Excerpt of the Week- Gamecube Vs PS2 IGN.com

Whereas PlayStation 2's CPU and two Vector Units split up the tasks of various graphic procedures, like transformation and lighting, for example, all of this is handled singularly by Gamecube's Flipper chip, which also decompresses textures at a 6:1 ratio. PS2 has no hardware texture compression and seeing as how it only features 4MBs of Embedded DRAM on its graphic synthesizer, developers would need to compress textures in software, which in turn means a significant hit on the Emotion Engine CPU.

Michael Lamb, CEO of Left Field Productions, offers: "One of the bottle necks the PS2 developers I talk to seems to be the limited size of video memory. This will be less of a problem on the Nintendo Gamecube because of the speed of the memory and S3 compression resulting in smaller textures."

Furthermore, Gamecube renders up to eight effects layers to a polygon in a single pass, whereas the PS2 features a multi-pass rendering system. So, for example, Gamecube developers can effectively start with the base geometry (1), add a bump-map to it (3), add a dirt map (4), add a gloss map (5), add a reflection map (6), add a radiosity light map (7) and an effects layer of their choice (8) -- all in a single pass. By contrast, PS2 developers would have to re-render the polygon itself for every pass meaning eight times the work to get the same effect. So essentially PS2 has to render 1,000 polygons eight times over whereas Gamecube only has to render 1,000 polygons once for the same effect.