Jak and Daxter's engine was freaking amazing on PS2.
The PS2 has a terrible CPU. Given the way the instruction cache works, you can hit a theoretical max icache hit rate of 7/8. Nothing hits that except synthetic demos that have no real application. Furthermore, you have a manually managed scratchpad memory (think manual L2 cache), and you have to be really clever to avoid stalling the CPU.
Your typical, hand-tuned C/C++ game on PS2 will be lucky to hit, perhaps, 50% cpu utilization. Jak and Daxter hits something in the upper 60% range, which is simply incredible. This means it's managing both its code and data exceedingly well. A naively written "simple" application, like the stuff you learn in software engineering class, will probably hit less than 20% CPU utilization, you have to work really hard for 50%.
I was once a game engine lead developer in the era of the Wii and PS2, and that game blew my socks off, since my incredibly "clever" code didn't even come close to their engine, I was proud to hit 50%.
The PS2 has a terrible CPU. Given the way the instruction cache works, you can hit a theoretical max icache hit rate of 7/8. Nothing hits that except synthetic demos that have no real application. Furthermore, you have a manually managed scratchpad memory (think manual L2 cache), and you have to be really clever to avoid stalling the CPU.
Your typical, hand-tuned C/C++ game on PS2 will be lucky to hit, perhaps, 50% cpu utilization. Jak and Daxter hits something in the upper 60% range, which is simply incredible. This means it's managing both its code and data exceedingly well. A naively written "simple" application, like the stuff you learn in software engineering class, will probably hit less than 20% CPU utilization, you have to work really hard for 50%.
I was once a game engine lead developer in the era of the Wii and PS2, and that game blew my socks off, since my incredibly "clever" code didn't even come close to their engine, I was proud to hit 50%.