, but the side by side compare show was stage two: stage two was attempted twice, and twice was stage two attempted; still...two attempts, still at stage two, faaailled twice, and twiiice did not work! (MoJo-Jo-Jo. ~ :P )
The PS2 hardware does rock, but aliasing and other smoothing features on the rest go a long way in the appearance of the games.
Nothing has been missed, I am infallible and perfect, and you should apologize for suggesting less.
(The truth is that I've been too tight and otherwise busy to spend the time & money to do my cross-platform homework.)

2. IMO:
Wreckless is a horrible game who's coloring/lighting could only improve on the PS2.
The graphics would be smoother on the Xbox...& I wouldn't buy hand-me-downs from the Xbox.
Why should you buy a lower quality copy, of an unimpressive game when you have the original version?
"Why doesn't it have games of the same quality as the Xbox?"
Because PSX games value gameplay over graphics, vis vis, the Xbox can't compete.
Agaiiinnnn?
Do you really think it's a huge surprise;
the PS2 is the super-freak console.
Open my eyes...I'm not into your strange kinky games. ~ lol

3. DOOM. You Gtang are DOOMed. (These guys love their PCs.)
The PS2 is not "more powerful" than the Xbox in it's sheer system numbers. (Each has their own advantages.)
And there is nothing to be missed in that statement.
(You may have made some errors in what you thought I wrote.)

Number game? What is this a street con? (most Advertising is.)
It wasn't my intention to only throw numbers.
I wanted to define what they meant and what they did. Xbox and the PS2 use different means for doing what they do. So saying that that this, does this many calculation a second, doesn't even up the two different measures. As the instruction length for different ways of programming things takes a different amount of time, or measure of operation to figure. What I wanted to know has become clearer as my time has passed here. There are no hardware measures that answer to say "This the the reason for everything." Each thing has it's own affect and it's up to the designers and programers to figure out the most efficient way of utilizing and writing the code.

In the end we are all gamers looking for a great game to play.
It's sad that some of use will have to buy or spend extra money to fullfil this dream of gaming glory. But each system has a lot to offer, and none are clearly superior for gaming fun.
Only the games can control the level of fun.


Good Gaming from,
~ David_South.
June 14, 2002, 3:01 AM CST by David_South to Pichu
Darn you Pichu,
I swear that all of next week will be spent learning this stuff. ;)
Here I thought I knew more than enough to get by then he says "DCT".
And I'm like "Huh?"

In case you wonder MPEG decoders are part of both Machines.
PS2 has a hardware decoder and the Xbox has __?__.
I think learning about this will help with understanding ideas or tricks for programming games on the PS2.
June 14, 2002, 3:10 AM CST by chairmansteve to David_South
Wreckless is a horrible game who's coloring/lighting could only improve on the PS2.
Do you still think it's a fact that the PS2 has better coloring/lighting? Most honest gamers think Xbox has better coloring/lighting.
June 14, 2002, 4:09 AM CST by chairmansteve to David_South
In case you wonder MPEG decoders are part of both Machines. PS2 has a hardware decoder and the Xbox has __?__. I think learning about this will help with understanding ideas or tricks for programming games on the PS2.
Xbox might have partial MPEG-II decoding (motion compensation) within the NVIDIA GPU. It can also easily do software decoding with the Intel CPU -- it's more than enough. MPEG-II decoding is useful for DVD movies and FMV cut-scenes. For real-time parts, DXTC (DirectX Texture Compression) would be more useful.
June 14, 2002, 4:21 AM CST by David_South to chairmansteve
I'm not arguing lighting effects.
I don't know enough to say that.

But I honestly see a big differance in things like this.
The PS2 seems to have a white background going on while the Pixels spin their color.
Some people call these games jaggies I'm not sure.
For now I'm speaking of MGS2.
There are fine little outlines to the pixel shapes.
I swear I can see them all shift with white in them.
Generally my PS2 impression is excellent color with some image noise.

Xbox: The texture smoothing and edges are sharp.
However the Color levels are always too dark or too light when there is directional lighting.
It's like with early cameras.
They all had just one CCD and couldn't adapt well to bright and dark at the same time.
It it (dialated) to the bright then the dark (shadows) went black.
If its to the dark then the bright glowed white.

