This generation was definitely the last time I was blown away by how much better graphics were from the previous gen. Although for me it was going from PS1 and seeing Soul Calibur on someones imported Dreamcast. Although I did get a PS2 and I still have it, unlike the Dreamcast which I think I sold when I bought the PS2.
Great video, but it doesn't scratch the surface of how difficult this system was to develop for. I was working as a graphics developer for EA at the time the EE came out and part of my job was to assess whether external devs had the technical capability to program it, most struggled to get a single polygon on the screen without the help of middleware. The biggest error I see in videos like this, and the corresponding architecture charts they show, is that there was no connection between the VU0 and VU1 other than the DMA bus. In reality, VU1 could access VU0's register set. This made it possible to do skinning on VU0 and pass the vertex data directly to VU1 for transform and lighting using a spare register as a semaphore for synchronization, thus side-stepping the main bus bottle-neck altogether. Another thing people often neglect to mention is that the vector units had a 4-cycle latency for each instruction with no stalling. If you executed any assembly instruction, and tried to use the result less than 3 instructions later, you simply got the wrong value. The final kicker was that the VUs had both an integer and floating point pipe; when you wrote the assembly for it you literally wrote two instructions per line. Now put all this together and try to imagine what programming this system was actually like. On any given cycle you had to know the exact state of not just the two instructions on that line but also the 6 instructions still in various stages of execution from the previous 3 cycles. And if you were doing the V0 skinning trick, and trying to keep it in perfect synchronization with VU1, then you had to keep track of 16 different instructions all running simultaneously. And this was for each and every cycle of your inner loop, which was typically written to process 3 vertices at once with each step looping back (first pass for transform, next for lighting, next for uv). Programming the PS2 was hard. Programming it properly was an absolute nightmare!
Yeah, I missed this time period, but do have a bit of experience with the PSP which shared a lot of these quirks. Doing things correctly is a nightmare, but it's quite a fun challenge. On the note of middleware, GTA is touted here for being a leader in streaming and graphics - but actually, they used render ware like everyone else, and Just Cause 1, I'd say, was far more impressive for the time and was completely custom on the rendering side. Unfortunately ended up a bit lost to time, though.
@@SK83RJOSH PSP was an awesome piece of kit, taught me more about the importance of cache coherency than any other system I ever worked on. The bus bottleneck had me continually wondering who in their right mind would have deliberately designed such an architecture? I have a theory that the CPU was originally supposed to be able to access the scratchpad directly without going through the main bus, but something happened in either design or fabrication that broke it. How else do you explain the presence of scratchpad memory that was actually slower to access than main RAM? Good times, good times.
Wow, that was very insightful! Do you think the PS3 was Harding to develop for or the PS2? Judging by how early PS3 games look and ran, I'm led to believe it was the harder console to develop for.
@@Firealone9 to be honest I only ever worked on two PS3 titles, and both were cancelled before release, so I'm not really qualified to make a fair comparison (I was working for THQ at that point, just a year or so before they folded). from the exposure I did get, the PS3 was much easier to work with, albeit crippled by the Cell/SPU architecture, which was utterly antithetical to how most game environments are modeled in code. PS3 was certainly challenging, but at least you knew from the start what you were dealing with, and it was pretty much the same as what everyone else was dealing with. PS2, on the other hand, resulted in many, many nights at the pub with other developers discussing and debating all the various tricks and techniques needed to get the most out of it.
PS2 was the beginning of a new era. It turned your home console into an entertainment center. It looked and functioned like a little mini PC, and doubled as your DVD player. Where-as the Dreamcast tried for the classic SNES console style, as did the gamecube. GTA 3, MetalGearSolid 2, Jak and Daxter. I still remember the first time I played the intro of GTA 3, and hopped into that first car on the bridge and starting driving, once I realized it was an actual open world, with radio stations. It was groundbreaking at the time, the previous GTA game was a top down DOS game. For me, this was mind blowing.
I remember being 7 years old and not being able to sleep waiting on the PS2 I got for Christmas, best Christmas ever combined with the PS3 when that came out. Those were the days. I was sick as a kid a lot and Jack and Daxter was the thing that saved me when I wasnt at school, I have so much wild nostalgia for the PS2. By that point I had played the ps1, nintendo 64, dreamcast, SEGA Megadrive and there was nothing like the PS2 it was truly the best system for years at that point. The dreamcast actually came close but the games weren't as good.
I don't know any of the programming particulars but you can tell when you play that game that each track was optimized differently. It wasn't just a general set of settings in the game engine to make it run on that hardware. It's a piece of art
I still can't believe iit either, especially when running that game on an emulator and scaling it up to HD/1440p/4k resolutions. That game has no business looking that good on a machine with no programmable shaders.
@@thomasmittelwerk410 The Vertex / Vector Units technically were programmable shaders for the PS2, in a time when even most PC owners didn't have a GPU with shaders.
The studio I worked at during this time had optimised the disc I/O to such a degree that when the PS/2 Slim was released, our games stopped working due to I/O failures because of very slight timing differences in the IOP when Sony combined multiple processors into fewer packages. The fix was simple: swap two instructions around in the IOP code, but this was before the days of issuing patches. That era of game consoles was dominated by software developers spending a generation trying to catch up to the vision of the hardware engineers.
Which studio did you work at during that time? Did they attempt to fix that problem so consumers could play the games on the PS2S? If they did attempt something, what did they attempt to do and did it work? If they didn’t attempt something, why didn’t they? (Apologies for the number of questions. I’m not a developer and I’ve never owned a PlayStation console, so what you said is something I never heard of before. I know nothing about the entire development process.)
@@BlackMaleLion what i guess they did (based on what other studios did when their game had bugs or whatnot) was update the game and send it to be put on every disc made from then on, so that anyone who buys the game from there oinwards has the patched version, and if anyone who got the old version called customer support bc of this issue offer to send them the disc of the patched version
@@BlackMaleLion The fix ended up being simple. Simply swapping two instructions in the IOP code fixed the timing issue, which was used in projects from that point on. There weren't any more releases of those games on the PS2 (that cost a lot in those days due to physical media and pressing a gold master disc). Thankfully the vast majority of PS2 players had the original console. We were transitioning to the PS3 soon afterwards though, so there weren't many more PS2 projects in the studio.
"trying to catch up to the vision of the hardware engineers", you can look at it in the opposite way. They developed the hardware knowing their design pushed the complexity of high performance games from them to the software developers. Reminds me of Itanium/Itanic, unbelievable levels of hype and pr claims of next generation performance but with all of the onus pushed onto software devs. With regard to patches, I have a vague memory of a game that used an existing network request for a EULA or something to abuse a buffer overflow exploit in order to patch a game that in theory couldn't be patched. In the 90/(early)2000's bizarrely a lot of the bug fixes and patches for PC games actually came from the warez scene, even though on PC they could release patches they generally followed the console trend and might provide a single update that was supposed to be there before they were forced to go gold.
I remember being utterly blown away by the graphics of Metal Gear Solid 2, Madden 2001, Gran Turismo 3, and Silent Hill 2 on the PS2. I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing. I still haven't been as wowed by graphics even to this day as I was back in in 2001. The only thing that came somewhat close to giving me that feeling was seeing the UE5 Matrix Awakens demo in person and to a lesser extent Hellblade 2 on my PC. I still own my PS2 with those games, I might buy a small CRT TV to enjoy the PS2 all over again. Im sure the games still look great to this day, especially on a CRT.
@@alg7115doesn't help that not that many PS2 games support progressive scan. If you don't have any upscaling/scan converting hardware like an OSSC or a Retrotink you're gonna have a bad time on a flatscreen, especially a big one
@@AlfalfaAccess no. Kutaragi was against open standards. If Kutaragi was still involved the PS5 would be an insane beast that used completely proprietary tech. No PC ports, all exclusives. Hardware for the PS3 and PS4 would be built in. It would probably be able to do PS2 emulation in software.
The jump from PS1 to PS2 was ridiculous. We went from largely impressionistic 3D to finely detailed 3D worlds and characters, and the characters could show emotion reasonably well. I feel so fortunate to have been able to get a PS2 at launch with Tekken Tag Tournament, and Timesplitters, and love that it still works. Silent Hill 2 and MGS 2 were just spellbinding.
But by the time the PS2 came out, we not only already had played on the Dreamcast, but 3D accelerators on the PC became standard. So it really didn't look very impressive in comparison.
@@MonstrMash123458943 Nah, definitely 4th to 5th. Absolutely no comparison. Going 3D at all was a crazy milestone. Even if it took a another generation to start rendering fingers lmao.
I think the jump between PS1 and PS2 may been the largest in history in terms of 3d, and its kind of surprising that people understimate it. At least while looking at the specs (and the games of course), PS2 can render hear me out in texture mode 100-200 times more than the PS1 in its fastest mode (flat or wireframe polygons), at way more framerate (1fps of a PS1 highly demanding game could hypotetically be 60fps on PS2), with way better graphics and on top of that part of those polygons on PS1 were reduced due to having to waste power to fix their hardware issues. That without counting all of the new introduced graphical techniques. Some of the most interesting things that the PS2 was capable over the PS1, both in interviews and tech demo showcases: For example, the point of Jak And Daxter The Precursor Legacy was to make Crash lush look on open world, and they did it with way better graphics and no load times. Any PS2 game main character heavily surprass any single scene frame in terms of poly count. Gran Turismo 4 cars probably has more polygons than an entire track in previous entries, etc... PS2 is not just able to do their own things, but its also able to do entire cutting edge limit pushing tech demos of fifth gen games in real time at a way higher framerate and way higher scale, basically (and thats also something that was show in one of the E3 i think). PS2 to PS1 is simply the most impressive evolution of 3d graphics imo. The jump between PS2 to PS3, PS3 to PS4 or PS4 to PS5 wasnt nearly as big. I dont think a PS3 could do characters as detail as the PS2 old man tech demo in real time multiple times, while PS2 could hypotetically handle the PS1 T Rex very easily duplicated it hundreds of times.
@@svr5423 Sure, but I mentioned the difference between PS1 and PS2 specifically, not Dreamcast and PS2, or PC games utilising 3D accelerator cards vs PS2. Taken in the context of the Dreamcast, and PC games using 3D accelerators, the PS2 was of course not so far ahead (and many Dreamcast games looked better than many PS2 games, and particularly early on), but so many console gamers went directly from PS1 to PS2 without ever playing a Dreamcast, or having a PC with the like of a Voodoo 2 for gaming. The jump between the 5th and 6th generation was such a massive leap forward for 3D gaming.
Fun facts: GTA SA did collision detection on the a vector unit afaik Disc access was also reprogrammed and models + textures were moved next to each other so they can be read at the same time. There was also a copy of the archive in another part of the disc so the laser doesn't have to move too far. Adam Fowler was responsible for the disc system Interiors were put high up above the fly limit, with textures loaded across 17 dimensions so they could unload the outside world and have them more detailed Reflections worked by rendering a copy of the same room underneath with a transparent floor texture
My dad and I were in a Circuit City once in 2000, I look over at a wall of screens and there's a race on, so I say to my Dad "hey, races are on over there." As we start walking closer it starts to Dawn on us that it's a video game, ( Gran Turismo 3) and that led to months of us trying to get a hold of a PlayStation 2. My dad looked everywhere to find that damn thing. We even saw one poor guy who got the last unit out of a kb toys. He was putting it into his car he had it balanced on his knee against the trunk, (out of its box by the way,) and he lost balance and we both saw the thing shatter. That was a sad day. I remember when I finally got the PlayStation 2 because I was sicker than a dog with the flu for almost a week. My brother comes into my room with a box and he says "a package came from Dad." Instantly knew what it was and was excited beyond belief. I must have been playing PlayStation 1 games on that thing for 3 months before I could save enough allowance to buy my first PlayStation 2 game.
I remember this happening on the Dreamcast with NFL 2K. So many people fooled by the post-play wandering that the models performed. I was never fooled by Gran Turismo 3 but I was blown away by the detail in the cars. It was like playing the pre-rendered cutscenes from the previous generation.
@@theultimatedriver3858 my first game was actually ATV off-road fury. Gran Turismo three was like my third game, and as I said it took months between getting games because they were so expensive back then for a kid with an allowance.
@@jamescampbell8482 I always find it really weird when people call that game ATV Offroad Fury. Here in Australia it was sold as just ATV Offroad. Strangely I can't find any mention of that online
My parents got a PS1 for my sister before I was born. She kinda first tipped off my gaming interest, her and my cousins. My parents looked into getting me a PS2 and felt it was in their price range, so they got me one. It was around the midpoint of its lifespan. Whenever the PS2 slim came around, that was the model they bought, and I still have it to this day. Kingdom Hearts and Sonic Heroes were the first two video games I had ever played. Teeny tiny kid me lol. It's wild to think I grew up playing the "best video game console ever." I think it definitely gave me quite the imagination, just with the shear number of wacky stories I got to play on that thing.
I don't think I've ever been blown away by graphics the way I was with Final Fantasy X. The opening Blitzball cutscene still looks amazing, and right after, when Auron hands Tidus his first sword, you *feel* the weight of it in the staggering animation and camera work. That game made me fall in love with JRPGs.
