Thread 12150029

Was the PS2 CPU really that difficult to optimize code for?

It was a nonstandard architecture and that made it difficult to code stuff, specially early in its life. Still it was pretty powerful stuff when mastered.

>>12150029 (OP)
No it was simple to work with after an SDK refresh and everyone developed games for it without bitching.

>>12150029 (OP)
Yes
The PS2 has the worst hardware out of any major retro console and devs literally only developed games for the PS2 because everyone literally only bought it because it could play DVD movies

>>12150073
>It was a nonstandard architecture and that made it difficult to code stuff, specially early in its life. Still it was pretty powerful stuff when mastered.

the most unique part of the PS2 is the Emotion Engine, the CPU is a MIPS R5900. The PS1 uses a MIPS R3000A variant. The N64 uses a MIPS 4300 variant. The CPU was not uncommon for the time, as they were found in SGI workstations as well. I think the only real hurdle was the GPU, which apparently was not that hard to work with once the documentation became more widely available. I would say that the Xbox was probably easier to work with in many ways, given that the entire software development kit was based around Windows.

I still have no idea what it means for one kind of computer to be harder to work with than the other. It's never been explained why C++ is harder on the PS2 than a PC.

>>12150029 (OP)
>Was the PS2 CPU really that difficult to optimize code for?
yes but the dev kits were in japanese. for gamecube the dev kits were in english because amd wrote it and the japs couldnt decipher it. for xbox they were probably in english too but idk

>>12151906
like with PSX there were Japanese kits for Japan and English kits for westerners
https://archive.org/details/ps-2-programmer-tool-runtime-library-controller-library-v-1.1

>>12150029 (OP)
>>12151636
The CPU (MIPS R5900) was industry standard and not hard to code for. The "GPU" (more like rasterizer, the Graphic Synthetizer (GS)) chip wasn't hard to use either. It's the Emotion Engine SOC that people had a great difficulty with. SOC means system on a chip, which in PS2 contains the CPU, two 64-bit ALUs (I think it's a MIPS R5900 feature? But it's still very uncommon for CPUs back in the day to have two ALUs), and various coprocessors and cache hierarchies.

The PS2 was hard to program for due to that SoC. It could run a lot of math operations in parallel and do general CPU tasks asynchronously. it's great on paper, but in reality it's a nightmare to optimize for due to the meager amount of cache and data paths. So many coprocessors, so little internal bandwidth and fast memory for running codes. The cache hierarchies complicate it even more. Also, multithreading wasn't a very popular thing back then, so most games didn't take full advantage of the 2x64-bit ALUs. Making games for the PS2 actually wasn't very difficult, but pushing the system to its limits would have required vast knowledge and nerves of steel.

But the PS2 was a lot of power for such a small price. It was probably the cheapest and most scaleable hardware among the major consoles that gen. The SoC is more powerful than Gamecube's CPU despite the lower clockspeed, thanks to better multithreading.