Splinter Cell PS2 details News

Hopefully this won't have to be yanked at Ubi's behest this time.

mornin!

like... which other title, Mugwum? and when is XIII out... the closest I guess I will ever get to an Aeon Flux game!

"like... which other title, Mugwum?"

I'm talking about this news item. We posted it on the 23rd of last month.

i know they are releasing the new level in march 2003, so i assume the release date is for march 2003 too :P good news for PS2 owners, bad tactical move by Microsoft not making it an exclusive

bad tactical move by Microsoft not making it an exclusive


Yawn

Xb0x 5ucKx.

So... Is it worth playing without the lightning effects? :)

so what's happened then Mugwum?
Had a major sense of deja vu reading this...

The sense of humour in some of these people are almost at zero level. Don't try to hard people, you might strain yourself.

ROFLMAO.

"so what's happened then Mugwum?
Had a major sense of deja vu reading this..."

Yep. Well we were asked to remove it by Ubi Soft until Jan 1st, and now it's back up.

Errol seems to spend more time on the floor than anywhere else these days :)

LOL. wow, this news actually did shock me. I thought the talk of a PS2 version was just talk. but march this year!! fair play to ubisoft in a world that revolves aound money, u gotta have ur hit game on the console that sells the most i guess!

Errol seems to spend more time on the floor than anywhere else these days :)

My floor is your ceiling.

Presumably Ubi weren't allowed to announce any other console versions until after New Year because of some kind of NDA with Microsoft.

A new level sounds nice, but it'll be interesting to see how the screenies end up looking. Admittedly I know bugger all about how hardware actually renders graphics, but wouldn't the wonderfully sizeable PS2 bandwidth we keep hearing about actually help with things like shadows? Surely it's more likely to be the textures and maybe the draw distance that takes a hit. Can anyone enlighten me?

yes, of course. Because all that makes a decent game is the lighting and graphics, right?

minimum system requirements

Arse. There goes all my hope of playing the PC version. :(

Edit: Wha..? How did your post get below mine? o_O

Ahem. Now lets try without making silly typos :)

Ripped from the Splinter Cell website...

The minimum system requirements [for the demo] are :

800 MHz Pentium III or AMD Athlon
256 MBytes RAM
DirectX 8.1
32 MBytes video card *
DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card
8x speed CD/DVD-ROM drive
1,5 GIG Hard Drive Space

My PC doesn't match this, nor will it for the next sixth months until I upgrade (by which time my PC will be nearly 4 years old).

I admit that it seems seriously unlikely that the PS2 version will be able to match the XBox's visuals but (AFAIR) the game was credited just as much because of the use of stealth and creation of atmosphere than as the graphics...

i have this system pretty much, and it chugs like a bitch.

oh, i have a 64MB Geforce2, P4 1Ghz blahblahblah

runs much better on t'box

Basically, Xbox suckz. I feel that we are all in agreement on this point.

"Basically, Xbox suckz. I feel that we are all in agreement on this point."

errr.

no.
not really

Cool news, finally our PS2 and PC brothers get to have a play on a very cool game.

/skips happily across the thread/

I just want to see the first real screenshot of SC PS2.

but I advise you not to even touch the Xbox version after you have bought and played the PS2 version. Suicide rates are high enough as it is. ;)

Yes, I agree. The very thought of playing a game like Splinter Cell on a piece of cr*p like the Xbox would drive most to suicide.

"has so much more versatility"

ROFL!! Comment of the year.

"Basically, Xbox suckz"

Hehehe.. a bit jealous are we?

Comment of the year

Which year? 2003? Hey, it's 03-Jan. Don't you think it's a bit early to do this? ;)

So PS2 gets XBox' Splinter Cell around the time XBox gets the PS2's Burnout 2... fair's fair I guess.

metal gear is nothing more than a rubbish b movie with a couple of interactive sections strung together, coupled with a rubbish combat system and dodgy camera angles.

"Because all that makes a decent game is the lighting and graphics, right?"

Well, if you've ever played Splinter Cell, the lighting makes it a great game. Hell, lighting IS the gameplay in that game. I have a bad feeling about the PS2 version.

And I agree that this is a bad tactical move by Microsoft by not making it exclusive. I have a feeling, however, that slowly Ubi Soft's future games will all be developed primarily for the Xbox and then ported to the lesser systems. Which is very good if you are an Xbox owner.

BTW, if you don't have Xbox Live and you want the new Splinter Cell levels, subscribe to OXM. They'll be releasing them on the demo disk as they come.

hmm I wonder if the NGC version will have the extra level, and if it will be on one or two discs..? Also, I wonder if it will be an Xbrick port or if those lazy programmers will just do a PSpoo port and then Renderware it to the NGC so that we get ANOTHER fekkin low quality PS2 port..
:-(

I own all consoles and have a pretty good "feel" for what they can do. I'm scared to see Splinter Cell on PS2, because honestly, it'll look like complete shit. I don't even know where my PS2 will get the power to do Splinter Cell.

Someone may have made this point already - I couldn't be bothered to read the whole thread through... :) I know, I'm being a jerk...