Yep. FFX was an insane leap from FFIX. I remember going nuts over how good it looked. If not for that game, I probably never would have tried the older titles and found out how great those are in their own rights.
October 26, 2000 I will never forget that day. I was in middle school and my parents were so cool they stood in line at Best Buy to get me a PS2 on launch day. Sure I had no games yet and was playing Crash Bash on it but I was so excited! Once I got Tekken Tag Tournament and a memory card I was in business.
I'm not sure about gta sa. While its a good game it's legacy back then was it made the ps2 felt like it was getting old. The game ran in the teens to mid 20s and was low resolution
@adrianshephardOP4 I remember that being mixed even for its time. Some people liked it but some thought it made the game too dark or hard to see. I feel like what the game was best remember for what just the large number of things you can do and being one of the best sandbox games of its day
Back when companies got creative in their hardware design, bringing their own special sauce. And the developers had hunger to unlock the potential of the consoles and develop unique new things. Today consoles are at best mid range PCs with some minor changes, and many game developers can't deliver finished game on launch.
Well the unfinished games bit is a publisher choice, that's just greed. As for the hardware... It was kinda inevitable. The PC market didn't have 3D graphics figured out at all (I mean... We didn't even have graphics cards, eventually really weak Voodoo cards). Technology has a way of standardizing. We'll probably see some amazing things with AI upscaling and AI frame generation *next* generation. But PCs will see similar progress, so the lack of diverse approaches to hardware design may remain.
Remember buying Zone of the Enders just for the MGS2 demo? I bought the game, took the demo and then traded in ZOE at EBgames. I was that guy. I was an idiot though because ZOE is actually a good game.
Sony's killer move was making the PS2 double as a DVD player. I was able to convince my mom to get us one by showing her the PS2 media remote. Same story for one of my friends. It was not much more than a stand alone DVD player at the time. So my mom and I made a deal.
DMA on the PS2 was unforgiving but the tricks you could pull off with it were nuts - you could achieve post processing in software that other platforms needed dedicated hardware for
Real time reflections in the opening of Xenosaga FFX being the first game with proper wind physics in the grass. Jak and Daxter being the first game to use Inverse Kinematics to prevent feet from sliding on the ground walk walking/running Gran Turismo being the one of the 1st console games to output at 1080i widescreen, ushering in Full HD PS2 gave us SOO much...
@@TrickshotHeadshot you mad? a cheap Riva Tnt can play HalfLife at 1280x1024, you dont need a geforce at that time to had ps2 graphics, and PS2 was Y2K... same year as Geforce2, and then nvidia launched the MX series were very very cheap adn way powerfull than ps2... Geforce2MX200 was launched at 130$ price wtf you talking about??? 130$ for a basic geforce2 with better graphics than PS2. That "buddy" got the first playstation and was awesome, but ps2 was only a hype for ratkids that did not know to use a PC at that time... i keep the Playstation1 and bought an ENTIRE PC with a Geforce2 instead of the PS2, for just a bit more money.
@@TrickshotHeadshot The cost is irrelevant. If you are going to say something is the first then it better be the first otherwise you are at best misinformed or at worse purposefully deceiving people. The PS2 graphics were pretty trash when it launched. It did have good games, it is still a legendary console, but its graphics weren't it for many of us.
I was working as an RA in the dorms at the time the PS2 came out. I remember how many PS2 boxes came in the door on release day, and how quickly they came in over the next few months via the mail room. No one really cared about the lack of games. The "killer app" that the Dreamcast and Gamecube lacked was the DVD player. Much like the PS3 years later, the PS2 was a very affordable (and at the time of release cheapest) DVD player on the market. Players were frequently $500-$1000. The PS2 came out and prices rapidly dropped post release resulting in the first sub $100 units at the end of 2000. We had a video rental place on campus that was VHS only until the PS2 came out, then they rapidly shifted to DVD.
Those early $500 RCA players were garbage. They just couldn't fulfill the DVD spec. One of the first dual layer DVD releases was Terminator 2 and it was often used as a test for player performance. The Sony 7000 model, which was long regarded as the reference standard, played it perfectly. The RCA produced several seconds of glitch when the layer transition came up. for a player worth the money, games aside, the PS2 launch was a big shift in cost of entry. Especially since it was still a while before the typical new PC could do good DVD playback without expensive decoding hardware.
Honestly since it was all pre-streaming, Netflix had only in the first few years of their DVD mailing service, and Blockbuster was still a significant player, the machine was basically all that you really needed in terms of entertainment.
I worked at Walmart in electronics in 2002 and for anyone that wanted a console, but not sure which one to get, the DVD player and backwards compatibility with PS1 games meant most of them opted for the PS2. For people buying for themselves that weren't big gamers the DVD player was the big seller. For people wanting to get a console for a child that didn't have a PS1, the PS1 backwards compatibility tended to be the bigger seller with the DVD player a bonus. They _loved_ being able to pick up a couple of cheaper PS1 games for the same price as a single PS2 game. It let them give their kids more games for Christmas for basically the same amount of money. The most frustrating PS2 sale I made was to a kid who had some kind of learning disability. He had a bag full of money with a lot of coins in it and one of those was a $10 gold coin from the late 1800s. He needed that $10 to pay for the console, but the coin was worth far more than $10. I pointed this out to the lady with him, since the kid didn't understand and she... didn't give a flip. Anyone that cared about the kid would have gotten out $10, kept the coin and sold it for a fair value to give the kid money for games. I tried multiple times to get her to do the right thing, but she wouldn't. So I made the sale and bought the coin out of the till immediately. I'm _still_ angry at that woman all these years later, but I really hope the kid enjoyed his PS2.
Hearing this, the design of the Cell in the PS3 makes a lot more sense. I never realized, that the PS2 already had an architecture built around streaming, vector units and a dedicated DMA engine. All features more emphasized in the PS3 (and probably equally difficult to utilize for developers)
Yes, now if you think about it. The saturn is the same. But like the PS3 the hefty price almos kill it. DVD capabilities, nex gen graphics and a affordable price in 2000 was the key of it's success. Sony forgot that on the PS3 and almost kill themselves.
i wish sony goes back into making proprietary architectures for ps6 and not semi x86 pc's like the consoles we have today, its just special and peculiar and will lead to special games but i doubt it.
@machinefannatic99 X86 is too easy to develop for and has more advantages then disadvantages compared to Sony's custom chips to ever go back. Plus Sony hasn't given up on custom hardware. The PS5 is more customized than the Xbox Series S and X. It's RDNA2 architecture uses some Sony specific designs that are exclusive only to the PS5. And the upcoming PS5 Pro uses some custom RDNA for upscaling techniques that Sony feels are better than AMDs solutions.
@@GalaxyFur Not true, x86 is simply known for being easy to develop for but not powerful or efficient as other architectures, Mark cerny said the same thing in his talk about road to ps4, he decided to choose x86 to make it easier for devs but said it was a tough choice since he could have gone for another architecture and made ps4 more powerful... proprietary consoles was the reason you needed a more powerful pc to outmatch them but this isnt the case anymore because everything is a semi pc now ruclips.net/video/xHXrBnipHyA/видео.html
@machinefannatic99 The problem is that Sony chip architecture technically isn't superior because the Sony-developed architectures have such a steep learning curve that it doesn't get realized towards the end of that console generation when new systems are on the Horizon regardless. The PS5 Cell and PS3 Emotion Engine never performed as well as the competition until the end, when it didn't really matter. That's why the 360 and GameCube for example had better-looking games than the PS2 generation or the PS3 for so long. X86 architecture yields overall better results early on. This is why 360 had better-looking games than PS3 for most titles, and Xbox and GameCube outperformed the PS2 visually more often than not vs PlayStation architectures. Sony is now using an all new approach and using their own developed GPU technology solutions In conjunction with AMD. Eventually, I would imagine Sony is going to switch over ARM down the road. I could imagine a Sony/Qualcomm solution for PS7, perhaps.
Nothing can ever come close to the experience of playing MGS2 for the first time - the graphics and cut scenes completely blew me away. Looking back at Silent Hill 3 now, it looks like a PS3/360 game lol. PS2 best console ever. The peak of pre-online gaming.
The PS2 was a dark horse power wise. But then so was the Gamecube. That purple box was such an efficient, elegant design architecturally. Id love to see a similar video on that. Great work!
@@abeeocta2599 It was also due to leftover sentiment from Nintendos NES and SNES eras when they weren't the most pleasant of platform holders to work with and didn't offer the most favourable conditions for 3rd parties. So N64 and Gamecube suffered due to that as well as the storage mediums they opted for
I remember playing on a friend's GC after owning a PS2 for a while and not really liking the controllers (it was honestly hard to beat the DualShock 2 in that era) but liking them a lot better than the N64's. That said beyond that Nintendo did a lot of really unique things that did work very well. They made the console easy enough to move from livingroom to livingroom by kids, allowed for a maximum of 4 wired controllers by default in an era where wireless controllers just only started to exist, allowed for the GBA to hook up to the console for extra utility in some games, and had some truly interesting first-party titles (in terms of 1st party titles Nintendo is probably the strongest of the console makers; the amount of ridiculously good titles from them is impressive). For that matter SSB:M is still an absolute blast to play, Mario Kart: Double Dash still has one of the more unique features from the series, and I remember how the water in several of the games (notably Super Mario Sunshine and Wave Racer) looked simply amazing.
The goal of many 60 FPS games on the PS2 really endeared it to me compared to many games of the generations that book-end the PS2. Smooth game play has always been something I have preferred going all the way back to the 8-bit days!
Yeah we really got screwed out of the beat era thx to the loss of computer gaming during the os2 era.. with the ps3 they compelling capped or development... consoles held us all back until ppl forgot that graphics went the only metric
The SSD and data compression tech (direct storage) is actually pretty impressive. It can help save on RAM usage. The Cell processor was amazing. It still is. The issue was it was very difficult to write for and really wasn't a good choice for a gaming console. Though by the end of the generation, once devs got the hang of it, games started to get really good. There was a reason the US Air Force and other companies would buy a bunch of ps3s, install Linux, and run clustering for massive (at the time) compute performance.
PS2 was complex to program, what saved it from having a similar fate to Saturn was the great success of its predecessor, and RenderWare which made the creation process easier. Think of it this way: The PS2 could be like the Saturn, very complex and not very powerful, but companies were so confident that they would profit (thanks to the success of its predecessor) that they were willing to mine and hire the best and most renowned professionals (hypothetically , the guys who created incredible demoscenes that ran on a potato). From my point of view, the best and most user-friendly console was the Xbox OG, it used a very well-established platform, with millions of devs around the world, in addition to great hardware. The PlayStation 2 is extremely respectable if you keep in mind that this hardware came out of the mid-90s, much more similar to an SGI station costing a few thousand dollars, but that Sony managed to make it cost less than a DVD Player.
@@normalguycap in what way? The Xbox was incredibly powerful when it was released, it rivaled higher end PCs. If I remember correctly it was at least 2x the power of the PS2 and since it was x86 and directx anyone that developed a game on PC could easily make it for the Xbox, no learning curve
I think many scrutinize the PS2's output from it's first year because of the enormous hype it had but it was also one of those consoles where once developers really got rolling with it, you saw the improvements coming down the pipeline very quick and the leaps in quality were huge.
I'm sure third-party engines like RenderWare helped too. Let another company figure out all the complicated hardware details for you and then just buy their engine! Plus then it was much easier to port between consoles as RW supported GameCube and Xbox
Always nice to see the great Dreamcast mentioned. :) The cell processor in PS3 was even harder to utilize fully than the emotion engine as far as I remember.
PS2 was hands down my favorite Playstation. I remember being in a PE class at my local university and we were playing basketball, and I was so excited to get out of there and pick up my PS2 preorder! After I picked it up, I couldn't put Smuggler's Run down! Oh, the memories...
i got goosebumps when u mentioned jak and daxter, the ps2 was the console i grew up on and to appreciate some of technical feats of developers that made these games possible was really nice.
Ah man, "The Emotion Engine" always a hoot reading about Ken Kutaragi telling everyone with the Emotion Engine for the PS2 you could "JACK INTO THE MATRIX" hahaha. Though a note on some developers experience with the Emotion Engine and the PS2 Hardware wasn't always sunshine and roses. Shinji Mikami and Tomonobu Itagaki weren't fans on how complicated it was to develop for.
I think it wasn’t that well for the ps3 era, but I like how many ps4 games have 30fps as to me it looked the most natural with the cinematic frame rate, but I still think 60+ should be for the faster paced/less graphically advanced games.
You're right @th3_ne0__ . Slow paced games are fine at 30fps as long as they don't require a ton of precision. Fast-paced games definitely feel intuitive at 60fps.
@@treedoor despite the sub-par frame rates I’m going to be honest though, nothing will ever beat the yellow-ish color scheme of the games from the era.
