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Sony PlayStation 2
One thing that all of the development houses in this forum agreed upon is that the PlayStation 2 is a much more complicated piece of hardware than Gamecube -- one where tasks must be divided between CPU and Vector Units effectively in order to get the most out of the system. "There are three main chips that you use on the PS2 for computing potential. There's the CPU chip, which is a pretty powerful CPU. There's VU0 [Vector Unit 0] and VU1 [Vector Unit 1]," says Jason Rubin of Naughty Dog. "The CPU of the PlayStation 2 is 100 to 150MHZ slower than the Gamecube. So the base CPU is a slower piece of hardware. However, if you only use that, that would be the equivalent of driving a 12-cylinder car and using only six of its cylinders. It's not the way you do it correctly."
While first-generation PS2 software has already made great use of the console's 300MHZ "Emotion Engine" CPU, developers have had a much more difficult time tapping into the chip's Vector Units, and because of that early software has suffered from sometimes lackluster graphics. And the only way to truly get the most out of Sony's console is to dig deep and tap into the Vector Unit extensions of the CPU, a feat that has yet to be fully accomplished, according to Rubin. "There are companies that are doing it, but none of the games have shown up yet," he says.
The PlayStation 2 is a raw polygon monster. Everything about its design is constructed in order to push out millions of polygons. Sony claims the console can push 75 million raw polygons per second with absolutely no effects, a meaningless number, as it doesn't apply to actual game environments. The company also alleges that the console can pump out 38 million polygons per second with strictly lighting and no textures applied -- another pointless figure unless PS2 is planning on a lineup of Cybermorph (Jaguar) sequels. Not only do Sony's polygon performance claims not factor in such important elements as textures, they don't equate gameplay physics or artificial intelligence either -- rather integral features in today's software. Nobody knows the true polygon pushing power of PlayStation 2 in play environments, but reports from developers suggest the count could be as low as three million polygons, as seen in games like Ridge Racer V and as high as 20 million. At any rate, though, the console can push polygons like none before it.
"A lot of the first software that came out, because developers were either porting from Dreamcast or doing something really quick, has only used the base CPU because that's the easy thing to do," says Rubin. "Once you get into it though, you start writing code that's sharing the two processors, either the CPU and the VU0 or the CPU and the VU1. And the VU1 is more powerful in a lot of ways than the VU0. So what we've done here is we have the CPU and the VU0 code as a combination, and then we have VU1 code that stands on its own."
Naughty Dog's still secret PlayStation 2 title, to be published by Sony and with a main character described as featuring flowing hair and armor, makes full use of the Vector Units for added results. "In our game, for example, VU1 is doing everything from our character joint stuff, to our background, to our foreground, and to our particle system right now, so it's quite powerful," Rubin explains. "Meanwhile VU0 is co-processing right now with the CPU to do our collision detection, all of our enemy AI, and a lot of other stuff." The main CPU processor speed gained by using the Vector Units effectively can be anywhere from 20% to 100% faster, according to Rubin. So, if PS2's CPU is being used 100% before tapping into the Vector Units, smart developers can drop that number down to approximately 1% under the right conditions and with a little luck -- a very impressive revelation.
Rubin makes the process sound much easier than it actually is. To adequately tap PlayStation 2's Vector Units is to devote your development resources entirely to the console -- to literally allocate all of your time, money and energy into getting the most out of the system. It's not easy, and it has led many developers formerly working on PlayStation 2 software to jump and run to the competition. Is the situation being over exaggerated? That depends on what software house you talk to.
"The developer's job is not to do the easy thing. That's not how Naughty Dog goes into a game," Rubin says in defense of the PS2. "When we worked on PlayStation we had people coming over to license the Crash engine. They said, 'You're out of your gourd! We are not going to do the kind of crap that you do to get the graphics out of this system. It's a waste of your time. Why can't you just model it simply and then do it?' And we'd say 'That's not the way to get the most out of the system.'"
