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[Lysandros]

The better version was on Xbox. I had them both. Metal Gear 2 as well.

All right now, that's just factually ridiculous. Even the most diehard Xbox fans would concede those two to PS2. Quite frankly it appears that you hate that console to the guts and simply can't be objective at the slightest.

Terrible thread with some of the most clueless takes out there by the way.

 

[SJRB]

Still looks insane to me.

 

[SeraphJan]

Tell me THIS is outdated, all you need is resolution upscale and some simple post processing you could DIY your own remaster version. Most game on PS2 runs at 60fps

 

[Majormaxxx]

The PS2 was the clear far and away champion of its generation, with the most games, the most hit releases, and was the machine everyone wanted. Many of the visual flaws and lack of AA among other problems were largely overlooked unless you were a multi-console owner.

But in 2023, looking back. IMO, many of the PS2's games including the ones that push graphics and effects the hardest, in almost all cases have aged quite poorly. I can go back and look at a Gamecube or Xbox game (where PS2 isn't the lead console and the port is lazy) or even a handful of Dreamcast games and see better colors, straight and clean polygons, better image qualify, less graininess, and higher resolution not just on character models and backgrounds, but on the texturing itself.

Go back and look at some of the favorite games of the day, San Andreas, Kingdom Hearts, True Crime, Tekken 4, the MK games, Bloodrayne, Tony Hawks Underground, Def Jam FFX|X-2, Splinter Cell, Silent Hill 4, DMC3, Yakuza, they all have aged quite badly compared to contemporaries on the competing consoles, or ports in some cases. Unless you modify an emulator but I'm talking about real-hardware on a TV.

It's not every game but it's the vast majority of them. For the time this was not as big a deal but going back the difference between playing Xbox games HD or SD, or Gamecube games compared to the PS2 ports or original titles is night and day. It's not about the games themselves that I am speaking of but the visuals of the games. Some of the best games on the PS2 look terrible.

If you play PS2 games on the right hardware, they look great. In fact, I dare you to play them on a 21 inch Sony Trinitron and find anything wrong with them. This is even with a composite cable. For a larger CRT TV, try SCART or S-VHS

 

[IAmRei]

Aside of Texture resolution for 2D heavy games, I think it's still quite okay. I played some lost in translations as well, and the game reminds me how great the industry was at those time. for me personally, I love how "photo realistic" (for their time) look on that era. Monster hunter 2, Gran turismo 4, Yakuza 2, Genji, Final Fantasy XII, playing them with 2000's eyes especially, makes me respect them a lot. Also i find that retro photorealistic graphic is immersive

 

[Team Andromeda]

They were never that impressive in the 1st place. So many PS2 games run in low res and had jaggies.
The display output of the system was poor, so much like the N64.

 

[CGNoire]

Games on PS2 that had more stylize visuals aged better than the games that were trying to be more realistic visually.

I use to think this till I played The Getaway on PCSX2. In HD shit holds up fantastic. Same as Max Payne.

 

[CGNoire]

The thing with older games is I think the low resolution helped hide a lot of ugly details.

Opposite the res hid all the high quality assets. In 4k ps2 assets look great.

 

[David B]

I would say yes. T2e PS1 games were 240i, pretty crappy. The PS2 games were 480i to 480P. It just was pretty bad. Also compared to GameCube and Xbox, the PS2 were horrible.

 

[Griffon]

Apart from the resolution on native hardware (easily fixed by emulation), the PS2 games look great.

It always held up, much better than the awkward 7th generation games.

 

[CGNoire]

Depends. Silent Hill 2, 3, and 4 were more on the "realistic" side, with character models, and it still looks amazing to this day. I would argue SH3 and SH4 looked better than many of the agmes on PS3 for the first year or two.

Yep a bunch of realistic art style games still look great.

 

[cireza]

It never looked good. Image quality was bad from the beginning, a ton of aliasing, blurry textures, samey colors quite often, low resolution etc...

 

[Toots]

short answer no, long answer yes

 

[Drew1440]

Exclusive games for the PS2 still look good to this day with the right hardware, though launch titles will always look rough (Ridge Racer V with it's aliasing)
The 4MB video ram meant most multiplatform games looked worse on the PS2, I always preferred playing them on PC or Xbox instead.

 

[I Love Rock 'n' Roll]

It never looked good. Image quality was bad from the beginning, a ton of aliasing, blurry textures, samey colors quite often, low resolution etc...

Yes that 100% true. The dreamcast destroyed PS2.

But now, thanks to emulation, PS2 - in HD, 2k or 4K - looks really good. Everything that I hated on the original hardware is mostly gone! I use AetherSX2 on my MacBookAir M2 and I'm having a blast!