Anyway, I'm sure the PS2 version will be serviceable, and probably a good PS2 game. However, that being said, the lighting and other graphics effects DO play a fairly important role in the gameplay - being a stealth title and all.

xbox version is better than either cube or ps2 version. how do i know this???? simple, xbox is about 2x stronger than gc [733mhz cpu vs 500mhz/300 GF3 vs Radeon etc]

Canley - you're a fool, obviously a 16 year old child with no real concept of hardware and who thinks he knows things about consoles cause the xbox is so like a PC. Specs. mean very little when it comes to consoles as all the architecture is different. I don't know how efficient the xbox architecture is but i'd hazard a guess at saying "not very" as its based on a PC. Until we see games towards the middle to end of this year we can't really start to judge which system produces the better graphics (which is what you seem to base your criteria for a better console on for some unknown reason).

I think PS2 can handle Splinter Cell quite well but the main difference between PS2 version and Xbox version will be textures 'cos PS2 can't run heavy engines with detailed textures. Here's something for "tech freaks"...

PS2 vs. Xbox - The real performance:

Fill Rate:

The following are all in billion pixels per second:

0 texture layers (Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter 1)
XGPU (= Xbox GPU (NV2A)) = 1.0
GS (= PS2 GPU) = 2.4

1 texture layer (most early texture-mapped 3D games)
XGPU = 1.0
GS = 1.2

2 texture layers (even Quake I uses 2 layers)
XGPU = 1.0
GS = 0.6

4 texture layers (common in modern 3D games)
XGPU = 0.5
GS = 0.3

These numbers are maximum pixel fill rates without considering Z-occlusion. If the visibility subsystem from NVIDIA’s Lightspeed Memory Architecture can improve fill rate by at least 20%, then XGPU effective fill rate comes to 1.2 billion pixels per second with 2 texture layers and 0.6 billion with 4 texture layers. That’s 2x the fill rate of Sony GS.


Polygon Performance:

All values here are in million polygons per second.

0 texture layers
XGPU = 31.25
GS = 75

1 texture layer
XGPU = 31.25
GS = 37.5

2 texture layers
XGPU = 31.25
GS = 18.75

4 texture layers
XGPU = 31.25 (4 texture layers per pass -- 2 clock cycles)
GS = 9.375

Again, like in the pixel fill rate section, XGPU includes hardware Z-occlusion that can increase effective polygon draw rate perhaps 20% or more. That would place the XGPU draw rate at 37.5 million polygons per second with 2 texture layers. That’s 2x the effective polygon drawing performance of Sony GS with 2 texture layers -- modern 3D games use textures. If the 4 layers part mentioned in the previous paragraph is true, then it's 4x the polygon draw rate.

In a best case scenario, if I recall correctly, NVIDIA claims a 4x effective improvement in fill rate from Z-occlusion -- that would bring that 31.25M to 125M polygons with 2 textures. PowerVR2 in Dreamcast has a claim of around 5x effective improvement from its TBR (tile-based rendering).

Once again, on top of the larger draw rate, XGPU can draw “smarter” polygons through help from the pixel shader. The vertex shaders plays a role too in how polygons are generated, but in this section above, we’ll consider only the texturing and drawing of polygons (triangles) after they have already been transformed and lit.


Integer Performance:

EE (= PS2 CPU) Vs XCPU (= Xbox CPU)
(based on SPECint2000) Peak / Base
XCPU: 374 / 368 (Pentium III 733)
EE: 289 / 280 (R12000 350MHz)*

That's 1.3x better general integer performance, which includes the following types of calculations:
- compression
- compiling and interpreting
- game artificial intelligence
- text processing
- database
- conditionals and loops
- searching and sorting

*An R12000 350MHz is likely more powerful than an Emotion Engine at integer processing, so Xbox should have greater than 1.3x lead. Perhaps XCPU is around 2x that of EE at integer.


Floating-Point:

Physics, vertex processing, and multimedia compression methods - EE Vs XCPU/XGPU/MCPX, since Xbox splits these tasks among the three chips.

Emotion Engine
Floating Point Performance: 6.2 GFLOPS
Geometry (million polygons per second), based on Sony's claims
- only Perspective Transformation: 66
- with Lighting: 38
- with Fog: 36
- with Bezier Curved Surface Generation: 16
Image Processing Unit (IPU): MPEG2 Macroblock Layer Decoder

We know that Sony GS requires multi-pass rendering for texture mapping. Thus, for every pass, it may require repeated vertex processing by EE, eating away at that geometry performance. With lighting, fog, and a few texture layers, geometry performance could be down to low single digits (millions). GS can only draw 9.375 million 32-pixel polygons with 4 texture layers anyhow. An actual game with a few texture layers may hit in the 5-million polygons per second range with good programming. To free up some resources, games may lower texture layer usage. The FLOPS that are left over after geometry processing is taken from the total GFLOPS (perhaps half left) goes to game physics, 3D sound processing, and other areas that demand.

