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Just read articles about how much difficulty konami has with PS2 coding.
I also found this one article, it makes sense:
"I remember when the PS2 was first announced and the technical specifications that were bandied about at that time: 75 million polygons/second, unlimited streaming texture potential, 48GB/s of memory bandwidth, and so on. It wasn't long after this that technology analysts began to question Sony's numbers.
Polygon Performance
The 75 million number was reduced to 66 million. Afterwards, it was admitted that these PS2 numbers were a peak performance figure for flat -shaded, identically shaped polygons. Unfortunately, the image of the PS2 as some sort of polygon monster had already become firmly entrenched in the minds of the mainstream media.
Sega chose a more conservative approach, which is in keeping with their new business philosophy - to regain the trust and confidence of gamers. Since its introduction two years ago, Sega has never mislead gamers about the Dreamcast's power. 3+ million polygons is all that Sega ever claims, even though new games like Test Drive: LeMans push closer to five million in 3D scenes loaded with effects.
The truth is that the PS2 has never displayed more than 2-3 million polys in a game. The main problem is a memory one. With only a 4MB VRAM cache on its GS graphics processor, the PS2 is severely limited in what it can achieve on screen. While it's true that 32MB of main memory and the fairly powerful Emotion Engine processor are capable of producing in the neighborhood of 10-12 million textured and lit polygons/second, the poor design of the GS and its small pipeline to main memory restrict the final number to roughly half of that.
What? You mean, regardless of the power of the EE processor and the large amount of available memory, the PS2 is still only capable of displaying 5-6 million on-screen polygons? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. By contrast, the Dreamcast has only 16 MB of main memory and a processor that is only capable of one-half the number of polygons/second - ie. 5- 6 million - but the whole point of the exercise is to get these onto your television. An intelligent memory saving technique known as differed rendering, coupled with the PowerVR2DC graphics chip's hardware texture compression abilities, allow the Dreamcast to display all of its generated polygons.
To better understand the PS2's limitations and the Dreamcast's strengths, you need only look at the available video memory for your answer. While the DC has 8MB of VRAM, the PS2 has only 4MB of VRAM. The main problem arises because a polygon takes up roughly 40 bytes of RAM. When you have 5 million of them in a given second, this amounts to 5 million/60fps = 83,333 polygons in a give frame of animation. If each of these polygons uses 40 bytes of VRAM, you will use 3.33 MB displaying these 5 million PPS. This doesn't leave the PS2 much room for it's framebuffer which uses around 1.2MB just to display the end data, not to mention that you still need to leave room for textures to put on those polygons.
Now, there are a few tricks which will allow the PS2 to display 5-6 million PPS, even though it only has a 4MB VRAM cache. One of them is to update the cache more frequently than once a second. But, there are other bandwidth limitations that prevent this from happening more than two or three times per second and the net result is that the PS2 is still limited to 5- 6 million PPS.
Here is a table which summarizes the polygon performance of both next- generation machines:
System Processor Stage Graphics Stage Best Example**
PS2 EE + 32MB 12 million PPS GS + 4MB 6 million PPS* Madden NFL 2001 2 million PPS*
3 M PPS*
* All polygons are textured and lit and represent peak performance
** Only games available right now were considered
Unfortunately, this isn't the PS2's only shortcoming. The reason I emphasize polygon performance at all is because these number have become the defacto standard for judging a console's power, when in fact they tell less than half the story. The main disadvantage of this expensive architecture is it's poor texturing ability.
Texturing Performance
The way texturing works is simple. Polygons and texture data arrive into video memory, textures are applied to the polygons and the result is displayed on screen. Most PC users are used to games with 16MB or more of texture data. A diehard Quake III player might have a setup capable of delivering 32MB of textures during the game. 32MB? But the PS2 and DC only have 4MB and 8MB of VRAM respectively. How can they hope to compete? The answer is that consoles do not hold all of a scene's texture data in memory at once. Usually, the data is streamed over the bus from main memory in a continuous manner.
The Dreamcast is a wonderful texturing beast, due in large part to the efficiency of the PVR2DC's graphics methodology. Two things help the PVR2DC - hardware texture decompression and infinite planes deferred rendering. Unlike the PS2's GS graphics processor, the PVR2DC is capable of decompressing textures on the fly. Thus, DC programmers usually take 20-25MB of texture data and compress it at a 5:1 (sometimes 8:1) ratio to reduce the amount of texture data to only 4 or 5MB. Then, the texture data is sent over the bus to the PVR2DC which simply decompresses the data at the moment of rendering into it's original huge size.
By contrast, the PS2's GS processor has no ability to decompress textures on the fly. This means that all texture data must flow over the relatively small pipeline between main memory and the GS 4MB VRAM cache, at it's original large size. Currently, this fact has limited PS2 games to only around 10 MB of texture data/frame, and this is why the buildings look so similar in Ridge Racer 5. Lack of variety in texturing has made most PS2 games look extremely plain when compared to Dreamcast games like Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, and even Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm.
Moreover, the PVR2DC belongs to the only processor family on the market that uses deferred rendering to texture only those polygons which are facing the gamer in any given frame. Other graphics chips must texture the backs of polygons as well as the front facing polygons. The net effect is to reduce the amount of texturing that the DC has to perform in a given scene by a factor of two or three depending on the complexity of the scene. The greater the scene complexity, the more you see the benefits of deferred rendering. This is why you never see any really large free-roaming 3D games on the PS2. Crazy Taxi, Ecco the Dolphin, and Shenmue are simply not possible on the PS2, because it doesn't have deferred rendering.
Here is another table which summarizes texturing performance for bother machines:
Texture Data Streaming Capacity
System Capacity Decompressed Texturing Ability Best Example*
PS2 10MB/frame (Main Memory -> GS Memory) 10MB/frame on screen Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore*
DC 5MB/frame (Main Memory -> VRAM 25MB/frame on screen Shenmue, Ecco the Dolphin*
* Only games available right now were considered
These two performance measure give you a pretty good idea of why the PS2 is, technically-speaking, a poor hardware design. The biggest problem of all with this architecture, however, is the difficulty that development houses are having extracting reasonable performance out of the machine. All the power in the world under the hood, doesn't do anyone much good if the games don't look good.
Development Environment
The PS2 shipped to developers with incomplete kits last year. By contrast, Sega has been giving excellent support to developers both large and small. Most DC developers are using 5th generation development kits, known as Set 5 Dev Kits. Sony mistakenly made the assumption that third-party PS2 developers would want bare bones development kits so they could program the hardware directly like they have during the last days of the PSX. Unfortunately, key features that are very hard to implement, like anti-aliasing to remove jagged edges from on-screen polygons have not yet surfaced.
Developers have responded to these PS2 programming challenges in a number of ways. Some developers like THQ (Summoner) have used a form of CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) blending to fake the effects that true anti- aliasing would offer. This is something which the DC has had for over two years, but unlike the DC CRT method, the PS2 method results in washed out, blurry textures. Tekken Tag Tournament is the perfect US launch title example. While they have eliminated the jagged edges which plague the Japanese version, the end result is that all of the textures in the game seem blurry or washed out. Hardly what I would call revolutionary for a next-generation console.
Another developmental problem, which is the reason for the jaggies in the first place, is serious lack of kit functions that will intelligently enable developers to overcome some of the limitations of the small size of the GS VRAM cache. While all Dreamcast games run at 640x480 resolution, many PS2 games only utilitize a 640x240 field- rendered display which fakes a 640x480 display. Bad jaggies are the result, and these need to be hidden through some form of anti-aliasing (AA, not yet available), or by using the CRT method described above, with all its unintended consequences.
Moreover, the EE processor is actually three separate CPUs in one core. Most developers, for lack of proper tools, are using only one thirdI remember when the PS2 was first announced and the technical specifications that were bandied about at that time: 75 million polygons/second, unlimited streaming texture potential, 48GB/s of memory bandwidth, and so on. It wasn't long after this that technology analysts began to question Sony's numbers.
Polygon Performance
The 75 million number was reduced to 66 million. Afterwards, it was admitted that these PS2 numbers were a peak performance figure for flat -shaded, identically shaped polygons. Unfortunately, the image of the PS2 as some sort of polygon monster had already become firmly entrenched in the minds of the mainstream media.
Sega chose a more conservative approach, which is in keeping with their new business philosophy - to regain the trust and confidence of gamers. Since its introduction two years ago, Sega has never mislead gamers about the Dreamcast's power. 3+ million polygons is all that Sega ever claims, even though new games like Test Drive: LeMans push closer to five million in 3D scenes loaded with effects.
The truth is that the PS2 has never displayed more than 2-3 million polys in a game. The main problem is a memory one. With only a 4MB VRAM cache on its GS graphics processor, the PS2 is severely limited in what it can achieve on screen. While it's true that 32MB of main memory and the fairly powerful Emotion Engine processor are capable of producing in the neighborhood of 10-12 million textured and lit polygons/second, the poor design of the GS and its small pipeline to main memory restrict the final number to roughly half of that.
What? You mean, regardless of the power of the EE processor and the large amount of available memory, the PS2 is still only capable of displaying 5-6 million on-screen polygons? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. By contrast, the Dreamcast has only 16 MB of main memory and a processor that is only capable of one-half the number of polygons/second - ie. 5- 6 million - but the whole point of the exercise is to get these onto your television. An intelligent memory saving technique known as differed rendering, coupled with the PowerVR2DC graphics chip's hardware texture compression abilities, allow the Dreamcast to display all of its generated polygons.
To better understand the PS2's limitations and the Dreamcast's strengths, you need only look at the available video memory for your answer. While the DC has 8MB of VRAM, the PS2 has only 4MB of VRAM. The main problem arises because a polygon takes up roughly 40 bytes of RAM. When you have 5 million of them in a given second, this amounts to 5 million/60fps = 83,333 polygons in a give frame of animation. If each of these polygons uses 40 bytes of VRAM, you will use 3.33 MB displaying these 5 million PPS. This doesn't leave the PS2 much room for it's framebuffer which uses around 1.2MB just to display the end data, not to mention that you still need to leave room for textures to put on those polygons.
Now, there are a few tricks which will allow the PS2 to display 5-6 million PPS, even though it only has a 4MB VRAM cache. One of them is to update the cache more frequently than once a second. But, there are other bandwidth limitations that prevent this from happening more than two or three times per second and the net result is that the PS2 is still limited to 5- 6 million PPS.
Here is a table which summarizes the polygon performance of both next- generation machines:
System Processor Stage Graphics Stage Best Example**
PS2 EE + 32MB 12 million PPS* GS + 4MB 6 million PPS* Madden NFL 2001 2 million PPS*
DC SH4 + 16MB 6 million PPS* PVR2DC + 8MB 5 million PPS* Ferrari F355 Challenge 3 million PPS*
* All polygons are textured and lit and represent peak performance
** Only games available right now were considered
Unfortunately, this isn't the PS2's only shortcoming. The reason I emphasize polygon performance at all is because these number have become the defacto standard for judging a console's power, when in fact they tell less than half the story. The main disadvantage of this expensive architecture is it's poor texturing ability.
Texturing Performance
The way texturing works is simple. Polygons and texture data arrive into video memory, textures are applied to the polygons and the result is displayed on screen. Most PC users are used to games with 16MB or more of texture data. A diehard Quake III player might have a setup capable of delivering 32MB of textures during the game. 32MB? But the PS2 and DC only have 4MB and 8MB of VRAM respectively. How can they hope to compete? The answer is that consoles do not hold all of a scene's texture data in memory at once. Usually, the data is streamed over the bus from main memory in a continuous manner.
The Dreamcast is a wonderful texturing beast, due in large part to the efficiency of the PVR2DC's graphics methodology. Two things help the PVR2DC - hardware texture decompression and infinite planes deferred rendering. Unlike the PS2's GS graphics processor, the PVR2DC is capable of decompressing textures on the fly. Thus, DC programmers usually take 20-25MB of texture data and compress it at a 5:1 (sometimes 8:1) ratio to reduce the amount of texture data to only 4 or 5MB. Then, the texture data is sent over the bus to the PVR2DC which simply decompresses the data at the moment of rendering into it's original huge size.
By contrast, the PS2's GS processor has no ability to decompress textures on the fly. This means that all texture data must flow over the relatively small pipeline between main memory and the GS 4MB VRAM cache, at it's original large size. Currently, this fact has limited PS2 games to only around 10 MB of texture data/frame, and this is why the buildings look so similar in Ridge Racer 5. Lack of variety in texturing has made most PS2 games look extremely plain when compared to Dreamcast games like Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, and even Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm.
Moreover, the PVR2DC belongs to the only processor family on the market that uses deferred rendering to texture only those polygons which are facing the gamer in any given frame. Other graphics chips must texture the backs of polygons as well as the front facing polygons. The net effect is to reduce the amount of texturing that the DC has to perform in a given scene by a factor of two or three depending on the complexity of the scene. The greater the scene complexity, the more you see the benefits of deferred rendering. This is why you never see any really large free-roaming 3D games on the PS2. Crazy Taxi, Ecco the Dolphin, and Shenmue are simply not possible on the PS2, because it doesn't have deferred rendering.
Here is another table which summarizes texturing performance for bother machines:
Texture Data Streaming Capacity
System Capacity Decompressed Texturing Ability Best Example*
PS2 10MB/frame (Main Memory -> GS Memory) 10MB/frame on screen Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore*
DC 5MB/frame (Main Memory -> VRAM 25MB/frame on screen Shenmue, Ecco the Dolphin*
* Only games available right now were considered
These two performance measure give you a pretty good idea of why the PS2 is, technically-speaking, a poor hardware design. The biggest problem of all with this architecture, however, is the difficulty that development houses are having extracting reasonable performance out of the machine. All the power in the world under the hood, doesn't do anyone much good if the games don't look good.
Development Environment
The PS2 shipped to developers with incomplete kits last year. By contrast, Sega has been giving excellent support to developers both large and small. Most DC developers are using 5th generation development kits, known as Set 5 Dev Kits. Sony mistakenly made the assumption that third-party PS2 developers would want bare bones development kits so they could program the hardware directly like they have during the last days of the PSX. Unfortunately, key features that are very hard to implement, like anti-aliasing to remove jagged edges from on-screen polygons have not yet surfaced.
Developers have responded to these PS2 programming challenges in a number of ways. Some developers like THQ (Summoner) have used a form of CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) blending to fake the effects that true anti- aliasing would offer. This is something which the DC has had for over two years, but unlike the DC CRT method, the PS2 method results in washed out, blurry textures. Tekken Tag Tournament is the perfect US launch title example. While they have eliminated the jagged edges which plague the Japanese version, the end result is that all of the textures in the game seem blurry or washed out. Hardly what I would call revolutionary for a next-generation console.
Another developmental problem, which is the reason for the jaggies in the first place, is serious lack of kit functions that will intelligently enable developers to overcome some of the limitations of the small size of the GS VRAM cache. While all Dreamcast games run at 640x480 resolution, many PS2 games only utilitize a 640x240 field- rendered display which fakes a 640x480 display. Bad jaggies are the result, and these need to be hidden through some form of anti-aliasing (AA, not yet available), or by using the CRT method described above, with all its unintended consequences.
Moreover, the EE processor is actually three separate CPUs in one core. Most developers, for lack of proper tools, are using only one third of the EE's processing ability, because both vector units (VP1 & VP2) are too hard to program. Certainly future games will take advantage of these units, thereby freeing the main CPU to implement some fairly nice AI routines, but the cost of developing these techniques has become enormous - something which I will outline in the next article.
The sad fact is that only a few development houses like EA have been able to extract reasonable next-generation performance out of the PS2 architecture. Even Namco and Konami, the kings of PSX development during the 32 bit era, are having a hard time getting more than 2-3 million PPS out of what is supposed to be the end-all of gaming machines. The fact of the matter is that Namco's 18 month old Soul Calibur on Dreamcast looks worlds better than the newly released Tekken Tag Tournament on PS2. Not very impressive compared to the promises that have been made by Sony and it's cabal of industry sycophants.
Overall
The Dreamcast is the best machine on the market. Tomorrow nothing will have changed. Technically speaking, nothing on the PS2 comes close to the beauty of Shenmue or Ecco, the speed and power of F355 Challenge or Test Drive: LeMans 24, and the sheer elegance and gaming grace of games like Metropolis Street Racer and Jet Grind Radio. If one full motion video demo of Metal Gear Solid 2 has convinced you that the PS2 is the better machine, then you haven't opened your eyes to the reality before you. The best next-generation machine from a technical standpoint is the Sega Dreamcast. Let other less informed individuals buy a machine capable of less, on the promise of one game thirteen months from now. In the meantime, you and I will be enjoying the technically best games for months to come.
of the EE's processing ability, because both vector units (VP1 & VP2) are too hard to program. Certainly future games will take advantage of these units, thereby freeing the main CPU to implement some fairly nice AI routines, but the cost of developing these techniques has become enormous - something which I will outline in the next article.