 

[L*][*N*K]

I disagree, In my opinion the only graphics that ages poorly are the ultra realistic graphics that try to be as realistic looking as it can, sure Call of Duty Finest Hour has aged poorly but can you say the same about Dark Cloud 2 or FFXII?

 

[Madserb2023]

The Game Cube holds up so much better to the point where they look like they released a lot more than a year apart. Image quality goes a long way and the greatest testiment to this has to be dreamcast which while its games are graphically more simple than the PS2 appear much sharper and ultimately more attractive today. The PS2 has really muddy image even when hooked up to a CRT which I didn't notice at the time.

 

[Killer8]

It's aged much much better than the brown mess that was the 7th gen. Particularly on a CRT where it still looks fantastic in context.

 

[Alexios]

Other than low res textures and looking blurry and/or aliased af most of the time (try fullscreening some of the non emulation videos people posted for example, quite different to watching them in a thumbnail size window), which was bad even back in its day on CRT, never mind now, not so much.

 

[Doctor Hades]

I was never a fan of the PS2's image quality when I got one as a reluctant replacement for my much loved Dreamcast. Sure, it could push more polygons but there was just something so irritating about its video output. The first game I played on PS5 was Ridge Racer 5 and we all know how that game looked using the PS2's interleaved display mode (or whatever it was called) that made the game look horrendously jaggy even on my 28" Panasonic CRT TV that I owned at the time. The Dreamcast never looked that bad and I even played many of its games on a PC CRT monitor using VGA. I then played Dead or Alive 2 on PS2 and this was another game that had more visual detail than the Dreamcast version but was let down by the image quality. That pretty much sealed the PS2's fate for me. It had some great games, I will not argue with that, but it was pretty much relegated to second-place once I got an Xbox which had much superior visual output compared with the PS2. From then on I only bought exclusives for the PS2 and got all third-party games for Xbox.

Looking back, I enjoyed the PS1 (which I part-exchanged my new Sega Saturn for), the PS2 was okay but ultimately underwhelming beyond a few exclusives (Metal Gear Solid 2/3, God of War etc) and I ended up using it more for watching DVDs on until I got a dedicated player and the launch PS3 was cool-looking design-wise but third-party games were better on Xbox 360. The PS3 did have Blu-ray though so that was a huge bonus in the early days over the Xbox 360 and, thankfully, my investment in movies and TV shows on that format paid off as HD DVD died a premature death. The PS4 though was the first console from Sony where I felt they got everything right from the design (fan noise aside) to the quality of the games (1080p being more prevalent than on the lacklustre Xbox One which targeted 720p - 900p) to the price and its controller. It became my main console for that generation and I loved it. That adoration continued with the PS5, another console that I feel Sony got mostly right and the decision to support PS4 games via backward compatibility just made the console all the more appealing, especially as it arguably has a finer games library than Microsoft's Xbox.

But the PS2. Yeah, wasn't a huge fan of the system at all. Back then the Xbox became my main gaming platform then the Xbox 360 and it wasn't until the PS4 that I 'switched sides' so to speak.

 

[Mr.Phoenix]

I feel this or the same could be said about any platform after a couple of generations.

Stylized graphics always ages better than photo-realistic graphics.

 

[Lokaum D+]

The good old days, that green/purple light was soooo gooood.

Playing FF10 and watching Naruto, life for sure was simple

 

[Morrie’s wig shop]

OP, what you experiencing is the lack of shaders on the PS2 games.

 

[K.N.W.]

You are remembering it wrong OP, I watch and make comparisons for a hobby, I know for sure the three machines are not that far apart, and rarely GC and XBOX completely trump it. PS2 usually is just about the same, sometimes it has "enhanced drawing distance", at the expense of pixel crawling effects, due to the lack of Mip-Maps (which requires more processing power, mind you!), sometimes there are extra special effects on any of the three machines (Frame Buffer effects favour immensely PS2, due to the 48 GB/s embedded ram), usually textures are better in color and resolution on XB and GC , but many times they become blurry in the distance, PS2 stays pixelated but sharp through most games. It's true that some GC and XBOX games had some futuristic/alien graphical effects which you rarely see on PS2 (or maybe never at all), but if you factor in that the sysyem eventually had its own share of secret weapons graphically, and that the two best looking games of that generation, Gran Turismo 4 and Silent Hill 4, are on PS2, there is no doubt it aged almost as bad and as good as the other two.

Maybe, I say maybe, you aren't enjoying the games in the proper way: are you playing PS2 on a CRT with a good cable? That makes or breaks the deal for PS2, quite a lot honestly, I've tried all combinations (PCSX2 + OLED TV, PCSX2/PS3 + LCD TV, PS2+ VGA CRT MONITOR, PS2 + HD CRT), and honestly I think only old school 480i CRT TVs really show what the system is capable of.
The other two gaming system might look a bit more flat on CRT, but they lose less warmth and vibrancy when displayed on other kinds of tv sets. That and better framerate are the reasons to buy the other two systems, more usabilty all around, but visuals-wise 99% on the games were almost the same on the three machines.

