That''s because the PS2 lacks anti-aliasing capabilities. Or at least according to developers. Developers say it doesn''t ahve anti-aliasing features and Sony says that it does deep down inside somewhere but developers just haven''t found it yet. Not sure who''s right.

That isn''t the only problem. The PS2 has two vector processors that have to be kept in sync. That''s what basically killed the Saturn because developers couldn''t create any decent games cuz they had to spend 90% of the time trying to make sure the processors were synced.

The biggest difference is that Sony (and others) provide decent middleware for PS2, so that developers don''t have to get down to the nuts and bolts of it all, unless they really disagree with the middleware.

And look at what happened with the original PS - games that bypass officially licensed middleware and do their own thing with the hardware often don''t run on the PS2...

On the other hand, Saturn was pretty nasty, and Sega didn''t support developers all that well. Er, allegedly .

TheTwistedOne
http://www.angrycake.com

Actually, pretty much all you guys are wrong :p

I''m currently working on a PSX2 RPG, and here''s my take on it :

- the PSX2 does have explicit hardware edge antialiasing.
- to use it effectively you have to draw polygons from back to front so the edges can be blended together properly.
- the overall architecture of the PSX2 is not very conducive to sorting polygons. Its geared towards throwing tons and tons of polygons into the graphics synthesizer with as little processing as possible. Sorting all the polygons in a scene typically is a _huge_ amount of processing.
- the vector units on the PSX2 can run completely independantly of the main CPU, but individually they''re kind of like one way streets. You send data _into_ them, they do their thing, and then spit out raw polygons to the graphics synthesizer. Their individual memories are so teeny tiny, and the assembly language they run in is so weird, that sorting operations are almost prohibitively expensive. Its not the "Sony Philosophy".

As next generation games come out I have no doubt people will come up with tricks to get around these issues, but its tough enough so that I''m not surprised first generation games are having problems. Don''t worry though, it''ll happen

DC have full screen antialiasing but with a ''crappy'' output like a TV it don''t need to be used, a good res might be enough. (640*480 is nice ,800*600 may not be required)

Daveb, I wonder how you manage the textures and what screen res you use.
Cause with only 4Mb of VRAM, you might have a problem.
I think that you use far less textures, or textures or far less quality than PC games, OR that you use the main memory to store the textures...

Maybe do you use streaming to load textures in memory too...

PS2 is far harder to program than a DC, and the DC have many interesting features not yet used in games.

Both console''s games will improve quality over time.

The PS2 will probably outcome the DC, but it''s not sure, and the time it''ll take will maybe give the PS2 edge @ the time of the DC2 or PS3 release...


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