@@th3_ne0__ Cinema is in 24/30FPS because it becomes a lot more expensive to make a movie the higher the framerate is. 24FPS is about the limit when it stops looking like a slideshow and becomes a more or less smooth picture. There's no reason to stick with 24 or 30FPS if it's possible to go higher. Games with more FPS simply feel better to play, especially if you have a monitor that can match the framerate. It's just a lot smoother and pleasant to play. 60FPS pales in comparison to even 85FPS, nevermind 120FPS or higher. There's just no reason to keep that 30FPS standard and there never truly was aside from hardware limitations. At least personally, I'd prefer a game to look worse if it means it performs really well. Games are meant to be played, not just looked at.
Yes it was. At the University of Glasgow we developed a couple of compilers for it, with two groups working on it, auto paralleling ones, but it turned out to be very hard to harness its hetrogenous architecture efficiently.
For it's low price back in the year of 2000 - I remember GeForce 256 and GeForce2 were like 300 USD which was 2 to 3 monthly incomes in my country, PS2 graphical capabilities were superb
@@bosquejo72 What do you mean? Gamecube was more powerful, but not that much because it was released 1 and a half year later - back then it was huge, but it couldn't play dvd... Xbox launched even later and was 300 usd when ps2 at the end of 2001 was something about 260-270 usd. Dreamcast was ofc less powerful
@@bosquejo72 consoles are about compromises between performancem features and price. Sony balanced them great in PS2. Every console had their best features. GameCube was about water and reflections. Xbox for shaders and number of polygons. PS2 for particles, transformations (PS2 apparently could produce the most complex geometry based water) and multi-layered transparencies. Great generation overall.
I used to play about with rendering shapes on the PS2 hardware in University (2000-2005). Never fully got the hang of the hardware, but it was definitely impressive and the games were amazing (PS2 is my favourite console). Great video!
I don't think I caught you mentioning this, but for some reason all of my friends and I referred (and still refer to this day) to that signature PS2 slow motion/blurring effect as "emotion engine", meaning that whenever we watch a twitch stream with a PS2 game that does it, we immediately all type "EMOTION ENGINE!" :D. Was this just something that we made up on our own, or was it common for other people to refer to that signature slow motion blurring as "emotion engine"? Fantastic video and really informative! Thank you!
No other consumer electronics item has ever been more hyped. Even newspaper business sections would write articles on it and the chips inside like months before it came out. It was so hyped that saddam huissen was supposedly buying them to launch missiles, or some shit lol. Only thing I've ever stood all night in line for, one of the best things I've ever bought.
@@nicksjacku9750 No the rumor was saddam. I'd read the paper everyday to see any news on it, and they mentioned him several times as buying them to use the chips to launch or guide his missiles.
Playing Final Fantasy 12 on PS2 using a Pelican wireless controller and a component cable (YPbPr) hooked up to a very large Sony Trinitron TV I had back in the day, a friend literally thought and asked if I was playing Xbox 360 when they came over, it looked so good - way beyond launch era PS2 titles. Respect for the Sega Dreamcast, still love it and had that first but there's no denying the power of the PS2 - even if it lacked VGA out, it had that DVD player too which sadly didn't help Sega was very convenient for the masses. With the remote control it was your all in one entertainment solution.
@@thequinlanshow3326 Okay guy. Other than some XBOX exclusives; (Panzer Dragoon Orta, Jet Set Radio Future, and Doom 3) God of War 2 was unmatched at the time.
Final Fantasy 10 on the PS2 was a HUGE leap compared to 7/8/9 on the PS1. I played it again recently and was still in awe 20 years later at how beautiful it all was even to this day.
The PS2 game that blew me away the most was probably Ōkami. I don't know if it does anything fancy on a technical level but as a game I just thought it was brilliant and still do to this day.
A friend saw me play MGS2 years after it's release and was really impressed with the graphics, I think it still looks great now, hard to believe its 23 years old.
The level of artistry and technical wizardry demonstrated by PS2 devs was bananas. God of War 2 in particular just floored me back then, surpassing even games that were available on Xbox 360. These games still look amazing today, especially on a good CRT.
Gran Turismo 3 blew me away. Also details about games you already mentioned. MGS2 blew me away with the small details that even modern games don't seem to do, like shooting all the Glass in windows and all the glass particles being on the ground and left there and making sound that would alert the enemies if you walked over them. Not to mention all your shells from your gun that were shot being left on the ground or floating in the water depending on where you stand. Silent Hill 3 shadows put my jaw on the floor once I unlocked the lightsaber I couldn't believe how well they kept up with the movement of swinging the sabre with the shadows. MGS3 everything blew me away from the water effects to the amount of animals and enemies that can be on screen at once to the lighting changes depending on the area and weather. The fire effect from the fury was just crazy. Of course there was final fantasy X's cutscenes
"MGS2 blew me away with the small details that even modern games don't seem to do, like shooting all the Glass in windows and all the glass particles" I've timestamped a part in the e3 footage that illustrates exactly how we would've reacted when that trailer dropped ruclips.net/video/Mr6RngfAeMY/видео.htmlsi=aJWaOSJPVC-Cfjn4&t=285
Ghosthunter, no doubt, the game had god rays, dynamic deformation facial textures, realistic water physics with reflections, dynamic reflections, softbodies, dynamic lights with shadows, inverse kinematics. The game was a technical master piece.
One of the most technically impressive games for the ps2, shame it's not mentioned more. imo the thing that lets it down is the art style, compared to the sh3 for example it looks cartoney.
I love your videos MVG. Especially this type of video, where you talk about what the hardware can do, and really break it down. I'm a nerd who loves engineering, so having an idea of how my consoles can play my favorite games is fascinating to me.
Simply NO and NO, you cant play that PS2 games on a 55" modern TV without laughting... then put Dead or Alive 3 from the twice as powerful than PS2, the 2001 xbox, and see it on a 55" modern TV... IT LOOKS one generation above PS2 😂😂😂😂 how can ps2 graphics look MODERN on a modern TV if that graphics looks worst than the original xbox
Champions of Norrath and it's direct sequel, Return to Arms, are peak PS2 power. They ramped up the Bladurs Gate Dark Alliance engine and took full advantage of the PS2.
First Video: Playstation 2 3D rendering @ 720p 60fps part2 Second Video: Playstation 2 rendering images at 1080i. The PS2 hardware is very flexible, one of the best examples of this are these two demos rendering at 1280x720 and 1920x540, it's not upscale, it's internal resolution. Thanks to its fillrate it was possible to render a framebuffer larger than its own video memory (4MB). Honestly, this is very impressive.
Have you heard of the homebrew app GSM? You can force games to output at 1080i or 720p internally. Obviously its not compatible with all games and cutscenes often need to be skipped with an option at the start for 720p, but its crazy to see games running like that on the ps2
@@YoDisNotFlyToSE yep, but it is just for the output, the internal resolution still remains at 640x448. However the results in some games are really good.
Xenosaga 3 will always stick in my head as how amazing the PS2 graphics got at the end. After the Xbox 360 launched and in the PS3 release window it looked great.
Surprised you didn't mention the small dedication to the Emotion Engine in MGS2; Otocon's sister, Emma Emmerich, is featured in the game and is often referred to as EE Other aspects of the game hint that the player is kind of exploring digital hardware, with all the references to Shells and Nodes
i'll tell you how. cell shading hides that the models are extremely low poly , ps1 levels of triangles per model in main character mechs , sub ps1 levels of polys in fodder enemy mechs. This lack of detail is hidden by cel shading. Also physics are ps1 primitive and what looks like physics is pre broken animations playing out. This leaves plenty of processing power for huge environments as well as abundant post processing effects like motion blur and depth of field. Basically excellent craftsmanship
Honestly, even the dreamcast had better graphics. The PS2 looked kind of trash, even for its time. Everyone could see with their own eyes that any other platform tended to look better.
@@iancurrie8844 So why did those other platforms struggle to sell even 10 million, or barely past 20 million, when PS2 went on to sell 160 million? "Everyone", right? xD
Back in the 2000s, I got a NetYaroze PlayStation and was abled to import 3D FBX data, MIDI data, Audio data, Image data to the system and get it to work in under a month. I later got the PS2 'NetYaroze' and couldn't get ONE flat shaded triangle on the screen. The PS1 had small books that would easily explain how to utilize the architecture & API. The PS2 REQUIRED you to print tens of A4 sized pages for GS, Vector Units, etc, but I still didn't have a clue on how to get it to work.
It was just too bad that DVD movies were very hard on the laser diode for a few years there (I think the "slim" model and contemporary "phat" model solved the issue)
@@jul1440 Never heard of a diode issue per se, but could that be related to the common read-error repairs on OG consoles? I remember having to send it in to overcome errors loading the game world in Vice City.
@@nthgth I believe you are correct (The diode issue might be the original PS), I just remember the tales that playing DVDs would hasten the appearance of the read errors.
Silent Hill 2, 3, MGS 2, 3 and Zone of the Enders were some of the best looking 6th gen games and they were all released relatively early in the lifecycle of the PS2. Konami were masters of coding for that hardware.
Zone of the Enders was a fun game. I remember people buying it just for the MGS2 demo disc. The running joke was “hey, this is a pretty good game that came with the MGS2 demo I bought!”
@@saricubra2867 Conker Live & Reloaded on Xbox is the closest anything got to Rogue Squadron 2 and Resident Evil Remake/Resident Evil 0/Resident Evil 4 on the GC imo (especially in 480p), for PS2 it would be Rogue Galaxy.
@@StratusFearX Zone of the Enders 2 is 5000 times better in every way. ZoE 1 looks like an amateur proof of concept in comparison. I still remember it fondly, though.
Dreamcast produces beautiful graphics, a lot of which is that VGA RAMDAC and the super crispy super sample based anti-aliasing it does, as well as clean edge AA, the GC used sub-pixel AA and while didn't have an official VGA lead, the RAMDAC can do it with a modified official component or D-Terminal cable, both the DC & GC had beautiful 480p IQ, the OGXB can also do VGA via a simple VGA Bios flash, but this involves modification of the console, but you can still do component 480p on the NTSC model, as far as power goes and graphical fidelity, from worst to best it's: PS2/DC/XB/GC, the GC R300 giving it the edge over the OGXB NV2A GPU and the PowerPC CPU having higher IPC, for the best audio hardware, that goes to the DC, with it's incredible Yamaha processor, the GC's Macronix DSP was really good too, the PS2 had very basic PCM and software mixing plus the SCP 1 & SCP 2 (which was the PS1 audio hardware), the OGXB had a list of audio specs that even out does the DC in some respects, real time Dolby Digital in games, a really nice Wolfson CODEC/DAC, HRTF Sensaura 3D with 256 stereo voices in real-time, full-fat MIDI support, Nvidia's Soundstorm audio processor was a powerhouse and I'm not actually sure how well it was used (not to mention shows how good Nvidia PC audio would be had they included a Soundstorm processor on PC GPU's and developed it further to this day), the Xbox was the only console that could do real-time HRTF like PC's could at the time, and in some ways the OGXB has much better audio than modern consoles and PC's even, as real-time HRTF is not actually coded into video game engines like they were during the OGXB generation, Microsoft went all out with the OGXB, but Nintendo's experience really helped them prodice a masterpiece of engineering with the Gamecube, the Macronix DSP may not be as powerful as the Soundstorm ASIC, but it was still a fantastic audio chip and the R300 GPU was just incredible and packed with features and effects and beautiful video output IQ.
@@Wobble2007 It's a real shame Nintendo shot themselves in the foot AGAIN after the storage capacity woes of N64 cartridges. The GameCube's hardware was top-notch, able to often times outperform all the others of that generation, if only games weren't constrained to those tiny discs. What's the point of a high-quality audio processing and a large, fast texture memory buffer if you have to compress the shit out of everything to wedge it in to 1.4GB?
Now this is a video I want to watch, also, 12 hrs and already 150k views and 11.5k likes, this is why you need to make more videos man, the quality doesn’t matter, if you find a certain subject interesting, the likelihood is we’ll also like it. I genuinely love your content man.
I remember reading the ars technica article on the graphics engine before the PlayStation 2 came out. The reviewer was definitely of the mind that this should have been the way for GPUs to grow in the future. I'm glad you mentioned the rain effect in metal gear solid 2. Nothing could touch it for years because of that super high bandwidth.
I don't see why it's a bad thing that we've moved to standardised architecture. Makes development a lot easier, especially across platforms, if the only thing to worry about is some OS level API changes that your engine can handle. The death knell for this was the PS3. A system that if you had a PHD in the hardware could look good but otherwise an overcomplicated mess with buggier and uglier multiplatform titles.
The problem is that multiplatform games developers likely wouldn't optimise efficiently for that bespoke hardware by targeting it first. In other words, horribly optimised ports.
It's better now, the PS3 Cell architecture showed the flaws in deviating too hard from the norm. You had companies like Valve who tried avoiding developing for it like the plague.
