Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Releases First X-Box Screens
Yu Suzuki writes: "Microsoft has released the first hi-res screenshots of the X-Box in action. Looks pretty impressive; especially the ping-pong ball demo. Is the X-Box going to be giving the PS2 some competition? "
It's important to remember that Microsoft is trying to play on people's fears here. "If I get a PS2, will the X-Box come out and blow it out of the water? I don't want to make a bad purchase decision," says the consumer, pleasing Microsoft to the fullest. The X-Box is a direct response to Sony's release of the PS2 and, while the X-Box does look impressive, let's remember it's a _long_ way off and probably even longer than expected knowing Microsoft. They've only announced it to send potential PS2 purchasers shaking in their sneakers.
Of course, I'm kinda sceptical of a few static screenshots, just like I was sceptical of the PS2 shots too, when they were released.
The first few butterfly pictures are pretty nice - I'd like to see the frame rate on that demo. If its smooth, that's quite impressive - though there are plenty of programming tricks that can be employed to boost performance on the butterflies that aren't immediately obvious - yet would give the impression of serious hardware power.
I'm reminded of early Renderware (remember them?) demo's, though. There's a clankiness to the edges of some of the objects in these screenshots that harkens back to the Renderware way of doing polygon transforms... can't place my finger on it, but it just 'feels' that way. Perhaps some other graphics guru's can explain what they see in those pics from a rendering perspective?
Overall, pretty impressive. I'll probably be adding an XBox to my setup, right alongside my Dreamcast and (this September) a PS2. The $1000 I'd spend on building a nice PC game system will instead go towards a 3-tier total entertainment, cover-all-bases-take-no-prisoners console 'mini-arcade' for my living room...
(I bet they hand out those ping pong balls with "X" on them at trade shows.)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I'm no big friend of Microsoft's, but I have to admit that their doing everything right. I've been talking to some folks about what they think of it, and it's been interesting. One company in particular (I can't say who, but I'll just say "They make sports games" have increasing frustrations with the PlayStation 2, with its incredible level of difficulty to program for. MS has reduced Win2000 to a super small, super tight kernel, no GUI at all, just "load file, run file, close file" type stuff and memory management. Without all of the other 250 MB of stuff, it looks like Win2000 is actually a good system.
What they've done right:
Gotten developers kits quickly, and made it super easy to program for. Yes, it uses DirectX and the like. But for PC programmers, it's an easy jump from X-box to PC and back again.
Lots of built in stuff. Built in hard drive. Lots of memory, good processor, and a graphics chip by Nvidia, the current (if you don't include the $600 Voodoo 6000) graphics chip king.
Ethernet at the outset. They know that modems are going away, and that DSL and the like is what's going on.
DVD on the outset. It works for the PS/2, it should work for the X-box.
What they've done wrong:
Games. I haven't heard of any games (except for Munch's Oddysee, and that's not a definite yet) that are coming for the X-Box. It doesn't matter how pretty it is, it needs games. MS has been trying to buy up companies (some rumors include Square), but no go just yet.
Bad image. Let's face it, MS doesn't have the right image for, well, anything. And with their trial going on, this might be a problem. Is this an application or OS? If MS is smart, they'll spin it off onto its own company, Open Source the kernal (to let more developers into building for it), and they'll have a winner. If they try to keep their propriety hands on it, they won't win against big Nintendo and Sony.
John "Dark Paladin" Hummel
We don't just like games, we love them!
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
http://xbox.ign.com/news/18793.html
Quicktime format. Not Sorenson codec, but Xanim still won't play it. I booted to Windows...
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
...and make it so the X-box can run Playstation2 games. :)
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
Given the current cut-and-thrust in the CPU and GPU markets on the PC platform at the moment, I wonder whether basing a console system on them is such a smart move. Let me explain my thoughts on this.
NVidia is producing the graphics processing unit for MS. By their own roadmaps, NVidia is doubling the speed of their graphics hardware inside a year. Similarly, CPUs are still following Moore's law of doubling ever 12-18 months. The X-box is supposed to have a 733MHz PIII in it at release, which given that it is probably 12-18 months away will make it about half the speed of the fastest CPUs on the market even if we are being charitable. So at launch, this platform will have a half-speed CPU and a state-of-the-art graphics processor.
But things don't stand still - so why bother with an XBox. When it comes out, I will probably have a 1.2GHz or better box with a GeForce 2 or better graphics card, so why should I even think about buying this object? It will be 'below spec' for me. Worse still, unless it is extremely upgradable (i.e. rip the CPU and GPU out and upgrade) it will be obsolete hardware when compared with the standard PC of the time only 6-12 months after release. So what is going on?