SOURCE: Silent Hill 3 is my love (since last year) , I play it every day/week on a CRT, and the culprit of my love is wondering every day "Why are people stuck in 2003/2004, when everybody thought PS2 never had a chance in high profile graphical effects compared to GC/XB, and they didn't even give a glimpse to modern games on PS2 like Path of Neo (which had lots of missing effects on XB an Pc) , Tourist Trophy or Medal of Honor Vanguard?", and then I rewatch the SH3 pre-final boss cutscene, where Valtiel climbs down the wall, and looks better than many of the games in the last 20 years.

 

[crazy monkey]

It was weakest console from that gen correct?

 

[K.N.W.]

It was weakest console from that gen correct?

Hard to say, had the slowest CPU but it could do natively vectorial calculus, had smallest total RAM but a VRAM speed which still scares today, and it had a GPU which wasted many many operations and cycles to do effects that the other two machines could do natively, but still had more than double theoretical pixel output (could crunch way more pixels per second, but wasted a lot of time trying to do effects that other consoles could do easily). If you look at the realistic look of GT4, it was the best, if you look at the crazy amount of stuff exploding and moving in Halo 2 (with modern shaders), then it was the worst. I would say that of the three it was the one with most weakness and drawbacks, but it could also do marvelous things( the realist look of GT4 and the scale of Shadow of the Colossus are hard to top for example).

 

[Lysandros]

It was weakest console from that gen correct?

Plain false.

 

[Lysandros]

Hard to say, had the slowest CPU but it could do natively vectorial calculus, had smallest total RAM but a VRAM speed which still scares today, and it had a GPU which wasted many many operations and cycles to do effects that the other two machines could do natively, but still had more than double theoretical pixel output (could crunch way more pixels per second, but wasted a lot of time trying to do effects that other consoles could do easily). If you look at the realistic look of GT4, it was the best, if you look at the crazy amount of stuff exploding and moving in Halo 2 (with modern shaders), then it was the worst. I would say that of the three it was the one with most weakness and drawbacks, but it could also do marvelous things( the realist look of GT4 and the scale of Shadow of the Colossus are hard to top for example).

Power debates between GC and PS2 aside (just one thing as to memory for now, PS2 had more embedded VRAM and more unified system RAM), what kind of a black hole swallowed Dreamcast from that generation?

 

[cireza]

But now, thanks to emulation, PS2 - in HD, 2k or 4K - looks really good. Everything that I hated on the original hardware is mostly gone!

PS2 emulators have a ton of input lag. Tried it recently, still way too bad. To reduce lag, I had to disable VSync, which lead to ugly tearing of course.

 

[Aldric]

I think games from gen 6 have aged remarkably well. I was watching a vid about Haunting Ground the other day and I was surprised at how good it still looked as I didn't remember it well.

 

[shiru]

No. Exclusive titles look great on a CRT/Emulated.

I use to think this till I played The Getaway on PCSX2. In HD shit holds up fantastic. Same as Max Payne.

Yeah. Emulation does wonders for 6th gen console games. I'm surprised sometimes.




Burnout Paradise in 2005

It was weakest console from that gen correct?

by far, but it still produced some great visuals.

 

[Lysandros]

by far, but it still produced some great visuals.

False by a long shot. I can't possibly imagine someone with an even basic understanding about Deamcast, GC and PS2 systems stating this.

 

[Corporal.Hicks]

That's not even remote close to how those games looked.

This is Black running at the highest possible settings and through a top of the line scaler from an actual PS2.

And Omimusha 3

Your screenshots looks extremely bad, not even my LCD upscale picture so badly.

Anyway on high resolution display something like 480i/p look bad no matter what you do. It's however possible to emulate 6'th gen consoles, because the image quality is noticeably improved on an emulator at something like 4x the resolution.

I however still prefer gaming on real hardware. On my low resolution plasma games from 6'th gen consoles looks amazing, way better even compared to my SD CRT (because the CRT makes the image blurry to an extreme degree.).

SD CRT

Plasma

SD CRT

Plasma

I have played burnout 2 lately (PS2 is the best version, even xbox version doesnt look so good) and this game still impress me. On my plasma the textures look much better compared to my SD CRT, and picture has almost HD look to it. I have taken these photos from close distance, but from something like 2.5m from my plasma (my normal viewing distance) not even aliasing is a problem.

