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Asher
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Calgary, Alberta
Nov 1999
time: 22:17
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More info on the Xbox 360 from this month's Official Xbox Magazine:
- The 20GB HD will be standard, and drives with up to 160GB will be available
- The camera peripheral captures 30fps @ 640x480, and 8fps @ 1280x1024
- You will be able to have your own online shop selling addons for games. They had the example of shirts for Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
- In some games you will be able to design the game extensions on the PC using tools found on the DVD, then stream over network to X360. Also had the example of using Adobe Illustrator to make game logos for Tony Hawk Pro Skater shirts.
- Ninja Gaiden 2 confirmed as Xbox 360 title
- Soul Calibur III confirmed as Xbox 360 title
- Will support VGA connections
- Every single game will support custom soundtracks
- Will launch in US, EUROPE AND JAPAN before Christmas 2005. Europe and US will be a week or 10 days apart, Japan closer to Christmas.
- Will be no hardware variations on launch (single model only)
- Can use the camera peripheral (optional) to use your photo in your Gamercard on Xbox Live, and for video chat
- Integration with MSN Messenger within 18 months of launch (ie, video chat with someone on MSN Messenger via Xbox Live)
- Can show a slide show of pictures to someone else on Xbox Live, can play games AND videochat with someone else on Xbox Live, can stream music from the Xbox, a connected PC, or connected audio device (ie, iPod) to someone else on Xbox Live
- Perfect Dark 0 will support 64-player multiplayer
- Faceplates will have access to a USB port, meaning they can receive power for various effects/functionality
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Maquiladora
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I havent read all the pages before this one in this thread, will Xbox games work on Xbox 360?
PS3 will play PS1 and 2 games, not that ive ever owned a PS but thats pretty tempting with such a massive catalogue of games available for one console.
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nostromo
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Montréal, Québec
Mar 2002
time: 00:17
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Here's the second part of the fairly technical Ars Technica article on the 360
http://arstechnica.com/articles/pae...xbox360-2.ars/1
The conclusion:
quote:
Like the Playstation 3's Cell processor, the Xbox 360's Xenon processor represents a fundamentally different approach to performance than that which characterized the previous generation of consoles—and the previous generation of PCs for that matter. The Xbox 360 will rely on multithreading and procedural synthesis to make visual environments that are more immersive than anything that's possible on the present generation of either game consoles or PCs. Still, with all that pixel-pushing power at its disposal, there are a few probable flies in the Xbox 360 ointment.
Rumors and some game developer comments (on the record and off the record) have Xenon's performance on branch-intensive game control, AI, and physics code as ranging from mediocre to downright bad. Xenon will be a streaming media monster, but the parts of the game engine that have to do with making the game fun to play (and not just pretty to look at) are probably going to suffer. Even if the PPE's branch prediction is significantly better than I think it is, the relatively meager 1MB L2 cache that the game control, AI, and physics code will have to share with procedural synthesis and other graphics code will ensure that programmers have a hard time getting good performance out of non-graphics parts of the game.
Furthermore, the Xenon may be capable of running six threads at once, but the three types of branch-intensive code listed above are not as amenable to high levels of thread-level parallelization as graphics code. On the other hand, these types of code do benefit greatly from out-of-order execution, which Xenon lacks completely, a decent amount of execution core width, which Xenon also lacks; branch prediction hardware, which Xenon is probably short on; and large caches, which Xenon is definitely short on. The end result is a recipe for a console that provides developers with a wealth of graphics resources but that asks them to do more with less on the non-graphical side of gaming.
Still, there is some hope on that front. In the PC market where there are multiple processors to support, developers can't fine-tune games for a specific CPU. This heterogeneity of hardware especially hurts with platform-sensitive optimizations like branch hints, which is one reason they don't get used much. In contrast, with the Xenon, the hardware will be fixed, which means that programmers can go all-out in profiling and optimizing branchy game control, AI, and physics code using every trick in the book. Furthermore, console coders can also take heavy advantage of prefetching to overcome the Xenon's cache size limitations. So it's quite possible that as time goes on developers will find ways to get much better branch-intensive code performance out of the hardware. Just don't count on it in the first generation of games, though.
At any rate, Playstation 3 fanboys shouldn't get all flush over the idea that the Xenon will struggle on non-graphics code. However bad off Xenon will be in that department, the PS3's Cell will probably be worse. The Cell has only one PPE to the Xenon's three, which means that developers will have to cram all their game control, AI, and physics code into at most two threads that are sharing a very narrow execution core with no instruction window. (Don't bother suggesting that the PS3 can use its SPEs for branch-intensive code, because the SPEs lack branch prediction entirely.) Furthermore, the PS3's L2 is only 512K, which is half the size of the Xenon's L2. So the PS3 doesn't get much help with branches in the cache department. In short, the PS3 may fare a bit worse than the Xenon on non-graphics code, but on the upside it will probably fare a bit better on graphics code because of the seven SPEs.
In sum, the Xenon will certainly make the Xbox 360 a 3D graphics powerhouse. Though history suggests that the Xbox 360's games will probably never attain the level of graphical realism promised by Microsoft's pre-launch hype and portrayed in the pre-rendered "game demos" that were shown off at E3, gamers can nonetheless expect a significant advance in levels of graphical realism and visual immersiveness. |
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21-05-2005 04:23
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