Rubin believes that there are ways around PlayStation 2's difficulties for development houses that are willing to put the time and effort into the system. He suggests that only lazy software companies will give up on the console in favor of X-Box or Gamecube, and that perhaps PS2 is better off without them. "If you're a lazy developer, you probably also haven't been a very good selling developer, that's my opinion," says Rubin. "I'll give you an example: Oddworld Inhabitants. 'Oh, this is too hard, we can't handle it!' I mean, these guys have never done 3D before! Who are they to whine? I mean, they literally have not done 3D before -- they skipped the training, and are now jumping to the 3D world. They skipped the whole last generation effectively, and they're whining. You know, those guys couldn't get it working on the PS2 and they were trying to use someone else's engine because they can't even program 3D engines. They did all of these mock-ups in 3D Studio, which is a pixel engine. None of these systems are pixel engines, they're all polygons. Not only Nintendo Gamecube and PS2, but also the X-Box, so it's not going to change for them. But they did get six extra months to have it come out, so good luck to them. I have a saying around here -- I give 70/30 that the game ever comes out, and 30/70 that they make any other games from now on."
Meanwhile Lorne Lanning, president of Oddworld Inhabitants, which recently cancelled its PlayStation 2 version of Munch's Oddysee in favor of an XBox release, has an entirely different view. The designer of the Hollywood-quality title confesses that there was simply too much limitations in PlayStation 2 development for the firm's game to be fully realized, and says that for true next-generation software the XBox is the better choice. "We've obviously placed our bet, and we've placed it on the XBox as opposed to PlayStation 2," he comments. "Historically, we've had some issues with the PlayStation 2 as a console. I don't want to get in a p*****g contest with other developers that are building PS2 games, and they go, 'Oh, it's going fine for us.' At the end of the day, we'll see who builds the better games when they hit the street."
While Lanning wouldn't offer details about the limitations of PlayStation 2 development on the record, he did state that Oddworld Inhabitants didn't just give up on the system one day without first exploring all of the options. "Anybody who claims that we haven't put the time into PlayStation 2 doesn't have a clue as to what they're talking about," Lanning says. "We've put more money, and more effort, and more sweat and tears for a longer point in time than I know of any other company outside of the Asian rim. And if people doubt that, well, the proof will be in the pudding."
Nintendo Gamecube
Nintendo's next-generation console is so vastly different in design and execution from PlayStation 2 that it's an incredibly difficult task to try to compare the two consoles. Gamecube is powered by a 405MHZ PowerPC-based chipset called "Gekko" that features several extensions optimized to process OpenGL code -- an API familiar to PC developers and used commonly for games like Quake and Unreal. On top of that the Gekko features 256k of L2 [Level 2] cache, which is extremely useful when processing code quickly and efficiently.
The console also features a 202.5MHZ ArtX developed graphics chip codenamed "Flipper" with 3MBs of embedded 1T-SRAM and onboard geometry and lighting engine. It also boasts hardwired S3 texture compression for on-the-fly decompression with no hit on hardware.
Gamecube includes a total of 40MBs additional RAM, 24MBs of which is 1T-SRAM -- a blazingly fast solution for the main RAM, and 16MBs of which is PC-100 DRAM used primarily for animation and audio purposes.
Whereas PlayStation 2's CPU and two Vector Units split up the tasks of various graphic procedures, like transformation and lighting, for example, all of this is handled singularly by Gamecube's Flipper chip, which also decompresses textures at a 6:1 ratio. PS2 has no hardware texture compression and seeing as how it only features 4MBs of Embedded DRAM on its graphic synthesizer, developers would need to compress textures in software, which in turn means a significant hit on the Emotion Engine CPU.
Michael Lamb, CEO of Left Field Productions, offers: "One of the bottle necks the PS2 developers I talk to seems to be the limited size of video memory. This will be less of a problem on the Nintendo Gamecube because of the speed of the memory and S3 compression resulting in smaller textures."
Furthermore, Gamecube renders up to eight effects layers to a polygon in a single pass, whereas the PS2 features a multi-pass rendering system. So, for example, Gamecube developers can effectively start with the base geometry (1), add a bump-map to it (3), add a dirt map (4), add a gloss map (5), add a reflection map (6), add a radiosity light map (7) and an effects layer of their choice (8) -- all in a single pass. By contrast, PS2 developers would have to re-render the polygon itself for every pass meaning eight times the work to get the same effect. So essentially PS2 has to render 1,000 polygons eight times over whereas Gamecube only has to render 1,000 polygons once for the same effect.
