Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2, Gran Turismo, and GTA.
I'm guessing you mean GTA 3, but then we also had GTA Vice City... and GTA San Andreas. Which are all three in the top 5 selling games for the PS2.
That being said I recently got the Analog 3d with 4 controllers and theres something amazing about the speed at which u can boot and get into a 4 player game.
Six hardware threads, so the thread per subsystem model didn't really work. Instead you got the best results from a DAG of tasks submitted to a job stealing scheduler running on most of the CPU resources. But beside that, no little DSPs that you had to separate work out onto other than the GPU.
And it had the first consumer GPU to incorporate unified shaders (so vertex and pixel shaders ran on the same cores, dynamically scheduled to improve utilization).
They had SMT, but unlike every other implementation of SMT I’m aware of, memory stalls on one thread would stall both threads… which kind of defeats the primary purpose of SMT.
At least with the PS3’s Cell, the SPUs were designed to be esoteric on purpose. It seems like Xenon kind of just ended up being esoteric by accident. (Or maybe they ended up like that because Microsoft were cheating off Sony’s homework)
You've got the option of OG authenticity with CRT emulation (although I use a shader emulating a high-end analog RGB CRT so the effect is more subtle) or you can 'upgrade' games to looking and feeling quite modern yet without the modern cruft. Also want to give a nod to PS3 / X360 emulation as both have come a long way in the last ~18 months and I'm really enjoying working my way through a backlog of titles I never played back in the day.
Mind you, I broke my video game addiction shortly after that time-period - my last console was an Xbox 360 - and haven't got a firm grasp on what's come since.