The sad fact is that only a few development houses like EA have been able to extract reasonable next-generation performance out of the PS2 architecture. Even Namco and Konami, the kings of PSX development during the 32 bit era, are having a hard time getting more than 2-3 million PPS out of what is supposed to be the end-all of gaming machines. The fact of the matter is that Namco's 18 month old Soul Calibur on Dreamcast looks worlds better than the newly released Tekken Tag Tournament on PS2. Not very impressive compared to the promises that have been made by Sony and it's cabal of industry sycophants.
Overall
The Dreamcast is the best machine on the market. Tomorrow nothing will have changed. Technically speaking, nothing on the PS2 comes close to the beauty of Shenmue or Ecco, the speed and power of F355 Challenge or Test Drive: LeMans 24, and the sheer elegance and gaming grace of games like Metropolis Street Racer and Jet Grind Radio. If one full motion video demo of Metal Gear Solid 2 has convinced you that the PS2 is the better machine, then you haven't opened your eyes to the reality before you. The best next-generation machine from a technical standpoint is the Sega Dreamcast. Let other less informed individuals buy a machine capable of less, on the promise of one game thirteen months from now. In the meantime, you and I will be enjoying the technically best games for months to come.
So you've all heard how well the PS2 is doing in Japan, right? Well, the reality is a little more complicated. Currently there is a growing concern that Japanese consumes are purchasing the PS2 mainly as a DVD player. But Sony's PS2 problem run far deeper than that. From production capacity, to production costs, to development cost over- runs, and a host of other troubles, Sony is in big trouble with the PS2.
Production Costs
On the eve of the PS2 launch into the US market, Sony posted a second quarter 57% fall in profitability over the same period in 1999. To quote a Bloomberg article, "Group net profit fell 57 percent to 19.8 billion yen ($183 million), or 21.7 yen per share, in the quarter ended Sept. 30, from 46.5 billion yen, or 113.0 yen, in the year-ago period. Analysts were expecting 26.6 billion yen in profit. The cost of developing the PlayStation 2, which went on sale in the U.S. just hours ago, will lead to an operating loss in the games division in the year ending in March, Sony said. That's overshadowing rising profit for other Sony products such as digital cameras and video recorders."
While it isn't surprising that Sony is losing money with their PS2 launch, the extent of those losses has not yet been realized by most of the mainstream media. Bloomberg estimates that each PS2 costs $488 to build. Therefore, ignoring marketing costs - which can sometimes amount to $50-$60 per unit - every American PS2 represents a loss of $188 that Sony has to recoup with game sales. In Japan, where costs have been closer to $550 per unit, the unit retails for $370 - yielding a similar loss of $180.
The flawed conventional wisdom is that Sony will make up for these problems by lowering their unit costs while selling massive amounts of software, thereby collecting royalty fees that will return them to profitability. Well, for one thing, the unit cost has only fallen by $70 over the last year. Soon, Sony will have to compete with $99 Dreamcasts, $249 GameCubes (likely entry price), and an aggressively priced X-box. There is simply no way for Sony to lower their PS2 costs faster than they need to lower the price of the unit to be competitive. A generous analyst might conclude that they will lower costs by $100 over the next 12 months, but that they will also have to lower their unit pricing by a similar amount.
This leaves software royalties as the only possible way to make good on that $180 we talked about earlier. Unfortunately, Sony's largest royalty on software is $10. Sony produces very few big sellers of their own, with the exception of next year's Gran Turismo 3, and they can't expect to sell more than two of their own titles with each unit. Namco's RR5 and TTT, Tecmo's DoA2, and EA's Madden 2001 are sure to be big enough hits to prevent Sony from making any serious first party in- roads. If they do manage to sell two titles to every PS2 owner, they will increase their royalty to roughly $30 per title. This will give them $60 towards their loss of $180, leaving $120 to be covered by third party royalty fees. In other words, they have to sell software at tie ratios of 14:1 in order to break even!
Let me remind everyone that the PSX, arguably the most successful console in the history of video gaming only has tie ratios of 9:1. The Dreamcast by comparison has tie ratios of 6:1 in the Japanese market, and 5:1 in the US market. The early numbers for the PS2 are horrible. Due to it's popularity as a DVD player, and it's lack of compelling software, the PS2 is currently enjoying software-hardware tie ratios of 1.6:1 in the Japanese market! This is unbelievable. They need to sell 14 titles and they are only selling 1.6.
Sony will never make money on the PS2, and this will have a huge impact on the entire market. The Dreamcast on the other hand is already making a profit in all territories. With production costs of $149 per unit and a market price of $149.99, Sega is already breaking even on the hardware. This frees them to earn large profits with the substantial tie ratios they have already attained. In addition, because so many of the popular games for the system are made by Sega itself, they enjoy increased profitability. I own 21 games, twelve of these are games published by Sega. How's that for tie ratios?
Buying into Sony's flawed business model is only going to get you burned. The PS2 is the trojan horse of the gaming world, so don't get fooled into picking up a console that will be abandoned two years down the road.
Production Capacity
If these weren't big enough problems in their own right, Sony is having even bigger difficulties just trying to produce the console. Last November Sony announced that it had just spent $2 billion dollars to ramp up PS2 production to 500,000 units per month. Then, in February is announced that it would be further increasing production to one million units per month. So, if these numbers were true, Sony should have been able to produce 11 million units by now. The fact is that with less that three million units sold in the Japanese market, and only one million more available in the US this Fall, Sony's production has been somewhere around 4 million units over the past year - roughly one-third of their announced production targets.
By contrast, the Dreamcast production capacity has stood at 500,000 units for more than a year now, so there should be more than enough units to put 3 million more into the US market before the end of the year. This more than anything is giving new life to Sega's Dreamcast which promises to be widely available with the best collection of holiday software a gamer could hope for.
Where has all that production capacity gone? Well, a number of factors are at work here. First of all, the RAMBUS memory used in the PS2 has suffered horrible wafer yields for more than a year now. To explain that further, memory is produced in big chunks called wafers. The good parts of the wafer are kept and the bad parts are discarded. The part that is kept is chopped into smaller chunks which are used to create the 32MB of main memory in the PS2.
Unfortunately, RAMBUS yields have been hovering around 10%. Meaning that 90% of any given wafer is thrown into the trash every time they make the RAM. Unbelievable! The Dreamcast uses off the shelf SDRAM, which is the cheapest best yield memory on the market. Some analysts last year estimated the DC memory costs at $30, and the PS2 memory costs at $150. It's no wonder they can't produce enough units and can't keep their costs down.
Other complicating factors include switching from .25 micron transistors, in the EE and GS processors, to .18 micron transistors. The idea behind this is to shrink the size of the chips, reducing costs, and more importantly reducing the probability of error in the wafers used to stamp these chips. Once again, someone screwed up and the switch to .18 has resulted in extremely poor yields and therefore very low production capacity and high costs.
System Planned Production Actual production
PlayStation 2 11 Million units 4 million units
Dreamcast 6 Million units 6 million units
Sales Numbers
But what about the huge success in the Japanese market against the Dreamcast? Well, as you can see from the following sales table (all figures in millions), the PS2's future is anything but certain, even in Japan.
System Hardware US/JP/EU* Software Sales US/JP/EU*
PS2 .5/2.7/0 = 3.2 million 0/4.3/0 = 4.3 million
DC 2.5/2.0/1.1 = 5.6 million 12.5/12.0/2.5 = 27 million
* As of October 26, 2000
It's the last number that should have Sony worried. The Dreamcast software is selling much better than PS2 software. This is why retailers had better realize that if someone comes into their store with $450 next month, it's going to be far more profitable to sell them a DC and a ton of games than it is to sell them a PS2, a game, a memory card, and a controller.
Development Problems
Lastly, one of the saddest testimonies to the market failure of Sony's PS2, is that development costs have skyrocketed for the machine. Dreamcast title devopment for quality titles is roughly half that of comparable software for the PS2. This has the effect of hurting the smaller developers a lot more than the larger houses. which can afford to float some of these extra costs. To put the US numbers in perspective - there are 50 titles coming out for the PS2 this Christmas. Only 1.3 million units are going to be available, and consumers with really deep pockets might be able to afford three titles. Therefore, the market should see sales of 4 million units, meaning the average game is only going to sell 80,000 copies.
Well, we all know that everyone is picking up an EA Sports Title, one of the fighting games, and maybe one other title. This has the effect of giving most of the PS2 market to EA, Namco and Konami. The smaller developers are screwed. This wouldn't be so bad if development costs weren't so high, but the reality is that the DC is likely going to sell 7-9 million pieces of software this year, enough for smaller development house to do fairly well. Unfortunately, most of these developers have backed the wrong horse.
This bodes poorly for the future. While Namco can sit there and claim that it is doing fine on PS2, Soul Calibur has sold nearly 2 million copies world wide on Dreamcast vs. somewhere around one million copies of TTT by the end of this year on PS2. Not to mention how cheap it was to make Soul Calibur, compared to the struggle that went into TTT.
Next year is going to bring a big wake up call to all of those people who thought the Sony PS2 was some sort of colossal juggernaut about to crush Sega's Dreamcast. Sega has surprised everybody so far, with robust sales of both software and hardware. Sony has surprised everybody too - just not in the way most people expected.
Tell me honestly, when Sony announced their uber-console two years ago, did you ever expect that you would be waiting in line for six hours just for the chance to buy one of these new units? Did you ever expect there to be a memory card shortages? What about the over-heating problems? Did you ever expect the launch list to be full of nothing but sequels to old PSX games? That the backwards compatibility wouldn't be fool-proof? Most of all, did you ever expect PS2 launch games like Tekken Tag Tournament to actually look worse than 18-month old Dreamcast titles like Soul Calibur? Yeah, well... neither did I.
The truth is that the PS2 is having trouble competing with Dreamcast games that are already out, let alone the games that will be arriving over the next few weeks. Here's a genre by genre breakdown of why you should stay clear of Sony's beast until there are major improvements on the software development side.
Fighting
Dreamcast
? Soul Calibur
? Dead or Alive 2
? Ultimate Fighting Championship
? Marvel Vs. Capcom 2
? Street Fighter Alpha 3
PlayStation 2
? Tekken Tag Tournament
? DoA2:Hardcore
? Street Fighter EX
Hands down Soul Calibur is the best looking, UFC is the best playing, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is the most fun, and SF Alpha 3 is the best tribute to its series. Street Fighter EX is horrible. DoA2 is better-looking on Dreamcast but has a few extra modes on PS2 that make this one a wash. As for TTT - what's with the 2D backgrounds, Namco?
Racing
Dreamcast
? Sega GT
? Test Drive: V-Rally
? F355 Challenge
? Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2
PlayStation 2
? Ridge Racer 5
? Wild Wild Racing
? Midnight Club Street Racing
While Ridge Racer 5 is up to the usual Namco standards, the other PS2 racing games are essentially a cruel joke. Dreamcast on the other hand has a slew of excellent racers, all extremely playable from the DC pad because of the brilliant analog triggers. If simulation is your thing, F355 and Sega GT will delight you. If you're more into rally racing, TD:V-Rally is amazingly good. Tokyo Extreme Racing 2 is available there for a more arcade-like experience. In the next couple of months the Dreamcast will see some other amazing racing games - Metropolis Street Racer, Daytona USA Online and Test Drive: LeMans are all unbelievable racers that are absolutely going to kill anything else out there for many months to come.
Sports
Dreamcast
? NFL2K1
? NBA2K1
? Virtua Tennis
? Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2
? Extreme Sports
Playstation 2
? Madden 2001
? NBA Live 2001
? NHL 2001
? SSX
All of the PS2 titles above are quality offerings. Although the gameplay in most EA titles hasn't evolved since the days of the Sega Genesis, the final result is some great looking playable titles. SSX was a nice surprise, but it doesn't seem to offer anything that Extreme Sports for Dreamcast won't. But, the PS2 has two big weaknesses this Fall - no online play, and worse - no Tony Hawk 2. Sure you can play the PSX version on you PS2, but it won't compare to the DC version due out next week. Over the long haul Sega will have to revitalize NHL2K1 and WSB2K2 enough to compete, but online play should carry them over the top for at least the next twelve months. Did I mention that Virtua Tennis is highly addictive and amazing? Well, I should have.
Action
Dreamcast
? Quake III: Arena
? Jet Grind Radio
? House of the Dead 2
? Crazy Taxi
? Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm
? MDK2
PlayStation 2
? Gun Griffon Blaze
? Armored Core 2
Let's face the cold hard truth, GG Blaze and AC 2 are decent titles in their own right, nothing is going to compare for action than a flawless, lag-free conversion of Quake 3: Arena. Nothing except Jet Grind Radio, that is. The inline skating, graffiti tagging, free roaming tribute to urban chaos turned everyone on their head at E3 this year. Expect no less when the title arrives next Wednesday.
Adventure
Dreamcast
? Ecco The Dolphin
? Rayman 2
? Sonic Adventure
? Soul Reaver
PlayStation 2
? Nothing
I should also mention that the Dreamcast will be getting the incredible Shenmue in about ten days. This genre is one of the Dreamcast's strongest because of the PS2's difficulty in rendering large texture intensive 3D game worlds. It seem pretty obvious that the Dreamcast is going to dominate this genre for quite some time... especially with Sonic Adventure 2 just around the corner.
RPG
Dreamcast
? Skies of Arcadia
? Grandia II
PlayStation 2
? Evergrace
? Summoner
This doesn't look like much of a fair fight either. While Summoner actually looks like an enjoyable quick fix, it hardly holds a candle to epic masterpieces like Grandia II and Skies of Arcadia. Evergrace is over course, a joke, but this was a weak genre for the Dreamcast in its early days as well. Good RPGs take time to make, and fortunately, the DC has been available long enough for this to happen.
Music/Puzzle/Other
Dreamcast
? Bust-A-Move 4
? Chu Chu Rocket
? Samba de Amigo
? Space Channel 5
? Seaman
PlayStation 2
? Fantavision
Ever the innovators, Sega has managed to bring some pretty special niche titles over. Samba and SC5 are some of the best music games ever invented, and Seaman is certainly good for a laugh. Don't expect too much from this beleaguered genre on the PS2, but it isn't likely the reason a North American gamer would ever buy a console.
Overall, the Dreamcast has the PS2 beat this year in every major game category, which is twice the price and lacks any online gaming capability. When faced with the decision on what to get this year, you might want to consider the fact that for $400 you can get:
DC Sports Pack, Sonic, Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur, Quake 3, Shenmue, a VMU and a second controller.
Rather than,
PS2, a memory card, a second controller and Madden 2001.
Better yet, grab the SegaNet rebate and pick up Jet Grind Radio, Metropolis and Skies of Arcadia while you're at it. A Dreamcast with ten games for only $400 is the kind of value that Sega is offering you as a gamer. If you can't respect that then you deserve to own a PS2.
John Benn
Royal Slayer of the dreaded Hype Monster.
An article from Segaweb-which is not so bad as it is only the sega division of a company that has sonyweb, nintendoweb, etc."
I also found this one article, it makes sense:
"I remember when the PS2 was first announced and the technical specifications that were bandied about at that time: 75 million polygons/second, unlimited streaming texture potential, 48GB/s of memory bandwidth, and so on. It wasn't long after this that technology analysts began to question Sony's numbers.
Polygon Performance
The 75 million number was reduced to 66 million. Afterwards, it was admitted that these PS2 numbers were a peak performance figure for flat -shaded, identically shaped polygons. Unfortunately, the image of the PS2 as some sort of polygon monster had already become firmly entrenched in the minds of the mainstream media.
Sega chose a more conservative approach, which is in keeping with their new business philosophy - to regain the trust and confidence of gamers. Since its introduction two years ago, Sega has never mislead gamers about the Dreamcast's power. 3+ million polygons is all that Sega ever claims, even though new games like Test Drive: LeMans push closer to five million in 3D scenes loaded with effects.
The truth is that the PS2 has never displayed more than 2-3 million polys in a game. The main problem is a memory one. With only a 4MB VRAM cache on its GS graphics processor, the PS2 is severely limited in what it can achieve on screen. While it's true that 32MB of main memory and the fairly powerful Emotion Engine processor are capable of producing in the neighborhood of 10-12 million textured and lit polygons/second, the poor design of the GS and its small pipeline to main memory restrict the final number to roughly half of that.
What? You mean, regardless of the power of the EE processor and the large amount of available memory, the PS2 is still only capable of displaying 5-6 million on-screen polygons? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. By contrast, the Dreamcast has only 16 MB of main memory and a processor that is only capable of one-half the number of polygons/second - ie. 5- 6 million - but the whole point of the exercise is to get these onto your television. An intelligent memory saving technique known as differed rendering, coupled with the PowerVR2DC graphics chip's hardware texture compression abilities, allow the Dreamcast to display all of its generated polygons.
