Thread 718030474

>has 4mb of vram
that's genuinely insane, how they could render entire 3d worlds with that much. Makes me wonder how 8 *gigabytes* could ever be too low

Limitations force innovation. After a certain point adding more memory just lets devs get away with being lazier.

>>718030623
truthnuke, funny how we keep discovering the benefits of limitations in basically everything

I'm impressed that it has internet browsing capabilities and a DVD player, and shit you could run a private server or something on games and it competes with the switch.

>>718030623
Its both limitations and talent. Modern devs even if you forced them to use ps2-like specs would never manage to do anything more complex than smb on the NES with it.

>>718030474 (OP)
The 4MB VRAM was all inside the gpu silicon, giving it more bandwidth than what the PS3 had in total.

>>718031005
i thought by now indies would've moved to ps2 level graphics, e.g. silent hill 3......

>>718030474 (OP)
ocarina of time is a whole adventure game in 32mb.

>>718030474 (OP)
>tiny low-quality textures
>480i
it's not that impressive

>>718031389
sounds like a modern game before upscaling

>>718030474 (OP)
>modern games still can't replicate ps2 tier alpha effects

>>718031389
>480i
was that really a problem considering everyone was on crts?
>>718031649
this can't be true

>>718030474 (OP)
lost technology, sorry chud

>>718031389
Textures only need as much detail and resolution as it takes for a player to identify what they're supposed to represent.

>>718030623
100% this. Limitations fostered skill in developers. Have an ambitious idea? Too bad, the tech doesn't support it out of the box yet, you have to develop the system for it from scratch. Gaming in that era was defined by one-upmanship, constantly pushing the envelope, squeezing better graphics, more impressive effects, bigger levels, more content out of extremely limited hardware. Being the first to do this or that thing, revolutionize. It was an arms race of pure skill and ability.

There was also the implicit limitation of disc releases. If your game was shit when you went gold, it would be shit forever. You still had bugs, but something like a multi-gig day 1 patch would've been unthinkable, largely because the internet wasn't really something you could just assume your customer to have, especially not on consoles.

The moment system resources kept ballooning out of control, and development environments got too many ways to do shit out of the box, games began to stagnate, developers got lazy, and talent withered to being barely adequate at using the most common tools off the rack. What's even the last game you can recall to be technologically impressive? To do something really interesting, something you haven't seen before? Hell, what's the last AAA game you can recall that ran smoothly on release?

>>718031389
well the og xbox was impressive too- 64mb is still paltry beyond the early aughts

>>718030474 (OP)
How much RAM total? I remember Dreamcast had 32MB. Anyway, they probably swap textures in from RAM as needed.

>>718030474 (OP)
You also have to factor that the actual RENDERING part of most of these low-polygonal environments were probably the least intensive thing going on generally. It's all those textures and effects, assets, NPCs going about, code allowing for interactivity and so forth that's going to be straining a system, and the VRAM can only store so much of any of that; if I remember right the smarter PS2 developers figured out tricks to swap between the processor and the RAM on the fly to be able to handle more impressive things, so it's not like the RAM is totally unworkable here, but the shit everyone is pushing nowadays is requiring absurd amounts of memory because of absurd amounts of asset pushing that doesn't need to be so absurd if people just knew to bloody optimize.

>>718030623
Yup, we're seeing is with DLSS slop. Devs have a FPS target and they will optimize to that. Give them a free FPS button and all they see is a free optimization button. Result: games now require DLSS to hit 30fps.

>>718031763
And judging by those "misinterpreted graphics" threads never featuring a game made after the 360, that was something they regularly failed to do.

>>718030474 (OP)
I think these comparisons are a little unfair. a lot of games back in the ps1 era didn't even hit 30fps. and ps2/gc era where not always 60 either.

check this out, only takes 64kb of space
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UchVsOVxYXQ

>>718031680
first, ps2 has a crazy fill rate, letting you go wild with transparency.
second, deferred rendering killed decent transparency. best you usually get is 1 bit dithering. real shame considering that mixed rendering is totally viable and very fast as idtech 7 shows.

>>718032112
It's deliberate, Nvidia pushes shit like DLSS and "framegen" because they want the industry to depend on their proprietary tech.

>>718031680
Most PC users were on at least 768p CRTs at that time, some on 1024p or 1200p.

>>718031680
Problem is that PS2 use every single dirty CRT trick to get shit done. Including run shit on lower resolution.

Ofc it works fine on CRT but is main reason that shit looks blurry as shit on anything else.

>>718032210
>ps2/gc era where not always 60 either.
fun fact, the ps2 has more 60fps games than the ps3, ps4 and ps5
don't you love progress?

>>718033238
That just shows the ps2 is a statistical outlier.

