Same can be said for the Dreamcast. With the number of polygons the PS2 can push, I would tend to think that the polygon count will make up for any shortfall in the texture department. What really struck me about RR5 were the trees. The trees in RR5 blow away the trees in the Dreamcast games. You may think this is nothing, but those are the types of things I focus on to assess the hardware.
Any platform can load up the primary objects with polygons.
It's the other stuff that people don't focus on, but that really show the power of the hardware. So the trees in RR5 show me that the PS2 has substantially more graphical oomph than the competition. Just drive up to one slowly and you see intricate detail and thousands of individual leaves. But what impressed me the most was the speed of the game. RR5 runs at a consistent 60 frames per second with no frame drops or slowdown.