To better understand the PS2's limitations and the Dreamcast's strengths, you need only look at the available video memory for your answer. While the DC has 8MB of VRAM, the PS2 has only 4MB of VRAM. The main problem arises because a polygon takes up roughly 40 bytes of RAM. When you have 5 million of them in a given second, this amounts to 5 million/60fps = 83,333 polygons in a give frame of animation. If each of these polygons uses 40 bytes of VRAM, you will use 3.33 MB displaying these 5 million PPS. This doesn't leave the PS2 much room for it's framebuffer which uses around 1.2MB just to display the end data, not to mention that you still need to leave room for textures to put on those polygons.
Now, there are a few tricks which will allow the PS2 to display 5-6 million PPS, even though it only has a 4MB VRAM cache. One of them is to update the cache more frequently than once a second. But, there are other bandwidth limitations that prevent this from happening more than two or three times per second and the net result is that the PS2 is still limited to 5- 6 million PPS.
Here is a table which summarizes the polygon performance of both next- generation machines:
System Processor Stage Graphics Stage Best Example**
PS2 EE + 32MB 12 million PPS GS + 4MB 6 million PPS* Madden NFL 2001 2 million PPS*
3 M PPS*
* All polygons are textured and lit and represent peak performance
** Only games available right now were considered
Unfortunately, this isn't the PS2's only shortcoming. The reason I emphasize polygon performance at all is because these number have become the defacto standard for judging a console's power, when in fact they tell less than half the story. The main disadvantage of this expensive architecture is it's poor texturing ability.
Texturing Performance
The way texturing works is simple. Polygons and texture data arrive into video memory, textures are applied to the polygons and the result is displayed on screen. Most PC users are used to games with 16MB or more of texture data. A diehard Quake III player might have a setup capable of delivering 32MB of textures during the game. 32MB? But the PS2 and DC only have 4MB and 8MB of VRAM respectively. How can they hope to compete? The answer is that consoles do not hold all of a scene's texture data in memory at once. Usually, the data is streamed over the bus from main memory in a continuous manner.
The Dreamcast is a wonderful texturing beast, due in large part to the efficiency of the PVR2DC's graphics methodology. Two things help the PVR2DC - hardware texture decompression and infinite planes deferred rendering. Unlike the PS2's GS graphics processor, the PVR2DC is capable of decompressing textures on the fly. Thus, DC programmers usually take 20-25MB of texture data and compress it at a 5:1 (sometimes 8:1) ratio to reduce the amount of texture data to only 4 or 5MB. Then, the texture data is sent over the bus to the PVR2DC which simply decompresses the data at the moment of rendering into it's original huge size.
By contrast, the PS2's GS processor has no ability to decompress textures on the fly. This means that all texture data must flow over the relatively small pipeline between main memory and the GS 4MB VRAM cache, at it's original large size. Currently, this fact has limited PS2 games to only around 10 MB of texture data/frame, and this is why the buildings look so similar in Ridge Racer 5. Lack of variety in texturing has made most PS2 games look extremely plain when compared to Dreamcast games like Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, and even Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm.
Moreover, the PVR2DC belongs to the only processor family on the market that uses deferred rendering to texture only those polygons which are facing the gamer in any given frame. Other graphics chips must texture the backs of polygons as well as the front facing polygons. The net effect is to reduce the amount of texturing that the DC has to perform in a given scene by a factor of two or three depending on the complexity of the scene. The greater the scene complexity, the more you see the benefits of deferred rendering. This is why you never see any really large free-roaming 3D games on the PS2. Crazy Taxi, Ecco the Dolphin, and Shenmue are simply not possible on the PS2, because it doesn't have deferred rendering.
Here is another table which summarizes texturing performance for bother machines:
Texture Data Streaming Capacity
System Capacity Decompressed Texturing Ability Best Example*
PS2 10MB/frame (Main Memory -> GS Memory) 10MB/frame on screen Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore*
DC 5MB/frame (Main Memory -> VRAM 25MB/frame on screen Shenmue, Ecco the Dolphin*
* Only games available right now were considered
These two performance measure give you a pretty good idea of why the PS2 is, technically-speaking, a poor hardware design. The biggest problem of all with this architecture, however, is the difficulty that development houses are having extracting reasonable performance out of the machine. All the power in the world under the hood, doesn't do anyone much good if the games don't look good.
Development Environment
The PS2 shipped to developers with incomplete kits last year. By contrast, Sega has been giving excellent support to developers both large and small. Most DC developers are using 5th generation development kits, known as Set 5 Dev Kits. Sony mistakenly made the assumption that third-party PS2 developers would want bare bones development kits so they could program the hardware directly like they have during the last days of the PSX. Unfortunately, key features that are very hard to implement, like anti-aliasing to remove jagged edges from on-screen polygons have not yet surfaced.
Developers have responded to these PS2 programming challenges in a number of ways. Some developers like THQ (Summoner) have used a form of CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) blending to fake the effects that true anti- aliasing would offer. This is something which the DC has had for over two years, but unlike the DC CRT method, the PS2 method results in washed out, blurry textures. Tekken Tag Tournament is the perfect US launch title example. While they have eliminated the jagged edges which plague the Japanese version, the end result is that all of the textures in the game seem blurry or washed out. Hardly what I would call revolutionary for a next-generation console.
Another developmental problem, which is the reason for the jaggies in the first place, is serious lack of kit functions that will intelligently enable developers to overcome some of the limitations of the small size of the GS VRAM cache. While all Dreamcast games run at 640x480 resolution, many PS2 games only utilitize a 640x240 field- rendered display which fakes a 640x480 display. Bad jaggies are the result, and these need to be hidden through some form of anti-aliasing (AA, not yet available), or by using the CRT method described above, with all its unintended consequences.
Moreover, the EE processor is actually three separate CPUs in one core. Most developers, for lack of proper tools, are using only one thirdI remember when the PS2 was first announced and the technical specifications that were bandied about at that time: 75 million polygons/second, unlimited streaming texture potential, 48GB/s of memory bandwidth, and so on. It wasn't long after this that technology analysts began to question Sony's numbers.
Polygon Performance
The 75 million number was reduced to 66 million. Afterwards, it was admitted that these PS2 numbers were a peak performance figure for flat -shaded, identically shaped polygons. Unfortunately, the image of the PS2 as some sort of polygon monster had already become firmly entrenched in the minds of the mainstream media.
Sega chose a more conservative approach, which is in keeping with their new business philosophy - to regain the trust and confidence of gamers. Since its introduction two years ago, Sega has never mislead gamers about the Dreamcast's power. 3+ million polygons is all that Sega ever claims, even though new games like Test Drive: LeMans push closer to five million in 3D scenes loaded with effects.
The truth is that the PS2 has never displayed more than 2-3 million polys in a game. The main problem is a memory one. With only a 4MB VRAM cache on its GS graphics processor, the PS2 is severely limited in what it can achieve on screen. While it's true that 32MB of main memory and the fairly powerful Emotion Engine processor are capable of producing in the neighborhood of 10-12 million textured and lit polygons/second, the poor design of the GS and its small pipeline to main memory restrict the final number to roughly half of that.
What? You mean, regardless of the power of the EE processor and the large amount of available memory, the PS2 is still only capable of displaying 5-6 million on-screen polygons? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. By contrast, the Dreamcast has only 16 MB of main memory and a processor that is only capable of one-half the number of polygons/second - ie. 5- 6 million - but the whole point of the exercise is to get these onto your television. An intelligent memory saving technique known as differed rendering, coupled with the PowerVR2DC graphics chip's hardware texture compression abilities, allow the Dreamcast to display all of its generated polygons.
To better understand the PS2's limitations and the Dreamcast's strengths, you need only look at the available video memory for your answer. While the DC has 8MB of VRAM, the PS2 has only 4MB of VRAM. The main problem arises because a polygon takes up roughly 40 bytes of RAM. When you have 5 million of them in a given second, this amounts to 5 million/60fps = 83,333 polygons in a give frame of animation. If each of these polygons uses 40 bytes of VRAM, you will use 3.33 MB displaying these 5 million PPS. This doesn't leave the PS2 much room for it's framebuffer which uses around 1.2MB just to display the end data, not to mention that you still need to leave room for textures to put on those polygons.
Now, there are a few tricks which will allow the PS2 to display 5-6 million PPS, even though it only has a 4MB VRAM cache. One of them is to update the cache more frequently than once a second. But, there are other bandwidth limitations that prevent this from happening more than two or three times per second and the net result is that the PS2 is still limited to 5- 6 million PPS.
Here is a table which summarizes the polygon performance of both next- generation machines:
System Processor Stage Graphics Stage Best Example**
PS2 EE + 32MB 12 million PPS* GS + 4MB 6 million PPS* Madden NFL 2001 2 million PPS*
DC SH4 + 16MB 6 million PPS* PVR2DC + 8MB 5 million PPS* Ferrari F355 Challenge 3 million PPS*
* All polygons are textured and lit and represent peak performance
** Only games available right now were considered
Unfortunately, this isn't the PS2's only shortcoming. The reason I emphasize polygon performance at all is because these number have become the defacto standard for judging a console's power, when in fact they tell less than half the story. The main disadvantage of this expensive architecture is it's poor texturing ability.
Texturing Performance
The way texturing works is simple. Polygons and texture data arrive into video memory, textures are applied to the polygons and the result is displayed on screen. Most PC users are used to games with 16MB or more of texture data. A diehard Quake III player might have a setup capable of delivering 32MB of textures during the game. 32MB? But the PS2 and DC only have 4MB and 8MB of VRAM respectively. How can they hope to compete? The answer is that consoles do not hold all of a scene's texture data in memory at once. Usually, the data is streamed over the bus from main memory in a continuous manner.
The Dreamcast is a wonderful texturing beast, due in large part to the efficiency of the PVR2DC's graphics methodology. Two things help the PVR2DC - hardware texture decompression and infinite planes deferred rendering. Unlike the PS2's GS graphics processor, the PVR2DC is capable of decompressing textures on the fly. Thus, DC programmers usually take 20-25MB of texture data and compress it at a 5:1 (sometimes 8:1) ratio to reduce the amount of texture data to only 4 or 5MB. Then, the texture data is sent over the bus to the PVR2DC which simply decompresses the data at the moment of rendering into it's original huge size.
By contrast, the PS2's GS processor has no ability to decompress textures on the fly. This means that all texture data must flow over the relatively small pipeline between main memory and the GS 4MB VRAM cache, at it's original large size. Currently, this fact has limited PS2 games to only around 10 MB of texture data/frame, and this is why the buildings look so similar in Ridge Racer 5. Lack of variety in texturing has made most PS2 games look extremely plain when compared to Dreamcast games like Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, and even Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm.
Moreover, the PVR2DC belongs to the only processor family on the market that uses deferred rendering to texture only those polygons which are facing the gamer in any given frame. Other graphics chips must texture the backs of polygons as well as the front facing polygons. The net effect is to reduce the amount of texturing that the DC has to perform in a given scene by a factor of two or three depending on the complexity of the scene. The greater the scene complexity, the more you see the benefits of deferred rendering. This is why you never see any really large free-roaming 3D games on the PS2. Crazy Taxi, Ecco the Dolphin, and Shenmue are simply not possible on the PS2, because it doesn't have deferred rendering.
Here is another table which summarizes texturing performance for bother machines:
Texture Data Streaming Capacity
System Capacity Decompressed Texturing Ability Best Example*
PS2 10MB/frame (Main Memory -> GS Memory) 10MB/frame on screen Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore*
DC 5MB/frame (Main Memory -> VRAM 25MB/frame on screen Shenmue, Ecco the Dolphin*
* Only games available right now were considered
These two performance measure give you a pretty good idea of why the PS2 is, technically-speaking, a poor hardware design. The biggest problem of all with this architecture, however, is the difficulty that development houses are having extracting reasonable performance out of the machine. All the power in the world under the hood, doesn't do anyone much good if the games don't look good.
Development Environment
The PS2 shipped to developers with incomplete kits last year. By contrast, Sega has been giving excellent support to developers both large and small. Most DC developers are using 5th generation development kits, known as Set 5 Dev Kits. Sony mistakenly made the assumption that third-party PS2 developers would want bare bones development kits so they could program the hardware directly like they have during the last days of the PSX. Unfortunately, key features that are very hard to implement, like anti-aliasing to remove jagged edges from on-screen polygons have not yet surfaced.
Developers have responded to these PS2 programming challenges in a number of ways. Some developers like THQ (Summoner) have used a form of CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) blending to fake the effects that true anti- aliasing would offer. This is something which the DC has had for over two years, but unlike the DC CRT method, the PS2 method results in washed out, blurry textures. Tekken Tag Tournament is the perfect US launch title example. While they have eliminated the jagged edges which plague the Japanese version, the end result is that all of the textures in the game seem blurry or washed out. Hardly what I would call revolutionary for a next-generation console.
Another developmental problem, which is the reason for the jaggies in the first place, is serious lack of kit functions that will intelligently enable developers to overcome some of the limitations of the small size of the GS VRAM cache. While all Dreamcast games run at 640x480 resolution, many PS2 games only utilitize a 640x240 field- rendered display which fakes a 640x480 display. Bad jaggies are the result, and these need to be hidden through some form of anti-aliasing (AA, not yet available), or by using the CRT method described above, with all its unintended consequences.
Moreover, the EE processor is actually three separate CPUs in one core. Most developers, for lack of proper tools, are using only one third of the EE's processing ability, because both vector units (VP1 & VP2) are too hard to program. Certainly future games will take advantage of these units, thereby freeing the main CPU to implement some fairly nice AI routines, but the cost of developing these techniques has become enormous - something which I will outline in the next article.
The sad fact is that only a few development houses like EA have been able to extract reasonable next-generation performance out of the PS2 architecture. Even Namco and Konami, the kings of PSX development during the 32 bit era, are having a hard time getting more than 2-3 million PPS out of what is supposed to be the end-all of gaming machines. The fact of the matter is that Namco's 18 month old Soul Calibur on Dreamcast looks worlds better than the newly released Tekken Tag Tournament on PS2. Not very impressive compared to the promises that have been made by Sony and it's cabal of industry sycophants.
Overall
The Dreamcast is the best machine on the market. Tomorrow nothing will have changed. Technically speaking, nothing on the PS2 comes close to the beauty of Shenmue or Ecco, the speed and power of F355 Challenge or Test Drive: LeMans 24, and the sheer elegance and gaming grace of games like Metropolis Street Racer and Jet Grind Radio. If one full motion video demo of Metal Gear Solid 2 has convinced you that the PS2 is the better machine, then you haven't opened your eyes to the reality before you. The best next-generation machine from a technical standpoint is the Sega Dreamcast. Let other less informed individuals buy a machine capable of less, on the promise of one game thirteen months from now. In the meantime, you and I will be enjoying the technically best games for months to come.
of the EE's processing ability, because both vector units (VP1 & VP2) are too hard to program. Certainly future games will take advantage of these units, thereby freeing the main CPU to implement some fairly nice AI routines, but the cost of developing these techniques has become enormous - something which I will outline in the next article.
The sad fact is that only a few development houses like EA have been able to extract reasonable next-generation performance out of the PS2 architecture. Even Namco and Konami, the kings of PSX development during the 32 bit era, are having a hard time getting more than 2-3 million PPS out of what is supposed to be the end-all of gaming machines. The fact of the matter is that Namco's 18 month old Soul Calibur on Dreamcast looks worlds better than the newly released Tekken Tag Tournament on PS2. Not very impressive compared to the promises that have been made by Sony and it's cabal of industry sycophants.
Overall
The Dreamcast is the best machine on the market. Tomorrow nothing will have changed. Technically speaking, nothing on the PS2 comes close to the beauty of Shenmue or Ecco, the speed and power of F355 Challenge or Test Drive: LeMans 24, and the sheer elegance and gaming grace of games like Metropolis Street Racer and Jet Grind Radio. If one full motion video demo of Metal Gear Solid 2 has convinced you that the PS2 is the better machine, then you haven't opened your eyes to the reality before you. The best next-generation machine from a technical standpoint is the Sega Dreamcast. Let other less informed individuals buy a machine capable of less, on the promise of one game thirteen months from now. In the meantime, you and I will be enjoying the technically best games for months to come.
So you've all heard how well the PS2 is doing in Japan, right? Well, the reality is a little more complicated. Currently there is a growing concern that Japanese consumes are purchasing the PS2 mainly as a DVD player. But Sony's PS2 problem run far deeper than that. From production capacity, to production costs, to development cost over- runs, and a host of other troubles, Sony is in big trouble with the PS2.
Production Costs
On the eve of the PS2 launch into the US market, Sony posted a second quarter 57% fall in profitability over the same period in 1999. To quote a Bloomberg article, "Group net profit fell 57 percent to 19.8 billion yen ($183 million), or 21.7 yen per share, in the quarter ended Sept. 30, from 46.5 billion yen, or 113.0 yen, in the year-ago period. Analysts were expecting 26.6 billion yen in profit. The cost of developing the PlayStation 2, which went on sale in the U.S. just hours ago, will lead to an operating loss in the games division in the year ending in March, Sony said. That's overshadowing rising profit for other Sony products such as digital cameras and video recorders."
