I recently picked up a used PS2 and was blown away at how well it actually looked from what I actually remembered. In my opinion it is one of the most impressive graphical jumps from its previous console ever.

the ps2 aesthetic is so underrated. definitely my favorite style

Fun fact: Wallace and gromit was the first game to feature fingers on characters

I think we can all agree that MGS3, even on PS2 graphics, looked fucking amazing.

Thank you! After I saw your PS1 graphic videos, I went around trying to find stuff on PS2 graphics / early PC game, but had no idea how to define them for the search engine. Amazing if you made another video like this but talking about those early PC games and how some of them were somewhat similar to some of the early consoles and how they were different. 🙏

God of war 2 has the best graphics on that generation. Forgot to mention that when GoW2 launched on Ps2, the Ps3 was already out for 6 months at that time but they still launched the sequel on Ps2 so that the people who played the first one could play the sequel as well and because of this, the ps2 was pushed to its limit in the colossus and zeus boss battle.

Also some ps2 games, like Kingdom Hearts, would have two different character models. One would be smoother and more detailed, and used for more detailed cutscenes, while there would also be simpler models for gameplay and less important cutscenes that would have swappable textures on the faces to allow for easily animated lip flaps

Honestly I think Shadow of the Colossus had too much bloom, but other than that it was beautiful

hmm. as a 3D artist myself i can tell you making ps2 graphics has a lot more to it then you think. on the surface you may not notice much but thats becasue of how good the games of that era hide their graphics . i would write it all down but honestly its better to just try it yourself. there is alot to check out and my writing skills wont do it justice. for example in the ps2 age shading techniques were very basic so things like reflective surfaces could not use fransel and there was no PBR techniques or screen space effects. reflective surfaces were either made with what is known as "double geometry" or pre rendered cubemaps. some games combined both techniques to create realistic reflections too with real time environment mapping. other games used screen shots of the screen itself as the reflection texture which is how GTA vice city stories had reflective cars on ps2 hardware. what is intresting here is that reflections were the same intensity from all camera angles becasue fransel was not a thing yet and were not specifically a "reflection" effect but rather a diffues color that was added on top of the existing textures as an extra and trasparent layer . other things you may notice are the very very extensive use of particle effects ! PS2 had an amazing particle renderer that could handle millions of triangles so many ps2 games had unusual effects with it. for example all the lens flares in GTA vice city and need for speed UG2 or alot of other games were actually particle effects and sprites. you can actually check for yourself by moving the camera super fast and check how the lens flares try to keep up and glitch out due to the fact that they are made of 3D sprites in the scene that have to try and keep up with the camera. i think one of the crash bandicot games also used particles to create a vollumetric effect for god rays coming out of windows in one of its levels . also a well known fact is that ps2 used SRGB color space instead of the current gen ACES colors which ment that many HDR effects like we see today had to be faked with sprites or bloom. which is something to keep in mind as all modern game engines use filmic and other photoreal dynamic range options. in general color and contrast has less depth and punch to it due to this limitation and how brightness caps out at values between to hard coded values which ment that developers had very little space to have realistic lighting and had to use artistic or creative techniqes to get the visuals they needed rather then simply using the real world llighting values other thing to note is that pretty much the majority of games that were made for the ps2 were using the RenderWare engine which is pretty much a good reason why ps2 games had such a disticnt look to them . you can actually still download renderware for your PC and use it to make new games with ps2 style. it will even export to ps2 if you know how to get it working

I’ve been trying to look into ps2 graphics but people don’t seem to really make videos about them. Thanks for this !

2:35 - 3:34 Now THAT'S why I couldn't find much tutorials on making 6th gen graphics. The technological advancements made it very easy to experiment with different art styles. And honestly I appreciate the 6th generation for that. I also like ps2 graphics a lot more than ps1 graphics as well for this reason, and also because they simply look better, breath more life into character designs and are easier to make and experiment with.

I want to really learn to make games with the aesthethics of Resident Evil and Silent Hill of the PS2 era. There is something about how those game looked that I loooove.