I can't remember what to say in place of dialated but that is it.
Also one reason I've never been a PC fan is the smear color on objects.
I just don't see a material pattern.
The reason I think is the result of FSAA or texture smoothing.
IMO: They should focus more on the objects outline and not the surface.
IMO: A speckled Monet treats the eyes easier.

I've also seen many PC games move to ambiant light to avoid this.
All of these issues are things fo the Xbox.

I also hear a clear differance when I comment on music.
I don't have "perfect pitch" but there is an emptiness to MP3.
June 14, 2002, 4:36 AM CST by chairmansteve to David_South
You're the only gamer so far I see that says that -- and appears to be serious. :)

I've seen both too, and Xbox coloring/lighting is better, edges are smoother, surfaces are smoother, more detailed, lighting is more realistic, everything is smoother and more detailed on Xbox -- and PC is even more detailed and smoother.

Perhaps you'll care for Kolgar's opinion since you're his fan? :) I don't know what his view is on this issue, but you could ask him.

CGI movies (Shrek and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within) use a ton (much more than current games) of FSAA and texture filtering (smoothing if you like). Do those look bad to you?

I think you just like PS2 coloring/lighting because you are a Sony fan. :) There may be another reason (perhaps even scientific), but I go for the obvious first. :)
June 14, 2002, 5:00 AM CST by David_South to chairmansteve
Please read this again.
I know that FSAA = Full Screen Anti-Aliasing.
I just feel that the FSAA is smearing the surface of objects.
Also one reason I've never been a PC fan is the smear color on objects.
I just don't see a material pattern.
The reason I think is the result of FSAA or texture smoothing.
IMO: They should focus more on the objects outline and not the surface.
When I look at things done with a typical PC game it just doesn't sit right.
I'll definitely agree that there are some truely awesomely lit PC games that blow away anything else.
It just games like Doom (A favorite of some here..you :P) never hit the balance my eyes see or need.
In a dark room I still see what's in the shadows, just less so.
With most of the PC games the shadows always go black or complete hell with the edges.
June 14, 2002, 5:12 AM CST by chairmansteve to David_South
I read it the first time. :)

FSAA doesn't smear objects (maybe Quincunx does). Are CGI movies smeared? BTW, Full Scene Anti-Aliasing is the more standard term.

If anything goes to complete hell with the edges, it's PS2.
June 14, 2002, 5:32 AM CST by David_South to chairmansteve
What? What?...Goes to hell with the edges is the PS2? :P
ouwh, Gut-shoot.

As I said earlier in this thread to Gtang it's all about the inept programmers not the PS2. :D
June 14, 2002, 8:48 AM CST by pvcHH to David_South
It's also all about your own personal perception of digital representation of reality and what you like / don't like, what seems most legit, etc. It's like the same thing as liking a Renoir more then a Monet or not -- you like their strokes their colors their dealing with light -- same thing with SPECIFIC games on different systems -- they all use different engines anyway, so you can't compare across systems unless you're talking about the same engine.
June 14, 2002, 1:42 PM CST by David_South to pvcHH
Aren't chickens color-blind? Hhehee :P

I know what you're getting at, but I'm sure the hardware has at least something to do with what we see.
BTW ~ There are many games that will reuse other game engines.
June 14, 2002, 1:51 PM CST by pvcHH to David_South
I agree with you, and yeah -- engines are reused all over the place. But mainly I just think the way we respond to what we see is based largely on opinion.

and you'd be color blind too if you had to stare at a big orange beak all day.
June 14, 2002, 1:57 PM CST by Kolgar to David_South
I'm just kind of jumping in here with a general comment - Xbox seems to deliver an all-around better image quality than PS2 - especially with regard to texturing and anti-aliasing. I'm happy with the lighting effects of both consoles, but there IS a stage in DOA3 that does things with lighting that I just don't know if the PS2 could do.

Wreckless too, is just filled with awesome lighting effects. I haven't seen anything quite as dramatic on any other console.

Does that help?

Kolgar
June 14, 2002, 2:01 PM CST by chairmansteve to David_South
Since you're a Metal Gear Solid nut, perhaps you can have a semi-unbiased comparison of MGS2: Substance when that comes out this fall. :) Same game, same engine, different platform -- but it may be based on the engine designed for PS2 (thus, we should have another game to compare something that comes from a PC/Xbox engine -- maybe something with Unreal Warfare engine). I won't go as far to say fully-unbiased, but semi-unbiased should be good enough -- and more than enough for most gamers.