6'th gen games can look good on LCD as well, but it has to be low resolution and small LCD. If you have something like 26 inch 720p LCD even PS2 games looks very good.

 

[SpokkX]

No - the look fine

And more importantly games mostly run at 60fps so are more playable than games from ps3/360 and even ps4/xbone

 

[GenericUser]

Worse then the PS1 imo. At least PS1 games have a unique aesthetic to them, PS2 games generally just look butt ugly.

 

[Kadve]

Dont know about GC but Xbox games are always gonna look better. It pretty much supported 480p across the board with some games even doing 720p while the PS2 was generally limited to just 480i. If you want "good looking" original hardware PS2 games you need to get a fat PS3 with BC.

 

[shiru]

False by a long shot. I can't possibly imagine someone with an even basic understanding about Deamcast, GC and PS2 systems stating this.

Other than its ridiculous framebuffer bandwidth, it was weaker than the other two consoles in every way. And I wasn't counting the Dreamcast.

 

[yosean]

The biggest problem is we had a change in TV technology. PS2 games on a CRT still look clean, crisp and well designed. We were also mostly playing on 21-27" CRT's. I suspect 42" is minimum for the average gamer now. Blow thos pixels up, increased TV fidelity and you have a recipe to make old stuff look very very old

 

[RoadHazard]

No, it's still a pretty sexy console.

Its games though? Kind of, but not as badly as the generation before it, or maybe even the generation after (so many PS360 games have garbage performance with sub 30fps and screen tearing).

 

[Loomy]

Some games hold up pretty well to this day.

Art direction >>>>>>>> polycount, resolution, etc

Black looked/played so good for its time. Still amazed at what they managed to put on screen.

 

[Lysandros]

Exclusive games for the PS2 still look good to this day with the right hardware, though launch titles will always look rough (Ridge Racer V with it's aliasing)
The 4MB video ram meant most multiplatform games looked worse on the PS2, I always preferred playing them on PC or Xbox instead.

GC had just 3MB of it at much lower bandwidth and most multiplatform titles had reduced texture detail, particles and post processing compared to PS2. You might well prefer smoother/more compressed look of GC, that's subjective.

 

[K.N.W.]

Power debates between GC and PS2 aside (just one thing as to memory for now, PS2 had more embedded VRAM and more unified system RAM), what kind of a black hole swallowed Dreamcast from that generation?

Low VRAM in PS2 left such an hole in our hearts, that Sony used it to suck away Dreamcast, I'm sure.
Seriously, I think it has to do with the system being mostly out of sales when the competitors started hitting the scene.

 

[Tiago Rodrigues]

Gran Turismo 3 and 4, Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, Final Fantasy games, God of War 2, most Jak & Daxter games, ICO, Virtua Fighter 4, etc...aged really good. So no.

 

[Dirk Benedict]

Yes and no. No, because without a CRT and or upscaling hardware, they'll look blurry, but.. Yes, because the newly rebuilt PCSX2 makes PS2 games look so good. You could consider everything you play on it a remaster, to a certain degree.

 

[Lysandros]

Other than its ridiculous framebuffer bandwidth, it was weaker than the other two consoles in every way. And I wasn't counting the Dreamcast.

The question was of that generation and in this context Deamcast should be counted since it's an undeniable hardware of this very generation, that's not optional. "Other than its ridiculous framebuffer bandwidth" huh? How about the fill rate for another: 1.2 Gigapixel/s for PS2, 648 Megapixel/s for GC and ~700 Megapixel/s for Xbox. And there are others.

 

[Beer Baelly]

No, have you seen any PS2 demakes?

 

[hemo memo]

PS2 graphics level is still acceptable. I can play MGS, RE4, FFX, Kingdom Hearts fine. PS1 games however are pain to the eyes.

 

[Shut0wen]

Have a chipped ps2 and xbox and a working gamecube, out of all 3 consoles ps2 had alot of ugly games, especially 3rd party games, black for instance literally runs 15fps on ps2 compared to xbox

 

[Lysandros]

Have a chipped ps2 and xbox and a working gamecube, out of all 3 consoles ps2 had alot of ugly games, especially 3rd party games, black for instance literally runs 15fps on ps2 compared to xbox

Can you please prove that claim?

 

[shiru]

The question was of that generation and in this context Deamcast should be counted since it's an undeniable hardware of this very generation, that's not optional. "Other than its ridiculous framebuffer bandwidth" huh? How about the fill rate for another: 1.2 Gigapixel/s for PS2, 648 Megapixel/s for GC and ~700 Megapixel/s for Xbox. And there are others.

Ok. It's obvious it's more powerful than the DC, relax. That 1.2Gp/s number is misleading since it's only for basic rendering. Once you enable rendering effects the other system use for their fillrate benchmark, it's actually lower than those.