Silent hill 3 is still one of the best looking games of all time. There are still games that don't look nearly as good in motion as SH3 does. It's amazing how much animation quality and lighting determine "graphic quality"

Thanks for this, really enjoyed the insight. There's an artistic project I'd love to do where you essentially make a PS2/XBOX era licensed tie-in video game...for a movie that doesn't exist. So you as a player have to decipher the plot of what this thing was supposed to be solely from this piece of ancillary material, and there'd be all these things that show up as padding that you as a player have to assume are presumably from additional ancillary media (i.e., cartoons, toylines, comic books, etc )...that, again, do not really exist. And to top it off, you'd get actors who were actually famous around 2002-2005 (i.e., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seth Green) to give intentionally flat, phoned-in performances. And there's all these digitally compressed extras like a music video and artwork. All of the game would be an effort to capture the quintessential vibe of one of those "rushed-to-meet-a-release-date" movie tie-in games, since that's an aesthetic I feel has been unexplored but was a huge part of my generation's childhood, and has now been sort of lost as the landscape of film and video games have both shifted drastically.

This really needs a follow up. I think modeling/going through the process of some of the darker themed heavy texture based games would go a long way. Shadow of Colossus, Metal Gear(s), Onimusha, DMC, FF-X, Resident Evil, etc. etc. You're absolutely right. There is a huge hole in Blender tutorials for this era of gaming and that would be the best place to start, IMO.

I've been looking for info on the ps2 era, this came in handy! Thanks! People are sleeping on the ps2 era, thinking it's forgettable and not as visually impressive as the psx era but they forgot games like FFXII, Okami, God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, Onimusha 3 (etc) were made in that period of time.

I never understood the ps1 nostalgia cuz i wasnt a ps1 kid but now i know that feeling but with the ps2 style

Ps2 Era of games are some of the most beautiful games to look at

Regarding the lighting, I recall Silent Hill 2 having an interesting situation. The original release used Gouraud (aka per vertex) lighting. However, when the game was ported to Xbox and PC, they were able to implement Phong (per pixel) lighting. The PS2 Greatest Hits release of the game (the one with the Maria side-campaign) was able to backport this lighting method for that release of the game. This was especially noticeable with the flashlight.

The PS2 has 32 MiB of main RDRAM for the Emotion Engine (the brains). PS2 has 4 MiB of eDRAM for the Graphics Synthesizer, the graphics processor chip. There is 1.6 GB/sec of bandwidth between the EE and the GS, which allows for texture streaming between the 32 MiB RDRAM pool and the 4 MiB eDRAM pool. The maximum pixel fillrate is theoretically over 1 gigapixel per second and the maximum texel fillrate is over 1 gigatexel per second, although assuming a native resolution of 640x480 at 60 FPS, the final rendered pixel fillrate will be about 12 million pixels per second fully rendered; and, assuming 3 megapixels of uncompressed 32-bit RGBA textures, updated at 60 FPS, the texel fillrate for a fully rendered output will be about 90 megatexels per second. If we assume a baseline of 12 MiB of texture data (this is enough to store 12 uncompressed, 32-bit RGBA, 512*512 resolution textures), and a framerate target of 60 FPS, this would take at least 720 MiB/sec of the 1,600 MB of available GIF bus bandwidth between the EE & GS. Geometry data requires at least 40 bytes per triangle, and the PS2 has a maximum of 75 million triangular transforms per second for unrendered geometry, and 20 million per second for fully rendered geometry across the GS's 16 pixel processing pipelines. Assuming 300,000 triangles for a given scene, at least 12 MB of RAM is required for geometry data, which at a 60 FPS framerate target, translates to 720 MB/sec of memory bus bandwidth required, and a geometry transform fillrate of 18 million fully rendered, transformed, lit, shaded triangles per second; 90% of the theoretical maximum. 12 MiB of geometry data plus 12 MB of texture data, updated at 60 times per second, requires over 1,440 MB/sec out of the available 1,600 MB/sec GIF EE-to-GS bus bandwidth for geometry and texture data streaming, between the 32 MiB RDRAM and 4 MiB eDRAM pools. The eDRAM stores up to 4 MiB at any time, of that combined 24 MiB texture-geometry data, and the remaining 20 MiB is left in the 32 MiB of RDRAM, which has 12 MiB leftover to work on the main engine threads, including streaming data from the DVD or HDD or memory card storage, sound, phyics, AI, and feeding the rest of the system with data. The PS2 has about 6 MB/sec of DVD read bandwidth, and the storage disk is about ten times that at best. Memory card bandwidth is even higher.