"With PS2 you have to write the code to do a lot of that stuff. But that's the trick behind it," says Gregory P. Zeschuk, president and CEO of Bioware, which created MDK2 for Dreamcast and is now bringing the title to PS2. "On the one hand the downside is that it's not done for you. On the upside, if it's not done for you then you can do it yourself, and potentially better -- more specialized to what your specific application is. So it's really a double-edged sword. That's the mystery of the system."
Still though, to have access to multi-texturing features from the beginning versus having to fight through code for the process is a definite advantage for developers hoping to create timely software. "Yes, it's very nice that Nintendo Gamecube can do eight layers in one pass. It's all set up for you. Believe me, I would have loved it," says Jason Rubin of Naughty Dog. "But we'll have eight-pass techniques done on PlayStation 2 by the time we're done with our first game. So it's automatically done on Gamecube, but we've got the same techniques. Yes, they take more time and yes they take more CPU power, but here we go again -- [PS2] is a more powerful CPU so who cares? In the end you break even."
But is PS2's CPU with Vector Units really more powerful than Gamecube's? We went to Julian Eggebrecht, president of Factor 5, a developer currently underway with Gamecube projects for a different opinion. "Gamecube's Gekko is the most powerful general-purpose CPU ever in a console. The PowerPC alone is so much better and faster structurally that Gekko not only is much, much faster than the PS2's main CPU but every bit as fast as a 733 MHz Pentium," rebukes Eggebrecht. "Don't forget how extremely powerful the 256K second level cache in Gekko makes Gamecube. The size of a CPU's second level cache determines how fast general game-code runs. The PS2 has a tiny 16K of second level cache, and even the X-Box only has 128K."
In terms of how it performs against PS2's Vector Units, Eggebrecht offers the following: "Gekko is not just a plain PowerPC CPU, it has special commands just for games and has special modes making it possible to run hand-written assembler code very, very fast. We did experiments with particles on Gamecube after the N64, and as opposed to the two weeks it took to get the particle system running and optimized on the vector unit it only took two days on Gamecube.
"Based on our calculations, Gamecube's CPU has all the power PS2's CPU and VU0 have combined and then some. Everything you do on VU1 on the PS2, Gamecube has in hardware in 'Flipper,' the graphics chip. And believe me, when it comes to fill-rate and polygon counts, Gamecube is every bit as good as PS2. Nintendo has chosen not to throw around numbers, but we know those numbers and as opposed to what Naughty Dog might think they are not necessarily lower than PS2's numbers."
There is much more to factor in, though, than just CPU speed and graphics chip architecture. Eggebrecht points to Gamecube's RAM set up, as well as its texture and lighting capabilities, as further proof of its power. "Another important area is the RAM," he says. "RAM is where your game and data are living in and being moved through and what really determines the speed and power of a system to a large degree. Anybody who ever programmed a N64 knows that Rambus RAM is especially problematic for game purposes when CPUs have to randomly access tiny chunks of data in a very fast manner. The PS2 has that same Rambus RAM. The more you use the CPU to randomly move chunks of data, the more speed problems you get.
"Gamecube has a completely new technology, MoSys RAM. The speed of it is unbelievable, something we noticed when we started throwing more and more data and game logic at the machine. RAM-speed simply is not an issue for Gamecube. That is a first among the next-gen consoles and a major breakthrough."
While which system ultimately pushes more polygon counts is debatable, there is no arguments about Gamecube's superiority in what can be done visually with those polygons. Naughty Dog's Jason Rubin concedes: "The Gamecube is going to have a great renderer, and probably will put out almost as many polygons as the PS2, but they will be prettier polygons. Its problem is going to be, truthfully, that its CPU is weaker so it won't be able to do as many cool things with those polygons."
Meanwhile Eggebrecht comments: "The area that Gamecube is similar to PS2 but just plain kills it is in textures and hardware lights. There is simply no comparison. So you get similar polygon counts on GC as you have on PS2, but with these incredible amounts of texture effects on top. Just imagine a textured, bump-mapped, reflecting and accurately glossy and dirty car with specular highlights thrown in - that's just one pass for Gamecube but many for PS2. And of course there is the Gamecube texture decompression thrown in for free, something the PS2 doesn't have at all."
Conclusions and Philosophy
Depending on which development house you talk to, there are different winners in the race for hardware supremacy. PS2 is a difficult, but nonetheless powerful console that software houses have yet to master, and Gamecube is a programmer friendly, yet powerful platform that, because of Nintendo's secrecy, is still largely unproven.