While it isn't surprising that Sony is losing money with their PS2 launch, the extent of those losses has not yet been realized by most of the mainstream media. Bloomberg estimates that each PS2 costs $488 to build. Therefore, ignoring marketing costs - which can sometimes amount to $50-$60 per unit - every American PS2 represents a loss of $188 that Sony has to recoup with game sales. In Japan, where costs have been closer to $550 per unit, the unit retails for $370 - yielding a similar loss of $180.
The flawed conventional wisdom is that Sony will make up for these problems by lowering their unit costs while selling massive amounts of software, thereby collecting royalty fees that will return them to profitability. Well, for one thing, the unit cost has only fallen by $70 over the last year. Soon, Sony will have to compete with $99 Dreamcasts, $249 GameCubes (likely entry price), and an aggressively priced X-box. There is simply no way for Sony to lower their PS2 costs faster than they need to lower the price of the unit to be competitive. A generous analyst might conclude that they will lower costs by $100 over the next 12 months, but that they will also have to lower their unit pricing by a similar amount.
This leaves software royalties as the only possible way to make good on that $180 we talked about earlier. Unfortunately, Sony's largest royalty on software is $10. Sony produces very few big sellers of their own, with the exception of next year's Gran Turismo 3, and they can't expect to sell more than two of their own titles with each unit. Namco's RR5 and TTT, Tecmo's DoA2, and EA's Madden 2001 are sure to be big enough hits to prevent Sony from making any serious first party in- roads. If they do manage to sell two titles to every PS2 owner, they will increase their royalty to roughly $30 per title. This will give them $60 towards their loss of $180, leaving $120 to be covered by third party royalty fees. In other words, they have to sell software at tie ratios of 14:1 in order to break even!
Let me remind everyone that the PSX, arguably the most successful console in the history of video gaming only has tie ratios of 9:1. The Dreamcast by comparison has tie ratios of 6:1 in the Japanese market, and 5:1 in the US market. The early numbers for the PS2 are horrible. Due to it's popularity as a DVD player, and it's lack of compelling software, the PS2 is currently enjoying software-hardware tie ratios of 1.6:1 in the Japanese market! This is unbelievable. They need to sell 14 titles and they are only selling 1.6.
Sony will never make money on the PS2, and this will have a huge impact on the entire market. The Dreamcast on the other hand is already making a profit in all territories. With production costs of $149 per unit and a market price of $149.99, Sega is already breaking even on the hardware. This frees them to earn large profits with the substantial tie ratios they have already attained. In addition, because so many of the popular games for the system are made by Sega itself, they enjoy increased profitability. I own 21 games, twelve of these are games published by Sega. How's that for tie ratios?
Buying into Sony's flawed business model is only going to get you burned. The PS2 is the trojan horse of the gaming world, so don't get fooled into picking up a console that will be abandoned two years down the road.
Production Capacity
If these weren't big enough problems in their own right, Sony is having even bigger difficulties just trying to produce the console. Last November Sony announced that it had just spent $2 billion dollars to ramp up PS2 production to 500,000 units per month. Then, in February is announced that it would be further increasing production to one million units per month. So, if these numbers were true, Sony should have been able to produce 11 million units by now. The fact is that with less that three million units sold in the Japanese market, and only one million more available in the US this Fall, Sony's production has been somewhere around 4 million units over the past year - roughly one-third of their announced production targets.
By contrast, the Dreamcast production capacity has stood at 500,000 units for more than a year now, so there should be more than enough units to put 3 million more into the US market before the end of the year. This more than anything is giving new life to Sega's Dreamcast which promises to be widely available with the best collection of holiday software a gamer could hope for.
Where has all that production capacity gone? Well, a number of factors are at work here. First of all, the RAMBUS memory used in the PS2 has suffered horrible wafer yields for more than a year now. To explain that further, memory is produced in big chunks called wafers. The good parts of the wafer are kept and the bad parts are discarded. The part that is kept is chopped into smaller chunks which are used to create the 32MB of main memory in the PS2.
Unfortunately, RAMBUS yields have been hovering around 10%. Meaning that 90% of any given wafer is thrown into the trash every time they make the RAM. Unbelievable! The Dreamcast uses off the shelf SDRAM, which is the cheapest best yield memory on the market. Some analysts last year estimated the DC memory costs at $30, and the PS2 memory costs at $150. It's no wonder they can't produce enough units and can't keep their costs down.
Other complicating factors include switching from .25 micron transistors, in the EE and GS processors, to .18 micron transistors. The idea behind this is to shrink the size of the chips, reducing costs, and more importantly reducing the probability of error in the wafers used to stamp these chips. Once again, someone screwed up and the switch to .18 has resulted in extremely poor yields and therefore very low production capacity and high costs.
System Planned Production Actual production
PlayStation 2 11 Million units 4 million units
Dreamcast 6 Million units 6 million units
Sales Numbers
But what about the huge success in the Japanese market against the Dreamcast? Well, as you can see from the following sales table (all figures in millions), the PS2's future is anything but certain, even in Japan.
System Hardware US/JP/EU* Software Sales US/JP/EU*
PS2 .5/2.7/0 = 3.2 million 0/4.3/0 = 4.3 million
DC 2.5/2.0/1.1 = 5.6 million 12.5/12.0/2.5 = 27 million
* As of October 26, 2000
It's the last number that should have Sony worried. The Dreamcast software is selling much better than PS2 software. This is why retailers had better realize that if someone comes into their store with $450 next month, it's going to be far more profitable to sell them a DC and a ton of games than it is to sell them a PS2, a game, a memory card, and a controller.
Development Problems
Lastly, one of the saddest testimonies to the market failure of Sony's PS2, is that development costs have skyrocketed for the machine. Dreamcast title devopment for quality titles is roughly half that of comparable software for the PS2. This has the effect of hurting the smaller developers a lot more than the larger houses. which can afford to float some of these extra costs. To put the US numbers in perspective - there are 50 titles coming out for the PS2 this Christmas. Only 1.3 million units are going to be available, and consumers with really deep pockets might be able to afford three titles. Therefore, the market should see sales of 4 million units, meaning the average game is only going to sell 80,000 copies.
Well, we all know that everyone is picking up an EA Sports Title, one of the fighting games, and maybe one other title. This has the effect of giving most of the PS2 market to EA, Namco and Konami. The smaller developers are screwed. This wouldn't be so bad if development costs weren't so high, but the reality is that the DC is likely going to sell 7-9 million pieces of software this year, enough for smaller development house to do fairly well. Unfortunately, most of these developers have backed the wrong horse.
This bodes poorly for the future. While Namco can sit there and claim that it is doing fine on PS2, Soul Calibur has sold nearly 2 million copies world wide on Dreamcast vs. somewhere around one million copies of TTT by the end of this year on PS2. Not to mention how cheap it was to make Soul Calibur, compared to the struggle that went into TTT.
Next year is going to bring a big wake up call to all of those people who thought the Sony PS2 was some sort of colossal juggernaut about to crush Sega's Dreamcast. Sega has surprised everybody so far, with robust sales of both software and hardware. Sony has surprised everybody too - just not in the way most people expected.
Tell me honestly, when Sony announced their uber-console two years ago, did you ever expect that you would be waiting in line for six hours just for the chance to buy one of these new units? Did you ever expect there to be a memory card shortages? What about the over-heating problems? Did you ever expect the launch list to be full of nothing but sequels to old PSX games? That the backwards compatibility wouldn't be fool-proof? Most of all, did you ever expect PS2 launch games like Tekken Tag Tournament to actually look worse than 18-month old Dreamcast titles like Soul Calibur? Yeah, well... neither did I.
The truth is that the PS2 is having trouble competing with Dreamcast games that are already out, let alone the games that will be arriving over the next few weeks. Here's a genre by genre breakdown of why you should stay clear of Sony's beast until there are major improvements on the software development side.
Fighting
Dreamcast
? Soul Calibur
? Dead or Alive 2
? Ultimate Fighting Championship
? Marvel Vs. Capcom 2
? Street Fighter Alpha 3
PlayStation 2
? Tekken Tag Tournament
? DoA2:Hardcore
? Street Fighter EX
Hands down Soul Calibur is the best looking, UFC is the best playing, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is the most fun, and SF Alpha 3 is the best tribute to its series. Street Fighter EX is horrible. DoA2 is better-looking on Dreamcast but has a few extra modes on PS2 that make this one a wash. As for TTT - what's with the 2D backgrounds, Namco?
Racing
Dreamcast
? Sega GT
? Test Drive: V-Rally
? F355 Challenge
? Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2
PlayStation 2
? Ridge Racer 5
? Wild Wild Racing
? Midnight Club Street Racing
While Ridge Racer 5 is up to the usual Namco standards, the other PS2 racing games are essentially a cruel joke. Dreamcast on the other hand has a slew of excellent racers, all extremely playable from the DC pad because of the brilliant analog triggers. If simulation is your thing, F355 and Sega GT will delight you. If you're more into rally racing, TD:V-Rally is amazingly good. Tokyo Extreme Racing 2 is available there for a more arcade-like experience. In the next couple of months the Dreamcast will see some other amazing racing games - Metropolis Street Racer, Daytona USA Online and Test Drive: LeMans are all unbelievable racers that are absolutely going to kill anything else out there for many months to come.
Sports
Dreamcast
? NFL2K1
? NBA2K1
? Virtua Tennis
? Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2
? Extreme Sports
Playstation 2
? Madden 2001
? NBA Live 2001
? NHL 2001
? SSX
All of the PS2 titles above are quality offerings. Although the gameplay in most EA titles hasn't evolved since the days of the Sega Genesis, the final result is some great looking playable titles. SSX was a nice surprise, but it doesn't seem to offer anything that Extreme Sports for Dreamcast won't. But, the PS2 has two big weaknesses this Fall - no online play, and worse - no Tony Hawk 2. Sure you can play the PSX version on you PS2, but it won't compare to the DC version due out next week. Over the long haul Sega will have to revitalize NHL2K1 and WSB2K2 enough to compete, but online play should carry them over the top for at least the next twelve months. Did I mention that Virtua Tennis is highly addictive and amazing? Well, I should have.
Action
Dreamcast
? Quake III: Arena
? Jet Grind Radio
? House of the Dead 2
? Crazy Taxi
? Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm
? MDK2
PlayStation 2
? Gun Griffon Blaze
? Armored Core 2
Let's face the cold hard truth, GG Blaze and AC 2 are decent titles in their own right, nothing is going to compare for action than a flawless, lag-free conversion of Quake 3: Arena. Nothing except Jet Grind Radio, that is. The inline skating, graffiti tagging, free roaming tribute to urban chaos turned everyone on their head at E3 this year. Expect no less when the title arrives next Wednesday.
Adventure
Dreamcast
? Ecco The Dolphin
? Rayman 2
? Sonic Adventure
? Soul Reaver
PlayStation 2
? Nothing
I should also mention that the Dreamcast will be getting the incredible Shenmue in about ten days. This genre is one of the Dreamcast's strongest because of the PS2's difficulty in rendering large texture intensive 3D game worlds. It seem pretty obvious that the Dreamcast is going to dominate this genre for quite some time... especially with Sonic Adventure 2 just around the corner.
RPG
Dreamcast
? Skies of Arcadia
? Grandia II
PlayStation 2
? Evergrace
? Summoner
This doesn't look like much of a fair fight either. While Summoner actually looks like an enjoyable quick fix, it hardly holds a candle to epic masterpieces like Grandia II and Skies of Arcadia. Evergrace is over course, a joke, but this was a weak genre for the Dreamcast in its early days as well. Good RPGs take time to make, and fortunately, the DC has been available long enough for this to happen.
Music/Puzzle/Other
Dreamcast
? Bust-A-Move 4
? Chu Chu Rocket
? Samba de Amigo
? Space Channel 5
? Seaman
PlayStation 2
? Fantavision
Ever the innovators, Sega has managed to bring some pretty special niche titles over. Samba and SC5 are some of the best music games ever invented, and Seaman is certainly good for a laugh. Don't expect too much from this beleaguered genre on the PS2, but it isn't likely the reason a North American gamer would ever buy a console.
Overall, the Dreamcast has the PS2 beat this year in every major game category, which is twice the price and lacks any online gaming capability. When faced with the decision on what to get this year, you might want to consider the fact that for $400 you can get:
DC Sports Pack, Sonic, Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur, Quake 3, Shenmue, a VMU and a second controller.
Rather than,
PS2, a memory card, a second controller and Madden 2001.
Better yet, grab the SegaNet rebate and pick up Jet Grind Radio, Metropolis and Skies of Arcadia while you're at it. A Dreamcast with ten games for only $400 is the kind of value that Sega is offering you as a gamer. If you can't respect that then you deserve to own a PS2.
John Benn
Royal Slayer of the dreaded Hype Monster.
An article from Segaweb-which is not so bad as it is only the sega division of a company that has sonyweb, nintendoweb, etc."
Page:
Just read articles about how much difficulty konami has with PS2 coding.
I also found this one article, it makes sense:
"I remember when the PS2 was first announced and the technical specifications that were bandied about at that time: 75 million polygons/second, unlimited streaming texture potential, 48GB/s of memory bandwidth, and so on. It wasn't long after this that technology analysts began to question Sony's numbers.
Polygon Performance
The 75 million number was reduced to 66 million. Afterwards, it was admitted that these PS2 numbers were a peak performance figure for flat -shaded, identically shaped polygons. Unfortunately, the image of the PS2 as some sort of polygon monster had already become firmly entrenched in the minds of the mainstream media.
Sega chose a more conservative approach, which is in keeping with their new business philosophy - to regain the trust and confidence of gamers. Since its introduction two years ago, Sega has never mislead gamers about the Dreamcast's power. 3+ million polygons is all that Sega ever claims, even though new games like Test Drive: LeMans push closer to five million in 3D scenes loaded with effects.
The truth is that the PS2 has never displayed more than 2-3 million polys in a game. The main problem is a memory one. With only a 4MB VRAM cache on its GS graphics processor, the PS2 is severely limited in what it can achieve on screen. While it's true that 32MB of main memory and the fairly powerful Emotion Engine processor are capable of producing in the neighborhood of 10-12 million textured and lit polygons/second, the poor design of the GS and its small pipeline to main memory restrict the final number to roughly half of that.
What? You mean, regardless of the power of the EE processor and the large amount of available memory, the PS2 is still only capable of displaying 5-6 million on-screen polygons? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. By contrast, the Dreamcast has only 16 MB of main memory and a processor that is only capable of one-half the number of polygons/second - ie. 5- 6 million - but the whole point of the exercise is to get these onto your television. An intelligent memory saving technique known as differed rendering, coupled with the PowerVR2DC graphics chip's hardware texture compression abilities, allow the Dreamcast to display all of its generated polygons.
To better understand the PS2's limitations and the Dreamcast's strengths, you need only look at the available video memory for your answer. While the DC has 8MB of VRAM, the PS2 has only 4MB of VRAM. The main problem arises because a polygon takes up roughly 40 bytes of RAM. When you have 5 million of them in a given second, this amounts to 5 million/60fps = 83,333 polygons in a give frame of animation. If each of these polygons uses 40 bytes of VRAM, you will use 3.33 MB displaying these 5 million PPS. This doesn't leave the PS2 much room for it's framebuffer which uses around 1.2MB just to display the end data, not to mention that you still need to leave room for textures to put on those polygons.
Now, there are a few tricks which will allow the PS2 to display 5-6 million PPS, even though it only has a 4MB VRAM cache. One of them is to update the cache more frequently than once a second. But, there are other bandwidth limitations that prevent this from happening more than two or three times per second and the net result is that the PS2 is still limited to 5- 6 million PPS.
Here is a table which summarizes the polygon performance of both next- generation machines:
System Processor Stage Graphics Stage Best Example**
PS2 EE + 32MB 12 million PPS GS + 4MB 6 million PPS* Madden NFL 2001 2 million PPS*
3 M PPS*
* All polygons are textured and lit and represent peak performance
** Only games available right now were considered
Unfortunately, this isn't the PS2's only shortcoming. The reason I emphasize polygon performance at all is because these number have become the defacto standard for judging a console's power, when in fact they tell less than half the story. The main disadvantage of this expensive architecture is it's poor texturing ability.
Texturing Performance
The way texturing works is simple. Polygons and texture data arrive into video memory, textures are applied to the polygons and the result is displayed on screen. Most PC users are used to games with 16MB or more of texture data. A diehard Quake III player might have a setup capable of delivering 32MB of textures during the game. 32MB? But the PS2 and DC only have 4MB and 8MB of VRAM respectively. How can they hope to compete? The answer is that consoles do not hold all of a scene's texture data in memory at once. Usually, the data is streamed over the bus from main memory in a continuous manner.