This was amazing! thank you so much.

Personally I think PS1 and PS2 graphics have a lot more personality than the newer generations (or maybe are the games lol)

best garbaj i've had in weeks (fr tho your channel is great, keep it up homie)

THANK YOU!!! I've been looking for a video like this.

Great vid, very insightful and well ahead of the art style popularity curve. Given time, the community will name and use various PS2 art/graphic styles, and you will look very prophetic.

One old game on the GameCube that still looks fantastic is Luigi's Mansion. I always loved to use the first person view to admire the environments. The lighting still looks great, and the environments are detailed. I'm amazed that Nintendo could make something look so good with the hardware they were working with, and with the game being rushed all to hell like all Nintendo GameCube games. Honestly, I think it's one of those games that would look objectively worse without filtered textures. The other game I think just looks wrong without texture filtering is Half Life.

What a absolutely amazing time to be alive for gaming graphics. I often feel shitty about the world im currently in but I have to remember how phenomenal it is that I was alive along side some of the biggest jumps in technology that the world has seen since. Many alive today or even in the last 20 years can't completely appreciate that jump. I was there.

THANK YOU SO MUCH! Not kidding, I've been thinking about this for at least a month, and I've been learning code so I can make a PS2 style game, but I had no idea how to make PS2 graphics. The timing of this video coming out is flippin perfect. Thanks mate :]

Bro I just saw you on film theory so that is cool

I just finished MGS on a Playstation 1 emulator, first time I've played it, and here you are releasing video with MGS in it.

I would love for you to do a video discussing the graphical limitations of the PS1 and the PS2 in terms of maximum polygons at once maximum objects highest texture possible and then go over you know the most common uses to get a better idea of how to go about creating graphics that resemble each respective console

THANK YOU I've been looking for a video to explain just this

About time you made this video

FINALLY!!!! someone finally did a video on this!!!! thx man

I came here because as much as I'm tired of the industry pushing graphics far beyond what a top-end rig can do nowadays, I want to make a game that takes a lot of inspiration from Kingdom Hearts, not just for its gameplay, but also its graphics. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is one of the best example of that, by staying as close as possible to the original material (DreamCast) and that game runs smooth AF!

MGS2 and SH3 still look amazing. SH3 was able to use the ps2 gpu’s stellar fill rate and imbedded texture memory to great effect.

on a specific deep dive on silent hill two/ pathologic sort of things, so this is perfect, thank you!

ty for this bc ive been trying so hard to hit the ps2/gamecube era with my game

You should do a video on how to do the old type of motion blur that older games did especially in the n64 and ps2 eras. Or other types of basic post processing from around that era, adding little touches like that can definitely add more authenticity

There has been this thing that bugs me how the jump form ps 1 to 2 feels like a huge leap but as we progress ps 3 to 4 to 5 it all feels like it is on paper but practically feels the same. People as been talking about future being this and that in next 20 years but the truth is imo that no we probably won't reach the technological singularity and it will get harder and harder to further process the tech itself.

So much information and nostalgia

I think were gonna work up all the way back to ps5 with garbaj

PS2 is my nostalgia era. That's what I try and fiddle with in blender

ty a lot, everyone talks about ps1 graphics, I was looking for a video just like this

We got to keep this series going, eventually we'll learn how to make ps5 graphics.

