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Daxter PSP impressions

Doom_Bringer said:
What's the word on ND's PS3 game? Will they make a new series or will they countinue with the Jak series?
Click to expand...

New series. Like PSX gen, Insomniac and ND will 'drop' their mascot games (Spyro, Crash... then Ratchet, Jak). I like this, it helps keep the catalog fresh every gen. Of course, the new variable in this equation is PSP... so this Daxter side game is interesting. Maybe they'll actually continue to keep the franchises alive on this platform like we see here.
 
Daxter is primarily being developed by Ready at Dawn, although Naughty Dog is providing some assistance. Ready at Dawn is a new company, comprised of former members of Naughty Dog and Blizzard.

It's possible that the PSP could be the destination for new entries in some of the established PS2 franchises originally created by Naughty Dog and Insomniac, while the developers prepare completely original games for PS3. As long as they keep them in the hands of trusted developers (such as Ready at Dawn with their connections to Naughty Dog), everything should be fine.
 
Agent X said:
Daxter is primarily being developed by Ready at Dawn, although Naughty Dog is providing some assistance. Ready at Dawn is a new company, comprised of former members of Naughty Dog and Blizzard.

It's possible that the PSP could be the destination for new entries in some of the established PS2 franchises originally created by Naughty Dog and Insomniac, while the developers prepare completely original games for PS3. As long as they keep them in the hands of trusted developers (such as Ready at Dawn with their connections to Naughty Dog), everything should be fine.
Click to expand...

I realize that, I was just talking in terms of brand continuity. Kinda like how Crash and Spyro lived on, but through the hands of shitty developers.

The actual companies who created them, they move on to better and brighter things for every new gen. Although I think they should keep it to "3" titles per gen (and the obligatory cart title), 'cause the whole 4 for Insomniac was pushing it.
 
The trailer on that site is really impressive.
The best graphics on the PSP so far easily (it really seems a PS2 game).
 
bridegur said:
That looks amazing, especially for the PSP. Is the PSP as powerful as the PS2?
Click to expand...

Nope on the paper it's half a PS2....and if clocked at the maximum possible frequency (333MHZ for CPU).The current games (also Daxter) are made at 220MHZ.
 
Static Daxter picture on that website is actually his cutscene model from the game. With fur and all. Yep, in this game Daxter has an actual fur like on that picture, and in that regard it looks better than the Daxter in PS2 J&D games. The game overall doesn't look as detailed as the PS2 J&D games, but then again not many games on PS2 look as detailed either.
 
Just saw the new trailer, OMG it looks awesome :D The frame rate has improved since the last time they showed it. Must buy for me.

I love this series soo much! I hope they continue it on PS3.
 
Elios83 said:
Nope on the paper it's half a PS2....and if clocked at the maximum possible frequency (333MHZ for CPU).The current games (also Daxter) are made at 220MHZ.
Click to expand...

Recent games would suggest it's far more than just half a ps2.
 
Elios83 said:
Nope on the paper it's half a PS2....and if clocked at the maximum possible frequency (333MHZ for CPU).The current games (also Daxter) are made at 220MHZ.
Click to expand...

It's far more than that. PSP's got hardwired support for a lot of stuff PS2 would have to do in software.
 
Izzy said:
It's far more than that. PSP's got hardwired support for a lot of stuff PS2 would have to do in software.
Click to expand...

As far as raw power is concerned the specs says it's half a PS2 and only at 333MHZ.
The rasterizer has a more advanced feature set than GS indeed but it's much less powerful.Anyway I think the PSP screen both for its small size and quality does a lot in improving the perceived level of graphics.
 
Izzy said:
It's far more than that. PSP's got hardwired support for a lot of stuff PS2 would have to do in software.
Click to expand...

Heh, that reminds me. Last summer I went to a seminar on pixelshading, well it was supposed to be about that. As it turned out half the seminar was spent by the guy holding it complaining about the lack of hardware clipping support.
 
Elios83 said:
As far as raw power is concerned the specs says it's half a PS2 and only at 333MHZ.
The rasterizer has a more advanced feature set than GS indeed but it's much less powerful.Anyway I think the PSP screen both for its small size and quality does a lot in improving the perceived level of graphics.
Click to expand...

Where does the spec say that? Link.

The only thing that's 1/2 of PS2 spec is T&L - but it's comparing apples and oranges. GC's spec was also at 1/2 (or even 1/3) of PS2 T&L spec - and yet it held its own very well.

Eric_S said:
Heh, that reminds me. Last summer I went to a seminar on pixelshading, well it was supposed to be about that. As it turned out half the seminar was spent by the guy holding it complaining about the lack of hardware clipping support.
Click to expand...