The Dreamcast is a wonderful texturing beast, due in large part to the efficiency of the PVR2DC's graphics methodology. Two things help the PVR2DC - hardware texture decompression and infinite planes deferred rendering. Unlike the PS2's GS graphics processor, the PVR2DC is capable of decompressing textures on the fly. Thus, DC programmers usually take 20-25MB of texture data and compress it at a 5:1 (sometimes 8:1) ratio to reduce the amount of texture data to only 4 or 5MB. Then, the texture data is sent over the bus to the PVR2DC which simply decompresses the data at the moment of rendering into it's original huge size.
By contrast, the PS2's GS processor has no ability to decompress textures on the fly. This means that all texture data must flow over the relatively small pipeline between main memory and the GS 4MB VRAM cache, at it's original large size. Currently, this fact has limited PS2 games to only around 10 MB of texture data/frame, and this is why the buildings look so similar in Ridge Racer 5. Lack of variety in texturing has made most PS2 games look extremely plain when compared to Dreamcast games like Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, and even Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm.
Moreover, the PVR2DC belongs to the only processor family on the market that uses deferred rendering to texture only those polygons which are facing the gamer in any given frame. Other graphics chips must texture the backs of polygons as well as the front facing polygons. The net effect is to reduce the amount of texturing that the DC has to perform in a given scene by a factor of two or three depending on the complexity of the scene. The greater the scene complexity, the more you see the benefits of deferred rendering. This is why you never see any really large free-roaming 3D games on the PS2. Crazy Taxi, Ecco the Dolphin, and Shenmue are simply not possible on the PS2, because it doesn't have deferred rendering.
Here is another table which summarizes texturing performance for bother machines:
Texture Data Streaming Capacity
System Capacity Decompressed Texturing Ability Best Example*
PS2 10MB/frame (Main Memory -> GS Memory) 10MB/frame on screen Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore*
DC 5MB/frame (Main Memory -> VRAM 25MB/frame on screen Shenmue, Ecco the Dolphin*
* Only games available right now were considered
These two performance measure give you a pretty good idea of why the PS2 is, technically-speaking, a poor hardware design. The biggest problem of all with this architecture, however, is the difficulty that development houses are having extracting reasonable performance out of the machine. All the power in the world under the hood, doesn't do anyone much good if the games don't look good.
Development Environment
The PS2 shipped to developers with incomplete kits last year. By contrast, Sega has been giving excellent support to developers both large and small. Most DC developers are using 5th generation development kits, known as Set 5 Dev Kits. Sony mistakenly made the assumption that third-party PS2 developers would want bare bones development kits so they could program the hardware directly like they have during the last days of the PSX. Unfortunately, key features that are very hard to implement, like anti-aliasing to remove jagged edges from on-screen polygons have not yet surfaced.
Developers have responded to these PS2 programming challenges in a number of ways. Some developers like THQ (Summoner) have used a form of CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) blending to fake the effects that true anti- aliasing would offer. This is something which the DC has had for over two years, but unlike the DC CRT method, the PS2 method results in washed out, blurry textures. Tekken Tag Tournament is the perfect US launch title example. While they have eliminated the jagged edges which plague the Japanese version, the end result is that all of the textures in the game seem blurry or washed out. Hardly what I would call revolutionary for a next-generation console.
Another developmental problem, which is the reason for the jaggies in the first place, is serious lack of kit functions that will intelligently enable developers to overcome some of the limitations of the small size of the GS VRAM cache. While all Dreamcast games run at 640x480 resolution, many PS2 games only utilitize a 640x240 field- rendered display which fakes a 640x480 display. Bad jaggies are the result, and these need to be hidden through some form of anti-aliasing (AA, not yet available), or by using the CRT method described above, with all its unintended consequences.
Moreover, the EE processor is actually three separate CPUs in one core. Most developers, for lack of proper tools, are using only one thirdI remember when the PS2 was first announced and the technical specifications that were bandied about at that time: 75 million polygons/second, unlimited streaming texture potential, 48GB/s of memory bandwidth, and so on. It wasn't long after this that technology analysts began to question Sony's numbers.
Polygon Performance
The 75 million number was reduced to 66 million. Afterwards, it was admitted that these PS2 numbers were a peak performance figure for flat -shaded, identically shaped polygons. Unfortunately, the image of the PS2 as some sort of polygon monster had already become firmly entrenched in the minds of the mainstream media.
Sega chose a more conservative approach, which is in keeping with their new business philosophy - to regain the trust and confidence of gamers. Since its introduction two years ago, Sega has never mislead gamers about the Dreamcast's power. 3+ million polygons is all that Sega ever claims, even though new games like Test Drive: LeMans push closer to five million in 3D scenes loaded with effects.
The truth is that the PS2 has never displayed more than 2-3 million polys in a game. The main problem is a memory one. With only a 4MB VRAM cache on its GS graphics processor, the PS2 is severely limited in what it can achieve on screen. While it's true that 32MB of main memory and the fairly powerful Emotion Engine processor are capable of producing in the neighborhood of 10-12 million textured and lit polygons/second, the poor design of the GS and its small pipeline to main memory restrict the final number to roughly half of that.
What? You mean, regardless of the power of the EE processor and the large amount of available memory, the PS2 is still only capable of displaying 5-6 million on-screen polygons? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. By contrast, the Dreamcast has only 16 MB of main memory and a processor that is only capable of one-half the number of polygons/second - ie. 5- 6 million - but the whole point of the exercise is to get these onto your television. An intelligent memory saving technique known as differed rendering, coupled with the PowerVR2DC graphics chip's hardware texture compression abilities, allow the Dreamcast to display all of its generated polygons.
To better understand the PS2's limitations and the Dreamcast's strengths, you need only look at the available video memory for your answer. While the DC has 8MB of VRAM, the PS2 has only 4MB of VRAM. The main problem arises because a polygon takes up roughly 40 bytes of RAM. When you have 5 million of them in a given second, this amounts to 5 million/60fps = 83,333 polygons in a give frame of animation. If each of these polygons uses 40 bytes of VRAM, you will use 3.33 MB displaying these 5 million PPS. This doesn't leave the PS2 much room for it's framebuffer which uses around 1.2MB just to display the end data, not to mention that you still need to leave room for textures to put on those polygons.
Now, there are a few tricks which will allow the PS2 to display 5-6 million PPS, even though it only has a 4MB VRAM cache. One of them is to update the cache more frequently than once a second. But, there are other bandwidth limitations that prevent this from happening more than two or three times per second and the net result is that the PS2 is still limited to 5- 6 million PPS.
Here is a table which summarizes the polygon performance of both next- generation machines:
System Processor Stage Graphics Stage Best Example**
PS2 EE + 32MB 12 million PPS* GS + 4MB 6 million PPS* Madden NFL 2001 2 million PPS*
DC SH4 + 16MB 6 million PPS* PVR2DC + 8MB 5 million PPS* Ferrari F355 Challenge 3 million PPS*
* All polygons are textured and lit and represent peak performance
** Only games available right now were considered
Unfortunately, this isn't the PS2's only shortcoming. The reason I emphasize polygon performance at all is because these number have become the defacto standard for judging a console's power, when in fact they tell less than half the story. The main disadvantage of this expensive architecture is it's poor texturing ability.
Texturing Performance
The way texturing works is simple. Polygons and texture data arrive into video memory, textures are applied to the polygons and the result is displayed on screen. Most PC users are used to games with 16MB or more of texture data. A diehard Quake III player might have a setup capable of delivering 32MB of textures during the game. 32MB? But the PS2 and DC only have 4MB and 8MB of VRAM respectively. How can they hope to compete? The answer is that consoles do not hold all of a scene's texture data in memory at once. Usually, the data is streamed over the bus from main memory in a continuous manner.
The Dreamcast is a wonderful texturing beast, due in large part to the efficiency of the PVR2DC's graphics methodology. Two things help the PVR2DC - hardware texture decompression and infinite planes deferred rendering. Unlike the PS2's GS graphics processor, the PVR2DC is capable of decompressing textures on the fly. Thus, DC programmers usually take 20-25MB of texture data and compress it at a 5:1 (sometimes 8:1) ratio to reduce the amount of texture data to only 4 or 5MB. Then, the texture data is sent over the bus to the PVR2DC which simply decompresses the data at the moment of rendering into it's original huge size.
By contrast, the PS2's GS processor has no ability to decompress textures on the fly. This means that all texture data must flow over the relatively small pipeline between main memory and the GS 4MB VRAM cache, at it's original large size. Currently, this fact has limited PS2 games to only around 10 MB of texture data/frame, and this is why the buildings look so similar in Ridge Racer 5. Lack of variety in texturing has made most PS2 games look extremely plain when compared to Dreamcast games like Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, and even Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm.
Moreover, the PVR2DC belongs to the only processor family on the market that uses deferred rendering to texture only those polygons which are facing the gamer in any given frame. Other graphics chips must texture the backs of polygons as well as the front facing polygons. The net effect is to reduce the amount of texturing that the DC has to perform in a given scene by a factor of two or three depending on the complexity of the scene. The greater the scene complexity, the more you see the benefits of deferred rendering. This is why you never see any really large free-roaming 3D games on the PS2. Crazy Taxi, Ecco the Dolphin, and Shenmue are simply not possible on the PS2, because it doesn't have deferred rendering.
Here is another table which summarizes texturing performance for bother machines:
Texture Data Streaming Capacity
System Capacity Decompressed Texturing Ability Best Example*
PS2 10MB/frame (Main Memory -> GS Memory) 10MB/frame on screen Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore*
DC 5MB/frame (Main Memory -> VRAM 25MB/frame on screen Shenmue, Ecco the Dolphin*
* Only games available right now were considered
These two performance measure give you a pretty good idea of why the PS2 is, technically-speaking, a poor hardware design. The biggest problem of all with this architecture, however, is the difficulty that development houses are having extracting reasonable performance out of the machine. All the power in the world under the hood, doesn't do anyone much good if the games don't look good.
Development Environment
The PS2 shipped to developers with incomplete kits last year. By contrast, Sega has been giving excellent support to developers both large and small. Most DC developers are using 5th generation development kits, known as Set 5 Dev Kits. Sony mistakenly made the assumption that third-party PS2 developers would want bare bones development kits so they could program the hardware directly like they have during the last days of the PSX. Unfortunately, key features that are very hard to implement, like anti-aliasing to remove jagged edges from on-screen polygons have not yet surfaced.
Developers have responded to these PS2 programming challenges in a number of ways. Some developers like THQ (Summoner) have used a form of CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) blending to fake the effects that true anti- aliasing would offer. This is something which the DC has had for over two years, but unlike the DC CRT method, the PS2 method results in washed out, blurry textures. Tekken Tag Tournament is the perfect US launch title example. While they have eliminated the jagged edges which plague the Japanese version, the end result is that all of the textures in the game seem blurry or washed out. Hardly what I would call revolutionary for a next-generation console.
Another developmental problem, which is the reason for the jaggies in the first place, is serious lack of kit functions that will intelligently enable developers to overcome some of the limitations of the small size of the GS VRAM cache. While all Dreamcast games run at 640x480 resolution, many PS2 games only utilitize a 640x240 field- rendered display which fakes a 640x480 display. Bad jaggies are the result, and these need to be hidden through some form of anti-aliasing (AA, not yet available), or by using the CRT method described above, with all its unintended consequences.
Moreover, the EE processor is actually three separate CPUs in one core. Most developers, for lack of proper tools, are using only one third of the EE's processing ability, because both vector units (VP1 & VP2) are too hard to program. Certainly future games will take advantage of these units, thereby freeing the main CPU to implement some fairly nice AI routines, but the cost of developing these techniques has become enormous - something which I will outline in the next article.
The sad fact is that only a few development houses like EA have been able to extract reasonable next-generation performance out of the PS2 architecture. Even Namco and Konami, the kings of PSX development during the 32 bit era, are having a hard time getting more than 2-3 million PPS out of what is supposed to be the end-all of gaming machines. The fact of the matter is that Namco's 18 month old Soul Calibur on Dreamcast looks worlds better than the newly released Tekken Tag Tournament on PS2. Not very impressive compared to the promises that have been made by Sony and it's cabal of industry sycophants.
Overall
The Dreamcast is the best machine on the market. Tomorrow nothing will have changed. Technically speaking, nothing on the PS2 comes close to the beauty of Shenmue or Ecco, the speed and power of F355 Challenge or Test Drive: LeMans 24, and the sheer elegance and gaming grace of games like Metropolis Street Racer and Jet Grind Radio. If one full motion video demo of Metal Gear Solid 2 has convinced you that the PS2 is the better machine, then you haven't opened your eyes to the reality before you. The best next-generation machine from a technical standpoint is the Sega Dreamcast. Let other less informed individuals buy a machine capable of less, on the promise of one game thirteen months from now. In the meantime, you and I will be enjoying the technically best games for months to come.
of the EE's processing ability, because both vector units (VP1 & VP2) are too hard to program. Certainly future games will take advantage of these units, thereby freeing the main CPU to implement some fairly nice AI routines, but the cost of developing these techniques has become enormous - something which I will outline in the next article.
The sad fact is that only a few development houses like EA have been able to extract reasonable next-generation performance out of the PS2 architecture. Even Namco and Konami, the kings of PSX development during the 32 bit era, are having a hard time getting more than 2-3 million PPS out of what is supposed to be the end-all of gaming machines. The fact of the matter is that Namco's 18 month old Soul Calibur on Dreamcast looks worlds better than the newly released Tekken Tag Tournament on PS2. Not very impressive compared to the promises that have been made by Sony and it's cabal of industry sycophants.
Overall
The Dreamcast is the best machine on the market. Tomorrow nothing will have changed. Technically speaking, nothing on the PS2 comes close to the beauty of Shenmue or Ecco, the speed and power of F355 Challenge or Test Drive: LeMans 24, and the sheer elegance and gaming grace of games like Metropolis Street Racer and Jet Grind Radio. If one full motion video demo of Metal Gear Solid 2 has convinced you that the PS2 is the better machine, then you haven't opened your eyes to the reality before you. The best next-generation machine from a technical standpoint is the Sega Dreamcast. Let other less informed individuals buy a machine capable of less, on the promise of one game thirteen months from now. In the meantime, you and I will be enjoying the technically best games for months to come.
So you've all heard how well the PS2 is doing in Japan, right? Well, the reality is a little more complicated. Currently there is a growing concern that Japanese consumes are purchasing the PS2 mainly as a DVD player. But Sony's PS2 problem run far deeper than that. From production capacity, to production costs, to development cost over- runs, and a host of other troubles, Sony is in big trouble with the PS2.
Production Costs
On the eve of the PS2 launch into the US market, Sony posted a second quarter 57% fall in profitability over the same period in 1999. To quote a Bloomberg article, "Group net profit fell 57 percent to 19.8 billion yen ($183 million), or 21.7 yen per share, in the quarter ended Sept. 30, from 46.5 billion yen, or 113.0 yen, in the year-ago period. Analysts were expecting 26.6 billion yen in profit. The cost of developing the PlayStation 2, which went on sale in the U.S. just hours ago, will lead to an operating loss in the games division in the year ending in March, Sony said. That's overshadowing rising profit for other Sony products such as digital cameras and video recorders."
While it isn't surprising that Sony is losing money with their PS2 launch, the extent of those losses has not yet been realized by most of the mainstream media. Bloomberg estimates that each PS2 costs $488 to build. Therefore, ignoring marketing costs - which can sometimes amount to $50-$60 per unit - every American PS2 represents a loss of $188 that Sony has to recoup with game sales. In Japan, where costs have been closer to $550 per unit, the unit retails for $370 - yielding a similar loss of $180.
The flawed conventional wisdom is that Sony will make up for these problems by lowering their unit costs while selling massive amounts of software, thereby collecting royalty fees that will return them to profitability. Well, for one thing, the unit cost has only fallen by $70 over the last year. Soon, Sony will have to compete with $99 Dreamcasts, $249 GameCubes (likely entry price), and an aggressively priced X-box. There is simply no way for Sony to lower their PS2 costs faster than they need to lower the price of the unit to be competitive. A generous analyst might conclude that they will lower costs by $100 over the next 12 months, but that they will also have to lower their unit pricing by a similar amount.
This leaves software royalties as the only possible way to make good on that $180 we talked about earlier. Unfortunately, Sony's largest royalty on software is $10. Sony produces very few big sellers of their own, with the exception of next year's Gran Turismo 3, and they can't expect to sell more than two of their own titles with each unit. Namco's RR5 and TTT, Tecmo's DoA2, and EA's Madden 2001 are sure to be big enough hits to prevent Sony from making any serious first party in- roads. If they do manage to sell two titles to every PS2 owner, they will increase their royalty to roughly $30 per title. This will give them $60 towards their loss of $180, leaving $120 to be covered by third party royalty fees. In other words, they have to sell software at tie ratios of 14:1 in order to break even!
Let me remind everyone that the PSX, arguably the most successful console in the history of video gaming only has tie ratios of 9:1. The Dreamcast by comparison has tie ratios of 6:1 in the Japanese market, and 5:1 in the US market. The early numbers for the PS2 are horrible. Due to it's popularity as a DVD player, and it's lack of compelling software, the PS2 is currently enjoying software-hardware tie ratios of 1.6:1 in the Japanese market! This is unbelievable. They need to sell 14 titles and they are only selling 1.6.
