Talk:PlayStation 2 technical specifications

Optical drive
The article currently states "Later models starting with SCPH-500xx are DVD+RW and DVD-RW compatible.". How come my SCPH-39004 (a european "fat" V7) happily reads DVD+RW without any problems or modifications..? (No modchip, unmodified consoles will play DVD video from burned disks). Am I missing something here?! SCPH-500xx would be referring to the later/younger V9 or V10 consoles (the ones with the Firewire/i.Link connector removed) --84.62.150.17 (talk) 23:02, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

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Some Tidying up PS2 Misconceptions
Just want to clarify a few things before anything is edited.

The idea of using the mainRAM for off-screen textures is misleading. The way the memory works is, like on the NGC, assets are all stored on the main RAM, and their VRAMs are streamed just the portion of the content needed to build the current frame. They then stream through, and process, very quickly, the data, to draw said frame. They're sent a lot more than just 3MBs or 4MBs per-frame, as they just build a frame in several MB doses at a time, at rates closer to an SGI workstation of the time's. A NGC game will have much more than 1MBs of textures, per frame, as it was built to handle everything going in & out, like PS2. PS2 has texture buffers that work out the texels for the frame buffers.

In fact, the ps2's vram, at 30-60hz, can stream through, and process, up to nearly 38-76MBs/frame (according to: Source, see GS section), more than the 32MBs of main RAM can even store. VRAM doesn't become a bottleneck, so you only have to worry about what you can fit into mainRAM. So, it's not that you need to allocate some portion of another memory, for extra space & potential, hence why the statement is misleading. Instead, it is again that you store all the level's assets on mainRAM, then stream it to their VRAMs, in little doses, and they build the frame, very quickly, in very small doses of a MB or so, at fast rates. So, it's more about how fast their VRAMs can work, the throughput, and, as they could go through way more than what the total of their RAMs sizes, once more, the main RAM becomes what determines what size & complexity a level will factor, on screen, etc.

Most graphics cards of the time (circa 2000-2005, and onward) would have stored all their assets into VRAM, as there was almost no work to be done on the CPU, anymore, save for the basics, and their buses were much slower, and not meant to handle constant streaming, like PS2's and NGC's. So, technically, this is where the confusion comes from, as many would merge this together with the fact those systems were intentionally slower, given how their memory arrangement worked, and could not, very quickly, stream, from one pool of memory to another, anywhere near as quickly as NGC & Ps2 could.

Xbox had just 6.4GB/sec, for the whole system, 5.34GB/sec, after CPU stuff was taken care of. PS2 & NGC had 2.6-3.2GB/sec, just for the main RAM, then a dedicated 1.2-1.3Gb/sec asset/data transfer bandwidth, only for sending content to the GPUs of the systems, then 18-48GB/sec for VRAM, so that work doses could be done, and gone through, incredibly quickly, so it could move on to the next dose of content.

Second, the bit about Multi-Pass rendering is a bit specific, while including the data from the pdf is fine. Mind you, the poly count listed isn't exactly in the paper listed. Maybe just the poly count bit could be removed?

--SilenceoftheHills (talk) 13:54, 12 April 2022 (UTC)