My thought on this is that MS is having increasing success in the gaming market, both on hardware peripherals such as game pads and also on the games themselves. But the consoles threaten to dilute this market so in goes MS after marketshare. Nothing wrong with that. The question is will MS move firmly into the XBox market to the exclusion of the PC, or will they ensure that the XBox games get ported back to PC land. The former might turn out to be business suicide against the PS2 and Dolphin platforms, since both MS's rivals are more experienced in this field and have an established fan base. The latter might be the real reason for this Xbox at all - to ensure a free-flowing supply of games to MS's dominant platform and therefore help keep people buying Windows - after all, 99% of the time I spend in Windows at home is playing games and all my real work is done under Linux. If Linux starts seeing lots of games, I shall be buying Linux versions in preference, particularly once I get Xfree86 4.0 and the TNT2 drivers installed. And maybe I'll be able to see my way to shrink that Windows partition down until I finally fdisk it out of existence.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
It is considerably easier for Microsoft to make the X-box nearly bug-free when compared to most of their other products, for the simple reason that the hardware is under their control and the OS is much simpler. Even though Microsoft is going to produce it based on one of their existing OSs (probably NT), the act of cutting out huge volumes of unused and unneeded material and the necessity of supporting only a small amount of hardware, should make this a stable platform.
The problem with the X-box, however, is the heavily COTS (Commercial, Off the Shelf) design. Using a standard CPU, a standard OS, and what will undoubtedly be a modified version of a standard 3D graphics chip, all save on design cost and would save on production cost if only a small number are produced.
Yet game consoles sell by the millions, so the design cost is spread over so many devices and the cost savings of using COTS parts largely diminishes, since by the time someone fabricates one million custom CPUs, they don't cost any more than buying 1M comparable CPUs.
And the performance hit of using a COTS design is substantial. The Playstation 2's CPU is custom designed to the task at hand, able to perform a massive number of floating point calculations/clock cycle. It does not need to run SPEC, it is not an attractive compiler target for high performance code, and it is really 3 CPUs in one.
Thus, Toshiba's silicon (made for Sony) for the Playstation 2 drastically outperforms what Intel can possibly provide, for the specific tasks involved in driving an effective game console.
The additional problem with the X-box, again introduced by the COTS nature of the system, is the burden which even a stripped-down Microsoft OS places on the device. The cost of a hard disk and additional memory are potential killers when designing a device which should retail for less than $300.
A COTS design by Microsoft was undoubtedly chosen so they could hurry it out into the marketplace, but the result will probably be less then spectacular, since Sony's offering will probably significantly outperform the X-box once applications are written which can take advantage of the available computational power.
Test your net with Netalyzr
You don't seem to understand the issues behind gaming, let me lay out why the X Box is not a PC.
1) Bus. The video and system memory are shared directly with the video card, there is no bus to go across, therefore moving data from system memory to the video card will be much faster.
2) OS. Yes, it's a modified version of the Windows 2000 kernel, but it's not the same Kernel, it's incredibly stripped down. I bet it doesn't even include multithreading code. There is almost no OS at all, as far as I know, all the Windows2000 kernel does on the X Box is handle reads and writes, and directX calls.
3) sameness. Every X Box will be the same, since Nvidia's involved, every X Box will have hardware Transformation and lighting, meaning everything can be moved off of the processor to the video card, allowing for advanced physics and AI, among other things. You could say that current Nvidia cards already do that, but it doesn't matter because programmers can't take advantage of it because not everyone has a T&L video card (BTW, PS2 doesn't have hardware T&L). This is a huge advantage, if you've seen Nvidia's tree demo, you know that T&L can be very impressive when you write directly to it.
3) sameness, instead of allowing to write directly to the same hardware, this "sameness" point deals with bugs. If there's only one platform, there are fewer bugs (blah blah blah buggy microsoft shit, blah blah), X Box games will generally have fewer bugs than their PC counterparts.
Those are pretty much the main differences, this is not a PC with no monitor.
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
I was at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) a few weeks ago. Microsoft had an X-Box theatre there to show off these X-Box demo's. Before the Expo I had heard big things about the X-Box, but wanted to see it with my own eyes. Let's just say I was pretty impressed. It reminded me a lot of the PS2 power-wise, at least from what I saw with the demo's.
I'd like to point out that I think the Raven images linked in this article are of the old Raven footage. That footage was of what the X-Box "might" be cabable of, before they had it actually running on the machine. At E3, they had the Raven demo running on actual X-Box hardware. The graphics weren't quite up to the original footage, but the poly count was still quite high, and still very impressive.
