Yep but it doesn't make the hardware weaker for games or emulation because it isn't used anyway. By the way I'm not sure what sort of AA the Flipper can handle. If it's only supersampling with an ordererd grid the GS should be able to do the same (as does any graphics chip that can render sufficient resolutions).
In the specs it is listed as FSAA (Full Scene Anti-aliasing). Sure, PS2 can do similar (supersampling), but since it would have to be in software (no dedicated hardware acceleration for it), so it comes at a much larger performance penalty. Same reason 3DMark's 2D tests are dog slow (not run in hardware).
The GC has one main processor (Gekko). The PS2 has in addition its two MIPS cores one FPU and two VUs (all together called Emotion Engine). Both have a SPU and a graphics chip (of course). You can't deny that the PS2 is a multiprocessor architecture while the GC is not.
This is also the reason why the PS2 is said to be hard to program and why it took a long time until we saw the potential of the hardware in games (and some devs still say it's not actually fully exploited yet).
Gekko also has an integrated FPU (and ALU), as do almost all modern processors. It just mainly lacks the vector units of the EE.
If you were to say multi-CPU/multi-core on the same die or similar, I would definitely agree with you, but 'multi-processor' merely implies more than one processor for a certain task, which the GC has.
The PS2 is hard to develop for mainly because of the poor design. The vector units are hard to exploit, but are often used as a crutch for graphics processing. Does not necessarily mean the units themselves are inherently harder to emulate from a reverse engineering perspective.
edit: Just to make it clear: I'm not saying the PS2 is more powerful than the GC (in practice it's usually the other way round), but it may be harder to emulate nevertheless.
You also have to account for the fact that the PS2 has already been emulated at fullspeed in many 3D games, while with GC, 3D games are generally about 10 fps with the latest unreleased Dolphin (which has 64-bit and dual-core optimisations), in about the same time frame (Teaser was released in 2004 and was in development for longer, 1st release of PCSX2 was around 2003). PCSX2 has been running full 3D games fast for well over a year. More projects have been started with the GC than PS2 as well.
If one were to say that the PS2 is harder to emulate, it contradicts what has actually happened so far. You may be right, but it is difficult to believe.
Last edited: