I don’t think GT3’s resolution is a matter of the PS2 so much as the TV. The aliasing is a different story, but compared to what GT 2000 (what GT3 was supposed to be), I don’t think it’s all bad. There are maybe two or three turns in the game that are difficult to make out, but that’s easily overcome with experience.
I mean, in real life (what resolution are eyes again?), you won’t see Michael Schumacher go full-tilt on a track the first time he’s there.
If you don’t know the circuits inside and out, you’re not going to succeed at the game
Agreed, but it hurts the whole “I’m playing a next gen console” effect when the road horizon has the approximate resolution of a playstation 1.
I’ll agree that the PS2 has some games that look crappy due to resolution.
I’d say most do. All the ones I’ve played anyway. And this is directly attributable to the PS2’s crappy architecture.
I just played some Sega GT 2002 and Gran Turismo 3 on the same monitor, pausing each game and switching back and forth.
Gran Turismo 3 is a far better approximation of car physics than GT 2002. No question about that. GT3 is a classic; GT2002 is merely good.
Gran Turismo 3’s foreground is a pixelated wasteland, much more so than GT 2002. It’s to the point that it is literally distracting when driving, particularly when the white and grey elements of the road are popping in and out.
The resolution is a factor-- but as I played (for the first time in, god, I have no idea when) I started to wonder if it’s actually texture sparkle from lack of mipmapping I am reacting to. Eg:
http://www.4bitterguys.com/rants/GT3/
However, the game is not without its flaws. Shimmering and the dreaded “jaggies” rear their ugly heads to tarnish an otherwise graphically flawless game. In some tracks the shimmering is barely noticeable; in others (particularly Seattle) it is at times unbearable. The jaggies (jagged lines) are not nearly as bad as on other Playstation 2 titles, but the game could definitely benefit from some form of anti-aliasing. Texture shimmer could be solved with simple mip-mapping, but PS2’s small amount of VRAM was obviously too limiting to implement this.
This game has a major sparkle problem due to lack of mipmapping. I am willing to concede that is the majority of the problem I was speaking of.
There is some aliasing on edges in GT2002, but you can still make out signs and walls in the distance far more easily than in GT3. 640x480 isn’t exactly the world’s highest resolution, even on a 15" LCD, but maybe 640x240 interlaced on the PS2 <> true 640x480 on the Xbox?