Before people start spewing off that MS will lose the console race I'd like to say that they really are giving game developers something to talk about. The first being using off the shelf components. If you can program for PC, you should be able to program for this thing. Compare that with PS2, which is a nightmare to program for. A lot of the developers I talked to at the Expo thought the PS2 would pull in better numbers than the X-Box simply because of the Playstation name, but that it may be more cost effective to program for the X-Box instead simply because of the ease of coding the thing. There are many more benefits to Microsofts strategy in the console business, but I'm sure you can read about those on any of the gaming sites.
I'd also like to point out that even though we're talking about technology in the X-Box that may be "obsolete" when it comes out, it doesn't have the overhead of an MS OS running on it. This will be a video game console. It is being marketed as a direct PS2 competitior. Thus, everything Sony does, MS will try to do one better. And so far, I think they're actually doing a pretty good job of that.
At the same time, they have hurdles to overcome. One being that they'll be launching a year after PS2. It will be hard for them to catch up, especially since the MS name isn't very attractive to the hard core gamer. Another downfall is that they are entering this race as the new kid on the block. I think MS is in for a serious wake up call here, as the console industry is probably one of the most cut throught industries there are. Microsoft will be the underdog going into a huge war I'm not sure it can survive in, even with it's marketing muscle. Sony, Sega, and Nintendo will not give up that easily.
Make no mistake about it, MS wants to own your entertainment system. It wants to be your Gaming, Movie, Music, and Internet experience. Then again, so does Sony. It will be interesting to see how this all unfolds.
The pc is steming out into 2 seperate markets: the web pad and the game console. Microsoft realizes this and they're going after both.
In a few short years everything that you do in the lines of word processing, e-mailing, chatting, web surfing etc. will be done on portable pads that you can take anywhere. All of your applications will reside online, hosted by asps. Proof is msn, Planet Intra etc.
The only thing that this leaves out however is gaming. Hence the X-Box.
With MSN and the X-Box Microsoft is preparing themselves for when the PC market is obsolete.
Garett Spencley
Hmmm... I've heard this multiple times before, so I guess it's time to clarify.
How can you everyone the PS2 doesn't have hardware T&L? Does it not have 2 vector processors (operating on 128bit floating point data), with one linked directly to the graphics chipset (one could argue it's a part of the graphics chipset), for the sole purpose of transforming and lighting vertices? Seriously, there is NO WAY the >300MHz MIPS processor can transform the claimed 60 million polygons/second by itself. So, the PS2 *does* in fact have hardware accelerated transformation and lighting.
The only difference between hardware T&L on the PS2 and on a GeForce is the way it's used. On a GeForce, the D3D/OGL driver takes care of everything for you and hides all the ugliness. You just hand it some vertices and say 'Go.' It's a bit more complicated on the PS2, where the programmer has to write his own T&L engine in assembly.
By the way, I'd be willing to bet the X-box does support multithreading, as generally sound and I/O runs in it's own thread on both PC's and consoles.
p.s. To my credit, I am a PS2 software engineer (writing low level graphics routines) at a respectable game studio, with several months experience with the hardware.
Worse still, unless it is extremely upgradable (i.e. rip the CPU and GPU out and upgrade) it will be obsolete hardware when compared with the standard PC of the time only 6-12 months after release. So what is going on?
The same argument could be made about any other gaming console, and holds. However, the reason why Playstations and Dreamcasts still sell is that they are far, far cheaper than the PC that blows them away.
For anyone who has a good gaming PC, a console can be argued to be redundant (aside from the little matter of getting all of the console _games_ on the PC).
However, Joe Average doesn't have a good gaming PC. Joe Average may not even have a PC at all. However, Joe Parent can more likely afford to shell out for a cheap console than for a full computer when their kid finally convinces them to buy a game system.
For people who don't already have PCs, a console is a good investment. Heck, it may cost less than your PC's next video card.
Look, I've just invented a game console that plugs into color PalmPilots to generate flightsims! Here is actual video footage taken off the PalmPilot's actual screen- this was generated by a PalmPilot in REAL TIME and you'll be able to fly combat missions against your friends on the Internet, while jotting down notes in Graffiti! (Do you believe FNORD! that?)
One.
Just get a lot of sprites with that little 'x' facing in all directions, keep track of the 'rotation': if the X shows, choose the relevant sprite. If the X is facing away- always use a featureless blank ping-pong ball sprite.
