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Scabbed Angel

Specutactular!

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Does the PS2 have the capability to render specular maps? I only ask because in Silent Hill 2, many of the creatures appeared to have this, but I was under the impression that the PS2 wasn't able to render bumpmapping, and thought that specular mapping was similar. Anyone know?

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I beg to differ. The PS2 can't even handle Multitexturing properly (if it wants to do it it needs to run everything through the Graphics chip twice, in serial, effectively halving the render speed) Let alone Specular or Normal Mapping. However the PS2 does sport a pretty high fill rate, which makes the lack of MultiTexturing less of a problem.

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If the artists know what they're doing, the benefit of mutiple texture passes would outweigh the halving of the rendering speed. 30fps would be a reasonable goal-- although keep in mind that when I say "the artists know what they're doing", I'm considering a certain amount of consistency with texture art and model/world complexity. As far as I can tell, Gran Turismo 4 features environment reflection on the cars(or at the very least, RGB specular maps). Of course, that's effectively the 4th time they've made the same engine and... how many years have they had to work on it?

Really, the area where the PS2 falls short on all counts is core processor speed. I saw an article that explained Half-Life 2 being developed for PS2 with a crippled physics engine. I would say it just isn't worth it, even if the Source engine is entirely possible for PS2 in every other aspect.

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Numbermind said:

As far as I can tell, Gran Turismo 4 features environment reflection on the cars(or at the very least, RGB specular maps).


Cube-map reflections. which basically take the world and paste it over the required model, using the alpha channel to get transparency and make it look like a reflection. This is done in a seperate texture pass, on all hardware.

IIRC.

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Well, in theory you're dealing with a 298MHz computer (however this is without DirectX so the scale is slightly different) so no. Unless the object of the game was to see how slow you can get your PS2 to run. And the PS2 is bullshit anyway.

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The emotion engine runs at 298 or 300 or whatever Mhz, the "Graphics Synthesiser", or the GPU runs at 150Mhz.

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The Graphics Synthesizer serves as the PS2's GPU or rasterizer. At 150 MHz, the GS possesses a formidable fillrate with 16 pixel pipelines, arranged in a 4 x 4 configuration. This gives the GS an untextured fillrate of 2.4 GPixel/s and, with its 8 texture units, a textured fillrate of 1.2 GPixel/s. Backing up this fillrate is 4 MB of eDRAM connected to a 2560-bit bus (1024-bit read, 1024-bit write, and 512-bit texture) with a peak bandwidth of 48 GB/s. The GS lacks multitexturing and therefore relies on its massive fillrate for multipass rendering. This also means that the Emotion Engine has to resend the transformed geometry for each pass.

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IT'S THE GAMES, NOT THE FUCKING HARDWARE, THAT MAKES A GAMES CONSOLE.

Personally, I think the expense of a second-hand, busted and old PS2 just for Gran Turismo 4 is worth it.

Anyway, the low clock speed of the Emotion Engine isn't that much of a shortcoming since it's one of those cool RISC designs etc. etc..

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The graphics of the PS2 are unnoticably different from the XBOX... if you want to look for a different in them THAT badly, you'll find it no matter what.

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Half-Life 2 being developed for PS2


Why?

The graphics of the PS2 are unnoticably different from the XBOX...


Yeah, I'm sure PS2 can handle Doom 3 just as good as the XBOX can. *sarcasm*

Besides, graphics don't fucking matter in games, just as long as they aren't horrible or anything. I still play NES, and some might say that the graphics of that system aren't exactly great, but the games are still fun as hell.

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Meh, I'm playing Metal Gear Solid 3 right now and as far visual splendor, it's right up there with Doom3 IMO. Horray for good artwork.

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DaJuice said:

Meh, I'm playing Metal Gear Solid 3 right now and as far visual splendor, it's right up there with Doom3 IMO. Horray for good artwork.


I wouldn't go so far as to say that it looks as good as Doom 3, but it does have some very impressive environments, with the foliage and everything..

I had to stop playing that game after about an hour though, because after about every 5 steps there would be some 15-minute long cut-scene.

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