If you get anything out of this article, we hope that it's a better sense of just how powerful Nintendo's Gamecube console is, though. We have not set out to prove PlayStation 2 is an inferior system, only that Nintendo's is just as strong in every single respect technically speaking. At the end of the day, we still believe the battlefield will be separated with those that are willing to master PS2's difficulties and create truly amazing software, and those that would prefer not to waste time and energy on struggling with the hardware when they can worry strictly about content on Nintendo's Gamecube and Microsoft's XBox. Perhaps the following quotes best sum it up: "My point is, if the PlayStation 2 is going to sell as many hardware units as the PlayStation 1 sold, then I don’t care if I have to pierce my nails with pins to get it to work, I'm going to do it because that's where the money is. And that's the attitude we go into every game with."
Jason Rubin, president, Naughty Dog "The PS2 undoubtedly can be a great machine if used right. The Vector Units especially have some potential. We have used the N64 Vector Unit probably more than anybody else out there. Battle for Naboo and Indiana Jones use the N64 Vector Unit for almost unlimited dynamic lights, we did a complete particle system on it, character animation and skinning and even a landscape background engine. So I guess we would be more than qualified to use the PS2's Vector Units. But why should we? Why spend enormous resources, time, and ultimately too much money fighting the machine?" -- Julian Eggebrecht, president, Factor 5 "I think what you'll find is that it'll take a good, long while to reach the maximum on PlayStation 2, whereas on the Gamecube, if it's more accessible, you'll have better looking games earlier. But at the same time, PlayStation 2 software will look great and continue to improve over time." -- Gregory P. Zeschuk, president and CEO, Bioware.
One thing, it seems, is for certain, and it's that the next-generation battle will not be won by superior technology, but rather superior software, and come E3 2001 I think you'll see that Gamecube is well-covered in this area.
One thing that all of the development houses in this forum agreed upon is that the PlayStation 2 is a much more complicated piece of hardware than Gamecube -- one where tasks must be divided between CPU and Vector Units effectively in order to get the most out of the system. "There are three main chips that you use on the PS2 for computing potential. There's the CPU chip, which is a pretty powerful CPU. There's VU0 [Vector Unit 0] and VU1 [Vector Unit 1]," says Jason Rubin of Naughty Dog. "The CPU of the PlayStation 2 is 100 to 150MHZ slower than the Gamecube. So the base CPU is a slower piece of hardware. However, if you only use that, that would be the equivalent of driving a 12-cylinder car and using only six of its cylinders. It's not the way you do it correctly."
While first-generation PS2 software has already made great use of the console's 300MHZ "Emotion Engine" CPU, developers have had a much more difficult time tapping into the chip's Vector Units, and because of that early software has suffered from sometimes lackluster graphics. And the only way to truly get the most out of Sony's console is to dig deep and tap into the Vector Unit extensions of the CPU, a feat that has yet to be fully accomplished, according to Rubin. "There are companies that are doing it, but none of the games have shown up yet," he says.
The PlayStation 2 is a raw polygon monster. Everything about its design is constructed in order to push out millions of polygons. Sony claims the console can push 75 million raw polygons per second with absolutely no effects, a meaningless number, as it doesn't apply to actual game environments. The company also alleges that the console can pump out 38 million polygons per second with strictly lighting and no textures applied -- another pointless figure unless PS2 is planning on a lineup of Cybermorph (Jaguar) sequels. Not only do Sony's polygon performance claims not factor in such important elements as textures, they don't equate gameplay physics or artificial intelligence either -- rather integral features in today's software. Nobody knows the true polygon pushing power of PlayStation 2 in play environments, but reports from developers suggest the count could be as low as three million polygons, as seen in games like Ridge Racer V and as high as 20 million. At any rate, though, the console can push polygons like none before it.
"A lot of the first software that came out, because developers were either porting from Dreamcast or doing something really quick, has only used the base CPU because that's the easy thing to do," says Rubin. "Once you get into it though, you start writing code that's sharing the two processors, either the CPU and the VU0 or the CPU and the VU1. And the VU1 is more powerful in a lot of ways than the VU0. So what we've done here is we have the CPU and the VU0 code as a combination, and then we have VU1 code that stands on its own."
