Was the PS2 "Emotion Engine" over hyped?

when I go back and think about console launchers it's hard to imagine any more hype leading up to a launch than the Sony PlayStation 2 the Nintendo 64 is certainly up there with its silicon Graphics in the living room and bringing the arcade to the home on the Nintendo Ultra 64 nonsense but the PS2 that was something else when it released in 2000 it took the World by storm it promised the future of video games many of us saw the power of what the PlayStation 2 could do thanks to the many Tech demos that we saw in 1999 these demos all ran in real time and the thing that really stood out for me was the graphics and Fidelity was a massive step up from the PlayStation 1 in fact its leap represents the single highest graphical jump from any one console generation to another the PS2 was the total package right down to the futuristic bootup startup sequence and the distinct purple Hue color of its discs and the hardware supported DVDs for both games and movies and of course it was was fully Backward Compatible with PlayStation 1 games but at the top of the PlayStation 2 hype train was the new custom chip dubbed emotion engine this chip was found inside every PS2 and is the heart of the system and even if you are not someone who's technically minded the chances are you've probably heard the name emotion engine before and this is because Sony marketed the emotion engine in such a way that made you feel like you were stepping into a whole new world a true next generation of gaming Hardware that went beyond Beyond traditional Computing and for developers the emotion engine boasted the ability to accurately model all manner of physics and world systems all of a sudden things like procedural World Generation realistic facial features water effects hair simulations soft Shadows were all possible thanks to the brand new emotion engine chip this technology was able to make games more realistic and varied and this level of performance in real time is what Sony calls it emotion synthesis this single chip would be responsible for this push to realistic 3D worlds better physics and simulations however for all this to be achievable at its core the emotion engine is not one chip it actually combines a MIP CPU clocked at 294 MHz with two very important additional co-processors and various other controller chips memory and interfaces in short extracting the very best out of the emotion engine required all these systems to be running in parallel with little to no stalling and it also required a very skill programmer Sony would Market the emotion Engine with the implication that they had something that the competition didn't the Sega Dreamcast was initially the ps2's main rival and then the Microsoft Xbox Nintendo GameCube would arrive a year later in 2001 but many were left feeling disappointed at the launch of the PS2 sure there were some good games here my personal favorite was Tekken Tag Team others would enjoy games like SSX and of course rid raser 5 but the main issue here was the games initially didn't seem to be any better than what we saw on the Dreamcast in fact many would say they were worse the Dreamcast was a true games console with many games being at arcade Perfection or near it and of course we have to talk about shenmu in 1999 the action adventure title featured environmental details numerous interactive objects a full day night system variable weather effects NPC characters and an really awesome assortment of Sega arcade min games and people would start to question Sony's reputation and marketing around the emotion engine can it really do anything that the Dreamcast hasn't already done before it and what about the upand cominging GameCube and Xbox Hardware launches was it a case of Sony overhyping the hardware just to sell more consoles or was the emotion engine a real thing that could do everything that it was advertised to do the answer is yes but getting to that stage would take some Blood Sweat and Tears at this point point it's easy to ride off the PS2 as the weakest of all the sixth generation consoles but I think that this is subjective and in the right hands the PlayStation 2 could outperform any other console at the time when Sony launched the PS2 in 2000 the first year was developers mostly coming to terms with the hardware this would be a paradigm shift in how traditional computation development was done in order to take advantage of the PS2 the developer needed to think differently think in parallel running many tasks at at once streaming data around the bus and minimizing stalls the PS2 was designed to be remarkably efficient at handling some pretty complex tasks without relying on traditional methods of data processing we said earlier that the emotion engine was a single chip on the surface but inside it had additional co-processors and these co-processors would be the key to untapping the massive performance that the p 2 could offer while the main chip ran myips at its core the secret weapon of the emotion engine were the two co-processor Vector units vu0 and V1 these Vector units while similar had different tasks vu0 for example would handle geometry Transformations Matrix and vector-based calculations including setting up projections and multiplications due to its simmed parallel processing it was a much better option than the traditional CPU V1 was designed to run independently and in parallel from the main CPU and it handles 3D vertex processing and Lighting and by taking advantage of both Vector units in this fashion with fast optimized code it's possible for the vector units to generate up to 66 million polygons per second and if you apply fog and lighting this number is half to about 36 million but according to the Micro Design report from 1999 this was still around 16 times