@@supersardonic1179 But didn't the 360 also use a version of the CELL, and don't forget the CELL was what ultimately gave us The Last of Us, Heavy Rain and Uncharted 2/3 et cetera, it paid of in the end, it was always the lifecycle of a system for games to get better and better as devs got more intimate with the hardware, it was part of what made consoles special, be it the Mega Drive Yamaha FM audio or SNES's Sony DSP, The N64's RSP & RDP, and so on, bare-metal consoles were so much better and more interesting, they had custom audio hardware, video, graphics and co-processors, unified architecture just allowed devs to get lazy, and produce the slop they put out today, it could have been a good thing, and it's not just the generic hardware that makes consoles the paper weights they are today, it's the forced online, the high-latency unoptimized games, the clunky GUI's, the over bloated code and cutting of content to sell it back as DLC, the lack of playtesting and announcing going gold long before they should, the rushed deadlines and crunch. Custom hardware used to force creativity, now devs are given the same generic tools that results in the same game over, and over, and over , and over again, they use the same engines and repeated formulas, it's not just hardware that is stale, it's the tools that are also stifling creativity, unified architecture and software, sadly is a big part of why gaming has become so starved of quality single player experiences that offer new experiences and are built with new game mechanic's and with actual love and creativity, sadly at this point, I'm not sure gaming will ever really recover, I do actually thinks it's a long time dead, with the exception of something special now and then for indi devs, and Nintendo, thanks to the Switch, still forces some creativity thanks to their own propitiatory game engines and stick quality that they still manage to adhere too, games like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are rare and few, Mr Iwata San actually predicted all this you can find a speech on RUclips where he lays all this out in black & White, and I fear with the NSwitch 2, Nintendo will go the way of every body else, they two will fall victim of forgetting how to just make good games, they have already deteriorated rapidly with this generation, so few IP's that they actually make use of now, so few new IP's and games from them, they no longer put out the many gameplay rich games they used too, instead just 1 or 2 big releases a year, so even Nintendo is a shadow of their former selves.
@@Wobble2007 So many wrong with your argument it's confusing. There are always people acting they know better than game developers and their hardworks. You do you I guess.
The pre-rendered cut scenes in Final Fantasy X were absolutely jaw-dropping. Been a few years since I played it but I guarantee they still look amazing to this day. That was one of those games that made me think graphics couldn't possibly get any better.
My sisters and I always talk about the insane graphical leap from Final Fantasy IX on the PS1 (2000) to Final Fantasy X on the PS2 (2001) -- obviously FFIX is very stylized, but even-so, going from pre-rendered backgrounds to fully detailed environments alone is really incredible. And not only were these two games released a year apart, but FFX released *only a year* after the launch of the PS2 and still looked fantastic -- In fact, our dad bought it solely based on the graphics alone, which in-turn introduced my siblings and I to the Final Fantasy franchise.
I hated writing EE code--memory access was SO SLOW. The VU0/VU1 processors were pretty neat---but really tricky to design around. Programming EE/VU code was just a nightmare with early tools. I remember being astounded at Tekken Tag given the primitive state of the tools. Making those launch titles with the devtool equivalent of sharpened sticks and rocks was QUITE an achievement. The GS, however, was really incredible for the time. PS2 architecture was really weird, but super flexible--which meant it could hold its own against the Xbox and other platforms that came out later on.
Drakan The Ancient's Gates is one of the more interesting technical marvels of early PS2 very few people seem to know about. It was developed by Psygnosis and published by Sony themselves and has some very unique features. The game actually kept track of everything you dropped in any of the small open world maps (there were several maps connected with one another but each one was pretty huge for PS2) and it features on the fly adjustment of LOD when going from walking mode to riding the dragon mode so you have nicely detailed levels when on foot and good performance when travel when on the dragon. The dragon himself has a really clever AI that will autonomously fight enemies nearby as well inform you when the place you're calling him to isn't good for landing. Wintin the small open worlds the game will use dynamic load screens, you'll only encounter them every once in a while and depending on how fast you're moving in a specific direction, the game will put the load screen at a further point(similar to unmodded Morrowind and on OG xbox). Speaking of that, if you happen to have the game installed on the internal HDD, you'll never encounter those loading screens within the small open worlds. The game keeps up with loading enough that those load screens just never show up and curiously it doesn't work like that when running a virtual DVD (ISO) on the PS2 emulator. I believe the game may have at some point been planned to use the internal HDD and the necessary code to take advantage of it was never removed form the game
I remember i was very impressed by Soul Calibur 2, Tekken 5, Persona 4, Ico looked nice too, it's a very powerful console and it has a great catalogue.
I adore the PS2, I grew up with this and even today I am discovering incredible games that haven't aged a day. Buf I will admit, on a purely graphic fidelity standpoint, the Gamecube has aged the best. Starfox Adventures even today is absolutely stunning.
@@LakesideAmusementPro I wonder why that is? Surely none of the gen6 consoles were made for HDTVs, and they all can push pretty decent pixels - why would GameCube stand out here? Could it be the devs?
@@LakesideAmusementPro I think it's because many GameCube games run at 480p (progressive) while most PS2 games run interlaced. A good scaler like the RetroTink 5X or 4K largely negate these issues.
@@nthgth The original Xbox did support 720p and 1080i. There are also a solid number of games that render at those resolutions. The GameCube had a lot more games that ran at 480p, though.
It’s interesting looking at the EE as a kind of first generation cpu- co processor SOC that we see in apple’s M series today…. In a lot of ways it was way ahead of its time
RenderWare was a generic graphics engine that targetted the common denominator for all platforms. As such most titles wouldn't take advantage of PS2 exclusive bits and games would often run slower on PS2 than Xbox and GC.
@@darksylinc ps2 had an insane install base. They totally focused on ps2 to make games and Xbox bruteforce the ports. Gamecube was left behind by 2003 and forward.
@@darksylinc Exactly, RenderWare wasn't an engine in the same way as Unreal. It was more of a toolkit. The way it was used in GTA games had little to do with the Burnout series, for instance, and the GTA Stories games were still able to use a custom engine based on the VC one even after RenderWare went exclusively to EA. GameBryo worked in a similar manner, the way it was implemented in say Civilization IV has nothing to do with Bethesda's games.
The PS2 was the First Console I bought with my own money. (All my PS1 was from dumpster diving because people didn't know that a blown fuse was all that was wrong with it.) In the early days, the PS2 games wasn't that intresting. However because it was backwards compatable, I was fine with it. It wasn't until Final Fantacy 10 that I was blown away with what the PS2 can do!
Great Video as always 👍 I’ve recently been reading quite a bit into PS2 Hardware for a video project about Half-Life I just uploaded, it’s pretty fascinating stuff. I think the shining component of Sony’s EE wasn’t so much its power in numbers, but rather just how efficient it could be at optimization, definitely an interesting design by Sony for the time.
I was a late PS2 owner but I was impressed by it. GoW, GoW 2, GT4, Killzone, Shadow of the Colossus to name a few. I already owned a classic Xbox for comparison. PS2 did hold up.
The Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synthesizer was a true black bishop, a big one. Only the skilled developers could put this pieces of hardware to work and get the special performance to display outstanding quality and gameplay experience. Look at Tekken 5, Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy XII, God of War II, Shadow of the Colossus, Silent Hill 3, Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty, Gran Turismo 3 and Gran Turismo 4. Excepcional quality games and I still I wonder if those software was capable to run properly on the original Xbox hardware without any kind of loss. Can't imagine how much the performance would be with more RAM memory for video, system and USB 2.0 maybe we never know.
Gotta love Kutaragi's vision. He was always thinking way ahead of the established trends. Even on the PC at the time, I never saw anything that looked as good as what the PS2 was capable of doing.
I remember playing gran turismo on the PS2 in 2001 with my buddy and we were both like ‘I can’t see how graphics can ever get better than this’
Aha it was amazing, Madden also blew me away, cant go wrong with metal gear solid series also, what a time for video game it was
and you were absolutely right.
This generation was definitely the last time I was blown away by how much better graphics were from the previous gen. Although for me it was going from PS1 and seeing Soul Calibur on someones imported Dreamcast.
Although I did get a PS2 and I still have it, unlike the Dreamcast which I think I sold when I bought the PS2.
@@General_MThe GameCube? Debatable. Yes, it might have the specs, but the discs have barely 2 GB capacity at most.
The Xbox? Definitely.
They haven't really got any better. It's the same game with more detail
Great video, but it doesn't scratch the surface of how difficult this system was to develop for. I was working as a graphics developer for EA at the time the EE came out and part of my job was to assess whether external devs had the technical capability to program it, most struggled to get a single polygon on the screen without the help of middleware.
The biggest error I see in videos like this, and the corresponding architecture charts they show, is that there was no connection between the VU0 and VU1 other than the DMA bus. In reality, VU1 could access VU0's register set. This made it possible to do skinning on VU0 and pass the vertex data directly to VU1 for transform and lighting using a spare register as a semaphore for synchronization, thus side-stepping the main bus bottle-neck altogether. Another thing people often neglect to mention is that the vector units had a 4-cycle latency for each instruction with no stalling. If you executed any assembly instruction, and tried to use the result less than 3 instructions later, you simply got the wrong value. The final kicker was that the VUs had both an integer and floating point pipe; when you wrote the assembly for it you literally wrote two instructions per line.
Now put all this together and try to imagine what programming this system was actually like. On any given cycle you had to know the exact state of not just the two instructions on that line but also the 6 instructions still in various stages of execution from the previous 3 cycles. And if you were doing the V0 skinning trick, and trying to keep it in perfect synchronization with VU1, then you had to keep track of 16 different instructions all running simultaneously. And this was for each and every cycle of your inner loop, which was typically written to process 3 vertices at once with each step looping back (first pass for transform, next for lighting, next for uv).
Programming the PS2 was hard. Programming it properly was an absolute nightmare!
I was kind of a star programmer at my university. This is the kind of challenge I would have loved when I was younger. 😭
Yeah, I missed this time period, but do have a bit of experience with the PSP which shared a lot of these quirks. Doing things correctly is a nightmare, but it's quite a fun challenge.
On the note of middleware, GTA is touted here for being a leader in streaming and graphics - but actually, they used render ware like everyone else, and Just Cause 1, I'd say, was far more impressive for the time and was completely custom on the rendering side. Unfortunately ended up a bit lost to time, though.
@@SK83RJOSH PSP was an awesome piece of kit, taught me more about the importance of cache coherency than any other system I ever worked on. The bus bottleneck had me continually wondering who in their right mind would have deliberately designed such an architecture? I have a theory that the CPU was originally supposed to be able to access the scratchpad directly without going through the main bus, but something happened in either design or fabrication that broke it. How else do you explain the presence of scratchpad memory that was actually slower to access than main RAM?
Good times, good times.
Wow, that was very insightful! Do you think the PS3 was Harding to develop for or the PS2? Judging by how early PS3 games look and ran, I'm led to believe it was the harder console to develop for.
@@Firealone9 to be honest I only ever worked on two PS3 titles, and both were cancelled before release, so I'm not really qualified to make a fair comparison (I was working for THQ at that point, just a year or so before they folded). from the exposure I did get, the PS3 was much easier to work with, albeit crippled by the Cell/SPU architecture, which was utterly antithetical to how most game environments are modeled in code. PS3 was certainly challenging, but at least you knew from the start what you were dealing with, and it was pretty much the same as what everyone else was dealing with. PS2, on the other hand, resulted in many, many nights at the pub with other developers discussing and debating all the various tricks and techniques needed to get the most out of it.
PS2 was the beginning of a new era. It turned your home console into an entertainment center. It looked and functioned like a little mini PC, and doubled as your DVD player. Where-as the Dreamcast tried for the classic SNES console style, as did the gamecube.
GTA 3, MetalGearSolid 2, Jak and Daxter. I still remember the first time I played the intro of GTA 3, and hopped into that first car on the bridge and starting driving, once I realized it was an actual open world, with radio stations. It was groundbreaking at the time, the previous GTA game was a top down DOS game. For me, this was mind blowing.
I remember being 7 years old and not being able to sleep waiting on the PS2 I got for Christmas, best Christmas ever combined with the PS3 when that came out. Those were the days. I was sick as a kid a lot and Jack and Daxter was the thing that saved me when I wasnt at school, I have so much wild nostalgia for the PS2. By that point I had played the ps1, nintendo 64, dreamcast, SEGA Megadrive and there was nothing like the PS2 it was truly the best system for years at that point. The dreamcast actually came close but the games weren't as good.
I still can't believe Gran Turismo 4 ran and looked like it did on the PS2. It sure could do some stuff in the right hands.
I don't know any of the programming particulars but you can tell when you play that game that each track was optimized differently. It wasn't just a general set of settings in the game engine to make it run on that hardware. It's a piece of art
I still can't believe iit either, especially when running that game on an emulator and scaling it up to HD/1440p/4k resolutions. That game has no business looking that good on a machine with no programmable shaders.
@@thomasmittelwerk410 The Vertex / Vector Units technically were programmable shaders for the PS2, in a time when even most PC owners didn't have a GPU with shaders.
1080i it ws epic
Absolutely true. I'm not even lying when I say that GT4 visuals still blow me away to this day.
The studio I worked at during this time had optimised the disc I/O to such a degree that when the PS/2 Slim was released, our games stopped working due to I/O failures because of very slight timing differences in the IOP when Sony combined multiple processors into fewer packages. The fix was simple: swap two instructions around in the IOP code, but this was before the days of issuing patches.
That era of game consoles was dominated by software developers spending a generation trying to catch up to the vision of the hardware engineers.
