I’ve played Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast. I have no problems with setting DC approximately equal to the PS2.[/quote]
The Dreamcast couldn’t do MGS3, God of War, DMC3, or even VF4:Evo on its best day. The DC is chronologically in the same generation as the PS2, but it’s substantially inferior technology on many levels.[/quote]
Yeah, I agree with all that. However, the DC at it’s height (SC) was better than a nascent PS2. There’s always a range in these things.
Frankly, God of War is simply stunning. That’s usually the case for late generation games on a console right before new ones come out. I shudder in delight at the thought of a God of War type game on the next iteration. I imagine everyday gameplay would be cut-scene quality pieces (I believe the cutscenes are mainly real-time; I’m thinking Kronos lumbering through the desert and a lot of the talking head Kratos pieces.)
I also think it’s harder to compare the DC because the plug got pulled on it before it really hit maturity. SC is the only local title I know of that really seemed to raise the bar on what the system could do.
I believe the DS is generally somewhere near N64 level (Slightly better, slightly worse?). So more capable than the GBA, less capable than the PSP.[/quote]
I’m going to guess the DS is slightly better than the N64, although how much so we probably won’t know unless the system sticks around for a while and matures. I’m can’t imagine seeing something as hot as that Metroid demo on my N64.
Take a look at blown up still shots of PSP games and you can easily see “how they do it.” There aren’t that many polygons. Because the screen is smaller, you don’t need to define your objects nearly as well in order to fool people into seeing a better image. When you see big screens (specifically have a look at PSM magazine’s PSP special thing on store shelves now), you can see that the polygon counts are pretty low, but with all the effects that PSP can do, the end result is something that looks really good.
Eh… early streaming on the PS2 also blew. A huge amountof it is how folks program it. I don’t think the PSP can’t stream, although stuff like GTA where you change locations quickly might be tough. I could see a GoW (within other technical limitations, of course) or Ratchet style game working. It would probably be a harder hit on the batteries, though. Not sure it’d matter if the price to get the compelling play of one of those games was going from 6 to 4 or 3 hours of battery life.
Speaking of battery life, mine is lasting forever. Anyone know which games, specifically, it is that give problems? And at what screen brightness? (I can’t stand the screen at anything other than the lowest brightness; everything else is just too damn bright. I imagine that’d change if I was playing outside though. Or in otherwise horrible backlighting.)
I was worried about the PSP’s battery power, but it seems it’s far more durable than my attention span at least with Lumines, Untold Legends, Wipeout or MGA. Maybe if I was away from a recharge for a couple days it would be a problem.
I am sure the PSP can stream even if it doesn’t have the massive bandwidth the PS2 has, the problem is streaming would kill the battery. The idea is power the UMD as little as possible, hence why movies uses the most battery power, games the next most, and audio the least.
I’ve played Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast. I have no problems with setting DC approximately equal to the PS2.[/quote]
The Dreamcast couldn’t do MGS3, God of War, DMC3, or even VF4:Evo on its best day. The DC is chronologically in the same generation as the PS2, but it’s substantially inferior technology on many levels.[/quote]
Question… Do you think it is fair to say that where the PS2 excelled in 3D games over the Dreamcast, the Dreamcast actually excelled in 2D games over the PS2?
Sony never had any intentions of making their systems powerful in the 2D field. They aren’t big fans of it. But Sega… Saturn and Dreamcast were both build with dual 2D and 3D aspects in mind, and it shows. Just about every article relating to the subject that I’ve personally come across, has went on to state that Sega’s 2D games always excelled over Sony’s 2D games.
I’ve even read a long time back that Ikaruga was slated to be ported to both the PS2 and Gamecube a few years ago, but Atari had to scrap their plans, because the PS2 processor just couldn’t handle the Game. And, I’m no expert in the field, but it seems that DMC, God of War, etc… are much more advanced than Ikaruga is.
The Dreamcast was a 2D powerhouse (much like the Saturn), and from what I’ve seen definitely outperformed the PS2 when it came to moving sprites around, at least at the time. Games like the Guilty Gear titles and Capcom Fighting Evolution would seem to indicate that the issues with 2D on the PS2 have been mostly solved, as those games play as smoothly as any of the Capcom fighters on the DC.
New question: Can the PSP ever pull off games like God of War, MGS3 or even Ratchet?
Good question. We’ll find out, I suppose. Death Jr. should be an early test.
The trick will come from how well developers can adapt to the PSP’s hardware. IMO, they’ve done a very good job so far. I’ve been very happy with how big some of the levels are in Twisted Metal, for instance.
But then look at how Spider-Man 2 on the PSP was a step backwards from the console versions. I’m really curious to see what they try with Grand Theft Auto. I suspect it’ll become a mission based game, which will be pretty disappointing, but I doubt will hurt its sales.
Any devs or anyone else with technical smarts know how similar the actual PSP architecture is to the PS2? While the PSP graphics aren’t generally as good as the current top PS2 titles, they are more impressive than most of the PS2 launch titles.
Death Jr. is in that PSP mag and it looks really basic and kinda crappy when you have those blown up screens. It’s definitely not very impressive and actually looks kinda bad. In motion though, it’ll probably be fine.
The CPU isn’t as beefy in the PSP. It’s a modified MIPs R4000 that can run at up to 333 Mhz, but is currently soft locked to 222 Mhz by Sony apparently to extend battery life. It’s a 32bit processor, but it features a FPU and a vector FPU. There is a 2nd R4000 core that serves as the media engine for deompressing audio and video. It features its own 2 MB of embedded memory. For graphics processing it’s kinda like the PS1 with seperate geometry and pixel units, a GTE and a GPU. It supports hardware T&L, clipping, compressed textures, curved surfaces with hardware tesselation. Oh, an bilinear and trilinear filtering are supported in hardware as well. It features 2 MBs of embedded VRAM and runs at half the CPU clock speed, currently 111 Mhz. It doesn’t have the extreme pixel fill rate or memory bandwidth of the PS2, but for a max resolution of 480x272 it doesn’t need it. Other than that you’ve got the 32 MB of system RAM and a DSP engine for 3D audio.
Basically lower peak numbers, but greater feature set in hardware. Dev tools are supposed to be pretty good, especially when compared to the half translated mess people were using for PS2 launch titles.
So is it because there’s not as much of a math coprocessor?
You characters know I’m not trolling - I have all of these portable devices (yet am not sold on any of them).
But I’m really impressed with the power of the PSP. Compared to the Mario on the DS, let alone stuff like the Mario games or Fire Emblem on the GBA, there’s really no comparison. We all know that capabilities don’t mean better games, but I’m just impressed by how capable such a small little think like the PSP is.
If it’s true that the games look so good in part due to visual trickery, that’s even more impressive to me than pure processing power. Intelligently using what you’ve got impresses me a lot more than just cramming in bigger / more complex chips.
Well, if it’s purely on the developers, not so impressive. If, however, the system was designed to make games and media presented on it look even better due to the design of the screen / presentation, that’s what I’d find impressive and canny.