Hell yeah man! 00:09 Also don't you dare ignore me I was one of the few "elites" that was interested in PS2 graphics 😤

The jump from the fifth generation to the sixth generation was almost as big the jump from the fourth to the fifth. I'm a Dreamcast fan, and despite it being the weakest console of the sixth generation, still looks great today. The colors are vivid and clear, the lighting is dynamic, and the VGA output looks quite good, even on large screens. It is a lot like the PS2 in that it had a huge variety of artistic styles. From Sonic, to Shenmue, to Jet Set Radio, to Soulcalibur, and so on.

I remember when this video was titled [We Need To Talk About "PS2" Graphics....and PS1 Graphics Too]. I kinda liked that title better? Seems more accurate to the content as well. But I know the algorithm stuff is weird, you do what you gotta do.

I'd love a video about ps3 and xbox 360 graphics. Thats an entire era of its own that no one ever talks about.

I Like How this Man has a Huge Dev Knowledge ! He's a Man of Science !

I was playing Gamecube Zelda Twilight Princess not that long ago and it's crazy how much better the Gamecube can be vs the PS2 by the lighting alone.

the fact that the ps2 era was a transitional period between two console generations with more defined aesthetics, the ps1 (known for a more explicitly low-poly aesthetic) and the ps3 (known for a more muted/desaturated look with glossy & light bloom-heavy finish; see ThorHighHeels' video on "Mysterious PS3 Games"), makes the discussion on a "PS2 aesthetic" more frustrating in comparison. additionally, I wonder how the discussion for a PS4 and PS5 aesthetic in the future would be as well

PS2 era feels like a golden age. Because there wasn't so much put into physically based rendering, everything had to be so artist driven and on top of that it's just so performant. (of course most of PS3 gen didn't have physically based rendering either) I don't think games these days have to be so pressured to use so much physical rendering. Specifically, Switch games too often look worse than PS2 graphics because their target is on Vfx that are just too heavy for the machine to make good use of. (Deadly Premonition, No More Heroes 3, and Beyonetta 3, all suffered some flat/dull/janky looking worlds mixed with rough performance)

jagged wobbly pixelated is the most iconic parts for ps1

While I like old school, low poly, pixelated games, I'll never understand why someone would want to reimplement wobbly affine texture mapping. To me, that never looked good, even back then.

another thing with PS2 visuals is just changing the display type; component fixes a lot of the issues with graphics relative to the display. This is an explicit thing due to everyone using the basic AV composite cables that came with the PS2 which hold most of the display issues. You can find videos of this stuff with 'component v composite PS2' here on youtube

1:53 Is this the technique used for the default Minecraft lighting? I feel like your description fits what I see in game

This video is excellent!

One of the things I don't understand and don't even know how to really put to words is that even thought the Dreamcast and PS2 don't really have one obvious dominating style, the visual difference looking at the two is pretty consistent. Like, somehow PS2 games tend to have more detailed textures, better dynamic lighting effects like glares and glows, but overall darker and less saturated colors. Dreamcast games tend to have more vibrant colors in a way that works fantastically with cartoonier games. And while I'm not _sure_ of it, it seems like Dreamcast games tend to have a softer feel.

Very good video, would you do similar videos for other 3d platforms? Saturn, Dreamcast, 360 etc

One thing a lot of ps2 games used was some kind of big smear effect that I recognize immediately upon seeing it. I think of it as the "you just beat a boss in Kingdom Hearts 1" effect, but it's used in a bunch of other places, in that game and in others. Did the ps2 have premade effects like that built in? Or did a bunch of games all coincidentally use a similar looking effect?

I would like to learn more about old-school mapping tools, like imo the best Radiant style BSP editors

finally something for ps2

Maybe you could do a video on ps3 & xbox 360 graphics? Idk I would love to see a video talking about the muddy color tones, mid poly character models ect

low poly and pixel games test creators to push the boundaries of creativity and craft in this style, the best thing about it is it has low budget for talented indie devs, and it just take very low processing power for budget gamers, i can play a great full fledge creative original 2d or 3d game made in low poly or pixel with my weak pc and probably in my mobile device, this trends needs to be keep popularizing more and more

You are in the new Film Theorists video :p

This video needs shots from Rygar to remind people of how great the PS2 looked.