:lol
 
I don't think there is a convenient apples-to-apples comparison between the PS2 and PSP. As Izzy noted, there are differences in the ability for hardware to assist in certain operations. The amount of pixels required to fill the screen would be less for PSP compared to a TV, which is also important.

More to the point -- who cares? If the games look good and are fun, does it really matter?
 
Izzy said:
Where does the spec say that? Link.

The only thing that's 1/2 of PS2 spec is T&L - but it's comparing apples and oranges. GC's spec was also at 1/2 (or even 1/3) of PS2 T&L spec - and yet it held its own very well.



:lol
Click to expand...

I don't have a link right now but I have the specs well saved on my PC :D :)

PSP CPU Core:
- MIPS R4000 32-Bit Core
- 128 Bit Bus
- 1~333 MHz @ 1.2V
- 8 MB (eDRAM)
- Bus Bandwidth: 2,6 GB/sec
- I-Cache / D-Cache
- FPU, VFPU (Vector Unit): @ 2,6 GFlops
- 3D-CG Extended Instructions

PSP Media Engine:
- MIPS R4000 32-Bit Core
- 128 Bit Bus
- 1~333 MHz @ 1.2V
- Sub Memory: 2MB (eDRAM) @ 2,5 GB/sec
- I-Cache / D-Cache
- 90nm Cmos

PSP Graphics Core 1:
- 3D Curved Surface + 3D Polygon
- Compressed Texture
- Hardware Clipping, Morphing, Bone(Fighissimo!
- Hardware Tessellator
- Bezier, B-Spline(NURBS)
- reduce memory footprint & bus traffic

PSP Graphics Core 2:
- Rendering Engine + Surface Engine
- 256bit Bus, 1-166 MHz @1.2V
- VRAM :2MB (eDRAM)
- Bus Bandwidth: 5.3GB/sec
- Pixel Fill Rate :664 M pixels/sec
- max. 33 M Polygon/Sec (T&L)
- 24bit Full Color: RGBA




Ad you can read the PSP graphic chip has 664 Megapixel/s fill rate at 166MHZ,the maximum frequency,against the 1,2 Gigapixel/s fill rate of PS2 in single texturing.
It can rasterize 33 million polygons peak,the same figure for GS is 75 million.
The embedded ram has a really small bandwidth compared to the 48GB/s of the GS.
The CPU has 2.6 Gigaflops @ 333MHz against 6,2Gigaflops of the Emotion Engine.
So on the paper it's really not a PS2,more a Dreamcast 1.5.
Anyway a lot of really impressive games are coming so who cares :D
 
Elios83 said:
Ad you can read the PSP graphic chip has 664 Megapixel/s fill rate at 166MHZ,the maximum frequency,against the 1,2 Gigapixel/s fill rate of PS2 in single texturing.
It can rasterize 33 million polygons peak,the same figure for GS is 75 million.
The embedded ram has a really small bandwidth compared to the 48GB/s of the GS.
The CPU has 2.6 Gigaflops @ 333MHz against 6,2Gigaflops of the Emotion Engine.
So on the paper it's really not a PS2,more a Dreamcast 1.5.
Anyway a lot of really impressive games are coming so who cares :D
Click to expand...

But as Izzy said, PSP's got hardwired support for a lot of stuff PS2 would have to do in software. Developers have to waste a lot of that power on the PS2 to do basic functions that should have been in the ps2 graphics chip to begin with. The ps2 would absolutely choke if it had to do the mip mapping that is in GTA: LCS.
 
Yes those things surely help,but they're clearly not sufficient to cover such a wide gap in raw power,especially with the current frquency limitation.
And it's sufficient to look at the games.
Even a good PS2 first generation title like Devil May Cry is far ahead of any PSP game graphically.
Anyway by the time developers master the hardware and (maybe) the frequency limitation is gone,a lot of games that on the PSP screen look as good as PS2 games will arrive.
 
Elios83 said:
Yes those things surely help,but they're clearly not sufficient to cover such a wide gap in raw power,especially with the current frquency limitation.
And it's sufficient to look at the games.
Even a good PS2 first generation title like Devil May Cry is far ahead of any PSP game graphically.
Anyway by the time developers master the hardware and (maybe) the frequency limitation is gone,a lot of games that on the PSP screen look as good as PS2 games will arrive.
Click to expand...

I guess that's a matter of opinion I guess. I think Devil May Cry looks absolutely horrible now due to it's half frame buffer mode and terrible texture aliasing due to no mip mapping. Just going by GTA: LCS compared to the GTAs on PS2 (I think LCS looks better in a lot of ways), I think the more feature rich graphics chip plus having to render at a much lower resolution helps close the gap much closer to what you are suggesting. According to some people, LCS runs around 60fps with the frequency bumped up to full speed.
 
