Graphics: ‘Graphics Synthesiser’ at 150MHz
Capable of displaying 75 million polygons per second, PS2 has a ‘fill rate’ of 2.4 billion pixels. The poor, aging PlayStation, in contrast, has a fill rate of around 66 million. Photo-realism is a genuine, mouth-watering prospect…

Sound
We’ll cover this in more detail next issue, but it’s confirmed that PlayStation 2 will fully support 3D sound. The huge leaps in sound technology currently being made on PC are finally coming to a home console…

Storage medium: DVD-ROM (speed to be confirmed)
The PlayStation 2 will possess a DVD-ROM drive, and it will be used not just to load code and spool music, but to also ‘stream’ ample texture information during play. It’s curious to note, though, that Sony are rather sketchy on the subject of whether it will actually play DVD movies. Many pundits have speculated that such a capability will be introduced in the form of an add-on device…

Is it significantly better than the PlayStation?

The leap from 16bit to 32bit machines marked a massive leap in the technical prowess of gaming hardware. Gameplay often laboured behind improved sound and visuals on most developers’ itineraries, but the gulf in pixel-pushing capabilities was pronounced. For example, Super Mario World and Mario 64, despite their individual play-based merits, are patently children of different hardware eras.

PlayStation 2 is, without question, a generational leap of similar, if not larger magnitude. Indeed, a number of its hardware features are genuinely the sole preserve of high-end workstations – the kind of machine the home user could never dream to afford. Its innovative set-up – including the oddly titled but technically outstanding 128bit Emotion Engine CPU – will include support for a variety of realistic features.

Realtime calculation of wind, and the effect it has on game details like hair and clothing, will be a relatively simple task. Similarly, lighting and physics that take surface characteristics into account – think of the different qualities of wood or loose dirt as a basic guide – will be staples of PS2 software.