Even a fully-unbiased comparison would have opinion involved and different ways of looking at things. I normally look at graphics from a technical stance (as in how I'd code it or produce the art -- or what I'd do with such hardware abilities), instead of a fan-stance.
June 14, 2002, 2:02 PM CST by Knowname to chairmansteve
I'm told substance will be on ps2 also... and of coarse PC (you were talking bout the xbox version right??)
June 14, 2002, 2:03 PM CST by chairmansteve to Knowname
I'm talking about PS2 and Xbox version. How else will the same game be compared on both, silly?
June 14, 2002, 2:04 PM CST by pvcHH to chairmansteve
"as in how I'd code it or produce the art"

same here. Except I don't know how the hell to code any of the stuff in those games; I'm totally impressed by all that -- but in terms of the art and the 3D models; that's how I judge. If I could do better, I'm not impressed, if I couldn't, then I'm impressed. Is that conceited?
June 16, 2002, 6:59 AM CST by mockta
just wanted to comment on th GS talk here..

the CLUT for 4bpp and 8bpp can be any of 8bit/16bit or 32bit
so you get alpha on your precious palette.

And as far as compression is concerned, Ive yet to feel the need of
compressing the textures, considering the speed from EEmem to GSmem, and since all vertex data has its own path ( VU1 -> GS )
they do not interefere with eachother.

As far as the neato effects on nVidia's gpu, the vector units is not as flexible as the VU's present on ps2.

Anyone who thinks the ps2 hw was hurried ( its older than xbox, think! ) is a fool, now other bits is questionable.
June 16, 2002, 7:22 AM CST by David_South to chairmansteve
Well, there is nothing wrong with the idea itself.
But Substance won't be out until November for the Xbox.
Followed by a few months until the PS2 and PC get their copies.

That means you'll have to wait about 8 months.
June 16, 2002, 8:26 AM CST by 1withxbox
(In regard's to xbox not having any good game's, and all of the "graphic flaws") The fair thing to do is compare first gen. ps2 game's to first gen. xbox game's. J&D, GT3, GtA3, Metal Gear Solid, wouldn't apply then! Let's see, Tekken Tag, Ridge Racer, Summoner, Dark Cloud, lol. Now compare future game's like star wars KOTAR, Brute Force, Project Ego, Unseen, (with it's REALTIME, IN GAME MORPHING) Sega GT, Mech Assault, VF 4 Evolution, (versus crappy ps2 VF4) BC, the list goes on... to current ps2 game's. Game's on previous platform's also had large disparity's in loading time's, even on the same platform, with the same kind of LOD and level size's! Also, yeah Rallisport has some blur here and there, but GT3 is blurry all over the place lol! You aren't seriously comparing the two are you? Look at the tree's and grass in Rallisport, then look at gt3, what a joke. You must also admit Polyphony are some of the most talented developer's in the world, probably more talented then the team behind Rallisport. Now what is going to happen when Sega put's xbox through it's pace's with Sega GT? GT3 will look very DATED, almost as if it was from the LAST generation of game's!
June 16, 2002, 8:48 AM CST by 1withxbox
About this porting GC game's to XBOX bit, then comparing load times.... In the real world, this will not work. Because most likely, the xbox version will have a bit more detail and higher resolution. If they did port it 100% EXACT, and had the code (as far as loading) optimized as much for xbox's architexture as gc's, then it would load faster, no doubt. The max data transfer rate of xbox's dvd is 6.25 MB/sec, on GC it's about 3.25 ! Then let's not even get into more ram plus the HD ! But for people like Chip, 3.25 MB/sec in the GC somehow is faster then the 6.25 MB/sec in the xbox. I guess the law's of science to apply to Nintendo's magical little machine? http://home.light.att.net/~magilord/rolleyes.gif
June 16, 2002, 9:36 AM CST by Kolgar to 1withxbox
>>>GT3 will look very DATED, almost as if it was from the LAST generation of game's!<<<

Even if that's true, it won't mean much if the gameplay doesn't hold up. Personally, I can't stand RalliSport. For sheer fun and playability, I'd take Gran Turismo - even the first two PSX games - over RalliSport.

But obviously your point is valid about graphics capability. Xbox can do more graphically - but then, isn't that to be expected?