Elios83 said:
I don't have a link right now but I have the specs well saved on my PC :D :)

PSP CPU Core:
- MIPS R4000 32-Bit Core
- 128 Bit Bus
- 1~333 MHz @ 1.2V
- 8 MB (eDRAM)
- Bus Bandwidth: 2,6 GB/sec
- I-Cache / D-Cache
- FPU, VFPU (Vector Unit): @ 2,6 GFlops
- 3D-CG Extended Instructions

PSP Media Engine:
- MIPS R4000 32-Bit Core
- 128 Bit Bus
- 1~333 MHz @ 1.2V
- Sub Memory: 2MB (eDRAM) @ 2,5 GB/sec
- I-Cache / D-Cache
- 90nm Cmos

PSP Graphics Core 1:
- 3D Curved Surface + 3D Polygon
- Compressed Texture
- Hardware Clipping, Morphing, Bone(Fighissimo!
- Hardware Tessellator
- Bezier, B-Spline(NURBS)
- reduce memory footprint & bus traffic

PSP Graphics Core 2:
- Rendering Engine + Surface Engine
- 256bit Bus, 1-166 MHz @1.2V
- VRAM :2MB (eDRAM)
- Bus Bandwidth: 5.3GB/sec
- Pixel Fill Rate :664 M pixels/sec
- max. 33 M Polygon/Sec (T&L)
- 24bit Full Color: RGBA




Ad you can read the PSP graphic chip has 664 Megapixel/s fill rate at 166MHZ,the maximum frequency,against the 1,2 Gigapixel/s fill rate of PS2 in single texturing.
It can rasterize 33 million polygons peak,the same figure for GS is 75 million.
The embedded ram has a really small bandwidth compared to the 48GB/s of the GS.
The CPU has 2.6 Gigaflops @ 333MHz against 6,2Gigaflops of the Emotion Engine.
So on the paper it's really not a PS2,more a Dreamcast 1.5.
Anyway a lot of really impressive games are coming so who cares :D
Click to expand...

Funny Izzy mentioned GC specs cause the PSP ones look kind of like a handheld GC than PS2 looking at these numbers.
 
Eric_S said:
Heh, that reminds me. Last summer I went to a seminar on pixelshading, well it was supposed to be about that. As it turned out half the seminar was spent by the guy holding it complaining about the lack of hardware clipping support.
Click to expand...

Ok, so it is not what PSP has that is more elegant than PSTwo (and there is plenty ;)), but what PSTwo implements in a worse manner ?

Better ?
 
Elios83 said:
I don't have a link right now but I have the specs well saved on my PC :D :)

PSP CPU Core:
- MIPS R4000 32-Bit Core
- 128 Bit Bus
- 1~333 MHz @ 1.2V
- 8 MB (eDRAM)
- Bus Bandwidth: 2,6 GB/sec
- I-Cache / D-Cache
- FPU, VFPU (Vector Unit): @ 2,6 GFlops
- 3D-CG Extended Instructions

PSP Media Engine:
- MIPS R4000 32-Bit Core
- 128 Bit Bus
- 1~333 MHz @ 1.2V
- Sub Memory: 2MB (eDRAM) @ 2,5 GB/sec
- I-Cache / D-Cache
- 90nm Cmos

PSP Graphics Core 1:
- 3D Curved Surface + 3D Polygon
- Compressed Texture
- Hardware Clipping, Morphing, Bone(Fighissimo!
- Hardware Tessellator
- Bezier, B-Spline(NURBS)
- reduce memory footprint & bus traffic

PSP Graphics Core 2:
- Rendering Engine + Surface Engine
- 256bit Bus, 1-166 MHz @1.2V
- VRAM :2MB (eDRAM)
- Bus Bandwidth: 5.3GB/sec
- Pixel Fill Rate :664 M pixels/sec
- max. 33 M Polygon/Sec (T&L)
- 24bit Full Color: RGBA




Ad you can read the PSP graphic chip has 664 Megapixel/s fill rate at 166MHZ,the maximum frequency,against the 1,2 Gigapixel/s fill rate of PS2 in single texturing.
It can rasterize 33 million polygons peak,the same figure for GS is 75 million.
The embedded ram has a really small bandwidth compared to the 48GB/s of the GS.
The CPU has 2.6 Gigaflops @ 333MHz against 6,2Gigaflops of the Emotion Engine.
So on the paper it's really not a PS2,more a Dreamcast 1.5.
Anyway a lot of really impressive games are coming so who cares :D
Click to expand...


