Volition "explains"
Posted by @ 2:20 PM, EDT
Some interesting questions about the PS2's capabilities has been posted in Volition’s forum (the developers of the PS2 RPG Summoner)
Here’s some stuff from the threads: BLOCKQUOTE style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">Question: What I like to know is, is storing texture in system RAM possible on PS2? It's quite easily done on the PC using AGP except that it's so slow that it's not pratical at all(according to my test results, anyway).
However, with the huge bandwidth of the PS2, will there be any problem with this? I think this will be good especially for storing sprites for 2D games at least.
Can the gurus at volition enlighten me??

Answer: The PSX2's architecture doesn't work like that. However, the massive bus speed is more than enough to overcome the relatively small amount of vram. In other words, transferring textures to VRAM with a decent caching scheme works extremely well.

General texture cache schemes are a pretty well-solved problem. Pretty much any modern 3d game in the last several years has its own twist on it.
Why people are complaining about small vram? Well, my guess would be that you've got this massively powerful graphics synthesizer and all kinds of cool doodads, but you're saddled with a vram size that's more like a 2nd generation PC card. It would be nice to not have to deal with texture caching

Still, there's a lot of the "Sony philosophy" behind the PSX2 architecture which isn't really apparent until you've really pounded on the thing for awhile and started to understand.Two interesting threads:
Thread 1
Thread 2