Which studio did you work at during that time?
Did they attempt to fix that problem so consumers could play the games on the PS2S?
If they did attempt something, what did they attempt to do and did it work?
If they didn’t attempt something, why didn’t they?
(Apologies for the number of questions. I’m not a developer and I’ve never owned a PlayStation console, so what you said is something I never heard of before. I know nothing about the entire development process.)
@@BlackMaleLion what i guess they did (based on what other studios did when their game had bugs or whatnot) was update the game and send it to be put on every disc made from then on, so that anyone who buys the game from there oinwards has the patched version, and if anyone who got the old version called customer support bc of this issue offer to send them the disc of the patched version
@@BlackMaleLion The fix ended up being simple. Simply swapping two instructions in the IOP code fixed the timing issue, which was used in projects from that point on. There weren't any more releases of those games on the PS2 (that cost a lot in those days due to physical media and pressing a gold master disc). Thankfully the vast majority of PS2 players had the original console. We were transitioning to the PS3 soon afterwards though, so there weren't many more PS2 projects in the studio.
Was it difficult transitioning to the ps3, having to learn the notorious Cell processor?
"trying to catch up to the vision of the hardware engineers", you can look at it in the opposite way. They developed the hardware knowing their design pushed the complexity of high performance games from them to the software developers. Reminds me of Itanium/Itanic, unbelievable levels of hype and pr claims of next generation performance but with all of the onus pushed onto software devs.
With regard to patches, I have a vague memory of a game that used an existing network request for a EULA or something to abuse a buffer overflow exploit in order to patch a game that in theory couldn't be patched. In the 90/(early)2000's bizarrely a lot of the bug fixes and patches for PC games actually came from the warez scene, even though on PC they could release patches they generally followed the console trend and might provide a single update that was supposed to be there before they were forced to go gold.
I remember being utterly blown away by the graphics of Metal Gear Solid 2, Madden 2001, Gran Turismo 3, and Silent Hill 2 on the PS2. I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing. I still haven't been as wowed by graphics even to this day as I was back in in 2001. The only thing that came somewhat close to giving me that feeling was seeing the UE5 Matrix Awakens demo in person and to a lesser extent Hellblade 2 on my PC. I still own my PS2 with those games, I might buy a small CRT TV to enjoy the PS2 all over again. Im sure the games still look great to this day, especially on a CRT.
Ps2 hooked up to modern HD tvs does look bad. It looked great on my parents old 1988 tatung TV. Unfortunately it died 5 years ago.
@@alg7115doesn't help that not that many PS2 games support progressive scan. If you don't have any upscaling/scan converting hardware like an OSSC or a Retrotink you're gonna have a bad time on a flatscreen, especially a big one
Kutaragi was a maniac. A visionary maniac but still responsible for more gray and lost hairs amongst the development teams than any other person.
The G.O.A.T of CEO
Nowdays sony CEO is a joke
@@AlfalfaAccess If he was still in charge most likely PS4/PS5 would be fully backwards compatible with PS1-PS3.
@@BUPMY1
Yep bet PS5 can emulate PS3 by now
And he would probably will colaborate with PCSX2 and RPCS3 developers
Lol
@@AlfalfaAccess no. Kutaragi was against open standards. If Kutaragi was still involved the PS5 would be an insane beast that used completely proprietary tech. No PC ports, all exclusives. Hardware for the PS3 and PS4 would be built in. It would probably be able to do PS2 emulation in software.
The jump from PS1 to PS2 was ridiculous. We went from largely impressionistic 3D to finely detailed 3D worlds and characters, and the characters could show emotion reasonably well. I feel so fortunate to have been able to get a PS2 at launch with Tekken Tag Tournament, and Timesplitters, and love that it still works. Silent Hill 2 and MGS 2 were just spellbinding.
But by the time the PS2 came out, we not only already had played on the Dreamcast, but 3D accelerators on the PC became standard.
So it really didn't look very impressive in comparison.
i feel like 7th generation to 8th generation was the biggest jump in gaming history
@@MonstrMash123458943 Nah, definitely 4th to 5th. Absolutely no comparison. Going 3D at all was a crazy milestone. Even if it took a another generation to start rendering fingers lmao.
I think the jump between PS1 and PS2 may been the largest in history in terms of 3d, and its kind of surprising that people understimate it. At least while looking at the specs (and the games of course), PS2 can render hear me out in texture mode 100-200 times more than the PS1 in its fastest mode (flat or wireframe polygons), at way more framerate (1fps of a PS1 highly demanding game could hypotetically be 60fps on PS2), with way better graphics and on top of that part of those polygons on PS1 were reduced due to having to waste power to fix their hardware issues. That without counting all of the new introduced graphical techniques.
Some of the most interesting things that the PS2 was capable over the PS1, both in interviews and tech demo showcases: For example, the point of Jak And Daxter The Precursor Legacy was to make Crash lush look on open world, and they did it with way better graphics and no load times. Any PS2 game main character heavily surprass any single scene frame in terms of poly count. Gran Turismo 4 cars probably has more polygons than an entire track in previous entries, etc...
PS2 is not just able to do their own things, but its also able to do entire cutting edge limit pushing tech demos of fifth gen games in real time at a way higher framerate and way higher scale, basically (and thats also something that was show in one of the E3 i think).
PS2 to PS1 is simply the most impressive evolution of 3d graphics imo. The jump between PS2 to PS3, PS3 to PS4 or PS4 to PS5 wasnt nearly as big. I dont think a PS3 could do characters as detail as the PS2 old man tech demo in real time multiple times, while PS2 could hypotetically handle the PS1 T Rex very easily duplicated it hundreds of times.
@@svr5423 Sure, but I mentioned the difference between PS1 and PS2 specifically, not Dreamcast and PS2, or PC games utilising 3D accelerator cards vs PS2.
Taken in the context of the Dreamcast, and PC games using 3D accelerators, the PS2 was of course not so far ahead (and many Dreamcast games looked better than many PS2 games, and particularly early on), but so many console gamers went directly from PS1 to PS2 without ever playing a Dreamcast, or having a PC with the like of a Voodoo 2 for gaming.
The jump between the 5th and 6th generation was such a massive leap forward for 3D gaming.
9:56 - This is "Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner", in case anyone was wondering.
Thanks so much!
Tx
Fun facts: GTA SA did collision detection on the a vector unit afaik
Disc access was also reprogrammed and models + textures were moved next to each other so they can be read at the same time. There was also a copy of the archive in another part of the disc so the laser doesn't have to move too far. Adam Fowler was responsible for the disc system
Interiors were put high up above the fly limit, with textures loaded across 17 dimensions so they could unload the outside world and have them more detailed
Reflections worked by rendering a copy of the same room underneath with a transparent floor texture
and it ran at 20fps, sometimes even lower than that.
@@efeloteishe4675 xbox version of the game also did not run great
@@efeloteishe4675 but remember 2 player mode, though?
Why can’t we buy good CD authoring tools? Every developer needed to resort to hacks.
@efeloteishe4675 and yet we all played it and loved it.
My dad and I were in a Circuit City once in 2000, I look over at a wall of screens and there's a race on, so I say to my Dad "hey, races are on over there." As we start walking closer it starts to Dawn on us that it's a video game, ( Gran Turismo 3) and that led to months of us trying to get a hold of a PlayStation 2.
My dad looked everywhere to find that damn thing. We even saw one poor guy who got the last unit out of a kb toys. He was putting it into his car he had it balanced on his knee against the trunk, (out of its box by the way,) and he lost balance and we both saw the thing shatter. That was a sad day.
I remember when I finally got the PlayStation 2 because I was sicker than a dog with the flu for almost a week. My brother comes into my room with a box and he says "a package came from Dad." Instantly knew what it was and was excited beyond belief. I must have been playing PlayStation 1 games on that thing for 3 months before I could save enough allowance to buy my first PlayStation 2 game.
Was your first game Gran Turismo 3?
I remember this happening on the Dreamcast with NFL 2K. So many people fooled by the post-play wandering that the models performed. I was never fooled by Gran Turismo 3 but I was blown away by the detail in the cars. It was like playing the pre-rendered cutscenes from the previous generation.
@@theultimatedriver3858 my first game was actually ATV off-road fury. Gran Turismo three was like my third game, and as I said it took months between getting games because they were so expensive back then for a kid with an allowance.
@@jamescampbell8482 I always find it really weird when people call that game ATV Offroad Fury. Here in Australia it was sold as just ATV Offroad. Strangely I can't find any mention of that online
My parents got a PS1 for my sister before I was born. She kinda first tipped off my gaming interest, her and my cousins. My parents looked into getting me a PS2 and felt it was in their price range, so they got me one. It was around the midpoint of its lifespan. Whenever the PS2 slim came around, that was the model they bought, and I still have it to this day.
Kingdom Hearts and Sonic Heroes were the first two video games I had ever played. Teeny tiny kid me lol.
It's wild to think I grew up playing the "best video game console ever." I think it definitely gave me quite the imagination, just with the shear number of wacky stories I got to play on that thing.
I don't think I've ever been blown away by graphics the way I was with Final Fantasy X. The opening Blitzball cutscene still looks amazing, and right after, when Auron hands Tidus his first sword, you *feel* the weight of it in the staggering animation and camera work. That game made me fall in love with JRPGs.
Yep. FFX was an insane leap from FFIX. I remember going nuts over how good it looked. If not for that game, I probably never would have tried the older titles and found out how great those are in their own rights.
October 26, 2000 I will never forget that day. I was in middle school and my parents were so cool they stood in line at Best Buy to get me a PS2 on launch day. Sure I had no games yet and was playing Crash Bash on it but I was so excited! Once I got Tekken Tag Tournament and a memory card I was in business.
niceeeee
Games like Burnout 3, God of War II, Gta SA, Gran Turismo 4 and so on.... they really showcased the power of the hardware at it's peak
I'm not sure about gta sa. While its a good game it's legacy back then was it made the ps2 felt like it was getting old. The game ran in the teens to mid 20s and was low resolution
@@pleasedontwatchthese9593 It had an amazing Orange-Athmosphere post processing effects, even though textures and resolution were lower than on Xbox.
@adrianshephardOP4 I remember that being mixed even for its time. Some people liked it but some thought it made the game too dark or hard to see. I feel like what the game was best remember for what just the large number of things you can do and being one of the best sandbox games of its day
Brarudn 3 😈
Don’t forget silent hill 2/3 early ps2 titles and still are visually stunning
Back when companies got creative in their hardware design, bringing their own special sauce. And the developers had hunger to unlock the potential of the consoles and develop unique new things. Today consoles are at best mid range PCs with some minor changes, and many game developers can't deliver finished game on launch.
Well the unfinished games bit is a publisher choice, that's just greed. As for the hardware... It was kinda inevitable. The PC market didn't have 3D graphics figured out at all (I mean... We didn't even have graphics cards, eventually really weak Voodoo cards). Technology has a way of standardizing.
We'll probably see some amazing things with AI upscaling and AI frame generation *next* generation. But PCs will see similar progress, so the lack of diverse approaches to hardware design may remain.
MGS2 rain still looks better than many generic rain effects we have today.
You mean the wave effect all across the screen? The rain looks really bad in cutscenes lol
Second place goes to rain in Far Cry 3 on PS3
Remember buying Zone of the Enders just for the MGS2 demo? I bought the game, took the demo and then traded in ZOE at EBgames. I was that guy. I was an idiot though because ZOE is actually a good game.
Onimusha 2 rain was peak
@@MagicDonut00Why has hasn't Capcom remade that series?
I love the naming of these Sony chips, like Emotion Engine, Reality Synthesizer etc
You discovered marketing
Now they just throw in crappy PC processors that overheat
Sony naming its chips vs. Sony naming its Headphones
@@b.d.a.8719you've got to give Sony credit for doing a better job of it than Atari.
@@jujiide6922it’s harder than one might think re: all the naming conventions the focus groups came up with for the directXbox
Sony's killer move was making the PS2 double as a DVD player. I was able to convince my mom to get us one by showing her the PS2 media remote. Same story for one of my friends. It was not much more than a stand alone DVD player at the time. So my mom and I made a deal.
DMA on the PS2 was unforgiving but the tricks you could pull off with it were nuts - you could achieve post processing in software that other platforms needed dedicated hardware for
I remember the audible gasp during the tech demo for FFVIII dance scene when they revealed it was done in real-time on PS2
@@adams4244 I remember seeing it at the time and I thought it was fake, I thought that’s impossible lol
Real time reflections in the opening of Xenosaga
FFX being the first game with proper wind physics in the grass.
Jak and Daxter being the first game to use Inverse Kinematics to prevent feet from sliding on the ground walk walking/running
Gran Turismo being the one of the 1st console games to output at 1080i widescreen, ushering in Full HD
PS2 gave us SOO much...
Meanwhile PC having all of that before: "thats cute"
@@SargentoDukebuddy, nvidia geforce 256 ddr was 300 dollars while the whole ass ps2 was 300 dollars.