Naughty Dog's still secret PlayStation 2 title, to be published by Sony and with a main character described as featuring flowing hair and armor, makes full use of the Vector Units for added results. "In our game, for example, VU1 is doing everything from our character joint stuff, to our background, to our foreground, and to our particle system right now, so it's quite powerful," Rubin explains. "Meanwhile VU0 is co-processing right now with the CPU to do our collision detection, all of our enemy AI, and a lot of other stuff." The main CPU processor speed gained by using the Vector Units effectively can be anywhere from 20% to 100% faster, according to Rubin. So, if PS2's CPU is being used 100% before tapping into the Vector Units, smart developers can drop that number down to approximately 1% under the right conditions and with a little luck -- a very impressive revelation.
Rubin makes the process sound much easier than it actually is. To adequately tap PlayStation 2's Vector Units is to devote your development resources entirely to the console -- to literally allocate all of your time, money and energy into getting the most out of the system. It's not easy, and it has led many developers formerly working on PlayStation 2 software to jump and run to the competition. Is the situation being over exaggerated? That depends on what software house you talk to.
"The developer's job is not to do the easy thing. That's not how Naughty Dog goes into a game," Rubin says in defense of the PS2. "When we worked on PlayStation we had people coming over to license the Crash engine. They said, 'You're out of your gourd! We are not going to do the kind of crap that you do to get the graphics out of this system. It's a waste of your time. Why can't you just model it simply and then do it?' And we'd say 'That's not the way to get the most out of the system.'"
Rubin believes that there are ways around PlayStation 2's difficulties for development houses that are willing to put the time and effort into the system. He suggests that only lazy software companies will give up on the console in favor of X-Box or Gamecube, and that perhaps PS2 is better off without them. "If you're a lazy developer, you probably also haven't been a very good selling developer, that's my opinion," says Rubin. "I'll give you an example: Oddworld Inhabitants. 'Oh, this is too hard, we can't handle it!' I mean, these guys have never done 3D before! Who are they to whine? I mean, they literally have not done 3D before -- they skipped the training, and are now jumping to the 3D world. They skipped the whole last generation effectively, and they're whining. You know, those guys couldn't get it working on the PS2 and they were trying to use someone else's engine because they can't even program 3D engines. They did all of these mock-ups in 3D Studio, which is a pixel engine. None of these systems are pixel engines, they're all polygons. Not only Nintendo Gamecube and PS2, but also the X-Box, so it's not going to change for them. But they did get six extra months to have it come out, so good luck to them. I have a saying around here -- I give 70/30 that the game ever comes out, and 30/70 that they make any other games from now on."
Meanwhile Lorne Lanning, president of Oddworld Inhabitants, which recently cancelled its PlayStation 2 version of Munch's Oddysee in favor of an XBox release, has an entirely different view. The designer of the Hollywood-quality title confesses that there was simply too much limitations in PlayStation 2 development for the firm's game to be fully realized, and says that for true next-generation software the XBox is the better choice. "We've obviously placed our bet, and we've placed it on the XBox as opposed to PlayStation 2," he comments. "Historically, we've had some issues with the PlayStation 2 as a console. I don't want to get in a p*****g contest with other developers that are building PS2 games, and they go, 'Oh, it's going fine for us.' At the end of the day, we'll see who builds the better games when they hit the street."
While Lanning wouldn't offer details about the limitations of PlayStation 2 development on the record, he did state that Oddworld Inhabitants didn't just give up on the system one day without first exploring all of the options. "Anybody who claims that we haven't put the time into PlayStation 2 doesn't have a clue as to what they're talking about," Lanning says. "We've put more money, and more effort, and more sweat and tears for a longer point in time than I know of any other company outside of the Asian rim. And if people doubt that, well, the proof will be in the pudding."
Nintendo Gamecube
Nintendo's next-generation console is so vastly different in design and execution from PlayStation 2 that it's an incredibly difficult task to try to compare the two consoles. Gamecube is powered by a 405MHZ PowerPC-based chipset called "Gekko" that features several extensions optimized to process OpenGL code -- an API familiar to PC developers and used commonly for games like Quake and Unreal. On top of that the Gekko features 256k of L2 [Level 2] cache, which is extremely useful when processing code quickly and efficiently.
The console also features a 202.5MHZ ArtX developed graphics chip codenamed "Flipper" with 3MBs of embedded 1T-SRAM and onboard geometry and lighting engine. It also boasts hardwired S3 texture compression for on-the-fly decompression with no hit on hardware.
