That is actually a very good question and I'm curious about members replies.

Comparing things to the PS2 is pretty hard because it is so weird in it's design choices. It has crazy high bandwidth and it can theoretically draw a mess of polygons, but then it has a weak MIPS processor, not much memory, and not much in the way of shader performance.

From what I have read about the PS2, the graphics engine (GS) is similar to a GF2, but the challenge was keeping it fed. The PS2 hardware is dominated by bandwidth strengths and limitations. The EEE could push serious bits in certain scenarios and then it falls apart in others.

I guess a PII 450mhz with a GeForce 2 GTS and 32mb of faster SDRAM would be similar in a lot of ways.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-01-05, 17:46:

Comparing things to the PS2 is pretty hard because it is so weird in it's design choices. It has crazy high bandwidth and it can theoretically draw a mess of polygons, but then it has a weak MIPS processor, not much memory, and not much in the way of shader performance.

From what I have read about the PS2, the graphics engine (GS) is similar to a GF2, but the challenge was keeping it fed. The PS2 hardware is dominated by bandwidth strengths and limitations. The EEE could push seriously bits in certain scenarios and then it falls apart in others.

I guess a PII 450mhz with a GeForce 2 GTS and 32mb of faster SDRAM would be similar in a lot of ways.

Interesting. I was reading too some old beyond3d forum discussions about the EE+GS config and impressed how capable theorically the PS2 seems to be compared to Xbox of that time but at the same time sometimes reached by the Dreamcast too graphically. But the bandwidth/RDRAM concept plus the impressive gpu make it really impressive considering the config of that time on PC. In fact some games are incredible like GT4 or some were talking about a Transformer game or for what I remember a FPS game called Black.

I've always found it difficult to effectively compare PC builds with gaming consoles. A console has a long life span and it's made sure (sort of) that everything runs while maintaining an enjoyable quality.
Also, the PS2 had the benefit of being designed for 480p resolution in a time when on PC the standard was XGA (1024x768) and by the time (PS2) support ended the standard was somewhere around 900p on the PC (back then I had a 1680x1050 monitor).

There comes a problem where I should say by framerate and graphical fidelity something like a 1.6GHz Northwood Pentium 4 and a Geforce3 Ti 200 with 256MB RAM could easily beat the PS2 in early PS2/WinXP era games, late era games wouldn't even start on the PC because of the lack of compatibility (DirectX, Shader Model).

Emulation devs have the best explanations, being that they intimately understand the hardware and are examining it from a modern perspective. This article is great:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/43184038

Because of the way that memory access worked on the PS2, a lot of games ran at 60fps because it was a better utilization of system resources.

Interesting article, thank.

If you want to read more, he has several other articles about the PS2, how some games utilized the hardware, and stuff like that. Most of what I kinda of know about the PS2 I learned from reading his posts.

Yes it's a difficult comparison, the PS2 could do things similar to vertex shaders, and with unified memory pixel shader like effects are possible too. As mentioned, everything is quite low-res though.
A basic way of looking at things would be to look at the specs required by PC ports of PS2 games, however these might or might not be well-optimized. Examples would be Pro Skater 2, Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2/3.

I think the answer will be found when looking at what games at a specific resolution, that the Ps2 can a PC can run. If the gaming experience (how fluid the game runs), then you have the equivelant of a Ps2 in x86 form. Looking at horsepower, will not give you the answer, as there are so many possibilities. Even the same GPU, will perform different on two or more makers of a GFX card. Yeah.... In that regards, the x86 platform is a mine field.