Kolgar
June 16, 2002, 9:41 AM CST by 1withxbox to Kolgar
Wait until a few year's go by and xbox second/third gen graphic's are done by everyone making game's for xbox. There will surely be more than one racing game that make's GT3 look like total crap! I have GT3, and it feel's sluggish to me, I hate it. I like Gotham and Rallisport better.
June 16, 2002, 10:18 AM CST by pvcHH
I've played 'em all and I hate PGR and I hate GT3 ... rallisport is totally my cup of tea. I'm such an addict. Damn, I love that game.

Monkeyball racing though; is the best. :)
June 16, 2002, 10:25 AM CST by Kolgar to 1withxbox
>>>Wait until a few year's go by and xbox second/third gen graphic's are done by everyone making game's for xbox.<<<

Dude, you are taking a LOT for granted. If Xbox sales don't pick up this year, the "everyone" you mentioned is going to seriously rethink developing for Xbox at all.

The console's future is by no means guaranteed at this point, so it's way too early for us Xbox owners to count on years of developer support just yet.

Kolgar
June 16, 2002, 3:03 PM CST by 1withxbox
Yeah, DC has better texture's than the ps2 lol! Let's see, smaller company behind it, (less money for development of DC) at least 1 year OLDER, and 100 dollar's CHEAPER !! Oh, you are going to say, ps2 play's dvd's, DC doesn't, but does ps2 have a modem?, no. So I find it UNEXUSABLE for the ps2 to have such poor texture quality/low resolution. It was HURRIED. If you are saying it wasn't hurried, then that isn't saying much for the people that created ps2 !!
June 16, 2002, 5:01 PM CST by David_South to 1withxbox
I could say the same of Tricky SSX.
First on the Xbox then on the PS2.
The fact that it was a year later meant that they could do a lot to improve on the original and they did.

Note:
A port doesn't guarantee quality or updated value.
But on these two games it did.

I'm going out right now I'll return AM tomorrow.
June 16, 2002, 5:17 PM CST by chairmansteve to David_South
I could say the same of Tricky SSX. First on the Xbox then on the PS2. The fact that it was a year later meant that they could do a lot to improve on the original and they did.
You could say, but that doesn't make it true. :)

Didn't SSX Tricky release on PS2 in November 2001 and then on Xbox in December 2001 (a month later)? It's most likely designed to run on PS2 -- and then the Xbox and GameCube versions are ports.
June 16, 2002, 5:18 PM CST by pvcHH to chairmansteve
Yeah -- that's what I thought... I remember playing SSX tricky before xbox existed ... or maybe that was its predecessor?
June 16, 2002, 5:25 PM CST by Kolgar to 1withxbox
>>>Let's see, smaller company behind it, (less money for development of DC)<<<

Actually, Sega had got two companies to work on designs for the hardware that would eventually become Dreamcast: NEC and 3dfx. The NEC design was ultimately chosen, of course, but it's apparent that Sega didn't scrimp a whole lot on development costs for the console.

>>>It was HURRIED. If you are saying it wasn't hurried, then that isn't saying much for the people that created ps2 !!<<<

The Sony engineers who created PS2's innards went about things in a different way than anyone has done before. The thought was that they'd create something revolutionary and with much greater performance than anything else at the time. The downside of creating such a radically different architecture, however, is that you are then forcing developers to change the way they think and work. The learning curve is incredibly steep and you run the risk of some people just not getting it and others saying, "Bunk! I don't want to do this."

PS2 wasn't hurried, but its design is probably too different and too open-ended for its own good. (I've read of several developers who've said that PS2 simply gives them TOO MANY different ways to do things, and it often takes them several tries to find out which one works best with the rest of their game. By the time they want to change to a different method, however, they're forced to go back and redo the whole damn thing.)

Hopefully, Sony will learn its lesson and create something a little more developer-friendly next time.

Kolgar
June 16, 2002, 5:31 PM CST by pvcHH to Kolgar
Or they, nintendo, and microsoft can join forces to fight serpentor.
June 17, 2002, 1:32 PM CST by mockta to 1withxbox
define better texture quality ?
Yes I do think SC on DC is one of the nicest looking game ive seen.
And no I dont think its hurried just because they didnt put more
mem on the GS or the ability to [de]compress on the fly.
Fortunately nowadays developers have gotten used to upload their textures more often than once. There is bandwith to do it.
June 17, 2002, 1:46 PM CST by chairmansteve to mockta
I'd assume better texture quality means higher color depth, higher resolution, and greater number of textures. These are based on the hardware ability. Then of course, there is artistic quality -- which is based on the developer ability.
June 20, 2002, 1:13 AM CST by David_South
Clueless writes,
GS = Graphics Synthesizer (Graphics Processor)
EE = Emotion Engine (CPU)
GIF = ???