@@TrickshotHeadshot you mad? a cheap Riva Tnt can play HalfLife at 1280x1024, you dont need a geforce at that time to had ps2 graphics, and PS2 was Y2K... same year as Geforce2, and then nvidia launched the MX series were very very cheap adn way powerfull than ps2... Geforce2MX200 was launched at 130$ price wtf you talking about??? 130$ for a basic geforce2 with better graphics than PS2. That "buddy" got the first playstation and was awesome, but ps2 was only a hype for ratkids that did not know to use a PC at that time... i keep the Playstation1 and bought an ENTIRE PC with a Geforce2 instead of the PS2, for just a bit more money.
@@TrickshotHeadshot The cost is irrelevant. If you are going to say something is the first then it better be the first otherwise you are at best misinformed or at worse purposefully deceiving people.
The PS2 graphics were pretty trash when it launched. It did have good games, it is still a legendary console, but its graphics weren't it for many of us.
yeah gave over 1000 games but you can only like list 4 or 5 that actually took full advantage of the hardware...
I was working as an RA in the dorms at the time the PS2 came out. I remember how many PS2 boxes came in the door on release day, and how quickly they came in over the next few months via the mail room. No one really cared about the lack of games. The "killer app" that the Dreamcast and Gamecube lacked was the DVD player. Much like the PS3 years later, the PS2 was a very affordable (and at the time of release cheapest) DVD player on the market. Players were frequently $500-$1000. The PS2 came out and prices rapidly dropped post release resulting in the first sub $100 units at the end of 2000. We had a video rental place on campus that was VHS only until the PS2 came out, then they rapidly shifted to DVD.
Those early $500 RCA players were garbage. They just couldn't fulfill the DVD spec. One of the first dual layer DVD releases was Terminator 2 and it was often used as a test for player performance. The Sony 7000 model, which was long regarded as the reference standard, played it perfectly. The RCA produced several seconds of glitch when the layer transition came up. for a player worth the money, games aside, the PS2 launch was a big shift in cost of entry. Especially since it was still a while before the typical new PC could do good DVD playback without expensive decoding hardware.
I loved the DVD capability of the PS2. I could rent both games and movies from the local store and play them on a single machine.
Honestly since it was all pre-streaming, Netflix had only in the first few years of their DVD mailing service, and Blockbuster was still a significant player, the machine was basically all that you really needed in terms of entertainment.
I worked at Walmart in electronics in 2002 and for anyone that wanted a console, but not sure which one to get, the DVD player and backwards compatibility with PS1 games meant most of them opted for the PS2. For people buying for themselves that weren't big gamers the DVD player was the big seller. For people wanting to get a console for a child that didn't have a PS1, the PS1 backwards compatibility tended to be the bigger seller with the DVD player a bonus. They _loved_ being able to pick up a couple of cheaper PS1 games for the same price as a single PS2 game. It let them give their kids more games for Christmas for basically the same amount of money.
The most frustrating PS2 sale I made was to a kid who had some kind of learning disability. He had a bag full of money with a lot of coins in it and one of those was a $10 gold coin from the late 1800s. He needed that $10 to pay for the console, but the coin was worth far more than $10. I pointed this out to the lady with him, since the kid didn't understand and she... didn't give a flip. Anyone that cared about the kid would have gotten out $10, kept the coin and sold it for a fair value to give the kid money for games. I tried multiple times to get her to do the right thing, but she wouldn't. So I made the sale and bought the coin out of the till immediately. I'm _still_ angry at that woman all these years later, but I really hope the kid enjoyed his PS2.
You mean "unlike" the PS3, surely? The PS3 sold poorly in its first year or so due to being thin on games and being horrendously expensive.
Hearing this, the design of the Cell in the PS3 makes a lot more sense. I never realized, that the PS2 already had an architecture built around streaming, vector units and a dedicated DMA engine. All features more emphasized in the PS3 (and probably equally difficult to utilize for developers)
Yes, now if you think about it. The saturn is the same. But like the PS3 the hefty price almos kill it. DVD capabilities, nex gen graphics and a affordable price in 2000 was the key of it's success. Sony forgot that on the PS3 and almost kill themselves.
i wish sony goes back into making proprietary architectures for ps6 and not semi x86 pc's like the consoles we have today, its just special and peculiar and will lead to special games but i doubt it.
@machinefannatic99 X86 is too easy to develop for and has more advantages then disadvantages compared to Sony's custom chips to ever go back.
Plus Sony hasn't given up on custom hardware. The PS5 is more customized than the Xbox Series S and X.
It's RDNA2 architecture uses some Sony specific designs that are exclusive only to the PS5.
And the upcoming PS5 Pro uses some custom RDNA for upscaling techniques that Sony feels are better than AMDs solutions.
@@GalaxyFur Not true, x86 is simply known for being easy to develop for but not powerful or efficient as other architectures, Mark cerny said the same thing in his talk about road to ps4, he decided to choose x86 to make it easier for devs but said it was a tough choice since he could have gone for another architecture and made ps4 more powerful... proprietary consoles was the reason you needed a more powerful pc to outmatch them but this isnt the case anymore because everything is a semi pc now ruclips.net/video/xHXrBnipHyA/видео.html
@machinefannatic99 The problem is that Sony chip architecture technically isn't superior because the Sony-developed architectures have such a steep learning curve that it doesn't get realized towards the end of that console generation when new systems are on the Horizon regardless.
The PS5 Cell and PS3 Emotion Engine never performed as well as the competition until the end, when it didn't really matter.
That's why the 360 and GameCube for example had better-looking games than the PS2 generation or the PS3 for so long.
X86 architecture yields overall better results early on. This is why 360 had better-looking games than PS3 for most titles, and Xbox and GameCube outperformed the PS2 visually more often than not vs PlayStation architectures.
Sony is now using an all new approach and using their own developed GPU technology solutions In conjunction with AMD.
Eventually, I would imagine Sony is going to switch over ARM down the road.
I could imagine a Sony/Qualcomm solution for PS7, perhaps.
Nothing can ever come close to the experience of playing MGS2 for the first time - the graphics and cut scenes completely blew me away. Looking back at Silent Hill 3 now, it looks like a PS3/360 game lol. PS2 best console ever. The peak of pre-online gaming.
The PS2 was a dark horse power wise. But then so was the Gamecube. That purple box was such an efficient, elegant design architecturally. Id love to see a similar video on that. Great work!
I think the game with the highest poly count that gen was a GameCube game,one of the stars wars games
Sadly because the little disc, gamecube lack of third party support
@@abeeocta2599 It was also due to leftover sentiment from Nintendos NES and SNES eras when they weren't the most pleasant of platform holders to work with and didn't offer the most favourable conditions for 3rd parties. So N64 and Gamecube suffered due to that as well as the storage mediums they opted for
I remember playing on a friend's GC after owning a PS2 for a while and not really liking the controllers (it was honestly hard to beat the DualShock 2 in that era) but liking them a lot better than the N64's. That said beyond that Nintendo did a lot of really unique things that did work very well. They made the console easy enough to move from livingroom to livingroom by kids, allowed for a maximum of 4 wired controllers by default in an era where wireless controllers just only started to exist, allowed for the GBA to hook up to the console for extra utility in some games, and had some truly interesting first-party titles (in terms of 1st party titles Nintendo is probably the strongest of the console makers; the amount of ridiculously good titles from them is impressive).
For that matter SSB:M is still an absolute blast to play, Mario Kart: Double Dash still has one of the more unique features from the series, and I remember how the water in several of the games (notably Super Mario Sunshine and Wave Racer) looked simply amazing.
Gamecube has very impressive RE4. On comparison PS2 version was dogshit
The goal of many 60 FPS games on the PS2 really endeared it to me compared to many games of the generations that book-end the PS2. Smooth game play has always been something I have preferred going all the way back to the 8-bit days!
He's wrong about GOW2 though, it's not locked to 60fps
@@ka7al958Not locked at all.
But he did mention Shadow of Colossus, having a subpar performance
Yeah we really got screwed out of the beat era thx to the loss of computer gaming during the os2 era.. with the ps3 they compelling capped or development... consoles held us all back until ppl forgot that graphics went the only metric
PS1 had a ton of games that ran at 60fps thoo
This was an awesome video, thanks! I always was enamored with the EE since I read about it in a magazine back in the day.
Not as overhyped as the PS3's Cell processor. Or PS5's magical SSD. The PS2 was and always will be iconic for the advances in video game development.
Yup the Cell did not deliver on the hype.. Completely agree about the SSD in the PS5. The improvements have been marginal, loading times persist
You forgot SEGA Mega Drive's Blast Processing
The PS5 SSD is such a huge meme. Loved how Sony was overhyping something that's been in every PC for almost decade at that point.
Uncharted 2 & 3 / Last of Us / Gran Turismo 5 & 6 / Killzone 2 & 3 / etc etc would beg to differ.
The SSD and data compression tech (direct storage) is actually pretty impressive. It can help save on RAM usage.
The Cell processor was amazing. It still is. The issue was it was very difficult to write for and really wasn't a good choice for a gaming console. Though by the end of the generation, once devs got the hang of it, games started to get really good.
There was a reason the US Air Force and other companies would buy a bunch of ps3s, install Linux, and run clustering for massive (at the time) compute performance.
Shadow of the Colossus PS2 feels, to me, like a very early PS3 game.
It was that ambitious.
id say fight night round 3, matrix path of neo, james bond from russia with love
SotC was clearly a seventh-gen game running on sixth-gen hardware.
It also chugged on the PS2. Not that we cared at the time.
@@bitwize in 2005 14fps - 25fps was the norm
@@machinefannatic99 Uhhh, no. Maybe on the Xbox, but not on PS2.
@@sebastiankulche at the end of ps2 lifecycle alot of games where choppy
Very chill and nostalgic listen. First seeing those graphics after growing up with the previous gens, I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
PS2 was complex to program, what saved it from having a similar fate to Saturn was the great success of its predecessor, and RenderWare which made the creation process easier.
Think of it this way: The PS2 could be like the Saturn, very complex and not very powerful, but companies were so confident that they would profit (thanks to the success of its predecessor) that they were willing to mine and hire the best and most renowned professionals (hypothetically , the guys who created incredible demoscenes that ran on a potato).
From my point of view, the best and most user-friendly console was the Xbox OG, it used a very well-established platform, with millions of devs around the world, in addition to great hardware.
The PlayStation 2 is extremely respectable if you keep in mind that this hardware came out of the mid-90s, much more similar to an SGI station costing a few thousand dollars, but that Sony managed to make it cost less than a DVD Player.
Yeah in short, money talks.
Highly overrating the Xbox.
By mid 90s what years specifically? 96?
@@normalguycapnot really most devs that Gen have said they preferred xbox over ps2 because of it being a strip down pc
@@normalguycap in what way? The Xbox was incredibly powerful when it was released, it rivaled higher end PCs. If I remember correctly it was at least 2x the power of the PS2 and since it was x86 and directx anyone that developed a game on PC could easily make it for the Xbox, no learning curve
I think many scrutinize the PS2's output from it's first year because of the enormous hype it had but it was also one of those consoles where once developers really got rolling with it, you saw the improvements coming down the pipeline very quick and the leaps in quality were huge.
I'm sure third-party engines like RenderWare helped too. Let another company figure out all the complicated hardware details for you and then just buy their engine! Plus then it was much easier to port between consoles as RW supported GameCube and Xbox
Always nice to see the great Dreamcast mentioned. :) The cell processor in PS3 was even harder to utilize fully than the emotion engine as far as I remember.
PS2 was hands down my favorite Playstation. I remember being in a PE class at my local university and we were playing basketball, and I was so excited to get out of there and pick up my PS2 preorder! After I picked it up, I couldn't put Smuggler's Run down! Oh, the memories...
Smuggler's Run and 2 are underrated classics in my book. It's a wonder we never got a remaster.
I'm still in the PS2 era and choosing to stay here a while. Awesome console, amazing library!
I stopped at 7th console generation
Me as well, not letting it go for a while
I deeply regret to sell my ps2 fat.
YES
Only like 20ish games and that's it. Everything else is cookie cutter and bad games
i got goosebumps when u mentioned jak and daxter, the ps2 was the console i grew up on and to appreciate some of technical feats of developers that made these games possible was really nice.
Ah man, "The Emotion Engine" always a hoot reading about Ken Kutaragi telling everyone with the Emotion Engine for the PS2 you could "JACK INTO THE MATRIX" hahaha. Though a note on some developers experience with the Emotion Engine and the PS2 Hardware wasn't always sunshine and roses. Shinji Mikami and Tomonobu Itagaki weren't fans on how complicated it was to develop for.
Itagaki is crazy. not for this, he's right about this, but the guy is crazy.
the "60 FPS as a standard" thing shouldn't have gone away. the PS3/360 era aged so poorly in comparison because of that
I think it wasn’t that well for the ps3 era, but I like how many ps4 games have 30fps as to me it looked the most natural with the cinematic frame rate, but I still think 60+ should be for the faster paced/less graphically advanced games.
You're right @th3_ne0__ . Slow paced games are fine at 30fps as long as they don't require a ton of precision. Fast-paced games definitely feel intuitive at 60fps.
I could hardly play most games during the PS3/360 era due to the horrible frame rate, and the layer of "Vaseline" that seemed to coat every game.
