/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10705447
Looks fine to me

VRAM limitations.

Someone in another thread said that PS2 devs eventually learned it was plenty fast to just constantly swap the needed textures in and out of VRAM from system RAM, allowing individual textures to be higher resolution, rather than trying to store everything needed in VRAM.

Looks fine. Videogames literally didn't need to improve past this stage. And it wouldn't take 7 years to make a game now. And we'd actually get new IP and companies taking risks instead of having to rely on established series to not go bankrupt

>>10705647
This is correct, devs on the PSX could just treat the whole 32mb of system RAM the same as the 4mb video RAM. Nintendo fucked up with the N64 by cheaping out on slow RAM chips that rendered it impossible to store textures in the system RAM, It was actually faster to read info from the cartridge than it was the n64's shit RAM

>>10705661
are there any games that actually showcase this ?

>>10705647
That must have only been a problem for western devs because 1) I’ve never seen a high budget Japanese PS2 game have obviously bad textures and 2) later titles were more likely to be cross generation, which trended moreso in the west’s favor.

>>10705505
That texture on the left really didn't need to be that huge considering how ugly it is. Still, it beats the shit out of the N64's 32x32 average texture size.

>>10706414
Conker's Bad Fur Day used it in the main hub with the turd tower. The devs said in a playthrough on Youtube how they designed the area in such a manner that they could have a variety of textures (particularly in the skybox) and it wouldn't suffer from streaming them from the cart as necessary.

>>10706501
GD-ROM had a ton of space on it and could load so much at once, so Shiny went crazy with the graphics. They could afford to do so too, given that MDK2 doesn't have -that- much going on at once.

>>10705647
That's what Sony wanted developers to figure out, but there were several problems with this.
>Sony never actually told/showed them that they can use the Emotion Engine to do fastswap allocation, their philosophy was that their clients needed to learn it themselves
>This assumes the developers are making a PS2 exclusive and therefore can devote 100% of their resources to programming it all into the game. During the console generation where literally everybody (other than Nintendo) was making general multiplats for all three/five/seven concurrent platforms with the cheapest, slimmest middleware technology available to them at the time RIP Renderware and thus would rarely take full advantage of the console's specific architecture
>EE fastswap allocation was still limited by the overall memory size and data bus speeds of the PS2, so the technique dropped off entirely if you wanted the game to feature a large active worldspace or a large amount of objects/meshes/textures/etc. drawn at once, during the console generation where literally everybody (other than Nintendo) wanted to make Grand Theft Auto III or clones of it
All of this is why the best looking PS2 games make a lot of sacrifices in order to look that good in the first place. Silent Hill 3 is entirely indoors with small, dark areas. Shadow of the Colossus has no frames. And of course the PS2's greatest weakness: extremely strong interlaced 480i.

>>10706673
>the PS2's greatest weakness: extremely strong interlaced 480i
Someone who was either retarded or trolling was claiming the PS2 had the best output out of all 6th gen consoles in another thread and I was like pic related

>>10706707
>the PS2 had the best output out of all 6th gen consoles
Maybe if you're like John Linneman and run all of your PS2 video feeds through a Framemeister with OEM component cables and a custom settings profile, while everything else is shoved through a Dazzle, then it'd have the best output out of all 6th gen consoles.

>>10705447
This is actually where the Dreamcast kicked the shit out of the PS2. It had a shit ton of VRAM so the games could have clean high res textures.