Thanks,
David_South

(The Military has enough acronyms. :P)
June 20, 2002, 2:56 AM CST by chairmansteve to David_South
GIF = Graphics Interface (or sometimes Graphics I/F)

GIF is a section of Emotion Engine, along with the ALU, FPU, VU0, VU1, DMA, MC, IPU, and IOIF. That's all on the same microprocessor -- the EE.
August 12, 2002, 6:48 PM CST by Suckattack
So where does this contrast bring us? Where's our conclusion? When will D_South just admit that EE and GS just suck!? Why? 'Cus they do!
August 12, 2002, 9:14 PM CST by WREN2002 to Suckattack
Gambecube is way more powerful than ps2. :) As is the xbox.
August 26, 2002, 7:16 PM CST by BigGamer
Now that Doom 3 has been officially anounced for the xbox only, (besides pc) what do all of the doubters have to say now? John Carmac has also said that Xbox was the only console capable of doing Doom 3 without any degradation in graphic quality. Unless you know more than John Carmac, I think that ends this thread ; ) (by the way, nice job bumping this thread for a meaningless sentence, Prizmsurf)
August 26, 2002, 7:44 PM CST by Kolgar to BigGamer
Carmack didn't say "graphics quality," he said "graphics fidelity." Due to memory and display limitations, Xbox wouldn't be able to maintain the same level of quality as the PC. However, squeezed onto a TV screen, they can keep the same "fidelity."

And since Xbox is made from Intel and nVidia parts, it's only natural that the console is best equipped to handle this "made-for-PC" game.

Kolgar
August 26, 2002, 8:12 PM CST by PirateGuy to Kolgar
As in most FPS PC to Console ports, details are always sacraficed to fit into console. Try to compare Quake 2 for PC and PSX. Even some of the leves of RTCW for PS2 is cut in half!
August 26, 2002, 8:25 PM CST by Kolgar to PirateGuy
Yep, I know, and that's perfectly acceptable to me because I understand that consoles don't have as much RAM as high-end PCs. My point was that Carmack didn't say that Doom III on Xbox would have the same graphics quality as on the PC. The Xbox version will suffer some degradation, I imagine, for lack of system RAM.

Maybe I'm splitting hairs. I just wanted to set the record straight.

Still, the game will likely look awesome, and no - neither PS2 nor Gamecube is equipped to do it quite as well as Xbox.

Kolgar
August 26, 2002, 10:40 PM CST by KOF to Kolgar
PC games are bloated in the first place. It's hardly surprising that console ports always have to suffer.
August 26, 2002, 11:13 PM CST by chairmansteve to KOF
Yep, 1024x768 screen is just a bloated 640x480 screen. And 512x512 textures are just bloated 256x256 textures.
August 27, 2002, 9:40 AM CST by BigGamer to chairmansteve
Unless you have hdtv, you are stuck with 640-480 anyway. Since tvs are interlaced, you have nowhere near the jaggies that a pc would show at that resolution. When you sit back farther away from any object, (or monitor) small imperfections become less noticeable, if at all noticeable... The larger screens of most tvs also help add an impact of size and immersion that computer monitors lack. Also, you could buy an xbox, and a hdtv (36" flatscreen anyone?) for the price of a high end pc. ; )
August 27, 2002, 9:50 AM CST by Chipaku to BigGamer
Carmack didn't say "graphics quality," he said "graphics fidelity."
yep, and another thing: what detail mode is the Xbox "fidelity"?
the PC is very customizable depending on the hardware, with many geometry and texture detail levels, and screen resolutions. so really, any console can have "graphics just like the PC version.", it just depends on which version :)

look at Quake 3 on Dreamcast for example. it has all the "fidelity" of the PC version.
August 27, 2002, 2:15 PM CST by chairmansteve to BigGamer
And what does HDTV have to do with PC code being bloated? My monitor goes above 640x480. I can take it up to 1920x1440.

