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Michael Abrash On X-Box Graphics
tomii writes: "This
one's tasty. Michael Abrash gives detailed information about the graphics system on Microsoft's new X-Box." Interesting information, and a pretty good 'tutorial' on graphics rendering in general. Also, a good treatise for working on fixed hardware.
If they can assume a disk, they'll want to "install" all sorts of stuff there, including patches, upgrades, and media that need fast access. Disks run out of space and need cleanup. And when you upgrade the console, the built-in disk with all your saved games, patches, upgrades, and media goes away. Putting a disk into the console gives us the same mess as Windows machines. I might as well buy a PC.
Keeping the disk optional means that a lot of software will be written that doesn't require a disk. It means that software developers will have an incentive to provide DVDs with bug fixes, rather than just throwing a few megabytes of bug fixes up on a web site. They may even be more careful with their releases because they can't just put up a patch. And the memory cards are still good enough for saving games.
Yeah, but how many of those have been successful? That was Jonnythan's point. The examples you named have been failures (a little too early for the N64 upgrade, but given that the system is at the end of its product cycle, I don't see a ton of people running out to get it). How about the Sega 32x or SegaCD? Both were add-ons for the Genesis and both flopped. There are some other causes for these failures, but the basic rule is: don't split your market share. Performance upgrades split your market and you have to deal with that split by adding complexity and ineffiency to your software (not to mention different user experiences) or by excluding part of your market share.
I'll be very impressed with the first manufacturer that successfully pulls that off.
Well, yes, actually.
For those who prefer OpenGL, NVIDIA will provide a fully Xbox-enhanced version.
Admittedly, the article credits the support to NVIDIA, but the support will be there. I'm very much doubting they'll make a linux port any easier than they can help it, but that's hardly a surprise. I haven't heard of any moves by Sony, Nintendo or Sega towards a Linux port, either. It is, after all, just a game console.
"NEVER EVER WILL MICROSOFT DEVELOP A CONSOLE SYSTEM" -Bill gates from Next Generation Magazine's interview with him
Ben Cathers - president/partner
Ben Cathers - president/partner
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Wow, didn't mean to touch the sacred cow. Just a funny little quip on my part, didn't mean to offend you. As for stability, you obviously never administered a 250+ NT domain. It was daily practice to walk around every morning and reboot BSOD'd machines, which usually numbered between 5 - 10. I'm sure the X-Box will be the pinnacle of stability and reliablity, and many toasters and microwaves will have their rom based off of it.
As an active Xbox user, I have to say it is really too bad that all the moderators spend all their points on mr. *syringe.
I think it would be better if everyone with positive karma had unlimited mod points. seems obvious to me. That way when I post stories from my Xbox, I know they'll get a fair shake.
please moderate up as (+1, insightful right now, in case you forget)
Altogether, this is just business as usual for Microsoft...
<<<SNIP>>>
We have seen exactly the same thing with PocketPC/WindowsCE, and they just don't seem to learn.
I agree with your post on everything but the last
bit. It isn't Microsoft that's unable to learn - they've very effectively learned that these techniques *work*. That's why they do it over and
over again.
Will it work this time? I hope not. Time will tell.
MS-App announces the X-Box will be retooled to use Linux.
The CEO of the recently split Microsoft Applications Division, Gill Bates announced today that the much anticipated X-Box gaming console would no longer use a Windows/Direct-X based OS, and would instead switch to using Linux.
"Those ***damn Microsoft-OS-holes are charging us such large licence fees it would essentially double the cost of the platform," Bates said.
"Now that we're no longer tied down to that crappy OS, we're free to make sensible engineering decisions," Bates added.
This latest announcement continues the deluge of bad news the OS division of Microsoft has had since the split was finally upheld by the Supreme Court in their groundbreaking ruling a few months ago. "Time for Microsoft-OS to bend over and spread 'em for a change," read the decision.
i can download a 2.4 kernel. i cannot buy an x-box.
:P
speaking of which, who's up for porting DX8 to linux as soon as it becomes available, so we can put linux on cheap-ass Xboxen and run those nice games?
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I attended the big GDC shindig in San Jose when Big Bill announced the specs for the X, and one of the numbers that we all kinda mumbled about was the 600MHz processor. Now it seems to have been beefed up a bit without any fanfare.
/for the time it would ship/... were they not paying attention to the world around them when they said "600MHz"?
The only reason I chose to talk about this is that Bill made a statement at the time (sorry, I don't recall the exacts,) that this may seem like an under-powered processor, but when combined with the new NV graphics goodies and such, there will be no need for more... well then why is it now 733?
I wonder what really drives these decisions... did the R&D folks finally "win out" with an argument that you can't do it with that proc, or as they get further into development, do they realize that their specs fell short and update them?? He had said that all their "guys" got together and made the specs for the best of everything
Anyway, I thought it was interesting that the processor that will be "more than adequate" a few months back (presumably, months before that as they were designing the original target-specs,) is now quietly (imo) being pumped up a notch.