I love your videos

In general, I just don't like how the average game looked after the PS2/GCN/Xbox era. IMO, that was the last era where games could hit that butter zone of being able to look good without having a ginormous budget to hire huge teams of artists. A single material was just a single texture, making it quicker to apply them and there were no surprises to the artist about how it would look when lighting is applied. If you are creating a texture, you can tell if it looks right just by looking at it. But once they started adding normal maps and specular highlights you had to really understand how these different things would come together, and with modern PBR models that fact has increased tenfold. Sure, the best and most talented creators can make masterpieces, but the average and common teams have to spend way longer just to hit par. I'd love to see more titles aim to replicate that style of graphics, but I get why it's such a hard sell. You need a very discerning eye to identify the visual effects that separated that generation from the next, so if you made such a game many people would think it just has bad graphics instead of being a stylistic choice.

Garbaj, I love your content, but you should start naming your videos with the actual contents they have :-/

Your videos are great, but can you not use such clickbait-y titles? How do I find your videos in the future if they're all named something vague like "why do all game devs do this?" "I can't believe this" "I can't unsee this". Thanks

You could maybe so a video on how retro games don't look as good on modern monitors compared to old CRT TVs.

Never thought I’d see Kenshi here lol.

i love modern adaptation of low poly graphics of ps1 n64, but we need more mid poly graphics style of ps2 gamecube wii also, and their are so much variety in it low mid, mid, high mid

I kind of thought this would be a tutorial, but this is cool too.

Ruruoni Kenshin... one of the Best Sagas 👍🏻

man Crash bandicoot and Rayman 3 give me the chills

Tomb raider o my what a game played that for hours as a kid on the ps1

I think the thing that lets ps2 and even ps3 graphics down nowadays is playing them back on HD monitors make them look worse because they weren't designed for them, with good upscaling they really do still hold up a lot of the time

Fixed camera angle PS2 games hold up insanely well when upscaled today. Haunting Ground's character models are shockingly good looking even today.

Will you make a video about PS3 graphics? Even though they aren't as recognizable, it would still be a cool video.

lol unexpected rurouni kenshin

PS2 games still look nice and the good looking games (the ones that have aged well) have this distinct charm.

Warriors on ps2 was an amazing game

The samus in the thumbnail is so cursed

One important missed point: field rendering (the jaggies).

you should make a full tutorial on a simple ps1 style FPS and how to apply the wobbly shaders in Godot sometime!

i like this title

Dude I've waited for a video on this topic for SO LONG. Too bad that as I suspected, it's just that the PS2 did not have any consistent style except for what you mentioned + polygon limitations

My main takeaway here: Holy crap, there's a Kenshin videogame?!

I'd really like to someday replicate the look of Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2005)'s models, terrain and lighting in my own game.

Wait ps2 had perspective correct textures? I’ve gone back to playing my ps2 and notice textures wiggling on surfaces? Specifically been playing black and textures on walls wiggle with camera movements

Great little bit of info. #lowpolydepression

> doesn't explain > leaves

I see a term being thrown around a lot in the PS1Graphics subreddit "ps1.5" which I imagine is supposed to be like this is better than what you'd see on the ps1, but not as good as what you'd see on the ps2, and a lot of those models still look really interesting. I'd really enjoy it if people started making models that would almost bridge the gap between the N64, and Gamecube

Low-Poly PS1 models could be sure that sometimes it's worth the improvement.

Finally

Could You Please make a Red Dot Sight tutorial in Godot I’m struggling

Dimitrescu from Resident Evil Village? I have a question: Why did Consoles since the 8-Bit era up to the early 3D Consoles (PS1, Saturn & N64 only displayed in 240p instead of 480i? And why didn't ALL games from the 2nd Generation 3D era made good use of 16:9 Widescreen TVs?

Nice