I can see aliasing very easily on TV. And I see it more when video is interlaced. Perhaps it takes a trained eye. ;)
August 27, 2002, 2:31 PM CST by khaid to chairmansteve
How do you train your eye? I try to but it is so hard to encourage it. I guess my eye has low morale.
August 27, 2002, 2:57 PM CST by Chipaku to khaid
your better off not being trained. its pointless to waste time looking for imperfections, just concentrate on the big picture.

sometimes its better to just take the blue pill and go back to sleep :)
August 27, 2002, 5:22 PM CST by BigGamer to chairmansteve
What does hdtv have to do with the code being bloated? I don't know, you tell me! (where did that come from?) I was talking about basic tvs, the point about the hdtv I had only brought up for sake of comparing prices. 640-480 progressive scan looks HORRIBLE. Interlaced it looks fine because it softens the edges.
August 27, 2002, 5:38 PM CST by chairmansteve to khaid
Knowledge and experience are the ingredients for a trained eye. But! Without the Gift, the eye will take more time to train and may be limited to a certain level of sophistication. These are the rules, according to our existence.
August 27, 2002, 5:56 PM CST by Pichu to khaid
People like us enjoy the movies and the games more. Others like ChairmanSteve enjoy watching pixels and interlaced signals more.
August 27, 2002, 5:59 PM CST by chairmansteve to Pichu
Not exactly. I enjoy the artistic and technical aspects more than the story/plot (unless the story is great and also something very different from what I've already seen/read before). But mainly the artistic -- which includes more than just content, but also how the content is created.

If you like movies and games, you obviously like pixels. Digital image works by displaying pixels. You wouldn't see the game without pixels.
August 27, 2002, 6:24 PM CST by Pichu to chairmansteve
true, true. However, "games" and "movies" are meant towards the game play and storyline than grahical displays, i.e. "pixels". Do you find text games, board games, and card games to be enjoyable? If you don't find them interesting, you're more into graphical aspects of the game and movie, i.e. pixels, arts, technical aspects, aesthetics, etc. The storyline/gameplay will not change with regards to the displaying resolutions (that is enough to roughly portray a certain imagery). Nonetheless, an extremely complicated art scenery will require a very high resolution of display. That is, if you're on a very low resolution, the art will look extremely bloated and blurry. Hence, pixels are well correlated with art and graphics. In conclusion, if you're more into aesthetic aspect, you will find high amount of pixels to be very appealing, which is why you could see the aliasing on an interlaced TV.
August 27, 2002, 6:31 PM CST by Chipaku to Pichu
I just look at the art, without regard to the screen reolution. I still use 640x480 on my GeForce 3, sometimes even without anti-aliasing.

the colors, imagery, and style are more important to me than the pixel size. as long as the resolution not too low so that it looks like Lego blocks.
August 27, 2002, 6:32 PM CST by chairmansteve to Pichu
I used to like text, board, and card games in the past. I don't mind them now, but it's nothing I look forward to. Well, I still like puzzle solving (strategy, mystery, creativity, etc.).

Gameplay is part of technical and artistic aspects (i.e. programming: physics/controls) -- well part of it is, as part of it is also tied into the story.

By artistic, I don't mean only what you see. Art can involve any form of creation -- more artistic would be more refined or higher skilled creation.
August 27, 2002, 6:35 PM CST by Pichu to chairmansteve
yes, but "artistic" means of relating to art (only graphics and WYS), but "Artistic" implies any form of creations. The subject of Art is extremely broad.
August 27, 2002, 6:39 PM CST by chairmansteve to Pichu
Well then, I'll use "Artistic" from now on, if it'll make you happy. :)
August 27, 2002, 6:47 PM CST by BigGamer
Ok, here is where I am coming from. If you run an emulator on a pc monitor. (my monitor is 17" crt, flatscreen) My desktop is 1024X768, although that doesn't really matter here... I run a game in 640x480 without being interlaced, and it's all "blocky" around the edges. I then select intlerlaced mode, and yes there are more blocks....so many more that it actually looks better. Another words instead of say....10 blocks on one "side" of an image, (say, left side of magicians hat) with interlaced you appear to have about 20 blocks, or "steps". It might have more aliasing, but it looks better to me. (because they appear to be smaller "steps") It must also be noted that this games original resolution was about 320x224. (dunno if that matters, but the emu makes it 640x480 progressive or interlaced, depending on what you desire) To me, the interlacing just seems to add more "noise" to the image to make the aliasing less noticable. On another side note, my tv has this "video noise" filter that really seems to get rid of alot of aliasing! (some sort of deflicker filter??)
August 27, 2002, 6:56 PM CST by chairmansteve to BigGamer
First of all, you shouldn't use an emu as an example, unless you understand what is going on inside the emu (and also inside the platform being emulated).