Sony will never make money on the PS2, and this will have a huge impact on the entire market. The Dreamcast on the other hand is already making a profit in all territories. With production costs of $149 per unit and a market price of $149.99, Sega is already breaking even on the hardware. This frees them to earn large profits with the substantial tie ratios they have already attained. In addition, because so many of the popular games for the system are made by Sega itself, they enjoy increased profitability. I own 21 games, twelve of these are games published by Sega. How's that for tie ratios?
Buying into Sony's flawed business model is only going to get you burned. The PS2 is the trojan horse of the gaming world, so don't get fooled into picking up a console that will be abandoned two years down the road.
Production Capacity
If these weren't big enough problems in their own right, Sony is having even bigger difficulties just trying to produce the console. Last November Sony announced that it had just spent $2 billion dollars to ramp up PS2 production to 500,000 units per month. Then, in February is announced that it would be further increasing production to one million units per month. So, if these numbers were true, Sony should have been able to produce 11 million units by now. The fact is that with less that three million units sold in the Japanese market, and only one million more available in the US this Fall, Sony's production has been somewhere around 4 million units over the past year - roughly one-third of their announced production targets.
By contrast, the Dreamcast production capacity has stood at 500,000 units for more than a year now, so there should be more than enough units to put 3 million more into the US market before the end of the year. This more than anything is giving new life to Sega's Dreamcast which promises to be widely available with the best collection of holiday software a gamer could hope for.
Where has all that production capacity gone? Well, a number of factors are at work here. First of all, the RAMBUS memory used in the PS2 has suffered horrible wafer yields for more than a year now. To explain that further, memory is produced in big chunks called wafers. The good parts of the wafer are kept and the bad parts are discarded. The part that is kept is chopped into smaller chunks which are used to create the 32MB of main memory in the PS2.
Unfortunately, RAMBUS yields have been hovering around 10%. Meaning that 90% of any given wafer is thrown into the trash every time they make the RAM. Unbelievable! The Dreamcast uses off the shelf SDRAM, which is the cheapest best yield memory on the market. Some analysts last year estimated the DC memory costs at $30, and the PS2 memory costs at $150. It's no wonder they can't produce enough units and can't keep their costs down.
Other complicating factors include switching from .25 micron transistors, in the EE and GS processors, to .18 micron transistors. The idea behind this is to shrink the size of the chips, reducing costs, and more importantly reducing the probability of error in the wafers used to stamp these chips. Once again, someone screwed up and the switch to .18 has resulted in extremely poor yields and therefore very low production capacity and high costs.
System Planned Production Actual production
PlayStation 2 11 Million units 4 million units
Dreamcast 6 Million units 6 million units
Sales Numbers
But what about the huge success in the Japanese market against the Dreamcast? Well, as you can see from the following sales table (all figures in millions), the PS2's future is anything but certain, even in Japan.
System Hardware US/JP/EU* Software Sales US/JP/EU*
PS2 .5/2.7/0 = 3.2 million 0/4.3/0 = 4.3 million
DC 2.5/2.0/1.1 = 5.6 million 12.5/12.0/2.5 = 27 million
* As of October 26, 2000
It's the last number that should have Sony worried. The Dreamcast software is selling much better than PS2 software. This is why retailers had better realize that if someone comes into their store with $450 next month, it's going to be far more profitable to sell them a DC and a ton of games than it is to sell them a PS2, a game, a memory card, and a controller.
Development Problems
Lastly, one of the saddest testimonies to the market failure of Sony's PS2, is that development costs have skyrocketed for the machine. Dreamcast title devopment for quality titles is roughly half that of comparable software for the PS2. This has the effect of hurting the smaller developers a lot more than the larger houses. which can afford to float some of these extra costs. To put the US numbers in perspective - there are 50 titles coming out for the PS2 this Christmas. Only 1.3 million units are going to be available, and consumers with really deep pockets might be able to afford three titles. Therefore, the market should see sales of 4 million units, meaning the average game is only going to sell 80,000 copies.
Well, we all know that everyone is picking up an EA Sports Title, one of the fighting games, and maybe one other title. This has the effect of giving most of the PS2 market to EA, Namco and Konami. The smaller developers are screwed. This wouldn't be so bad if development costs weren't so high, but the reality is that the DC is likely going to sell 7-9 million pieces of software this year, enough for smaller development house to do fairly well. Unfortunately, most of these developers have backed the wrong horse.
This bodes poorly for the future. While Namco can sit there and claim that it is doing fine on PS2, Soul Calibur has sold nearly 2 million copies world wide on Dreamcast vs. somewhere around one million copies of TTT by the end of this year on PS2. Not to mention how cheap it was to make Soul Calibur, compared to the struggle that went into TTT.
Next year is going to bring a big wake up call to all of those people who thought the Sony PS2 was some sort of colossal juggernaut about to crush Sega's Dreamcast. Sega has surprised everybody so far, with robust sales of both software and hardware. Sony has surprised everybody too - just not in the way most people expected.
Tell me honestly, when Sony announced their uber-console two years ago, did you ever expect that you would be waiting in line for six hours just for the chance to buy one of these new units? Did you ever expect there to be a memory card shortages? What about the over-heating problems? Did you ever expect the launch list to be full of nothing but sequels to old PSX games? That the backwards compatibility wouldn't be fool-proof? Most of all, did you ever expect PS2 launch games like Tekken Tag Tournament to actually look worse than 18-month old Dreamcast titles like Soul Calibur? Yeah, well... neither did I.
The truth is that the PS2 is having trouble competing with Dreamcast games that are already out, let alone the games that will be arriving over the next few weeks. Here's a genre by genre breakdown of why you should stay clear of Sony's beast until there are major improvements on the software development side.
Fighting
Dreamcast
? Soul Calibur
? Dead or Alive 2
? Ultimate Fighting Championship
? Marvel Vs. Capcom 2
? Street Fighter Alpha 3
PlayStation 2
? Tekken Tag Tournament
? DoA2:Hardcore
? Street Fighter EX
Hands down Soul Calibur is the best looking, UFC is the best playing, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is the most fun, and SF Alpha 3 is the best tribute to its series. Street Fighter EX is horrible. DoA2 is better-looking on Dreamcast but has a few extra modes on PS2 that make this one a wash. As for TTT - what's with the 2D backgrounds, Namco?
Racing
Dreamcast
? Sega GT
? Test Drive: V-Rally
? F355 Challenge
? Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2
PlayStation 2
? Ridge Racer 5
? Wild Wild Racing
? Midnight Club Street Racing
While Ridge Racer 5 is up to the usual Namco standards, the other PS2 racing games are essentially a cruel joke. Dreamcast on the other hand has a slew of excellent racers, all extremely playable from the DC pad because of the brilliant analog triggers. If simulation is your thing, F355 and Sega GT will delight you. If you're more into rally racing, TD:V-Rally is amazingly good. Tokyo Extreme Racing 2 is available there for a more arcade-like experience. In the next couple of months the Dreamcast will see some other amazing racing games - Metropolis Street Racer, Daytona USA Online and Test Drive: LeMans are all unbelievable racers that are absolutely going to kill anything else out there for many months to come.
Sports
Dreamcast
? NFL2K1
? NBA2K1
? Virtua Tennis
? Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2
? Extreme Sports
Playstation 2
? Madden 2001
? NBA Live 2001
? NHL 2001
? SSX
All of the PS2 titles above are quality offerings. Although the gameplay in most EA titles hasn't evolved since the days of the Sega Genesis, the final result is some great looking playable titles. SSX was a nice surprise, but it doesn't seem to offer anything that Extreme Sports for Dreamcast won't. But, the PS2 has two big weaknesses this Fall - no online play, and worse - no Tony Hawk 2. Sure you can play the PSX version on you PS2, but it won't compare to the DC version due out next week. Over the long haul Sega will have to revitalize NHL2K1 and WSB2K2 enough to compete, but online play should carry them over the top for at least the next twelve months. Did I mention that Virtua Tennis is highly addictive and amazing? Well, I should have.
Action
Dreamcast
? Quake III: Arena
? Jet Grind Radio
? House of the Dead 2
? Crazy Taxi
? Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm
? MDK2
PlayStation 2
? Gun Griffon Blaze
? Armored Core 2
Let's face the cold hard truth, GG Blaze and AC 2 are decent titles in their own right, nothing is going to compare for action than a flawless, lag-free conversion of Quake 3: Arena. Nothing except Jet Grind Radio, that is. The inline skating, graffiti tagging, free roaming tribute to urban chaos turned everyone on their head at E3 this year. Expect no less when the title arrives next Wednesday.
Adventure
Dreamcast
? Ecco The Dolphin
? Rayman 2
? Sonic Adventure
? Soul Reaver
PlayStation 2
? Nothing
I should also mention that the Dreamcast will be getting the incredible Shenmue in about ten days. This genre is one of the Dreamcast's strongest because of the PS2's difficulty in rendering large texture intensive 3D game worlds. It seem pretty obvious that the Dreamcast is going to dominate this genre for quite some time... especially with Sonic Adventure 2 just around the corner.
RPG
Dreamcast
? Skies of Arcadia
? Grandia II
PlayStation 2
? Evergrace
? Summoner
This doesn't look like much of a fair fight either. While Summoner actually looks like an enjoyable quick fix, it hardly holds a candle to epic masterpieces like Grandia II and Skies of Arcadia. Evergrace is over course, a joke, but this was a weak genre for the Dreamcast in its early days as well. Good RPGs take time to make, and fortunately, the DC has been available long enough for this to happen.
Music/Puzzle/Other
Dreamcast
? Bust-A-Move 4
? Chu Chu Rocket
? Samba de Amigo
? Space Channel 5
? Seaman
PlayStation 2
? Fantavision
Ever the innovators, Sega has managed to bring some pretty special niche titles over. Samba and SC5 are some of the best music games ever invented, and Seaman is certainly good for a laugh. Don't expect too much from this beleaguered genre on the PS2, but it isn't likely the reason a North American gamer would ever buy a console.
Overall, the Dreamcast has the PS2 beat this year in every major game category, which is twice the price and lacks any online gaming capability. When faced with the decision on what to get this year, you might want to consider the fact that for $400 you can get:
DC Sports Pack, Sonic, Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur, Quake 3, Shenmue, a VMU and a second controller.
Rather than,
PS2, a memory card, a second controller and Madden 2001.
Better yet, grab the SegaNet rebate and pick up Jet Grind Radio, Metropolis and Skies of Arcadia while you're at it. A Dreamcast with ten games for only $400 is the kind of value that Sega is offering you as a gamer. If you can't respect that then you deserve to own a PS2.
John Benn
Royal Slayer of the dreaded Hype Monster.
An article from Segaweb-which is not so bad as it is only the sega division of a company that has sonyweb, nintendoweb, etc."
I also found this one article, it makes sense:
"I remember when the PS2 was first announced and the technical specifications that were bandied about at that time: 75 million polygons/second, unlimited streaming texture potential, 48GB/s of memory bandwidth, and so on. It wasn't long after this that technology analysts began to question Sony's numbers.
Polygon Performance
The 75 million number was reduced to 66 million. Afterwards, it was admitted that these PS2 numbers were a peak performance figure for flat -shaded, identically shaped polygons. Unfortunately, the image of the PS2 as some sort of polygon monster had already become firmly entrenched in the minds of the mainstream media.
Sega chose a more conservative approach, which is in keeping with their new business philosophy - to regain the trust and confidence of gamers. Since its introduction two years ago, Sega has never mislead gamers about the Dreamcast's power. 3+ million polygons is all that Sega ever claims, even though new games like Test Drive: LeMans push closer to five million in 3D scenes loaded with effects.
The truth is that the PS2 has never displayed more than 2-3 million polys in a game. The main problem is a memory one. With only a 4MB VRAM cache on its GS graphics processor, the PS2 is severely limited in what it can achieve on screen. While it's true that 32MB of main memory and the fairly powerful Emotion Engine processor are capable of producing in the neighborhood of 10-12 million textured and lit polygons/second, the poor design of the GS and its small pipeline to main memory restrict the final number to roughly half of that.
What? You mean, regardless of the power of the EE processor and the large amount of available memory, the PS2 is still only capable of displaying 5-6 million on-screen polygons? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. By contrast, the Dreamcast has only 16 MB of main memory and a processor that is only capable of one-half the number of polygons/second - ie. 5- 6 million - but the whole point of the exercise is to get these onto your television. An intelligent memory saving technique known as differed rendering, coupled with the PowerVR2DC graphics chip's hardware texture compression abilities, allow the Dreamcast to display all of its generated polygons.
To better understand the PS2's limitations and the Dreamcast's strengths, you need only look at the available video memory for your answer. While the DC has 8MB of VRAM, the PS2 has only 4MB of VRAM. The main problem arises because a polygon takes up roughly 40 bytes of RAM. When you have 5 million of them in a given second, this amounts to 5 million/60fps = 83,333 polygons in a give frame of animation. If each of these polygons uses 40 bytes of VRAM, you will use 3.33 MB displaying these 5 million PPS. This doesn't leave the PS2 much room for it's framebuffer which uses around 1.2MB just to display the end data, not to mention that you still need to leave room for textures to put on those polygons.
Now, there are a few tricks which will allow the PS2 to display 5-6 million PPS, even though it only has a 4MB VRAM cache. One of them is to update the cache more frequently than once a second. But, there are other bandwidth limitations that prevent this from happening more than two or three times per second and the net result is that the PS2 is still limited to 5- 6 million PPS.
Here is a table which summarizes the polygon performance of both next- generation machines:
System Processor Stage Graphics Stage Best Example**
PS2 EE + 32MB 12 million PPS GS + 4MB 6 million PPS* Madden NFL 2001 2 million PPS*
3 M PPS*
* All polygons are textured and lit and represent peak performance
** Only games available right now were considered
Unfortunately, this isn't the PS2's only shortcoming. The reason I emphasize polygon performance at all is because these number have become the defacto standard for judging a console's power, when in fact they tell less than half the story. The main disadvantage of this expensive architecture is it's poor texturing ability.
Texturing Performance
The way texturing works is simple. Polygons and texture data arrive into video memory, textures are applied to the polygons and the result is displayed on screen. Most PC users are used to games with 16MB or more of texture data. A diehard Quake III player might have a setup capable of delivering 32MB of textures during the game. 32MB? But the PS2 and DC only have 4MB and 8MB of VRAM respectively. How can they hope to compete? The answer is that consoles do not hold all of a scene's texture data in memory at once. Usually, the data is streamed over the bus from main memory in a continuous manner.
The Dreamcast is a wonderful texturing beast, due in large part to the efficiency of the PVR2DC's graphics methodology. Two things help the PVR2DC - hardware texture decompression and infinite planes deferred rendering. Unlike the PS2's GS graphics processor, the PVR2DC is capable of decompressing textures on the fly. Thus, DC programmers usually take 20-25MB of texture data and compress it at a 5:1 (sometimes 8:1) ratio to reduce the amount of texture data to only 4 or 5MB. Then, the texture data is sent over the bus to the PVR2DC which simply decompresses the data at the moment of rendering into it's original huge size.
By contrast, the PS2's GS processor has no ability to decompress textures on the fly. This means that all texture data must flow over the relatively small pipeline between main memory and the GS 4MB VRAM cache, at it's original large size. Currently, this fact has limited PS2 games to only around 10 MB of texture data/frame, and this is why the buildings look so similar in Ridge Racer 5. Lack of variety in texturing has made most PS2 games look extremely plain when compared to Dreamcast games like Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, and even Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm.
Moreover, the PVR2DC belongs to the only processor family on the market that uses deferred rendering to texture only those polygons which are facing the gamer in any given frame. Other graphics chips must texture the backs of polygons as well as the front facing polygons. The net effect is to reduce the amount of texturing that the DC has to perform in a given scene by a factor of two or three depending on the complexity of the scene. The greater the scene complexity, the more you see the benefits of deferred rendering. This is why you never see any really large free-roaming 3D games on the PS2. Crazy Taxi, Ecco the Dolphin, and Shenmue are simply not possible on the PS2, because it doesn't have deferred rendering.
Here is another table which summarizes texturing performance for bother machines:
Texture Data Streaming Capacity
System Capacity Decompressed Texturing Ability Best Example*
PS2 10MB/frame (Main Memory -> GS Memory) 10MB/frame on screen Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore*
DC 5MB/frame (Main Memory -> VRAM 25MB/frame on screen Shenmue, Ecco the Dolphin*
* Only games available right now were considered
These two performance measure give you a pretty good idea of why the PS2 is, technically-speaking, a poor hardware design. The biggest problem of all with this architecture, however, is the difficulty that development houses are having extracting reasonable performance out of the machine. All the power in the world under the hood, doesn't do anyone much good if the games don't look good.