faster than a Pentium 3 at 500 MHz the main job of the emotion engine was to take all the graphics data needed to render a fr frame known as display lists and pass them to the GS or the graphic synthesizer chip which in turn handles the rendering the GS chip has an insanely fast fill rate of about 1.2 gapix per second and the vector units in turn represented an early look of what we would consider to be vertex shaders in modern times but to keep these Vector units fed required some precision and the PlayStation to a motion engine had arguably the most important chip known as the dma controller or dmac which offer developers a smart way to move data to the GS with three different Pathways to get there so for example during code execution the vector unit could be generating vertex data while at the same time texture data could be sent to the vram via the dmac this could all be done at the same time to maximize the ps2's bandwidth one of the more interesting demos that I remember was known as V Universe the objective here was to create a graphically interesting demo using only the 16 kiloby of program memory and the 16 Koby of data memory of the PlayStation 2's V1 Vector processing chip and this is the result it's quite remarkable Sony would frequently host competitions to see what developers could do with only the use of the V1 chip and some of these demos are amazing by late 2001 developers started to get more experience and understanding the emotion engine architexture and really started to show off the power of the PlayStation 2 and there are a few interesting examples of how developers took advantage of them the first is Silent Hill 2 arguably the very best game in the series it took the original PS1 version which used fog to not only create the suspense and the mood for the game but more importantly used it to hide technical issues with the rendering 3D on the PlayStation 1 but on the PlayStation 2 Silent Hill 2 the fog was used in a completely different way applying many Alpha textures and took advantage of the vector units and the high fill rate to create one of the most unique fog layers that's instantly recognized if you're a survival Horror Game Fan it also featured Dynamic real time lighting and soft shadows and these features sound pretty trivial in today's age of consoles but the PS2 at the time was the only system really capable of pulling off these effects the original Xbox Port of Silent Hill 2 while it is a port and very good the fog effect has been reduced it's simply just not the same and if you side by side this in comparison if you stand in the same spot you can see exactly what I'm talking about and while the original Xbox had a more powerful GPU and a faster overall raw performance porting some of these Vu effects to direct X8 which was the supported version at the time on the original Xboxes meant that some sacrifices had to be made Silent Hill 3 is a clear Step Up in visuals from its predecessor and it absolutely shows textures have been improved significantly and many believe that Silent Hill 3 is one of the best looking PlayStation 2 games on the hardware and I'm not one to disagree it's a technical Masterpiece polygon counts were increased over the original but what's striking about Silent Hill 3 is its improved texture resolution take for example this model of Douglas it uses around 8,700 polygons and detailed textures and it looks absolutely fantastic not only this many effects in the game were done years before programmable shaders were standard and this was all thanks to the power of the emotion engines Vector units for example check out the this early implementation of bump mapping as the light source hits the floor you can see that the Shadows accurately reflect off the ground tiles as Heather moves around what is actually happening here is that the ground geometry is drawn twice with the second pass slightly offsetting the ground texture from the direction of the light source then a blending pass is done to subtract color from the frame buffer to pull off this very realistic effect because the PlayStation 2's graphic synthesizer has such an fill rate developers took advantage of this and the PlayStation 2 holds the record for the most number of games that Target 60 frames per second God of War 2 is another technical Showcase of the PlayStation 2's emotion engine it released late in the PlayStation 2's life cycle and Santa Monica Studio were locked in on how to get the very best out of the hardware it's silky smooth gameplay coupled with high resolution texture work with many enemies and particles on screen at once running at a locked 60 frames per second was not a fluke but how does a game manage to look so good and never drop a single frame the game uses a fixed camera system that moves on a rail depending on where you are in the level which means that it focuses on only what's on screen at all times and streaming in predefined Geometry data as Kratos moves around the level and the effect works incredibly well but the vector units weren't only used for particle and interesting postprocessing effects either because the PlayStation 2 only had a small amount of vram developers were challenged to innovate in how games could be designed streaming data in real time would now be possible traditionally level data is loaded in statically and fit within the bounds of assistant memory and vram developers had to make sacrifices to load in as much data as possible and separating gameplay using loading screens which would unload old level data and bring in new level data as needed but thanks to the powerful dmac chip streaming technology in several PlayStation 2 games were considered groundbreaking at the time for me personally I remember the first time I played GTA 3 on the PS2 graphically it didn't look