>>718031231
Some did, if they use premade assets.
The problem is that bedroom coders will never have as much means as even a small dedicated team. You really need a dedicated 3d modeler and a texture artist or even multiple of them if you wish to be even remotely comparable to a ps2 AAA game.
Technology does not invalidate skill. All technology has done is make it so making bad games is easier than ever. Making a good one is marginally better in comparison

Nobody NEEDS fill rate
>gimps fog and particle effects in all other ports
Looking at you silent hill 2.

>>718030474 (OP)
It’s a 480i console

>>718030474 (OP)
Thank god for AMD powered consoles. Kutaragi lost his mind after the PS1

i miss when games were fun

>>718030474 (OP)
You could DMA more data in and out.
Fill VRAM with x textures, draw shit that use these X textures, swap, rinse and repeat until the scene is done.
You're pulling this data out of 32MB of main RAM.

>>718030474 (OP)
the NES had 4kb of vram and 4kb of system ram
imagine trying to code for that

Old devs were just way smarter than modern day devs. Its not even a joke or anything. Its serious.

>>718036370
2KB each, but the graphics come from an external 8KB ROM that you can swap around with mappers.
Also come games did come with extra main RAM.

>>718036445
yeah but why. it's not like the knowledge was lost to time. how has nobody written a book on how to code like a ps2 dev?

>>718036713
You can just follow old tutorials like the nehe ones etc..
But trying to code EXACTLY like on the PS2 is a pretty terrible idea, because the PS2 is monstrously good at drawing transparencies at it's native resolution.
Almost 50GB/s to fill a tiny ass 512x448 picture.
The PS5 don't have the same bandwidth per pixel as the PS2.

>>718036713
devs don't have the time to hyper optimize in the way you think, for one

>>718036982
Most games are just "optimized well enough given the time alloted", which means some run like absolute dogshit.
Despite the OP's drama, the PS2 was actually pretty lenient due the massive fillrate, and dealing with the "4MB of VRAM (tm)" wasn't that much different from something like the N64.
Code wise, it just meant you told the PS2 DMA to copy the textures you will use for that particular part of the scene and swapped and swapped until the scene was done.
You was not ACTUALLY limited to 4MB of assets at all, just had to be careful with the scene organization to not hit the DMA too hard.

>>718030474 (OP)
The extremely limited VRAM is counteracted by its ridiculous texture streaming bandwidth. The PS2 might not have been as "powerful" as the GCN and Xbox, but its streaming bandwidth is what allowed it to have so many unique graphical artifacts that couldn't be recreated on other pieces of hardware at the time. The way they made the GTA games work within this limitation is still one of the most impressive feats of game development ever.

>>718030474 (OP)
optimization
i had a laptop with a x3100 gpu
ran oblivion 30 fps with the lighting off and it was stronger than a ps2 but everything ran like shit cuz drivers

>>718030623
This!

Just look at the absolute state of devs today.
How the fuck is tekken 7 almost 100GB? It's just utter laziness and poor programming.
No tekken was ever that big before. The last soul calibur was only around 40GB. So how it tekken 7 somehow 100

>>718032112
dlss and fsr did more damage than mtx and woke did
its on purpose
all pcs are in an ai bot net connected to cern and they want you gaming at sub native res to allow more resources for spying on you

>>718032946
bro nobody gave a single fuck
i didnt use 1080p besides my grandparents ps3 till like 2019 lol

>>718036713
>it's not like the knowledge was lost to time.
*laughs in Kali Yuga*

Lots of experts in this thread who I'm sure have developed games for the PS2 and aren't just talking out their asses

>>718030623
100%

>>718038432
extremely cool funny talented and wealthy guy who gets mad pussy... detected

>>718038432
i have a masters in EE and i'm an independent software consultant. it takes an extremely rudimentary understanding of rendering hardware to answer op's question. you are a retard if you think it takes a genius to understand any of this.
>>718038876
yes this is true

>>718038094
i've always thought rockstar knew best of all devs how to fully utilize the ps2's unique architecture. most devs didn't know how to code for the way data is streamed on that console

>>718030623
This!

>>718032093
PS2 had a really wide system bus, so transferring from RAM to VRAM was really fast. Meaning they could do it a lot and not lose much performance.

>>718032301
64k of storage space, sure, but how much RAM is it using? how much CPU load is it generating? These kind of demos work by generating all the assets mathematically, rather than storing any assets, so while they're very storage efficient, they're horribly inefficient in terms of performance.

>>718032946
They had screens capable of high resolutions, yes, but they often ran games at really low ones like 640x480 for the sake of performance.

>>718041272
thats true but i had just seen it earlier and figured this was relevant enough to post itt

>>718033467
NES and SNES games ran at 60fps

>>718033238
60fps is common now thanks to performance modes on consoles

>>718030474 (OP)
devs used a lot of the main system ram because of how fast the bandwidth bus was. and there was a lot of DVD streaming tricks and optimizations that rockstar found (mostly sound files and asset models), which was the reason why open world games could be so expansive of detail of that time.