Development Environment
The PS2 shipped to developers with incomplete kits last year. By contrast, Sega has been giving excellent support to developers both large and small. Most DC developers are using 5th generation development kits, known as Set 5 Dev Kits. Sony mistakenly made the assumption that third-party PS2 developers would want bare bones development kits so they could program the hardware directly like they have during the last days of the PSX. Unfortunately, key features that are very hard to implement, like anti-aliasing to remove jagged edges from on-screen polygons have not yet surfaced.
Developers have responded to these PS2 programming challenges in a number of ways. Some developers like THQ (Summoner) have used a form of CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) blending to fake the effects that true anti- aliasing would offer. This is something which the DC has had for over two years, but unlike the DC CRT method, the PS2 method results in washed out, blurry textures. Tekken Tag Tournament is the perfect US launch title example. While they have eliminated the jagged edges which plague the Japanese version, the end result is that all of the textures in the game seem blurry or washed out. Hardly what I would call revolutionary for a next-generation console.
Another developmental problem, which is the reason for the jaggies in the first place, is serious lack of kit functions that will intelligently enable developers to overcome some of the limitations of the small size of the GS VRAM cache. While all Dreamcast games run at 640x480 resolution, many PS2 games only utilitize a 640x240 field- rendered display which fakes a 640x480 display. Bad jaggies are the result, and these need to be hidden through some form of anti-aliasing (AA, not yet available), or by using the CRT method described above, with all its unintended consequences.
Moreover, the EE processor is actually three separate CPUs in one core. Most developers, for lack of proper tools, are using only one thirdI remember when the PS2 was first announced and the technical specifications that were bandied about at that time: 75 million polygons/second, unlimited streaming texture potential, 48GB/s of memory bandwidth, and so on. It wasn't long after this that technology analysts began to question Sony's numbers.
Polygon Performance
The 75 million number was reduced to 66 million. Afterwards, it was admitted that these PS2 numbers were a peak performance figure for flat -shaded, identically shaped polygons. Unfortunately, the image of the PS2 as some sort of polygon monster had already become firmly entrenched in the minds of the mainstream media.
Sega chose a more conservative approach, which is in keeping with their new business philosophy - to regain the trust and confidence of gamers. Since its introduction two years ago, Sega has never mislead gamers about the Dreamcast's power. 3+ million polygons is all that Sega ever claims, even though new games like Test Drive: LeMans push closer to five million in 3D scenes loaded with effects.
The truth is that the PS2 has never displayed more than 2-3 million polys in a game. The main problem is a memory one. With only a 4MB VRAM cache on its GS graphics processor, the PS2 is severely limited in what it can achieve on screen. While it's true that 32MB of main memory and the fairly powerful Emotion Engine processor are capable of producing in the neighborhood of 10-12 million textured and lit polygons/second, the poor design of the GS and its small pipeline to main memory restrict the final number to roughly half of that.
What? You mean, regardless of the power of the EE processor and the large amount of available memory, the PS2 is still only capable of displaying 5-6 million on-screen polygons? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. By contrast, the Dreamcast has only 16 MB of main memory and a processor that is only capable of one-half the number of polygons/second - ie. 5- 6 million - but the whole point of the exercise is to get these onto your television. An intelligent memory saving technique known as differed rendering, coupled with the PowerVR2DC graphics chip's hardware texture compression abilities, allow the Dreamcast to display all of its generated polygons.
To better understand the PS2's limitations and the Dreamcast's strengths, you need only look at the available video memory for your answer. While the DC has 8MB of VRAM, the PS2 has only 4MB of VRAM. The main problem arises because a polygon takes up roughly 40 bytes of RAM. When you have 5 million of them in a given second, this amounts to 5 million/60fps = 83,333 polygons in a give frame of animation. If each of these polygons uses 40 bytes of VRAM, you will use 3.33 MB displaying these 5 million PPS. This doesn't leave the PS2 much room for it's framebuffer which uses around 1.2MB just to display the end data, not to mention that you still need to leave room for textures to put on those polygons.
Now, there are a few tricks which will allow the PS2 to display 5-6 million PPS, even though it only has a 4MB VRAM cache. One of them is to update the cache more frequently than once a second. But, there are other bandwidth limitations that prevent this from happening more than two or three times per second and the net result is that the PS2 is still limited to 5- 6 million PPS.
Here is a table which summarizes the polygon performance of both next- generation machines:
System Processor Stage Graphics Stage Best Example**
PS2 EE + 32MB 12 million PPS* GS + 4MB 6 million PPS* Madden NFL 2001 2 million PPS*
DC SH4 + 16MB 6 million PPS* PVR2DC + 8MB 5 million PPS* Ferrari F355 Challenge 3 million PPS*
* All polygons are textured and lit and represent peak performance
** Only games available right now were considered
Unfortunately, this isn't the PS2's only shortcoming. The reason I emphasize polygon performance at all is because these number have become the defacto standard for judging a console's power, when in fact they tell less than half the story. The main disadvantage of this expensive architecture is it's poor texturing ability.
Texturing Performance
The way texturing works is simple. Polygons and texture data arrive into video memory, textures are applied to the polygons and the result is displayed on screen. Most PC users are used to games with 16MB or more of texture data. A diehard Quake III player might have a setup capable of delivering 32MB of textures during the game. 32MB? But the PS2 and DC only have 4MB and 8MB of VRAM respectively. How can they hope to compete? The answer is that consoles do not hold all of a scene's texture data in memory at once. Usually, the data is streamed over the bus from main memory in a continuous manner.
The Dreamcast is a wonderful texturing beast, due in large part to the efficiency of the PVR2DC's graphics methodology. Two things help the PVR2DC - hardware texture decompression and infinite planes deferred rendering. Unlike the PS2's GS graphics processor, the PVR2DC is capable of decompressing textures on the fly. Thus, DC programmers usually take 20-25MB of texture data and compress it at a 5:1 (sometimes 8:1) ratio to reduce the amount of texture data to only 4 or 5MB. Then, the texture data is sent over the bus to the PVR2DC which simply decompresses the data at the moment of rendering into it's original huge size.
By contrast, the PS2's GS processor has no ability to decompress textures on the fly. This means that all texture data must flow over the relatively small pipeline between main memory and the GS 4MB VRAM cache, at it's original large size. Currently, this fact has limited PS2 games to only around 10 MB of texture data/frame, and this is why the buildings look so similar in Ridge Racer 5. Lack of variety in texturing has made most PS2 games look extremely plain when compared to Dreamcast games like Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, and even Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm.
Moreover, the PVR2DC belongs to the only processor family on the market that uses deferred rendering to texture only those polygons which are facing the gamer in any given frame. Other graphics chips must texture the backs of polygons as well as the front facing polygons. The net effect is to reduce the amount of texturing that the DC has to perform in a given scene by a factor of two or three depending on the complexity of the scene. The greater the scene complexity, the more you see the benefits of deferred rendering. This is why you never see any really large free-roaming 3D games on the PS2. Crazy Taxi, Ecco the Dolphin, and Shenmue are simply not possible on the PS2, because it doesn't have deferred rendering.
Here is another table which summarizes texturing performance for bother machines:
Texture Data Streaming Capacity
System Capacity Decompressed Texturing Ability Best Example*
PS2 10MB/frame (Main Memory -> GS Memory) 10MB/frame on screen Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore*
DC 5MB/frame (Main Memory -> VRAM 25MB/frame on screen Shenmue, Ecco the Dolphin*
* Only games available right now were considered
These two performance measure give you a pretty good idea of why the PS2 is, technically-speaking, a poor hardware design. The biggest problem of all with this architecture, however, is the difficulty that development houses are having extracting reasonable performance out of the machine. All the power in the world under the hood, doesn't do anyone much good if the games don't look good.
Development Environment
The PS2 shipped to developers with incomplete kits last year. By contrast, Sega has been giving excellent support to developers both large and small. Most DC developers are using 5th generation development kits, known as Set 5 Dev Kits. Sony mistakenly made the assumption that third-party PS2 developers would want bare bones development kits so they could program the hardware directly like they have during the last days of the PSX. Unfortunately, key features that are very hard to implement, like anti-aliasing to remove jagged edges from on-screen polygons have not yet surfaced.
Developers have responded to these PS2 programming challenges in a number of ways. Some developers like THQ (Summoner) have used a form of CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) blending to fake the effects that true anti- aliasing would offer. This is something which the DC has had for over two years, but unlike the DC CRT method, the PS2 method results in washed out, blurry textures. Tekken Tag Tournament is the perfect US launch title example. While they have eliminated the jagged edges which plague the Japanese version, the end result is that all of the textures in the game seem blurry or washed out. Hardly what I would call revolutionary for a next-generation console.
Another developmental problem, which is the reason for the jaggies in the first place, is serious lack of kit functions that will intelligently enable developers to overcome some of the limitations of the small size of the GS VRAM cache. While all Dreamcast games run at 640x480 resolution, many PS2 games only utilitize a 640x240 field- rendered display which fakes a 640x480 display. Bad jaggies are the result, and these need to be hidden through some form of anti-aliasing (AA, not yet available), or by using the CRT method described above, with all its unintended consequences.
Moreover, the EE processor is actually three separate CPUs in one core. Most developers, for lack of proper tools, are using only one third of the EE's processing ability, because both vector units (VP1 & VP2) are too hard to program. Certainly future games will take advantage of these units, thereby freeing the main CPU to implement some fairly nice AI routines, but the cost of developing these techniques has become enormous - something which I will outline in the next article.
The sad fact is that only a few development houses like EA have been able to extract reasonable next-generation performance out of the PS2 architecture. Even Namco and Konami, the kings of PSX development during the 32 bit era, are having a hard time getting more than 2-3 million PPS out of what is supposed to be the end-all of gaming machines. The fact of the matter is that Namco's 18 month old Soul Calibur on Dreamcast looks worlds better than the newly released Tekken Tag Tournament on PS2. Not very impressive compared to the promises that have been made by Sony and it's cabal of industry sycophants.
Overall
The Dreamcast is the best machine on the market. Tomorrow nothing will have changed. Technically speaking, nothing on the PS2 comes close to the beauty of Shenmue or Ecco, the speed and power of F355 Challenge or Test Drive: LeMans 24, and the sheer elegance and gaming grace of games like Metropolis Street Racer and Jet Grind Radio. If one full motion video demo of Metal Gear Solid 2 has convinced you that the PS2 is the better machine, then you haven't opened your eyes to the reality before you. The best next-generation machine from a technical standpoint is the Sega Dreamcast. Let other less informed individuals buy a machine capable of less, on the promise of one game thirteen months from now. In the meantime, you and I will be enjoying the technically best games for months to come.
of the EE's processing ability, because both vector units (VP1 & VP2) are too hard to program. Certainly future games will take advantage of these units, thereby freeing the main CPU to implement some fairly nice AI routines, but the cost of developing these techniques has become enormous - something which I will outline in the next article.
The sad fact is that only a few development houses like EA have been able to extract reasonable next-generation performance out of the PS2 architecture. Even Namco and Konami, the kings of PSX development during the 32 bit era, are having a hard time getting more than 2-3 million PPS out of what is supposed to be the end-all of gaming machines. The fact of the matter is that Namco's 18 month old Soul Calibur on Dreamcast looks worlds better than the newly released Tekken Tag Tournament on PS2. Not very impressive compared to the promises that have been made by Sony and it's cabal of industry sycophants.
Overall
The Dreamcast is the best machine on the market. Tomorrow nothing will have changed. Technically speaking, nothing on the PS2 comes close to the beauty of Shenmue or Ecco, the speed and power of F355 Challenge or Test Drive: LeMans 24, and the sheer elegance and gaming grace of games like Metropolis Street Racer and Jet Grind Radio. If one full motion video demo of Metal Gear Solid 2 has convinced you that the PS2 is the better machine, then you haven't opened your eyes to the reality before you. The best next-generation machine from a technical standpoint is the Sega Dreamcast. Let other less informed individuals buy a machine capable of less, on the promise of one game thirteen months from now. In the meantime, you and I will be enjoying the technically best games for months to come.
So you've all heard how well the PS2 is doing in Japan, right? Well, the reality is a little more complicated. Currently there is a growing concern that Japanese consumes are purchasing the PS2 mainly as a DVD player. But Sony's PS2 problem run far deeper than that. From production capacity, to production costs, to development cost over- runs, and a host of other troubles, Sony is in big trouble with the PS2.
Production Costs
On the eve of the PS2 launch into the US market, Sony posted a second quarter 57% fall in profitability over the same period in 1999. To quote a Bloomberg article, "Group net profit fell 57 percent to 19.8 billion yen ($183 million), or 21.7 yen per share, in the quarter ended Sept. 30, from 46.5 billion yen, or 113.0 yen, in the year-ago period. Analysts were expecting 26.6 billion yen in profit. The cost of developing the PlayStation 2, which went on sale in the U.S. just hours ago, will lead to an operating loss in the games division in the year ending in March, Sony said. That's overshadowing rising profit for other Sony products such as digital cameras and video recorders."
While it isn't surprising that Sony is losing money with their PS2 launch, the extent of those losses has not yet been realized by most of the mainstream media. Bloomberg estimates that each PS2 costs $488 to build. Therefore, ignoring marketing costs - which can sometimes amount to $50-$60 per unit - every American PS2 represents a loss of $188 that Sony has to recoup with game sales. In Japan, where costs have been closer to $550 per unit, the unit retails for $370 - yielding a similar loss of $180.
The flawed conventional wisdom is that Sony will make up for these problems by lowering their unit costs while selling massive amounts of software, thereby collecting royalty fees that will return them to profitability. Well, for one thing, the unit cost has only fallen by $70 over the last year. Soon, Sony will have to compete with $99 Dreamcasts, $249 GameCubes (likely entry price), and an aggressively priced X-box. There is simply no way for Sony to lower their PS2 costs faster than they need to lower the price of the unit to be competitive. A generous analyst might conclude that they will lower costs by $100 over the next 12 months, but that they will also have to lower their unit pricing by a similar amount.
This leaves software royalties as the only possible way to make good on that $180 we talked about earlier. Unfortunately, Sony's largest royalty on software is $10. Sony produces very few big sellers of their own, with the exception of next year's Gran Turismo 3, and they can't expect to sell more than two of their own titles with each unit. Namco's RR5 and TTT, Tecmo's DoA2, and EA's Madden 2001 are sure to be big enough hits to prevent Sony from making any serious first party in- roads. If they do manage to sell two titles to every PS2 owner, they will increase their royalty to roughly $30 per title. This will give them $60 towards their loss of $180, leaving $120 to be covered by third party royalty fees. In other words, they have to sell software at tie ratios of 14:1 in order to break even!
Let me remind everyone that the PSX, arguably the most successful console in the history of video gaming only has tie ratios of 9:1. The Dreamcast by comparison has tie ratios of 6:1 in the Japanese market, and 5:1 in the US market. The early numbers for the PS2 are horrible. Due to it's popularity as a DVD player, and it's lack of compelling software, the PS2 is currently enjoying software-hardware tie ratios of 1.6:1 in the Japanese market! This is unbelievable. They need to sell 14 titles and they are only selling 1.6.
Sony will never make money on the PS2, and this will have a huge impact on the entire market. The Dreamcast on the other hand is already making a profit in all territories. With production costs of $149 per unit and a market price of $149.99, Sega is already breaking even on the hardware. This frees them to earn large profits with the substantial tie ratios they have already attained. In addition, because so many of the popular games for the system are made by Sega itself, they enjoy increased profitability. I own 21 games, twelve of these are games published by Sega. How's that for tie ratios?
Buying into Sony's flawed business model is only going to get you burned. The PS2 is the trojan horse of the gaming world, so don't get fooled into picking up a console that will be abandoned two years down the road.
Production Capacity
If these weren't big enough problems in their own right, Sony is having even bigger difficulties just trying to produce the console. Last November Sony announced that it had just spent $2 billion dollars to ramp up PS2 production to 500,000 units per month. Then, in February is announced that it would be further increasing production to one million units per month. So, if these numbers were true, Sony should have been able to produce 11 million units by now. The fact is that with less that three million units sold in the Japanese market, and only one million more available in the US this Fall, Sony's production has been somewhere around 4 million units over the past year - roughly one-third of their announced production targets.
By contrast, the Dreamcast production capacity has stood at 500,000 units for more than a year now, so there should be more than enough units to put 3 million more into the US market before the end of the year. This more than anything is giving new life to Sega's Dreamcast which promises to be widely available with the best collection of holiday software a gamer could hope for.
Where has all that production capacity gone? Well, a number of factors are at work here. First of all, the RAMBUS memory used in the PS2 has suffered horrible wafer yields for more than a year now. To explain that further, memory is produced in big chunks called wafers. The good parts of the wafer are kept and the bad parts are discarded. The part that is kept is chopped into smaller chunks which are used to create the 32MB of main memory in the PS2.
