I disagree any of them were underpowered. The PS1 and PS3 arguably produced the nicest graphics of their generations - the PS1 because its competition was compromised in their own way, and the PS3 due to sheer brute force.
The PS2 for sure was less powerful than the more conventional architectures of the GameCube and Xbox, but it was released 18 months before either of them in a time when Moore's law was still extremely relevant. Yet it could still hold its own against the competition. All pieces of impressive hardware.
Compared to PCs of the same era they were very underpowered. And that only got worse as the generation went on. The PS3 and 360 only had 512mb of ram shared between the cpu and gpu which was a pretty serious handicap.
(The lack of ram was definitely the biggest issue, and the thing that held back PC games the most as levels had to be made a lot smaller than they could have been otherwise - Destiny and Final Fantasy XIV are two concrete examples, both released expansions with much larger playable areas as soon as PS3/360 support was dropped).
Compared to other consoles of the same generation they were on par though.
> Compared to PCs of the same era they were very underpowered.
Compared to top-of-the-line PCs of the same era yes. But the GPU alone of "PCs of the same era" would set you back as much as a 6th gen console, and you'd have a shiny graphics adapter sitting in a box.
The 7th gen is where consoles started really falling behind (though somewhat ironically also where MS decided to go with somewhat more bespoke hardware than the "PC in a box" Xbox).
Did you just call wobbly fixed point vertex no subpixel precision no transparency no perspective correction mess full of gaps on PS1 a nicest graphics of their generations?
For what it’s worth, I do really enjoy the aesthetic of that sort of work in the same way that I enjoy a nice piece of pixel art with a limited colour palette.
PS1 didn't hold back PC or other consoles so I bear it no ill will.
PS2 dominated sixth gen sales. By being the winning console but releasing 18 months earlier it held back everyone. And since, like you said, Moore's law was very much alive this represented a significant reduction in overall quality for an entire generation. :(
PS3 at it's peak was great. But it took waaaay too much effort to get there making it a very poor value proposition for developers. And 7th gen was a fully multi-platform era so the end result is the average game was held back and only first party prestige titles could justify the extra cost.
It’s a financial decision. Building a competitive console game wasn’t cheap by that generation, and passion only goes so far. Publishers ultimately want to recoup their investment, which means developers targeting the common subset of functionality and using middleware wherever possible to support multiple platforms. Unless Sony was your publisher, it wouldn’t have made economic sense to deeply optimize for Cell. PS4 and Xbox One being so similar to each other is good for developers, which is good for games, which is good for gamers, even if it does mean fewer esoteric toys for passionate engineers to play with.
This reminds me so much of the discussions around the Amiga back in the 80s.
Powerful custom hardware can be great for the developers that invest in it, until it isn't anymore and now you've got a bunch of sunk R&D. And then there's the need to ship on more than one platform...
No, its' tragic that blaming developers is even considered an option. Developers are human and can be expected to behave as such. The value of developer time is well known, and if anything developers undervalue their own time, and are far too willing to waste their time microoptimising for a gratuitously difficult CPU design rather than getting on with more valuable work.
You kinda have to work with the people existing, while there were other CPUs available at the time.
And even if everyone were a super smart 10x-developer like you surely are, their time would still be better spent on a platform that is more productive. The idea that some technology is difficult but rewards proficiency with incredible productivity is almost entirely wrong, which is why nobody does web development in Assembly. LaTeX vs Word would be the only example I would have agreed with in the past, but if you search you'll find a study showing even the most proficient practitioners are slower and make more typesetting mistakes using the former.
It is completely fine for you to say that opinion is unjustified.
But they still weren't calling themselves some kind of better-than-everyone dev.
Though if you're using "developers" to mean that entire section of the company, including management, then what was on their plate and the constraints are almost all self-inflicted.
Yes. The blame correctly lies on the processor architecture.
Assume you have a developer who is one of the best in the world at writing hyper-optimized SPU code. Imagine this dev WANTS to write micro-optimized assembly. (And there are many such devs). This developer's time would far more efficiently spent if they were writing "normal" code for a "normal" processor.
So yeah. The criticism belongs squarely on the processor. :)
The PS2 for sure was less powerful than the more conventional architectures of the GameCube and Xbox, but it was released 18 months before either of them in a time when Moore's law was still extremely relevant. Yet it could still hold its own against the competition. All pieces of impressive hardware.