The Shortcomings of PS2, and Why Dolphin will be better.
Well, here we have it. PS2 has been released in Japan, and
we still have no info on Nintendo's next generation cosole,
dubbed "Dolphin". Because of this, many are jumping onto the
massive ban-wagon called Sony and ditching Nintendo. Many of
you may be thinking about doing the same thing. Before you
make a move, though, it would be ideal for you to know the
following information:
- Sony's system is supposedly having massive glitches.
It seems as though Sony has released their system a
little too early for their own good. People have been
reporting defective DVD capabilities, as well as many
other issues with the CD-ROM capabilities. Also, that
so-called "backwards-compatibility" is turning out to be
a joke. Many games have already been found not to work at
all, with some others not running correctly. I have a
feeling that the "small" list of incompatible games,
released by Sony, will continue to grow into a massive
pool of crap.
What Dolphin has over this: Nobody cares! Few, at this point, have realized that no one will want to play the older games with a system that produces many times the quality of graphics. Backwards compatibilty is almost useless to Sony, since the people that would like it already have a Playstation. Eliminatings this from the system would have made PS2 cheaper, something that Dolphin will be.
- Developers have been having problems with the PS2.
Sony really fouled up this time. If you look at the
system specs as well as inside the thing, you will
discover that this "deathstar" only has 4(!)Mb of video
RAM. As many of you know, this is really an insufficient
amount for any type of 3D game. Disregarding a PCs open
architectecture and Operating System limitations, video
memory isn't hindered by these things. The fact that Sony
decide to go with 4 megs of video memory is very strange
for such a polygon-capable system. Many developers have
commented that this is becoming a big problem. Trying to
fit a Z-buffer and a few texture filters into 4 megs is
easy, but the remaining space for the textures themselves
is miniscule. Think about it. Sega Dreamcast contains 8Mb
of video memory and look how poorly it is starting to
function. Many who have played PS2 have commented that
the polygon power is amazing...but the textures suck
worse than Dreamcast's.
Reason why Dolphin towers above this problem: S3 technology. Since this technology enables Dolphin to decompress textures on the fly without processor lag, it won't need much video memory. Plus, the 8:1 compression ratio of the S3 chip enables the Dolphin to have 1/8 of PS2's video memory while still producing the same quality detail. Dolphin supposedly has 16Mb of video memory. Multiply this out and you have one heck of a texture base to work from.
- No anti-aliasing in PS2. What the heck!? What kind of
idiot declines to include one of the most widely used
grapics devices in the videogame market today? Even
Nintendo 64 had an anti-aliasing chip! I don't think that
its even possible to find a decent name-brand video card
without this funcion. Sony claims to have a built-in
software mode for this functions, but it takes a lot of
processor power. Many developer have been commenting that
it's practically useless! IGN showed a demonstration of
how it works. I notice that instead of a big jagged
stairstep edge, I saw a big jagged stairstep
edge...without my glasses on. The purpose of
Anti-aliasing isn't to blur everything(hear that
Konami?), it is to fill the gaps to make the edges of
polygons smoother and well blended into the surrounding
polygons.
How Dolphin will lick this: Experience. Nintendo has a LOT of experience using anti-aliasing in their games. Mostly because the Nintendo 64 had a chip that produced this effect on the fly. Nindendo claims that Dolphin has a much better developed anti-aliasing system built right in. The problems with N64 games was that they appeared blurry. This wasn't because the system did a bad job at it. It was because the developers didn't have the system code and didn't really know how to work with it. You can really see the difference when you compare Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and NBA: In the Zone. This time around, Nintendo will probably have an easilly accessible function, built right into their development kits.
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Last updated: 7/31/2000