Unfortunately, RAMBUS yields have been hovering around 10%. Meaning that 90% of any given wafer is thrown into the trash every time they make the RAM. Unbelievable! The Dreamcast uses off the shelf SDRAM, which is the cheapest best yield memory on the market. Some analysts last year estimated the DC memory costs at $30, and the PS2 memory costs at $150. It's no wonder they can't produce enough units and can't keep their costs down.
Other complicating factors include switching from .25 micron transistors, in the EE and GS processors, to .18 micron transistors. The idea behind this is to shrink the size of the chips, reducing costs, and more importantly reducing the probability of error in the wafers used to stamp these chips. Once again, someone screwed up and the switch to .18 has resulted in extremely poor yields and therefore very low production capacity and high costs.
System Planned Production Actual production
PlayStation 2 11 Million units 4 million units
Dreamcast 6 Million units 6 million units
Sales Numbers
But what about the huge success in the Japanese market against the Dreamcast? Well, as you can see from the following sales table (all figures in millions), the PS2's future is anything but certain, even in Japan.
System Hardware US/JP/EU* Software Sales US/JP/EU*
PS2 .5/2.7/0 = 3.2 million 0/4.3/0 = 4.3 million
DC 2.5/2.0/1.1 = 5.6 million 12.5/12.0/2.5 = 27 million
* As of October 26, 2000
It's the last number that should have Sony worried. The Dreamcast software is selling much better than PS2 software. This is why retailers had better realize that if someone comes into their store with $450 next month, it's going to be far more profitable to sell them a DC and a ton of games than it is to sell them a PS2, a game, a memory card, and a controller.
Development Problems
Lastly, one of the saddest testimonies to the market failure of Sony's PS2, is that development costs have skyrocketed for the machine. Dreamcast title devopment for quality titles is roughly half that of comparable software for the PS2. This has the effect of hurting the smaller developers a lot more than the larger houses. which can afford to float some of these extra costs. To put the US numbers in perspective - there are 50 titles coming out for the PS2 this Christmas. Only 1.3 million units are going to be available, and consumers with really deep pockets might be able to afford three titles. Therefore, the market should see sales of 4 million units, meaning the average game is only going to sell 80,000 copies.
Well, we all know that everyone is picking up an EA Sports Title, one of the fighting games, and maybe one other title. This has the effect of giving most of the PS2 market to EA, Namco and Konami. The smaller developers are screwed. This wouldn't be so bad if development costs weren't so high, but the reality is that the DC is likely going to sell 7-9 million pieces of software this year, enough for smaller development house to do fairly well. Unfortunately, most of these developers have backed the wrong horse.
This bodes poorly for the future. While Namco can sit there and claim that it is doing fine on PS2, Soul Calibur has sold nearly 2 million copies world wide on Dreamcast vs. somewhere around one million copies of TTT by the end of this year on PS2. Not to mention how cheap it was to make Soul Calibur, compared to the struggle that went into TTT.
Next year is going to bring a big wake up call to all of those people who thought the Sony PS2 was some sort of colossal juggernaut about to crush Sega's Dreamcast. Sega has surprised everybody so far, with robust sales of both software and hardware. Sony has surprised everybody too - just not in the way most people expected.
Tell me honestly, when Sony announced their uber-console two years ago, did you ever expect that you would be waiting in line for six hours just for the chance to buy one of these new units? Did you ever expect there to be a memory card shortages? What about the over-heating problems? Did you ever expect the launch list to be full of nothing but sequels to old PSX games? That the backwards compatibility wouldn't be fool-proof? Most of all, did you ever expect PS2 launch games like Tekken Tag Tournament to actually look worse than 18-month old Dreamcast titles like Soul Calibur? Yeah, well... neither did I.
The truth is that the PS2 is having trouble competing with Dreamcast games that are already out, let alone the games that will be arriving over the next few weeks. Here's a genre by genre breakdown of why you should stay clear of Sony's beast until there are major improvements on the software development side.
Fighting
Dreamcast
? Soul Calibur
? Dead or Alive 2
? Ultimate Fighting Championship
? Marvel Vs. Capcom 2
? Street Fighter Alpha 3
PlayStation 2
? Tekken Tag Tournament
? DoA2:Hardcore
? Street Fighter EX
Hands down Soul Calibur is the best looking, UFC is the best playing, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is the most fun, and SF Alpha 3 is the best tribute to its series. Street Fighter EX is horrible. DoA2 is better-looking on Dreamcast but has a few extra modes on PS2 that make this one a wash. As for TTT - what's with the 2D backgrounds, Namco?
Racing
Dreamcast
? Sega GT
? Test Drive: V-Rally
? F355 Challenge
? Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2
PlayStation 2
? Ridge Racer 5
? Wild Wild Racing
? Midnight Club Street Racing
While Ridge Racer 5 is up to the usual Namco standards, the other PS2 racing games are essentially a cruel joke. Dreamcast on the other hand has a slew of excellent racers, all extremely playable from the DC pad because of the brilliant analog triggers. If simulation is your thing, F355 and Sega GT will delight you. If you're more into rally racing, TD:V-Rally is amazingly good. Tokyo Extreme Racing 2 is available there for a more arcade-like experience. In the next couple of months the Dreamcast will see some other amazing racing games - Metropolis Street Racer, Daytona USA Online and Test Drive: LeMans are all unbelievable racers that are absolutely going to kill anything else out there for many months to come.
Sports
Dreamcast
? NFL2K1
? NBA2K1
? Virtua Tennis
? Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2
? Extreme Sports
Playstation 2
? Madden 2001
? NBA Live 2001
? NHL 2001
? SSX
All of the PS2 titles above are quality offerings. Although the gameplay in most EA titles hasn't evolved since the days of the Sega Genesis, the final result is some great looking playable titles. SSX was a nice surprise, but it doesn't seem to offer anything that Extreme Sports for Dreamcast won't. But, the PS2 has two big weaknesses this Fall - no online play, and worse - no Tony Hawk 2. Sure you can play the PSX version on you PS2, but it won't compare to the DC version due out next week. Over the long haul Sega will have to revitalize NHL2K1 and WSB2K2 enough to compete, but online play should carry them over the top for at least the next twelve months. Did I mention that Virtua Tennis is highly addictive and amazing? Well, I should have.
Action
Dreamcast
? Quake III: Arena
? Jet Grind Radio
? House of the Dead 2
? Crazy Taxi
? Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm
? MDK2
PlayStation 2
? Gun Griffon Blaze
? Armored Core 2
Let's face the cold hard truth, GG Blaze and AC 2 are decent titles in their own right, nothing is going to compare for action than a flawless, lag-free conversion of Quake 3: Arena. Nothing except Jet Grind Radio, that is. The inline skating, graffiti tagging, free roaming tribute to urban chaos turned everyone on their head at E3 this year. Expect no less when the title arrives next Wednesday.
Adventure
Dreamcast
? Ecco The Dolphin
? Rayman 2
? Sonic Adventure
? Soul Reaver
PlayStation 2
? Nothing
I should also mention that the Dreamcast will be getting the incredible Shenmue in about ten days. This genre is one of the Dreamcast's strongest because of the PS2's difficulty in rendering large texture intensive 3D game worlds. It seem pretty obvious that the Dreamcast is going to dominate this genre for quite some time... especially with Sonic Adventure 2 just around the corner.
RPG
Dreamcast
? Skies of Arcadia
? Grandia II
PlayStation 2
? Evergrace
? Summoner
This doesn't look like much of a fair fight either. While Summoner actually looks like an enjoyable quick fix, it hardly holds a candle to epic masterpieces like Grandia II and Skies of Arcadia. Evergrace is over course, a joke, but this was a weak genre for the Dreamcast in its early days as well. Good RPGs take time to make, and fortunately, the DC has been available long enough for this to happen.
Music/Puzzle/Other
Dreamcast
? Bust-A-Move 4
? Chu Chu Rocket
? Samba de Amigo
? Space Channel 5
? Seaman
PlayStation 2
? Fantavision
Ever the innovators, Sega has managed to bring some pretty special niche titles over. Samba and SC5 are some of the best music games ever invented, and Seaman is certainly good for a laugh. Don't expect too much from this beleaguered genre on the PS2, but it isn't likely the reason a North American gamer would ever buy a console.
Overall, the Dreamcast has the PS2 beat this year in every major game category, which is twice the price and lacks any online gaming capability. When faced with the decision on what to get this year, you might want to consider the fact that for $400 you can get:
DC Sports Pack, Sonic, Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur, Quake 3, Shenmue, a VMU and a second controller.
Rather than,
PS2, a memory card, a second controller and Madden 2001.
Better yet, grab the SegaNet rebate and pick up Jet Grind Radio, Metropolis and Skies of Arcadia while you're at it. A Dreamcast with ten games for only $400 is the kind of value that Sega is offering you as a gamer. If you can't respect that then you deserve to own a PS2.
John Benn
Royal Slayer of the dreaded Hype Monster.
An article from Segaweb-which is not so bad as it is only the sega division of a company that has sonyweb, nintendoweb, etc."
shouldn't this be in the console wars forum?
Lots of nice info. I've always wondered why Sony thought 4mb of video RAM was enough. DC has 8mb so you would think that with a 32mb of RAM the video would be half this size i.e 16mb.
jonno2001uk wrote:
> The playstation2 is by far the best out of these two
> consoles.
YEAH RIGHT!!!!!
Dreamcast is far superior. Everyone apart from 'Ant', 'I am the Tarrant' and you. The games are better and this shows that it is technically better. There is no reason to buy a PS2 whatsoever.
> The playstation2 is by far the best out of these two
> consoles.
YEAH RIGHT!!!!!
Dreamcast is far superior. Everyone apart from 'Ant', 'I am the Tarrant' and you. The games are better and this shows that it is technically better. There is no reason to buy a PS2 whatsoever.
I meant to say everyone apart from 'Ant', 'I am the Tarrant' and you know that DC is better than PS2 in every way. This does actually prove that Sony gave everyone their list of specs and expected everyone to be amazed when the DC is actually a technically better console. Sony write it down but they never make it, basically.
I still think that the DC has got some great graphics. I've never been biased about consoles. I own a PSX, N64, DC and a PS2 and will be looking forward to X-Box and the Game cube. I think that the PS2 can pull off some amazing effects and it does show in games like MGS2 and GT3. I also think that Shenmue and MSR also have amazing graphics. But graphics aint no good with out games. I have so many games for the PSX around 50. N64 I have 7, there were very few games for it even tho it was a technically better console. For the DC I have 23 games and for PS2 I have 6(Should be 7 as Iam getting a free game from Sony. But without this and my gameaday prize I would have 5).
I got my PS2 on launch day and played on it with my 3 launch games for around 3 weeks. Then I got bored it wasnt this super console. I have played on it a little in between those 3 weeks and the time till I got my 4th game Z.O.E. You would think that having a PS2 I would be playing it to death, the game I got were TTT , R5 and Timesplitters. TTT good but just Tekken, R5 good but when completed nothing left to do, and Timesplitters fun. In the mean time I was playing on my DC and FF9 on the PSX. I think that the PS2 will come good this year. So far that is the only console I have played since getting Z.O.E, then I got Shadow Of Memories then Starwars. I will be playing it until games like Red Faction, The Bouncer and GT3 come out. PS2 is good but so is the DC and a 3rd of the price with a huge selection of good games. I wish Sega would make another console as it would be nice to see the 3 - way battle between Sony, Sega and Nintendo. But now it could be the 3 - way battle Microsoft , Sony and Nintendo.
I got my PS2 on launch day and played on it with my 3 launch games for around 3 weeks. Then I got bored it wasnt this super console. I have played on it a little in between those 3 weeks and the time till I got my 4th game Z.O.E. You would think that having a PS2 I would be playing it to death, the game I got were TTT , R5 and Timesplitters. TTT good but just Tekken, R5 good but when completed nothing left to do, and Timesplitters fun. In the mean time I was playing on my DC and FF9 on the PSX. I think that the PS2 will come good this year. So far that is the only console I have played since getting Z.O.E, then I got Shadow Of Memories then Starwars. I will be playing it until games like Red Faction, The Bouncer and GT3 come out. PS2 is good but so is the DC and a 3rd of the price with a huge selection of good games. I wish Sega would make another console as it would be nice to see the 3 - way battle between Sony, Sega and Nintendo. But now it could be the 3 - way battle Microsoft , Sony and Nintendo.
jonno2001uk wrote:
> The playststion2 is by far the best out of these two
> consols.
A). Learn to spell.
B). It has just been proven to you that technically the DC is better, or can't you read?
C). Look at the games out for each console AT THE MOMENT. I'm not talking 2 years time, when MGS2 finally comes out.
Overall the DC is better, especially as it is a third of the price.
BTW, why do all PS2 owners say: "Yeah but wait for MGS2 and GT3!"? Do they really think that the consoles fortunes can be turned around by 2 games?
It's obvious Sony know they will be beaten as soon as the X and the 'Cube come out. Why else do you think that they announced the PS3 about 4 months after the launch of the PS2?
Can't PS2 owners just realise that they have been ripped off big time by the PS2? Why do they all keep saying "it's miles better than the DC", when its blatantly not? I'm not trying to say that PS2 owners are thick, but it's sure starting to look that way when you get people like jonno2001uk posting rubbish like this!
> The playststion2 is by far the best out of these two
> consols.
A). Learn to spell.
B). It has just been proven to you that technically the DC is better, or can't you read?
C). Look at the games out for each console AT THE MOMENT. I'm not talking 2 years time, when MGS2 finally comes out.
Overall the DC is better, especially as it is a third of the price.
BTW, why do all PS2 owners say: "Yeah but wait for MGS2 and GT3!"? Do they really think that the consoles fortunes can be turned around by 2 games?
It's obvious Sony know they will be beaten as soon as the X and the 'Cube come out. Why else do you think that they announced the PS3 about 4 months after the launch of the PS2?
Can't PS2 owners just realise that they have been ripped off big time by the PS2? Why do they all keep saying "it's miles better than the DC", when its blatantly not? I'm not trying to say that PS2 owners are thick, but it's sure starting to look that way when you get people like jonno2001uk posting rubbish like this!
They're not the only ones.
There are many others - myself included - who are extremely happy with their PS2, but see no point in arguing the toss, as it's no-ones business but ours. Just as it's not our business that you bought a Dreamcast.
Much of the info in the article is true; much of it is also out of date. PS2 is selling very well the world over, great games have already arrived (though that of course depends on your tastes) and many more are coming.
It is also worth pointing out that the MGS2 demo mentioned is *not* FMV, but in-game footage; play the demo.
Tech specs, whichever machine they favour, are also irrelevant. The fact is that Sega no longer manufacturing the Dreamcast and are producing software for other platforms, including PS2. If history is anything to go by, a discontinued platform rarely receives support much beyond a year after its 'death', and at least one major third-party title has already been canned.
It is true that Dreamcast sales have increased recently, and while it may be a very fine machine, it cannot be denied that the increase is due in no small part to the price drop. A similar price drop on the PS2 would see a similar massive boost in sales.
The difference is, the number of DC owners is now finite, where as the PS2 user base will continue to grow for at least the next four or five years. It has already outsold the PS1 by 3-to-1 in its first year, and the PS1 is still selling in large numbers even though it is technically the weakest console currently available.
Whatever spin Sega zealots try to put on it, whatever figures you care to dig up, and whatever mistakes Sony have made, the PS2 is an unqualified success. That's not to say that Dreamcast is a failure, because it's most definitely not. The thing is, there are different degrees of success.
Instead of getting your knickers in a twist over Sega's decision, a true Sega fan would support them by buying their software - whichever platform it's on.
There are many others - myself included - who are extremely happy with their PS2, but see no point in arguing the toss, as it's no-ones business but ours. Just as it's not our business that you bought a Dreamcast.
Much of the info in the article is true; much of it is also out of date. PS2 is selling very well the world over, great games have already arrived (though that of course depends on your tastes) and many more are coming.
It is also worth pointing out that the MGS2 demo mentioned is *not* FMV, but in-game footage; play the demo.
Tech specs, whichever machine they favour, are also irrelevant. The fact is that Sega no longer manufacturing the Dreamcast and are producing software for other platforms, including PS2. If history is anything to go by, a discontinued platform rarely receives support much beyond a year after its 'death', and at least one major third-party title has already been canned.
It is true that Dreamcast sales have increased recently, and while it may be a very fine machine, it cannot be denied that the increase is due in no small part to the price drop. A similar price drop on the PS2 would see a similar massive boost in sales.
The difference is, the number of DC owners is now finite, where as the PS2 user base will continue to grow for at least the next four or five years. It has already outsold the PS1 by 3-to-1 in its first year, and the PS1 is still selling in large numbers even though it is technically the weakest console currently available.
Whatever spin Sega zealots try to put on it, whatever figures you care to dig up, and whatever mistakes Sony have made, the PS2 is an unqualified success. That's not to say that Dreamcast is a failure, because it's most definitely not. The thing is, there are different degrees of success.
Instead of getting your knickers in a twist over Sega's decision, a true Sega fan would support them by buying their software - whichever platform it's on.
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