@@treedoor despite the sub-par frame rates I’m going to be honest though, nothing will ever beat the yellow-ish color scheme of the games from the era.
@@th3_ne0__ Cinema is in 24/30FPS because it becomes a lot more expensive to make a movie the higher the framerate is. 24FPS is about the limit when it stops looking like a slideshow and becomes a more or less smooth picture. There's no reason to stick with 24 or 30FPS if it's possible to go higher. Games with more FPS simply feel better to play, especially if you have a monitor that can match the framerate. It's just a lot smoother and pleasant to play. 60FPS pales in comparison to even 85FPS, nevermind 120FPS or higher.
There's just no reason to keep that 30FPS standard and there never truly was aside from hardware limitations. At least personally, I'd prefer a game to look worse if it means it performs really well. Games are meant to be played, not just looked at.
Yes it was. At the University of Glasgow we developed a couple of compilers for it, with two groups working on it, auto paralleling ones, but it turned out to be very hard to harness its hetrogenous architecture efficiently.
For it's low price back in the year of 2000 - I remember GeForce 256 and GeForce2 were like 300 USD which was 2 to 3 monthly incomes in my country, PS2 graphical capabilities were superb
PC gamers being shafted for components is a tale as old as tine
Superb? It was the less powerful of the 4 consoles of that generation!!!! By a wide margin!
@@bosquejo72 What do you mean? Gamecube was more powerful, but not that much because it was released 1 and a half year later - back then it was huge, but it couldn't play dvd... Xbox launched even later and was 300 usd when ps2 at the end of 2001 was something about 260-270 usd. Dreamcast was ofc less powerful
@@bosquejo72 consoles are about compromises between performancem features and price. Sony balanced them great in PS2.
Every console had their best features. GameCube was about water and reflections. Xbox for shaders and number of polygons. PS2 for particles, transformations (PS2 apparently could produce the most complex geometry based water) and multi-layered transparencies. Great generation overall.
@@bosquejo72 clearly you did not watch the video
I used to play about with rendering shapes on the PS2 hardware in University (2000-2005). Never fully got the hang of the hardware, but it was definitely impressive and the games were amazing (PS2 is my favourite console). Great video!
I think the PS3 was the same in terms of a slow start then running the lead in game render tech.
I don't think I caught you mentioning this, but for some reason all of my friends and I referred (and still refer to this day) to that signature PS2 slow motion/blurring effect as "emotion engine", meaning that whenever we watch a twitch stream with a PS2 game that does it, we immediately all type "EMOTION ENGINE!" :D. Was this just something that we made up on our own, or was it common for other people to refer to that signature slow motion blurring as "emotion engine"? Fantastic video and really informative! Thank you!
No other consumer electronics item has ever been more hyped. Even newspaper business sections would write articles on it and the chips inside like months before it came out. It was so hyped that saddam huissen was supposedly buying them to launch missiles, or some shit lol. Only thing I've ever stood all night in line for, one of the best things I've ever bought.
Standing in line all night waiting to get my PS2 is one of my great childhood memories 😁
Saddam didn't buy any, that was a rumour likely started by Sony too make it seem even more impressive.
Yeah, then people were worried about PS3 Super-Computer clusters...
You mean Osama Bin Laden? He was a gamer, there's an old photo of his PS2 and games he had.
@@nicksjacku9750 No the rumor was saddam. I'd read the paper everyday to see any news on it, and they mentioned him several times as buying them to use the chips to launch or guide his missiles.
still impressed by the PS2's 2560-bit vram (48 GB/sec peak bandwidth). the thing they did with that cute 4mb vram is borderline miraculous.
Playing Final Fantasy 12 on PS2 using a Pelican wireless controller and a component cable (YPbPr) hooked up to a very large Sony Trinitron TV I had back in the day, a friend literally thought and asked if I was playing Xbox 360 when they came over, it looked so good - way beyond launch era PS2 titles. Respect for the Sega Dreamcast, still love it and had that first but there's no denying the power of the PS2 - even if it lacked VGA out, it had that DVD player too which sadly didn't help Sega was very convenient for the masses. With the remote control it was your all in one entertainment solution.
I am still utterly blown away by GoW2 on PS2. It was unreal for its time, and it still holds up.
Absolutely not you didnt play many games there are much more graphically impressive games
Twilight princess on gamecube and halo2 look way better
It looks pretty shit even for the PS2
@@thequinlanshow3326 Okay guy. Other than some XBOX exclusives; (Panzer Dragoon Orta, Jet Set Radio Future, and Doom 3) God of War 2 was unmatched at the time.
The Getaway for me.
Final Fantasy 10 on the PS2 was a HUGE leap compared to 7/8/9 on the PS1. I played it again recently and was still in awe 20 years later at how beautiful it all was even to this day.
The PS2 game that blew me away the most was probably Ōkami. I don't know if it does anything fancy on a technical level but as a game I just thought it was brilliant and still do to this day.
A friend saw me play MGS2 years after it's release and was really impressed with the graphics, I think it still looks great now, hard to believe its 23 years old.
The level of artistry and technical wizardry demonstrated by PS2 devs was bananas. God of War 2 in particular just floored me back then, surpassing even games that were available on Xbox 360. These games still look amazing today, especially on a good CRT.
Gran Turismo 3 blew me away.
Also details about games you already mentioned. MGS2 blew me away with the small details that even modern games don't seem to do, like shooting all the Glass in windows and all the glass particles being on the ground and left there and making sound that would alert the enemies if you walked over them. Not to mention all your shells from your gun that were shot being left on the ground or floating in the water depending on where you stand.
Silent Hill 3 shadows put my jaw on the floor once I unlocked the lightsaber I couldn't believe how well they kept up with the movement of swinging the sabre with the shadows.
MGS3 everything blew me away from the water effects to the amount of animals and enemies that can be on screen at once to the lighting changes depending on the area and weather. The fire effect from the fury was just crazy.
Of course there was final fantasy X's cutscenes
"MGS2 blew me away with the small details that even modern games don't seem to do, like shooting all the Glass in windows and all the glass particles"
I've timestamped a part in the e3 footage that illustrates exactly how we would've reacted when that trailer dropped ruclips.net/video/Mr6RngfAeMY/видео.htmlsi=aJWaOSJPVC-Cfjn4&t=285
Ghosthunter, no doubt, the game had god rays, dynamic deformation facial textures, realistic water physics with reflections, dynamic reflections, softbodies, dynamic lights with shadows, inverse kinematics.
The game was a technical master piece.
One of the most technically impressive games for the ps2, shame it's not mentioned more. imo the thing that lets it down is the art style, compared to the sh3 for example it looks cartoney.
Rachet and Clank blew me away when I first got my PS2. (Still have it and it still works)
I love your videos MVG. Especially this type of video, where you talk about what the hardware can do, and really break it down. I'm a nerd who loves engineering, so having an idea of how my consoles can play my favorite games is fascinating to me.
In 2006 I bought a used PS2 to catch up on console games I missed, I'm primarily a PC gamer. I was shocked how good RE4 looked out of the PS2.
Absolutely one of the best looking games on PS2
You should've experienced it on the Gamecube , much better than the PS2 version .
And that's considering it was ported from the Gamecube!
@@bryanobrien2726Those loading times though...
@@granixo Yep , RE4 seemed to be right at the redline of the PS2 .
Some PS2 games still look modern 20 years later. Tekken 5 comes to mind.
It's easy to render though. The scene is mainly just two characters so most of the polygons go on them...
Metal gear solid 2 and 3
There are some PS1 and N64 games that also aged rather well.
Simply NO and NO, you cant play that PS2 games on a 55" modern TV without laughting... then put Dead or Alive 3 from the twice as powerful than PS2, the 2001 xbox, and see it on a 55" modern TV... IT LOOKS one generation above PS2 😂😂😂😂 how can ps2 graphics look MODERN on a modern TV if that graphics looks worst than the original xbox
@@SargentoDukeboth look shit on modern tv
Champions of Norrath and it's direct sequel, Return to Arms, are peak PS2 power. They ramped up the Bladurs Gate Dark Alliance engine and took full advantage of the PS2.
First Video: Playstation 2 3D rendering @ 720p 60fps part2
Second Video: Playstation 2 rendering images at 1080i.
The PS2 hardware is very flexible, one of the best examples of this are these two demos rendering at 1280x720 and 1920x540, it's not upscale, it's internal resolution. Thanks to its fillrate it was possible to render a framebuffer larger than its own video memory (4MB). Honestly, this is very impressive.
That's nuts when you think about it. Of course this was before post-processing became the norm but still.
Have you heard of the homebrew app GSM? You can force games to output at 1080i or 720p internally. Obviously its not compatible with all games and cutscenes often need to be skipped with an option at the start for 720p, but its crazy to see games running like that on the ps2
@@YoDisNotFlyToSE yep, but it is just for the output, the internal resolution still remains at 640x448. However the results in some games are really good.
Really enjoy your narrative voice man, keep it up
Xenosaga 3 will always stick in my head as how amazing the PS2 graphics got at the end. After the Xbox 360 launched and in the PS3 release window it looked great.
That was a golden era before the shitshow of the next generation where everyone was trying to do 1080p on hardware that couldn't really do it well.
I love that you make these and I love that I’m someone who says “a deep dive on the emotion engine?? Yes please!”
Surprised you didn't mention the small dedication to the Emotion Engine in MGS2;
Otocon's sister, Emma Emmerich, is featured in the game and is often referred to as EE
Other aspects of the game hint that the player is kind of exploring digital hardware, with all the references to Shells and Nodes
Don't forget the twist about the -kernel- Colonel
I'm so happy you gave ZOE 2 some love. How a game was doing that in 2003 is beyond me?
i'll tell you how. cell shading hides that the models are extremely low poly , ps1 levels of triangles per model in main character mechs , sub ps1 levels of polys in fodder enemy mechs. This lack of detail is hidden by cel shading. Also physics are ps1 primitive and what looks like physics is pre broken animations playing out. This leaves plenty of processing power for huge environments as well as abundant post processing effects like motion blur and depth of field. Basically excellent craftsmanship
There is something about the graphics the PS2 outputs that is so pleasing to me, that no other platform can replicate.
PS2 graphics look dull and washed out!!!
@@JabariJones-kg6dd not every PS2 game was Gran Turismo yknow
Honestly, even the dreamcast had better graphics. The PS2 looked kind of trash, even for its time. Everyone could see with their own eyes that any other platform tended to look better.
Not on a 20 inch crt no they dont@@JabariJones-kg6dd
@@iancurrie8844 So why did those other platforms struggle to sell even 10 million, or barely past 20 million, when PS2 went on to sell 160 million? "Everyone", right? xD
Back in the 2000s, I got a NetYaroze PlayStation and was abled to import 3D FBX data, MIDI data, Audio data, Image data to the system and get it to work in under a month.
I later got the PS2 'NetYaroze' and couldn't get ONE flat shaded triangle on the screen.
The PS1 had small books that would easily explain how to utilize the architecture & API.
The PS2 REQUIRED you to print tens of A4 sized pages for GS, Vector Units, etc, but I still didn't have a clue on how to get it to work.
I remember getting the ps2 mainly to have a dvd player and game system
Still one of the most ingenious console launches ever, partly bc of that
It was just too bad that DVD movies were very hard on the laser diode for a few years there (I think the "slim" model and contemporary "phat" model solved the issue)
@@jul1440 Never heard of a diode issue per se, but could that be related to the common read-error repairs on OG consoles? I remember having to send it in to overcome errors loading the game world in Vice City.
@@nthgth I believe you are correct (The diode issue might be the original PS), I just remember the tales that playing DVDs would hasten the appearance of the read errors.
Silent Hill 2, 3, MGS 2, 3 and Zone of the Enders were some of the best looking 6th gen games and they were all released relatively early in the lifecycle of the PS2. Konami were masters of coding for that hardware.
Zone of the Enders was a fun game. I remember people buying it just for the MGS2 demo disc. The running joke was “hey, this is a pretty good game that came with the MGS2 demo I bought!”
Metal Gear Solid 3 is the closest thing to Gamecube graphics.
@@saricubra2867 Conker Live & Reloaded on Xbox is the closest anything got to Rogue Squadron 2 and Resident Evil Remake/Resident Evil 0/Resident Evil 4 on the GC imo (especially in 480p), for PS2 it would be Rogue Galaxy.
@@StratusFearX Zone of the Enders 2 is 5000 times better in every way. ZoE 1 looks like an amateur proof of concept in comparison. I still remember it fondly, though.
@@BeaugosseRiche somehow I never played 2. I will have to get on that
I remember (back then) being able to play DVD movies on PS2 was a huge deal. It certainly was for me!