I cannot believe we are onto this again... look if I had $15 Million to spend on a PSP game (good budget for a PSTwo title) and I could get ND/Team Kojima/Insomniac/etc... to develop all the technology and art assets for it devolving to the project their top talent... you'll see things ina different light ;).

There are different areas where PSP has less brute-force to do things and implements more effects in a hardwired fashion and/or in an improoved/more elegant fashion (see VFPU, see PSP's GPU texture cache, see PSP having a full GPU this time: T&L on-board, automatic culling, more blending modes available, more hardwired texture compression formats, a NICE thing about main RAM & VRAM ;) that makes some things easier to do :))and in some cases yes it is slower (it has quite a lot les main RAM available to the application running to begin with).

Reading those specs though you also forgot, when looking at the fill-rate element, that the PSP is rendering each time less then half the number of pixels (640x448 vs 480x272), you also forgot that the PSP's GPU has an on-board T&L engine (while the EE does all the T&L itself) or that tri-linear filtering has quite a lower impact on PSP than PSTwo's GS if you count the target resolution difference and tis impact on "good" texture sizes ( PSTwo's best case was 4 tri-linearly filtered pixels which is the same PSP does... and PSP only has 4 pixel pipelines vs PSTwo's 16 pixel pipelines, GPU-wise).
 
Amir0x said:
The actual companies who created them, they move on to better and brighter things for every new gen. Although I think they should keep it to "3" titles per gen (and the obligatory cart title), 'cause the whole 4 for Insomniac was pushing it.
Click to expand...

Agreed that the trilogy is good balance for a series. Then again, have you played Ratchet 4? It's actually rather great, I liked it a lot more than 3 because it was hard again and had nice structure. Plus, it was really built as an online game first and foremost (though the single-player campaign is surprisingly huge), so that's sort of the equivalent of a Kart game.

Marconelly said:
Static Daxter picture on that website is actually his cutscene model from the game. With fur and all. Yep, in this game Daxter has an actual fur like on that picture, and in that regard it looks better than the Daxter in PS2 J&D games. The game overall doesn't look as detailed as the PS2 J&D games, but then again not many games on PS2 look as detailed either.
Click to expand...

The fur's for cutscenes, though -- there's no fur in gameplay, if I remember right.

As far as comparisons to the PS2 game, it's freaking amazing on PSP, looks and play. The demo I played showed its limits, but also played to the strength of what it could do. Expect the same seamless level structure of J&D - no "loading" even on PSP - but don't expect levels to be out in the open like Jak 1 or Jak 3, instead most stages are tunnelled with connected rooms and halls (albeit some very, very big rooms and very long halls), so I don't think you'll get that one big vista view you could with the ND engine (I wonder what might happen if the rumored Clank game comes to PSP, because R&C is even more amazing to me in its full load of the world?) but you will get the feeling that it's one full world.
 
Ratchet: Deadlocked worked because it really streamlined all of the series into the core elements.
UYA was basically just a beefed up GC with little new. Fun, but nothing surprising.
Clank would need a REAL game change for a whole title to work. The times where you control Clank are okay, but the giant robot bit gets boring and tedious, and commanding the robots was always way too easy.

And god damnit. How I miss Haven City.
 
Panajev2001a said:
I cannot believe we are onto this again... look if I had $15 Million to spend on a PSP game (good budget for a PSTwo title) and I could get ND/Team Kojima/Insomniac/etc... to develop all the technology and art assets for it devolving to the project their top talent... you'll see things ina different light ;).

There are different areas where PSP has less brute-force to do things and implements more effects in a hardwired fashion and/or in an improoved/more elegant fashion (see VFPU, see PSP's GPU texture cache, see PSP having a full GPU this time: T&L on-board, automatic culling, more blending modes available, more hardwired texture compression formats, a NICE thing about main RAM & VRAM ;) that makes some things easier to do :))and in some cases yes it is slower (it has quite a lot les main RAM available to the application running to begin with).

Reading those specs though you also forgot, when looking at the fill-rate element, that the PSP is rendering each time less then half the number of pixels (640x448 vs 480x272), you also forgot that the PSP's GPU has an on-board T&L engine (while the EE does all the T&L itself) or that tri-linear filtering has quite a lower impact on PSP than PSTwo's GS if you count the target resolution difference and tis impact on "good" texture sizes ( PSTwo's best case was 4 tri-linearly filtered pixels which is the same PSP does... and PSP only has 4 pixel pipelines vs PSTwo's 16 pixel pipelines, GPU-wise).
Click to expand...