A better test would be to use Xbox at 480p and 480i, since that's an original resolution and the system is meant to be displayed progressively. As in, it's rendered internally at full resolution (640x480) -- well, I think it is.
August 27, 2002, 7:11 PM CST by BigGamer to chairmansteve
Ok thanks for the advice. I will try to dig up some pc game that gives a choice, if I have any. Eventually we should see consoles that are so powerfull that the aliasing debate should be moot ! I think with consoles, since I sit so much farther from the tv than I do my pc monitor, I don't notice the aliasing so much. If I were rich I'd have some 30+ inch monitor and a high end pc hooked up to it and some kick a$$ speakers! For me personally, and many other people, we are better off with xbox (and other consoles)for now. I will be buying a new pc almost in the middle of console generations, probably a bit past that mark. That way every 2-3 years I get to be blown away by something new.
August 30, 2002, 4:25 PM CST by Chipaku to BigGamer
I think the games look better on the TV also, mostly because TV's generally have a nice rich contrast and brighter colors.
September 23, 2002, 6:59 PM CST by Mister101 to PirateGuy
Well some of the levels on Max Payne for the Xbox are cut in half as well.
September 23, 2002, 7:03 PM CST by Mister101 to Suckattack
AH you are a mindless fanboy. He doesn't admit the GS2 and EE "sucks" because they don't, simple.

Sorry, had to say it.

People were claiming the PS2 to be inferior to the Dreamcast immediatley after its release, I was one of those guys saying "Wait and see, the potential is there, just not being utilized". Then Metal Gear Solid 2 released, I didn't hear to much from those dreamcast guys then.

The xbox will increase over time, yes, but it has a much smaller gap to cross between the potential:performance ratop then the PS2 does. Vector Unit 0 is still being used as a coprocessor, once the next generation of software utilizes these 2 Vector Units more EFFICIENTLY, the software will see another great jump in quality. I remember back in the days of its release, people on forums everywhere were saying the PS2 cannot surpass 5 Million polygons per second, where are they now?

The Emotion Engine is competely micro-programmable and customizable, micro code can be created that can create polygon meshes, apply transformations to polygons to mimick the Vertex Shaders, and maybe even utilize procedural textures. I read somewhere that the pairings between the Units can be changed, so Vector Unit 0 should be able to work independently from the CPU.

The next generation of games will look astonishingly similar to games on the Xbox, except that the texturing will be of less quality. The nVIDIA/Pentium combo had a definite advantage because developers were accustomed to using this platform. These lazy developers that don't want to bother maximizing performance out of the PS2 probably wouldn't have done so even if it were easier to program for (like they don't for the Gamecube and Xbox). This architecture is extremely lenient and gives developers many possibilities, they will most certainly make us wonder at the games that will be produced...especially those guys at Konami and SCEA.
September 24, 2002, 12:06 AM CST by ImMoRTaL
No matter what you say dreamcast will have a place in my heart and PS2 will not. That goes for Gamecube to no more room left for a baby toy that has a handle.
September 24, 2002, 12:14 AM CST by pat777 to Mister101
PS2 is superior to Dreamcast in graphics but PS2 is inferior to DC overall and DC is more efficient than PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox combined but performance and potential IQ is less. Why is DC so efficient? Three words: Tile Based Rendering
September 24, 2002, 6:38 AM CST by Kolgar to Mister101
I wouldn't go so far as to say that future PS2 games will look like Xbox games with inferior texturing, because I'm sure there's room for Xbox games to continue improving too. I think developers will find ways to pump more and more polys with Xbox, and games designed specifically for that console will take great advantage of the more powerful hardware.

That said, I'm enjoying it too, seeing developers get a handle on PS2 development. Some of the games coming this fall, and even more next year, are going to do things a lot of PS2 detractors said the machine couldn't do.

Like you, I've been in some bitter arguments with some of these anti-PS2 folk, and it's fun to watch as the system and its developers begin serving up crow for them to eat.

Speaking of crow, I've got some movies I'll post for Silent Hill 3. Yeah, they take a while to download, but they do things in realtime that most of us haven't seen done before on PS2.

Catch you on the flipside.

