how do consoles get such good graphics with crappy GPUS?

[borat_sagdiyev]

well i was looking at the ps2 specs (333mhz with like 64mb of ram and a 4mb video card) and im like "wtf this thing cant run all those games". How does it run all that and even the ps3 only has 512 mb of ram and the wii only has 128mb. How do they run all those games with good framerates and stuff?

 

[David Lindon]

They run at like 400*250

 

[Half Evil]

Because the games are strickly made to utilize the hardware as best as possible.

 

[borat_sagdiyev]

yeah but how do they still manage to get it to look good? like you cant really see the pixels and you can still read the writing.

 

[kchi55]

i mean, if they made games right now specifically designed for video cards like the 7900GT and up, then computer games would have much better graphics, the problem is that theres such a small amount of people with those kinds of cards as opposed to say.. a Radeon 9800pro. theres no money in making a game that only a few systems can handle. i expect things to change once dx10 and vista are released though.

 

[Lac3y]

Unlike PCs Consoles use all their resources for the game, there's no background processes eating up RAM etc. Also, TVs have a much lower resolution than PCs (standard definition) and therefore it takes much lower technical specifications to pull it off, and because it's SD the textures are less sharp and fuzzier, hiding any bad texture work.

Also, devs have had 5 years to max out the current line of consoles.

 

[THEpiGUY]

All that which was mentioned above, plus the fact that the Xbox 360's (and maybe the others') GPU isn't bad at all. So maybe the Xbox 360 has 10MB of memory, but it's so fast that it makes up for it. Forty-eight shader units w/ a 500MHz clock speed. Plus, the system's got 700MHz GDDR3 RAM that's shared by the processor and the GPU by means of the unified memory architecture. And also, the Xbox 360's got a triple-core CPU with SMT, clocked at 3.2GHz. So the Xbox 360 isn't really that bad, if you think about it. About the PS3 and the Wii, I don't know anything about those because I don't have much interest in them as of now. But the Wii comes out 1 day before my birthday, and if the price really is around $250, I may consider it if I get some extra money.

 

[borat_sagdiyev]

prices - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii

 

[joxley1990]

Wow! £179, that's not bad at all! Im gonna get me one of those!

 

[X1337]

Its because PS2 has a really good Drivers and a good OS that is all optimize.

* CPU: Emotion Engine 300MHz, 128-bit INT, 128-bit FP, 24KB L1, 16KB Scratch, 8KB VU0, 32KB VU1, 450 MIPS, 6.2 GFLOPS, 66M Vertices/Sec, 2.4 GB/s Internal, 1.2 GB/s Graphics, 3.2 GB/s Memory

* Graphics: Sony GS 150MHz, 1.2G Texels/Sec, 32-bit Color, 4MB (48 GB/s), 1.2 GB/sec Bus

* Sound: SPU2, 48 2D Voices, ADPCM, 2MB

* Data: 24MB (2.6 GB/s), 16MB (81 MB/s), 4.7GB Discs, Expansion 56K Modem Ethernet

This is PSP GPU specs

The 166 MHz graphics chip has 2 MiB embedded memory and through its 512 bit interface provides hardware polygon and NURBS rendering, hardware directional lighting, clipping, environment projection and texture mapping, texture compression and tessellation, fogging, alpha blending, depth and stencil tests, vertex blending for morphing effects, and dithering, all in 16 or 32 bit colour, along with handling image output. Specifications state that the PlayStation Portable is capable of rendering 33 million flat-shaded polygons per second, with a 664 million pixel per second fill rate.