> It looks like one of the ports to Dreamcast from the PS1. When the developers
> built from the ground up on Dreamcast, they usually had very good results.
> Remember, Dreamcast still has higher res textures than PS2. Oh, and hardware
> anti-aliasing.

It doesn't have hardware anti-aliasing. This is a common misconception because the PS2 was very flickery in the beginning, and people thought this was because of jaggies. Actually it had more to do with the way the framebuffer was drawn onto the screen, as the PS2 actually renders two alternate images to make the full 640x480 picture and flips each to the screen in stages. It leaves a lot to be desired in terms of quality but it saves on memory.

Idiot articles like this one say the opposite.

You can clearly see that in Ridge Racer you're only seeing half the scanlines, so of course it looks like shit. But that's the way the game drew the graphics onto the screen.

Also, the crawly ass graphics are caused by a lack of mip mapping (presumably to save memory) and also because of the inaccuracy of rendering half the picture at a time.

Nobody knew how to use the PS2 efficiently back then. Konami showed everyone with MGS2. Everyone smartened up since then.

Dreamcast has texture compression, but PS2 can do it on the fly with VU0/1. But it's more suited to drawing more polygons and doing special effects on the screen rather than concentrating on textures, you have to play on its strengths.

MGS2 didn't have the greatest textures but it had special effects up the yin-yan, and even the X-Box had trouble keeping up in the storm scenes. It might have been able to do it as efficiently as the PS2, but you can see that the PS2 is certainly powerful enough to measure up to the X-Box in certain ways.