Awesome video! Do a Dreamcast one next 🙏
Dreamcast produces beautiful graphics, a lot of which is that VGA RAMDAC and the super crispy super sample based anti-aliasing it does, as well as clean edge AA, the GC used sub-pixel AA and while didn't have an official VGA lead, the RAMDAC can do it with a modified official component or D-Terminal cable, both the DC & GC had beautiful 480p IQ, the OGXB can also do VGA via a simple VGA Bios flash, but this involves modification of the console, but you can still do component 480p on the NTSC model, as far as power goes and graphical fidelity, from worst to best it's: PS2/DC/XB/GC, the GC R300 giving it the edge over the OGXB NV2A GPU and the PowerPC CPU having higher IPC, for the best audio hardware, that goes to the DC, with it's incredible Yamaha processor, the GC's Macronix DSP was really good too, the PS2 had very basic PCM and software mixing plus the SCP 1 & SCP 2 (which was the PS1 audio hardware), the OGXB had a list of audio specs that even out does the DC in some respects, real time Dolby Digital in games, a really nice Wolfson CODEC/DAC, HRTF Sensaura 3D with 256 stereo voices in real-time, full-fat MIDI support, Nvidia's Soundstorm audio processor was a powerhouse and I'm not actually sure how well it was used (not to mention shows how good Nvidia PC audio would be had they included a Soundstorm processor on PC GPU's and developed it further to this day), the Xbox was the only console that could do real-time HRTF like PC's could at the time, and in some ways the OGXB has much better audio than modern consoles and PC's even, as real-time HRTF is not actually coded into video game engines like they were during the OGXB generation, Microsoft went all out with the OGXB, but Nintendo's experience really helped them prodice a masterpiece of engineering with the Gamecube, the Macronix DSP may not be as powerful as the Soundstorm ASIC, but it was still a fantastic audio chip and the R300 GPU was just incredible and packed with features and effects and beautiful video output IQ.
@@Wobble2007 That's a good read. Awesome!
I wish Dreamcast stuck around longer. It was a really interesting console.
I also love Dreamcast.
@@Wobble2007 It's a real shame Nintendo shot themselves in the foot AGAIN after the storage capacity woes of N64 cartridges. The GameCube's hardware was top-notch, able to often times outperform all the others of that generation, if only games weren't constrained to those tiny discs. What's the point of a high-quality audio processing and a large, fast texture memory buffer if you have to compress the shit out of everything to wedge it in to 1.4GB?
Now this is a video I want to watch, also, 12 hrs and already 150k views and 11.5k likes, this is why you need to make more videos man, the quality doesn’t matter, if you find a certain subject interesting, the likelihood is we’ll also like it. I genuinely love your content man.
I wish this video went into more detail about the gritty details of the Vector processors and bus system
It’s blue not purple and those were the CD discs the DVD discs were not coloured.
I remember reading the ars technica article on the graphics engine before the PlayStation 2 came out. The reviewer was definitely of the mind that this should have been the way for GPUs to grow in the future.
I'm glad you mentioned the rain effect in metal gear solid 2. Nothing could touch it for years because of that super high bandwidth.
MGS2 may have looked good, but in my opinion it was MGS3 the one who showcased how good graphics could get on the PS2
The days when console maker developed their own architecture instead of just throw in a PC-APU.
I don't see why it's a bad thing that we've moved to standardised architecture. Makes development a lot easier, especially across platforms, if the only thing to worry about is some OS level API changes that your engine can handle. The death knell for this was the PS3. A system that if you had a PHD in the hardware could look good but otherwise an overcomplicated mess with buggier and uglier multiplatform titles.
The problem is that multiplatform games developers likely wouldn't optimise efficiently for that bespoke hardware by targeting it first. In other words, horribly optimised ports.
It's better now, the PS3 Cell architecture showed the flaws in deviating too hard from the norm. You had companies like Valve who tried avoiding developing for it like the plague.
@@supersardonic1179 But didn't the 360 also use a version of the CELL, and don't forget the CELL was what ultimately gave us The Last of Us, Heavy Rain and Uncharted 2/3 et cetera, it paid of in the end, it was always the lifecycle of a system for games to get better and better as devs got more intimate with the hardware, it was part of what made consoles special, be it the Mega Drive Yamaha FM audio or SNES's Sony DSP, The N64's RSP & RDP, and so on, bare-metal consoles were so much better and more interesting, they had custom audio hardware, video, graphics and co-processors, unified architecture just allowed devs to get lazy, and produce the slop they put out today, it could have been a good thing, and it's not just the generic hardware that makes consoles the paper weights they are today, it's the forced online, the high-latency unoptimized games, the clunky GUI's, the over bloated code and cutting of content to sell it back as DLC, the lack of playtesting and announcing going gold long before they should, the rushed deadlines and crunch.
Custom hardware used to force creativity, now devs are given the same generic tools that results in the same game over, and over, and over , and over again, they use the same engines and repeated formulas, it's not just hardware that is stale, it's the tools that are also stifling creativity, unified architecture and software, sadly is a big part of why gaming has become so starved of quality single player experiences that offer new experiences and are built with new game mechanic's and with actual love and creativity, sadly at this point, I'm not sure gaming will ever really recover, I do actually thinks it's a long time dead, with the exception of something special now and then for indi devs, and Nintendo, thanks to the Switch, still forces some creativity thanks to their own propitiatory game engines and stick quality that they still manage to adhere too, games like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are rare and few, Mr Iwata San actually predicted all this you can find a speech on RUclips where he lays all this out in black & White, and I fear with the NSwitch 2, Nintendo will go the way of every body else, they two will fall victim of forgetting how to just make good games, they have already deteriorated rapidly with this generation, so few IP's that they actually make use of now, so few new IP's and games from them, they no longer put out the many gameplay rich games they used too, instead just 1 or 2 big releases a year, so even Nintendo is a shadow of their former selves.
@@Wobble2007 So many wrong with your argument it's confusing. There are always people acting they know better than game developers and their hardworks. You do you I guess.
The pre-rendered cut scenes in Final Fantasy X were absolutely jaw-dropping. Been a few years since I played it but I guarantee they still look amazing to this day. That was one of those games that made me think graphics couldn't possibly get any better.
My sisters and I always talk about the insane graphical leap from Final Fantasy IX on the PS1 (2000) to Final Fantasy X on the PS2 (2001) -- obviously FFIX is very stylized, but even-so, going from pre-rendered backgrounds to fully detailed environments alone is really incredible.
And not only were these two games released a year apart, but FFX released *only a year* after the launch of the PS2 and still looked fantastic -- In fact, our dad bought it solely based on the graphics alone, which in-turn introduced my siblings and I to the Final Fantasy franchise.
I hated writing EE code--memory access was SO SLOW. The VU0/VU1 processors were pretty neat---but really tricky to design around. Programming EE/VU code was just a nightmare with early tools. I remember being astounded at Tekken Tag given the primitive state of the tools. Making those launch titles with the devtool equivalent of sharpened sticks and rocks was QUITE an achievement. The GS, however, was really incredible for the time. PS2 architecture was really weird, but super flexible--which meant it could hold its own against the Xbox and other platforms that came out later on.
and lets not forget the controller with the pressure buttons
Drakan The Ancient's Gates is one of the more interesting technical marvels of early PS2 very few people seem to know about. It was developed by Psygnosis and published by Sony themselves and has some very unique features.
The game actually kept track of everything you dropped in any of the small open world maps (there were several maps connected with one another but each one was pretty huge for PS2) and it features on the fly adjustment of LOD when going from walking mode to riding the dragon mode so you have nicely detailed levels when on foot and good performance when travel when on the dragon. The dragon himself has a really clever AI that will autonomously fight enemies nearby as well inform you when the place you're calling him to isn't good for landing. Wintin the small open worlds the game will use dynamic load screens, you'll only encounter them every once in a while and depending on how fast you're moving in a specific direction, the game will put the load screen at a further point(similar to unmodded Morrowind and on OG xbox).
Speaking of that, if you happen to have the game installed on the internal HDD, you'll never encounter those loading screens within the small open worlds. The game keeps up with loading enough that those load screens just never show up and curiously it doesn't work like that when running a virtual DVD (ISO) on the PS2 emulator. I believe the game may have at some point been planned to use the internal HDD and the necessary code to take advantage of it was never removed form the game
Dynast Warriors 2 a launch title was able to have so many enemies on the screen at once it was mind boggling at the time.
DW 2 have good eng dub
The dynamic water effects of baldurs gate or maximo come to mind, they blew me away when i was younger
Oh yeah, Baldur's Gate was an awesome multi-player hack-and-slash game! My brother and I played it together a lot.
I remember i was very impressed by Soul Calibur 2, Tekken 5, Persona 4, Ico looked nice too, it's a very powerful console and it has a great catalogue.
I adore the PS2, I grew up with this and even today I am discovering incredible games that haven't aged a day.
Buf I will admit, on a purely graphic fidelity standpoint, the Gamecube has aged the best. Starfox Adventures even today is absolutely stunning.
GameCube (out of the big three from that era) is the only system that to me has never looked like a blurry mess on a HD tv.
@@LakesideAmusementPro I wonder why that is? Surely none of the gen6 consoles were made for HDTVs, and they all can push pretty decent pixels - why would GameCube stand out here? Could it be the devs?
@@LakesideAmusementPro I think it's because many GameCube games run at 480p (progressive) while most PS2 games run interlaced. A good scaler like the RetroTink 5X or 4K largely negate these issues.
@@nthgth The original Xbox did support 720p and 1080i. There are also a solid number of games that render at those resolutions. The GameCube had a lot more games that ran at 480p, though.
@@LakesideAmusementPro its because GC have zero post proccesing effects in general
god how i like those technical cpu engine console reviews and explenations. Good video.
It’s interesting looking at the EE as a kind of first generation cpu- co processor SOC that we see in apple’s M series today…. In a lot of ways it was way ahead of its time
WipeOut, Gran Turismo... These are two that you could have added to the list.
RenderWare deserved a mention. Great engine that focused on what PS2 did best.
NAMCO was PlayStation for most gamers this gen, and Square. They sold this system, certainly not Sony's software.
@@TheKayliedGamerChannel-RUclips For me it was Tecmo and Konami's games. Also RenderWare was made by Criterion.
RenderWare was a generic graphics engine that targetted the common denominator for all platforms.
As such most titles wouldn't take advantage of PS2 exclusive bits and games would often run slower on PS2 than Xbox and GC.
@@darksylinc ps2 had an insane install base. They totally focused on ps2 to make games and Xbox bruteforce the ports. Gamecube was left behind by 2003 and forward.
@@darksylinc Exactly, RenderWare wasn't an engine in the same way as Unreal. It was more of a toolkit. The way it was used in GTA games had little to do with the Burnout series, for instance, and the GTA Stories games were still able to use a custom engine based on the VC one even after RenderWare went exclusively to EA. GameBryo worked in a similar manner, the way it was implemented in say Civilization IV has nothing to do with Bethesda's games.
Transformers by Atari Melbourne House was really impressive in terms of technology.
The PS2 was the First Console I bought with my own money. (All my PS1 was from dumpster diving because people didn't know that a blown fuse was all that was wrong with it.)
In the early days, the PS2 games wasn't that intresting. However because it was backwards compatable, I was fine with it.
It wasn't until Final Fantacy 10 that I was blown away with what the PS2 can do!
Which fuse was that? CD motors or PSU ?
@@rafaelfrequiao It was the PSU one. I didn't run into CD motor issues until a year before the the release of the PS2.
Definitely one of the most impressive and important chips ever made. They followed suit with the PS3 but ended it with the PS4.
I agree, GTA 3, MGS 2, and GoW 2 were such amazing looking and performing games. The PS2 felt like the future.
Great Video as always 👍
I’ve recently been reading quite a bit into PS2 Hardware for a video project about Half-Life I just uploaded, it’s pretty fascinating stuff.
I think the shining component of Sony’s EE wasn’t so much its power in numbers, but rather just how efficient it could be at optimization, definitely an interesting design by Sony for the time.
I really want someone to develop some recompilation tool for the PS2 the same way Wiseguy did for the N64
I see, so I guess for more efficient PC ports of PS2 games?
@@skycloud4802 yes, im just dying for a pc port of Gran Turismo 4
Hands down
@@skycloud4802 People out there really hoping for a version of FFX/FFX2 that's not got animations tied to the framerate.
ew
I was a late PS2 owner but I was impressed by it. GoW, GoW 2, GT4, Killzone, Shadow of the Colossus to name a few. I already owned a classic Xbox for comparison. PS2 did hold up.
Primal, Developer by studio " SCE Studio Cambridge " is quite simply technically breathtaking
also they made Ghosthunter with the same evel of graphics 😎
The Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synthesizer was a true black bishop, a big one.
Only the skilled developers could put this pieces of hardware to work and get the special performance to display outstanding quality and gameplay experience. Look at Tekken 5, Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy XII, God of War II, Shadow of the Colossus, Silent Hill 3, Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty, Gran Turismo 3 and Gran Turismo 4.
Excepcional quality games and I still I wonder if those software was capable to run properly on the original Xbox hardware without any kind of loss.
Can't imagine how much the performance would be with more RAM memory for video, system and USB 2.0 maybe we never know.
USB 2.0 for what?!
Gran Turismo 4 still looks very impressive today.
Gotta love Kutaragi's vision. He was always thinking way ahead of the established trends. Even on the PC at the time, I never saw anything that looked as good as what the PS2 was capable of doing.
PCs were pushing way higher resolutions but with less impressive effects for sure.