Eh, unfortunately a lot of PSP GPU features are either half ass implemented or there are some draw backs that you are probably better of not using those features, so plenty of "nicer" things about PSP compared to PS2 are almost moot point. Bus bandwidth on PSP is also no where close to PS2 and there's a lot less parallelism on PSP. I think that's where PSP is losing to PS2 big time...
 
RuGalz said:
Eh, unfortunately a lot of PSP GPU features are either half ass implemented or there are some draw backs that you are probably better of not using those features, so plenty of "nicer" things about PSP compared to PS2 are almost moot point. Bus bandwidth on PSP is also no where close to PS2 and there's a lot less parallelism on PSP. I think that's where PSP is losing to PS2 big time...
Click to expand...

Yes, I have heard stories about things that "yeah, there... and oh no... why this way ?", (clipping is just the icing on the cake here ;)) but still there are enhancement to texture caching, on the memory architecture (which can simplify programming for the puppy), etc... still I think we can see some steps forward.

I agree with you on the less parallelism thing and the bus issues: if main RAM latency were lower and most of all if one of the redeeming features of the R5900i core (no, I am not talking about MMI, which is the other one) was not implemented in a way to make it quite unusable (which means more bus contention between devices: nominally PSP CPU bus is not that far from EE's main bus, but the situation would be much better if professional developers could use in games the 333/166/166 setting as 50 MHz of speed increase is not a trivial amount or the bus and for the GPU core).

Potentially though you do have plenty of parallelism: a separate custom R4000i with FPU, and always talking about programmable blocks a nice DSP such as the VME (I know that the VME arguments pisses PSP developers off, sorry to have brought this up hehe :D).
 
Wow at Gameplay Movie #1 and #5... I think it's far to say this looks better than most platformers on PS2. That was just very nice looking!

RuGalz said:
Eh, unfortunately a lot of PSP GPU features are either half ass implemented or there are some draw backs that you are probably better of not using those features, so plenty of "nicer" things about PSP compared to PS2 are almost moot point.
Click to expand...
Hey, there's actual mipmapping this time! Rejoyce, no more ridiculous texture shimmer that plagues so many PS2 games.
 
The new videos on GameSpot are great. The graphics are awesome!

GameSpot also has a picture of the box art.

927355_66184_front.jpg
 
I know I shouldn't get this considering I hate platformers, but damn those videos look great plus there is no lame ass Jax (I hope).
 
I dunno. The graphics look really good but they're.. I dunno, a little off.

And every video was boring. He barely fought anyone and basically just collected stuff. I hope the whole game isn't like that.

The Matrix level though = awesome.
 
Anyone receive the demo of this game and find the levels that were open to be derivative, boring pieces of crap?

I swear, this little furry dude can climb up walls, fly with his spray gun, and swat things, and the best they could do (in the demo levels, anyway) was come up with cookie cutter hallways and rooms loaded with the standard platform jumps and wack, wack, wack enemies? Usually a demo shows off a game's strengths. If this is the case with Daxter, they're putting together a graphical masterpiece that won't play worth a damn.

The damn level ends with a pattern matching task, that goes on too long, involving all four face buttons and all four directionals.

That Matrix level... wtf... it's a button press minigame too. Guards come out, an icon appears, and you have to hit the corresponding button when the guard walks over the icon. Effing lame. So effing unoriginal.

The graphics, framerate, etc., definitely floored me, but after playing the demo, my interest level in the game has dropped to nil.

I hope, hope, hope, the demo was just a matter of poor level selection by the people that put it together, and that the levels in the full game are interesting. Heck, I'd like to know if any of the other dream levels or vehicle stages are decent. But good lord, the demo left me with the terrible fear that Daxter is just going to end up a collection of rehashed concepts gussied up by hot visuals.
 
Somes awesome mosaic. Can't wait to get my hands on this.

CamHostage said:
Agreed that the trilogy is good balance for a series. Then again, have you played Ratchet 4? It's actually rather great, I liked it a lot more than 3 because it was hard again and had nice structure. Plus, it was really built as an online game first and foremost (though the single-player campaign is surprisingly huge), so that's sort of the equivalent of a Kart game.
Click to expand...

I played Ratchet 4 a little bit, but I haven't really got into it yet. Maybe soon. I just think when you get to a 4th game in a single gen you begin to make people tired of these worlds and characters, and you risk creating derivative titles/watering down the brand quality. That may not be the case for Deadlocked, but just in principle I'd rather them not risk it.
 
Demos should be in most stores now or soon. Some Sunday ads are advertising it free with any purchase of PSP game
 
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