Gamecube includes a total of 40MBs additional RAM, 24MBs of which is 1T-SRAM -- a blazingly fast solution for the main RAM, and 16MBs of which is PC-100 DRAM used primarily for animation and audio purposes.
Whereas PlayStation 2's CPU and two Vector Units split up the tasks of various graphic procedures, like transformation and lighting, for example, all of this is handled singularly by Gamecube's Flipper chip, which also decompresses textures at a 6:1 ratio. PS2 has no hardware texture compression and seeing as how it only features 4MBs of Embedded DRAM on its graphic synthesizer, developers would need to compress textures in software, which in turn means a significant hit on the Emotion Engine CPU.
Michael Lamb, CEO of Left Field Productions, offers: "One of the bottle necks the PS2 developers I talk to seems to be the limited size of video memory. This will be less of a problem on the Nintendo Gamecube because of the speed of the memory and S3 compression resulting in smaller textures."
Furthermore, Gamecube renders up to eight effects layers to a polygon in a single pass, whereas the PS2 features a multi-pass rendering system. So, for example, Gamecube developers can effectively start with the base geometry (1), add a bump-map to it (3), add a dirt map (4), add a gloss map (5), add a reflection map (6), add a radiosity light map (7) and an effects layer of their choice (8) -- all in a single pass. By contrast, PS2 developers would have to re-render the polygon itself for every pass meaning eight times the work to get the same effect. So essentially PS2 has to render 1,000 polygons eight times over whereas Gamecube only has to render 1,000 polygons once for the same effect.
"With PS2 you have to write the code to do a lot of that stuff. But that's the trick behind it," says Gregory P. Zeschuk, president and CEO of Bioware, which created MDK2 for Dreamcast and is now bringing the title to PS2. "On the one hand the downside is that it's not done for you. On the upside, if it's not done for you then you can do it yourself, and potentially better -- more specialized to what your specific application is. So it's really a double-edged sword. That's the mystery of the system."
Still though, to have access to multi-texturing features from the beginning versus having to fight through code for the process is a definite advantage for developers hoping to create timely software. "Yes, it's very nice that Nintendo Gamecube can do eight layers in one pass. It's all set up for you. Believe me, I would have loved it," says Jason Rubin of Naughty Dog. "But we'll have eight-pass techniques done on PlayStation 2 by the time we're done with our first game. So it's automatically done on Gamecube, but we've got the same techniques. Yes, they take more time and yes they take more CPU power, but here we go again -- [PS2] is a more powerful CPU so who cares? In the end you break even."
But is PS2's CPU with Vector Units really more powerful than Gamecube's? We went to Julian Eggebrecht, president of Factor 5, a developer currently underway with Gamecube projects for a different opinion. "Gamecube's Gekko is the most powerful general-purpose CPU ever in a console. The PowerPC alone is so much better and faster structurally that Gekko not only is much, much faster than the PS2's main CPU but every bit as fast as a 733 MHz Pentium," rebukes Eggebrecht. "Don't forget how extremely powerful the 256K second level cache in Gekko makes Gamecube. The size of a CPU's second level cache determines how fast general game-code runs. The PS2 has a tiny 16K of second level cache, and even the X-Box only has 128K."
In terms of how it performs against PS2's Vector Units, Eggebrecht offers the following: "Gekko is not just a plain PowerPC CPU, it has special commands just for games and has special modes making it possible to run hand-written assembler code very, very fast. We did experiments with particles on Gamecube after the N64, and as opposed to the two weeks it took to get the particle system running and optimized on the vector unit it only took two days on Gamecube.
"Based on our calculations, Gamecube's CPU has all the power PS2's CPU and VU0 have combined and then some. Everything you do on VU1 on the PS2, Gamecube has in hardware in 'Flipper,' the graphics chip. And believe me, when it comes to fill-rate and polygon counts, Gamecube is every bit as good as PS2. Nintendo has chosen not to throw around numbers, but we know those numbers and as opposed to what Naughty Dog might think they are not necessarily lower than PS2's numbers."
