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Comment by blodkorv | Hacker News Reader

Despite its advanced and complicated design it was outpreformed pretty easily by more general purpose cpus that where not nessicarily much newer.

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Including the Xbox and GameCube. Well, the Xbox was built out of significantly more "general purpose" parts than the GameCube, but both still handily outperformed the PS2.

I'm really surprised how the Gamecube was able to run circles around the PS2, despite being cheaper and using just a standard CPU/GPU combo.

I think with the Emotion Engine (PS2) and Cell (PS3) Sony got a bit obsessed with things like vector coprocessors that are theoretically very powerful, but basically require a programmer to meditate under a waterfall for 5 years to actually master. I don't think they had a reputation for providing the best support libraries etc. either.

Of course Xbox and Gamecube also released at least a year later than the PS2, and graphics tech was moving fast at the time, so that was an advantage for them as well.

I think the GameCube would have been much more of a success had Nintendo not opted to go with 1.8GB mini DVDs in an era where huge open world blockbuster games were filling up 9GB dual-layer DVDs on other consoles.

Extra silly when you consider that the N64 had already been hamstrung by the decision to use <= 64MB cartridges over CDs.

Historically it's in-line with Nintendo's policies around guiding content however.

After the CD-I debacle, Nintendo was not at all on-board with the idea of disc-based storage. One of those reasons was loading times.

Another was likely that they had concerns about games that were more 'FMV' than game; This really -was- a legit problem in the 90s. By keeping things constrained, it limits the temptation for a publisher to push out a crappy title filled with cutscenes.

It wasn't though. The cube had a few extras built in, particularly in texturing (compression and a texture register combiner), but in terms of flexibility and straight line speed the ps2 is definitely ahead. Burnout 3 and revenge, for example, were not possible on gamecube at the same level of performance. Gamecube has no vertex shader equivalent and has less than 1/2 the SIMD throughput per clock.

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