The PS2 even had Netflix

>>718038432
you don't need to make games to know how hardware works when theres hundreds of game development guides and logs about how to use the console hardware. theres like tons of GDC videos where devs just explains how their engines work

>>718030474 (OP)
makes me wonder how much farther they could've taken it if games started requiring a HDD to install them. like if it lasted another decade or so.

>>718030623
fpbp

>>718041960
all it wouldnt done that very much other than having more way more LOD in games. i think games like final fantasy 11 was so massive in scope primarly because a lot of the game logic and scripting was done through dedicated servers so it eased off a lot of local runtime CPU cycles to do more graphical effects.

>>718031031
what, like the edram on the 360?

>>718041746
I wonder what video codec it used. I know the PS2 is incapable of decoding 480p h264 fast enough to play it. I know vp9 is even harder to decode. That leaves mpeg2, which the PS2 had dedicated hardware for, but which would make every movie multiplee gigabytes in size, and xvid, which would still make even SD movies hundreds of megabytes in size.

>>718030474 (OP)
It didn't need more than 4MB of VRAM.

>>718038035
N64 issue were mostly from slow ass rambus, and fact that Nintendo was stupid and held back microcode from everyone.

Rare and factor 5 were only devs with enough tism to deal with whole thing. But tech was ridiculous impressive at time and still can do lot of fancy things, but ofc now we have proper documentation and compiler.

>>718044528
What Bioware games were on the PS2?

>>718041472
60fps was the limit then due to ntsc. Pal games run at 50fps
Now that we have 90-120hz+ displays being more common why do new games still only do 30-60fps?

>>718043923
Netflix on PS2 supported all compatible resolutions including 720p and 1080i

>>718045329
But is the video at that resolution, or is it just scaling to fit that resolution? If its actually playing 1080i video, I think it'd have to be using the mpeg2 codec. I've tried playing hd xvid on my PS2 before and it didn't decode fast enough for proper playback. I can't imagine that was very nice to the mid 2000s thirdie data limits.

>>718044528
Both the PS2 and gamecube were on the same boat that you have to fill the texture memory to use a texture quickly.
On the PS2 it was mandatory, but it's not a problem because you have the DMA to do the copy for you:
https://wiki.pcsx2.net/PCSX2_Documentation/PS2%27s_Programmable_DMA
In theory it's 2.4GB/s but in practice is slower.
But even if you can extract only 1GB/s out of it.
That's still enough to use 16MB of textures per frame at 60 FPS, which you probably won't because that's half of the memory.

>>718043923
Netflix for ps2 just had mpeg2 which was the codec DVD video uses, i think the Wii didnt have h264 either so it was basically playing the same video files on netflix servers the wii had

>>718046710
>i think the Wii didnt have h264 either
I don't know if Nintendo had the license for it, but the hardware was perfectly capable of decoding it. You can comfortably watch h264 video on a modded Wii. The Wii also had a Youtube client, which means it might have even been able to play vp9 video, of course youtube also serves h264, so it could have just been that.

>>718039004
>i have a masters in EE and i'm an independent software consultant
Sure buddy. How would you generate quadrature phase shift keying signal?

>>718030623
They hated him because he spoke the truth.

>>718046862
VP9 codec didn't exist in its early from until 2012 to the public so it was probably MPEG-2 at most but H264 is possible on the Wii but its in software only, and it struggles if you amp the resolution and bitrate.

>>718041746
That's for the PS3. Not PS2.

>>718046862
>The Wii also had a Youtube client, which means it might have even been able to play vp9 video, of course youtube also serves h264, so it could have just been that.
I believe the Wii Youtube app used the flash video container, so whatever codec that would have been I don't know

>>718047102
I believe it's a Brazil only thing, still interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKOi4C5Uv9I
>13 years ago
different times.

>>718047043
It could have been vp8 or vp6. Anyways, most video was 480p or less on youtube at the time.
>>718047102
nta, but there was a Brazil exclusive version of Netflix for the PS2.

>>718047139
Flash used vp6 at the time.

>>718031231
>meanwhile
Minimum:
>Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
>OS: Windows 10 or later
>Processor: i5-9th Gen CPU or similar
>Memory: 8 GB RAM> Graphics: GeForce GTX 1660 or AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT
>DirectX: Version 11
>Network: Broadband Internet connection
>Storage: 10 GB available space

>>718033238
>a game like Spartan can have nearly 100 units on screen with reinforcements while still chugging along at silky smooth 60 fps outside of the arena level
Can't even have 40 AI in a small skirmish with your average Bethesda game without your whole console shitting a cinderblock nowadays.

The magic of the past was to write your game in C/C++ instead of blueprints and painting the illumination in the texture instead of trying to do things "for real".