particularly amazing that would come later with San Andreas but one thing that was apparent was that Rockstar knew how to program the PlayStation 2 the entire Overland map of Los Santos is streamed in in real time taking full advantage of the vector units with no loading Jack and Daxter the precursor Legacy is a title that's often credited as the first or at least one of of the very first games to have no loading screens and this is entirely true if you play the game from start to finish you will never experience a single loading screen once you've unlocked the entire game you can run from the very start at Sentinel Beach right until the final stage at the Citadel without a single loading screen Insight Metal Gear Solid 2 is one of the earliest games I remember that completely blew me away in its presentation it was a clear generational leap in technology from the PS1 game and again thanks to the high fill rate of the hardware meant that we saw some incredible for the time realtime cutcenes and effects the entire game is a cinematic showcase featuring a real time Dynamic and self shadows and of course the rain effect on the tanker level is one of the most notoriously difficult things to replicate on anything other than original PS2 Hardware at least for many many years on the PS2 the effect is effortlessly rendering at 60 frames per second on the Xbox Port of mgs2 with an even more powerful GPU it simply can't keep up and the frame rate is reduced to 30 FPS Metal Gear Solid 2 also features some impressive motion blur and depth of field Alpha Blended textures Reflections and even a physics system and the game was all about interactivity and it eclipsed what any other game was capable of doing at the time one of the games that perhaps went beyond what was considered possible on the on the PlayStation 2 undoubtedly is Shadow of the Colossus the game brought some new rendering techniques to the PS2 including simulated High Dynamic lighting realistic fur simulation smooth animations the horse animation for example is very realistic and lifelike the game also comes with two different motion blur systems both on the scenery itself and as well as the character when it's performing its animations there's also a very nice soft Shadow implementation in the game but of course the colossi fur effect is possibly one of the most unique rendering techniques on the PlayStation 2 at a high level it's combining six or more multiple texture layers with similar texture geometry duplicated multiple times to give off the effect the game uses clever use of alpha blending and vertex lighting to simulate the color of the fur now if you want a deep dive on how the fur rendering was done in the game in more detail I will leave a link to Lena P's excellent technical background in the description below sh of the Colossus also features a very interesting level of detail implementation that would bring in new geometry as the world got closer to the player and thanks to the high bandwidth and fill rate of the PlayStation 2 once again the game features a streaming implementation with zero pausing it's possible to ride around the complete vast landscape of the entire world and never have a single load the game was criticized for pushing the hardware perhaps too much and suffering in its performance but the game to me never feels unplayable Shadow of the Colossus is a true Masterpiece and a swans song for the PS2 itself and I do recommend you check it out if you haven't played the game before either the original game on the PlayStation 2 perhaps via emulation or the PS3 or even PS4 remasters by blueo of course the Charming vision of the original game is lost on those remakes but any version of Shadow of the Colossus that you try you'll have an amazing experience and I definitely recommend it so in conclusion after I slow start the emotion Engine with its Vector units was a amazing solution to solve big problems at the time increasing the number of polygons on screen to create realistic environments and characters and the PlayStation 2 wouldn't have been the same without it it's the sole of the hardware and while it wasn't perfect its lack of anti-aliasing for example is one of the main drawbacks it brought games to a new generation and while the Xbox and GameCube were on paper more powerful than the PlayStation 2 the hardware really shined when the experiences were built exclusively for the PS2 so with that all said was the emotion engine overhyped definitely not once developers and you had a program on it and after a slow start it would truly be a next Generation breakthrough the problem is there's just more than one way to get the job done the Xbox used Brute Force to often eclipse the PS2 in terms of performance it didn't have Vector units but it did have a fast CPU GPU and a built-in hard drive for fast streaming for example but let me know your thoughts about the PlayStation 2 and the emotion engine hype in the comments below and let me know if there was a game that I didn't cover in this episode that comes to mind being something that blew you away back in the day of course there are many more examples that I haven't covered in this episode but I definitely want to hear what you guys have to say in the comments below but we are going to leave it here for today's episode thank you so much for watching if you did like it please don't forget to leave me a thumbs up and I'll catch you guys in the next episode bye for now [Music]

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 478,468

Keywords: ps2, playstation 2, ee, emotion engine, sony, sony ps2, mvg, modern vintage gamer, vector units, vu0, vu1, floating point, shaders, xbox, metal gear solid 2, ps1, psx, ps2 best games, best ps2 games

Id: _PiiXM51oBo

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2024