I was working on a version of Tetris (Tetris Worlds) for the Game Boy Advance, and the team that was doing the PS2 version was having problems with performance. For Tetris.
A lot of the PS2's speed came from vector processing; not sure how great the tools were for taking advantage of vector math. Didn't code on one myself. Also possible they were just using too many polygons; it's easy to kill your performance when you push your polygon numbers too high, or if you have too much overdraw and you blow past the pixel fill rate. (The design of the game had various animations happening in the background, which no player could ever see because of course you're paying attention to the Tetris board in the middle...not my idea; I just implemented what they asked for.)
I didn't have performance problems on the Game Boy Advance because even though my CPU was slower, I was in 2d-land. It was funny to me that they eschewed the C++ engine and rewrote their in C because "performance!", while they ended up with performance problems and I didn't, but what can you do...
A lot of the PS2's speed came from vector processing; not sure how great the tools were for taking advantage of vector math. Didn't code on one myself. Also possible they were just using too many polygons; it's easy to kill your performance when you push your polygon numbers too high, or if you have too much overdraw and you blow past the pixel fill rate. (The design of the game had various animations happening in the background, which no player could ever see because of course you're paying attention to the Tetris board in the middle...not my idea; I just implemented what they asked for.)
I didn't have performance problems on the Game Boy Advance because even though my CPU was slower, I was in 2d-land. It was funny to me that they eschewed the C++ engine and rewrote their in C because "performance!", while they ended up with performance problems and I didn't, but what can you do...