Xbox CPU
FP Performance: 2.9 GFLOPS
- all goes to game physics and general FP tasks; no vertex transformations or lighting required on CPU, and 3D sound processing is done by MCPX

Xbox GPU: > 75 GFLOPS (or GnvidiaFLOPS perhaps), based on NVIDIA's claim of 80 GFLOPS for Xbox
- dual vertex shaders dedicated to vertex processing
- greater than 100 million vertices per second
- 4 texture layers per rendering pass, so vertices are not wasted unless more than 4 texture layers are required
- texture decompression handled by GPU while texturing.

With efficient vertex storage (use of triangle strips and indexing), it could be possible to make use of entire 31 million polygon drawing performance -- but maybe 20 something million is doable in many cases.

Xbox MCPX:
- dedicated to dolby digital encoding and 2D/3D sound processing

EE can do almost everything Xbox can do in these floating-point areas, but not as elegantly, efficiently, or quickly, giving Xbox perhaps 2x to 3x as much power in this area. Given that there aren't any benchmarks, it's hard to make a solid comparison of how many times more powerful. For a benchmark, all we can do is just look at the games and see how well various sorts of scenes and games run.


Memory and Data Paths:

Xbox
- 64MB UMA DDR
- 6.4 GB/sec from XGPU to memory
- 1 GB/sec from XGPU to XCPU
- 800 MB/sec from XGPU to MCPX

That's plenty of bandwidth and space for games this generation at 480p on a TV. XGPU does the majority of the processing, so it has the best connection to memory.

PS2
- 32MB main RDRAM
- 3.2 GB/sec from EE to RDRAM
- 2.4 GB/sec within EE (among VU0, VU1, IPU, etc.)
- 1.2 GB/sec from EE to GS
- 150 MB/sec from EE to I/0 and Sound
- 4MB eDRAM on GS @ 48 GB/sec

One might assume that's 36MB total for PS2, but part of that 4MB that's used for texture caching is duplicated in main memory, so it's more like 34MB or 35MB total -- anyhow, not too important.

That 1.2 GB/sec is a major bottleneck. That's not much faster than AGP 4x, and textures will be going through that path many times uncompressed each frame. The solution? Reduce memory texture usage (size, count, and color depth). The result? Plain looking graphics with repetitive textures.

That 48 GB/sec eDRAM is certainly fast at texture processing and pixel rendering once textures are in that cache (or with non-textured pixels), but how will large amounts of textures be used when they must go through that 1.2 GB/sec path? Using 8-bit color textures will decrease size, but won't work on textures that need alpha. Developers have to use a combination of 8-bit color textures, small textures, repeating textures, and some non-textured polygons to make the most out of the strong areas of PS2 (and minimize penalties from bottlenecks).

Overall, the Xbox design is great for real-time graphics and games (mainly because of the NVIDIA chips, XGPU and MCPX), while the Intel CPU is good enough for what it has to do (AI, physics, and general tasks). The PS2 is designed for...well, maybe marketing? 128-bit and 48 GB/sec are good for tossing around in the specs. PS2 can manage decent visuals, sound, and game environments with good programming, but its no match for Xbox (especially if good programming is used with Xbox too).

What exactly was the point of that long post ? We all know that the Xbox is more powerful !

It still sucks though.

Yes, it was a particularly convincing argument. I thank you for your kind praise.

I always believed that I had amazing powers of persuasion, and this confirms my belief.

don't tell me you're going to start spouting star wars lines again.

I am your father !

I do love it when someone wastes their time, and everyone elses by stating the technical specs of consoles to try and prove a point of "which console is best"

shovelling shitloads of polygons/data is only good if the polygons/data are worth shifting. In the case of Splinter Cell you'd expect the PS2 version to be slightly inferior for chrissakes (and if you're a three-console owner you'll naturally go for the XBOX version) - miracle enough that someone will actually be able to squeeze ANY kind of game into a piece of hardware that, if it was a PC, would barely run Office 2000 without having a major Connery!

Peej

miracle enough that someone will actually be able to squeeze ANY kind of game into a piece of hardware that, if it was a PC, would barely run Office 2000 without having a major Connery!

Yes, an exact conversion requires a lot Moore than PS2 can handle.

PS2 is technically the most powerfull, but raw power doesn't translate directly to graphical ability, the xbox has better routines and more memory.. so the grunt of the PS2, normally goes unused.

wtf

fact is it's a dated piece of hardware which can't keep up

Well, every console is a dated piece of hardware on release day basically. If you want to avoid this, buy a PC, simple as that. I wonder what all the Xbox fanboys will say once it becomes more obvious that the Xbox is dated, too.

edit: Made the mistake to surf the areaxbox forum. Just made me furious. All these idiots saying the PS2 can't keep up (of course it can't!) without realising the Xbox is in the same boat.

I don't know where this myth of the emotion engine and PS2 being supremely powerfull 'if programmed right' comes from, fact is it's a dated piece of hardware which can't keep up. Its had long enough to prove this 'supreme power' already. Can't belive people still believe all this emotion engine hype.Same here, the machine has yet to prove it's supposed 'supreme power' emotion engine hype. I suppose it could be best described as having a monster truck engine on a mini. Thus far the xbox is without question the most powerful of the three machines.

Kyle said -

how can i get the game free for my brother

Erm .... steal it ?