Presto- all the ping pong balls can be ONE poly. Don't even waste your time looking at them and trying to figure how many polys it is! I suspect even if the demo is totally rigged the balls are _still_ one-poly cards drawing from a really large selection of sprites: this serves several purposes. One, the entire ping-pong ball load is about as much as one Quake model, and two, if they can get people trying to imagine how many polys make those 'round' ( ;) ) forms, they can get people imagining huge impossible poly counts.
Sprite cards are actually a damned good way to do 3D game programming- look at Myth and Myth II, the characters in that are all sprites on cards and it lets lots of activity be happening on relatively humble computers with good framerate- and allows more CPU to be used for terrain. However, used as a fraud, it's annoying :)
But take a moment to think about the hardware engineers, and coders who stay up all night behind deadlines trying to sqeeze a few more frames per second out of the hardware. Did you see how many butterflies there was on the screen, or how many ping pong balls there was? Or how fine the polygons where on the Raven models.
Now I like bashing M$ as much as the next guy. Its easy to do, they have made silly mistakes in the past, but this demo I can respect. Slasdotters always complain about the FUD, or try to turn everything into FUD. Have you ever thought about the hardcare coders, and hackers at M$? Oh yes.. they are there. Microsoft has some of the most dedicated and hardcare techies out there.
You know what I think is happening. I think that you see these amazing and beautifully renders screenshots, and you know that its good, you just dont have the balls to admit it. That said, I work at a major telecom company that *cough* *cough* (created UNIX). I love Linux/FreeBSD I use them at work and at home extensively. Just because I love UNIX doesnt mean I cant see the beauty in other things. The words of Socrates come to mind.
I went to a man who was reputed to be wise, thinking that there, if anywhere, I should prove the answer wrong. So I examined the man -- I need not tell you his name, he was a politician--but this was the result, Athenians. Then I conversed with him I came to see that, though a great many persons, and most of all himself, he thought he was wise, yet he was not wise, though he fancied he was. By doing so I mafe him indignant, and many of the bystanders. So when I went away I thought myself, "I am wiser than this man: neither of us knows anything that is really worth knowing, but he thinks that he has knowledge when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have. I seem, at any rate, to be a little wiser then he is on this point: I do not think that I know what I do not know."
Socrates - The Apology
So I ask of you dear Slashdotters, tell us not that the XBox blows, but also tell us your reasoning behind so we may become clear in the truth.
Okay, folks...
a) These screenshots are not new. I have seen magazines at the newsstands with these exact same screenshots. M$ probably pumped them out to the print media months ago. I've seen them online in various places also, though not in high-res.
b) Demos tell you nothing about the power of a system. I saw screenshots of demos for the Sega Saturn before it was released... a complete human skeleton with all 200-some bones dancing to hip-hop. It looked nice and was running on actual Saturn hardware, but nothing like that would ever be in a game due to practicality.
And the Nintendo 64, (back when it was the Ultra 64) had demos running on SGI workstations that had 2 to 3 times the power of the actual N64 today. As a result, Nintendo wowed the public enough to keep interest in the system. But those demos, amazing though they were, were far more impressive than the actual N64 at launch time. Thus, don't expect hundredes of butterflies in your video games when you bring the X-Box home.
c) Microsoft mentioned that these demos do not run on the actual X-Box hardware, as none exists yet. Their graphics designers were told to whip up some demos while trying to conform to the theoretical specs of the X-Box. That's why you have high-res screenshots.
The engineer, weary of design trade-offs and wary of uninformed decisions, asks for more details. "Sure," replies the gatekeeper. "Here is the elevator. You can ride up to see Heaven and down to see Hell. Take your time and make your choice.
So, off the engineer goes taking the elevator up to Heaven. He sees the angels playing on their harps and blissfully flitting back and forth among the clouds.
"That looks about like what I expected, but it doesn't look ... well, exciting" he says to himself.
So, off he goes down the elevator to the floor labeled "Hell" to look around. He finds sandy beaches, beautiful women, snowcapped mountains, and parties going on all over.
Returning to the gates, he has no problem informing the gatekeeper of his decision. "Heaven looks fine, but pretty boring to me. Hell is what I have always dreamed of! Let me in."
The gatekeeper hands him an entry pass and the engineer goes back down the elevator to take his place in Hell. But, to his surprise, he finds none of what he saw before. Instead, he finds himself in a pit swarming with vipers, fire and brimstone.
"Wait! What happened to the beach parties, fun, and sunshine I saw before?" "Oh," replies Lucifer. "That was the demo."
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.