It had more powerful hardware, but the decision to use smaller discs unfortunately still held it back in asset quality. Textures and audio had to be more compressed in order to fit into the 1.5GB discs as opposed to the PS2’s 4.7GB. The Tony Hawk games for example looked and sounded worse on the GameCube, but they also ran better on it.
The Game Cube was limited compared to the rest of the generation as well, but I think it was due to the smaller storage space on the dumb tiny discs.
GameCube could render more polys than PS2 though. RE4 Leon model was 2x as many polys on GameCube than PS2.
It had more powerful hardware, but the decision to use smaller discs unfortunately still held it back in asset quality. Textures and audio had to be more compressed in order to fit into the 1.5GB discs as opposed to the PS2’s 4.7GB. The Tony Hawk games for example looked and sounded worse on the GameCube, but they also ran better on it.
It’s even worse, PS2 supported dual layer with up to 8.5GB.