There is much more to factor in, though, than just CPU speed and graphics chip architecture. Eggebrecht points to Gamecube's RAM set up, as well as its texture and lighting capabilities, as further proof of its power. "Another important area is the RAM," he says. "RAM is where your game and data are living in and being moved through and what really determines the speed and power of a system to a large degree. Anybody who ever programmed a N64 knows that Rambus RAM is especially problematic for game purposes when CPUs have to randomly access tiny chunks of data in a very fast manner. The PS2 has that same Rambus RAM. The more you use the CPU to randomly move chunks of data, the more speed problems you get.
"Gamecube has a completely new technology, MoSys RAM. The speed of it is unbelievable, something we noticed when we started throwing more and more data and game logic at the machine. RAM-speed simply is not an issue for Gamecube. That is a first among the next-gen consoles and a major breakthrough."
While which system ultimately pushes more polygon counts is debatable, there is no arguments about Gamecube's superiority in what can be done visually with those polygons. Naughty Dog's Jason Rubin concedes: "The Gamecube is going to have a great renderer, and probably will put out almost as many polygons as the PS2, but they will be prettier polygons. Its problem is going to be, truthfully, that its CPU is weaker so it won't be able to do as many cool things with those polygons."
Meanwhile Eggebrecht comments: "The area that Gamecube is similar to PS2 but just plain kills it is in textures and hardware lights. There is simply no comparison. So you get similar polygon counts on GC as you have on PS2, but with these incredible amounts of texture effects on top. Just imagine a textured, bump-mapped, reflecting and accurately glossy and dirty car with specular highlights thrown in - that's just one pass for Gamecube but many for PS2. And of course there is the Gamecube texture decompression thrown in for free, something the PS2 doesn't have at all."
Conclusions and Philosophy
Depending on which development house you talk to, there are different winners in the race for hardware supremacy. PS2 is a difficult, but nonetheless powerful console that software houses have yet to master, and Gamecube is a programmer friendly, yet powerful platform that, because of Nintendo's secrecy, is still largely unproven.
If you get anything out of this article, we hope that it's a better sense of just how powerful Nintendo's Gamecube console is, though. We have not set out to prove PlayStation 2 is an inferior system, only that Nintendo's is just as strong in every single respect technically speaking. At the end of the day, we still believe the battlefield will be separated with those that are willing to master PS2's difficulties and create truly amazing software, and those that would prefer not to waste time and energy on struggling with the hardware when they can worry strictly about content on Nintendo's Gamecube and Microsoft's XBox. Perhaps the following quotes best sum it up: "My point is, if the PlayStation 2 is going to sell as many hardware units as the PlayStation 1 sold, then I don’t care if I have to pierce my nails with pins to get it to work, I'm going to do it because that's where the money is. And that's the attitude we go into every game with."
Jason Rubin, president, Naughty Dog "The PS2 undoubtedly can be a great machine if used right. The Vector Units especially have some potential. We have used the N64 Vector Unit probably more than anybody else out there. Battle for Naboo and Indiana Jones use the N64 Vector Unit for almost unlimited dynamic lights, we did a complete particle system on it, character animation and skinning and even a landscape background engine. So I guess we would be more than qualified to use the PS2's Vector Units. But why should we? Why spend enormous resources, time, and ultimately too much money fighting the machine?" -- Julian Eggebrecht, president, Factor 5 "I think what you'll find is that it'll take a good, long while to reach the maximum on PlayStation 2, whereas on the Gamecube, if it's more accessible, you'll have better looking games earlier. But at the same time, PlayStation 2 software will look great and continue to improve over time." -- Gregory P. Zeschuk, president and CEO, Bioware.
One thing, it seems, is for certain, and it's that the next-generation battle will not be won by superior technology, but rather superior software, and come E3 2001 I think you'll see that Gamecube is well-covered in this area.
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Stop copying off mags.
lol!
That's the funniest thing I've heard on here for a long time...
If I were you Tom, I would quit the forums while you still have access to your account!
That's the funniest thing I've heard on here for a long time...
If I were you Tom, I would quit the forums while you still have access to your account!
The funniest thing is the other topic with the same title as this...
I don't mind the odd quote from magazines - I've done it enough myself; but I always give credit.
Surely a cut and paste breaches copyright? And I'm sure it says in the SR regulations that a post must be your own work... well, the majority of a post should be anyway!
Surely a cut and paste breaches copyright? And I'm sure it says in the SR regulations that a post must be your own work... well, the majority of a post should be anyway!
If your looking for more lifted articles from old TOM, look at '100 games' in the GameCube section. N64 Magazine anyone?
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