Kolgar
September 24, 2002, 9:17 AM CST by Suckattack to Mister101
Who's the more mindless fanboy? Me, or one who can't see that Xbox is superior to your GCN.

BTW, you spelled "you're" wrong. Think twice before you call someone mindless.
September 24, 2002, 3:40 PM CST by Mister101 to Kolgar
Yea, I've seen some Silent Hill 3 movies. They are amazing. Also, Zone of the Enders 2 is coming along nicely. Need for Speed 2: Hot Pursuit, that game is looking great. We're finally seeing 2nd generation games from top developing houses coming along (Jak and Daxter, Sly Coooper, Tekken 4) I wonder what Polyphony's going to cook up for us in Gran Turismo 4.....I'm gonna enjoy seeing the quality increase in the 3rd and 4th generation titles.
September 24, 2002, 9:27 PM CST by Mister101
Check out the difference between GTA Vice City and GTA III (1 generation).

"Generally, the level of detail in the game has at least doubled. We're using twice as many polys and textures on almost every object. The cars have loads more detail, and the peds are skinned, creating a far smoother look. We had a good look at how we built Liberty City and found what was fast and what was slow within the engine. Obbe [Vermeij], one of the technical directors, wrote a real-time occlusion system, which works out whether buildings are blocking the view and whether it needs to draw all the objects behind it. This has given us a lot of breathing space to squeeze in that extra detail. We've also got a lot of new effects: heat haze from the roads, flamethrowers, explosions, lots of aquatic life in the ocean, birds, flies, and a much better day-night cycle with lots of neon casting light everywhere. Generally speaking, as with the rest of the game, it's a case of bigger, better, faster, more.

Vice City's use of lighting looks to be even more impressive than GTAIII's.

AF: Vice City will be able to display more peds and more vehicles. Both pedestrians and vehicles have higher polygon counts. Pedestrians are now skinned, as mentioned. Because the level size has doubled in Vice City, the game has to display far more buildings at any one time. We've been able to include these increases because of improvements in the rendering engine and also improvements in our model culling methods. Vice City has many more visual effects, including sun reflection on water and raindrops on the screen."

http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/action/grandtheftautovicecity/news.html?sid=2881042
September 24, 2002, 9:33 PM CST by XboxCubePS2 to Mister101
GTA III looks like ass. Improving upon that is supposed to be remarkable?
September 24, 2002, 10:12 PM CST by Mister101
Well the point I was trying to get at is that the game is improving by a large margin, justifying my idea that the PS2 game quality will increase a lot as time goes by.
September 24, 2002, 10:14 PM CST by XboxCubePS2 to Mister101
GTA III should have looked like that on the first try. Improve over Vice City, and you'll have something.
September 25, 2002, 3:23 PM CST by nonamer to Mister101
Zone of the Enders 2 is coming along nicely.
Have you seen the latest ZOE2 screens? Some kick ass, other suck. Weird... or maybe not. It seems to me that nearly other every PS2 game have "enhanced" screenshots and "real" screenshots. Compare the difference:

Good one:
http://www.konamijpn.com/products/zoe2/english/pic/screenshot/2ndRunner_800_600_no18.jpg

Bad one:
http://www.konamijpn.com/products/zoe2/english/pic/screenshot/2ndRunner_800_600_no19.jpg
September 25, 2002, 4:07 PM CST by PirateGuy
I think graphic in GTA 3 should be better in the first place. Vice City is what it should have been (graphics).
September 25, 2002, 5:19 PM CST by Suckattack
I think the PS2 can do a lot more than we think...

http://www.gamened.com/Wallpapers/Malice_WP_4/Malice_Wallpaper_4.GIF

AWESOME!
September 25, 2002, 5:28 PM CST by Mister101 to nonamer
Well one is just lower res then the other. Here are some pics:

http://www.xengamers.com/docs/news/elements/files/ps-anu5.jpg

http://www.xengamers.com/docs/news/elements/files/ps-anu6.jpg
September 25, 2002, 5:57 PM CST by Kolgar to Suckattack
I think the PS2 can do a lot more than we think...
Erm... Isn't that image from the Xbox version of Malice?

Kolgar
September 27, 2002, 2:12 PM CST by nonamer to Mister101
Well one is just lower res then the other. Here are some pics:
Um, this is supposed to be displayed on a TV. They all should be at the same rez unless you're talking about doctored images.
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