*end of babble*
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
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well, without any OS, and next gen hardware texture commpression, 64 megs does not sound to bad. I suspect that most games will use a scalable graphics engine, that will look better on more powerfull PC hardware, but run well on X-Box
Take a look at the dreamcasts specs and then compare the graphics to a PCs. Consoles have clearly shown that having a closed architecture can effectively double the performance of a similarly configured PC. So the X-Box will have considerably better graphics than a PC.
Mutatis mutandi is latin for (roughly) "all things considered".
:-D~
If you work through the math, it's the cost of (8) lights in the scene.
Software rendering (assuming efficient) is often cumulatively more expensive than hardware, yet is not necessarily a direct multiple. HUH ? In other words, in software, you got memory, it's kinda evident you can cache a bunch of values during computation, i.e. when you calculate the surface normal (direction surface is "pointed") you can cache this and use (instead of recompute) later.
In hardware, this may be too expensive, it really may be cheaper to recompute the whole shebang every time.
OK, lets try this again. Esp since my first post was deemed so bad that the question in response to it scored higher. Don't they teach Shannon in school anymore ???-D
If you're doing it in software, you by definition have scratch memory. Your fundamental algorithm is slower, but it has scratch memory to store temporary results, which improves it's efficiency when solving roughly the same problem multiple times, i.e. multiple lights On the other hand, a hardware solution may literally be a set of transistors wired to an addressable register (variable) which results in a solution that is damn fast, but incapable of remembering temporary results (register only holds the source values, temporaries recalculated each time) so time per iteration is significantly faster, but overall time is simple linear product, not an exponentially decreasing product.
Oh damn. Lets try again. If you solve a problem slowly, but can remember and use interim value to accellerate the solution of related problems, then if you have ANY machine that can solve the problem faster for a fixed number of solutions, there is a point at which the slow solution is always the best choice, because over N calculations, the calculation savings for the cached values exceed the time of efficiently recalculating the solution from scratch.
Urrk! I've had a busy day, and my brain is seizing. If in pure software it takes me X to compute a single light and 1/2X as much time to compute each subsequent light, or I have hardware that computes any one light in 1/2X time, then obviously if I have five lights, software is much better. One light, and it's the other way around. That's the main reason grafix systems can get so damn persnicety about the number of lights in a scene.
Back to the original post and your first assertion, yup - if the number of lights you use exceeds the hardwares max, you're going to see one hell of a falloff in scene rendering speed. If the solution is hardware based (likely) and there are a finite nunber of "potential" solutions, when the solution requirement exceeds the hardware limit, there's going to be a nasty falloff in rendering rate, cause a) software has to do it, and b) nobody remembers a damn thing about earlier results,
Wow! How cathartic, for reasons I can't even explain. Yo, MSFT, methinks a little detail is the fact you're claiming a straight line path based on # lights, i.e. you don't cache a damn thing!
OK, this is enough. Everything that involves light falling on it (photons from lite, photons to your eye, everything) means you need to work thru geometry. Whole damn thing is what do you compute, what do you recall, how do those costs blend to form best algorithm. Damn nasty question, JC is bright damn fellow, but he ruled out the big outdoors to get his answer. Yes, that's a deliberately cryptic SD troll
Dracosystems - Virtual Reality Engines and Applications
Okay then, explain S.O.A.P. in terms of the Microsoft 'lock programmers to windows' conspiracy... Wake up. Get real. Anyway COM is already implemented for UNIX. Version 2 is out there, why don't you check it out before you continue claiming it doesn't exist?
You mean the Xbox? Well.. it's not outperforming ANYTHING yet - considering the fact that one hasn't actually been demoed (at all, as far as we know), so we can't actually compare an Xbox to current consoles. The demos that HAVE been done are on fast PCs or faster hardware, from what I've heard.
Consoles typically aren't upgradable. That's fine by me. But at least usually when they ship, they're fairly high on the technology wave. By the time the Xbox actually SHIPS (late next year?), it'll be so far behind what's current, anyone who knows their consoles won't waste their time.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Textures will need to be mip-mapped so as not to stall the cache.
Why don't you have a go at saying that again? It just makes no sense the way you wrote it.
Abrash explains the issues (concisely, clearly) in this link at the top of the original article referenced by Slashdot - it's easy to miss the link if you're skimming the article.
Even if I buy that the API is crap (I have no knowlege to agree or disagree with that statement), isnt there alot of game software being developed to that API? How much is being developed using the *not crap* OpenGL api?
As we all know, the better technology does not necessarily win a race. (e.g., VHS and "what is BETA?")
I can't believe implementing any API would require implementing Win32 and COM. I just don't believe that is fully thinking the problem through at all.
Okay, I get it, thank you very much for the explanation.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
MS is using COTS hardware to speed R&D time and ultimately, time to market. For a company brand new to the gaming world, I'm worried. They're going to integrate existing hardware and software.
Granted the CPU and memory are COTS (I assume you mean Cheap Off The Shelf) hardware, but why did Microsoft pay nVIDIA $200 million - surely the GPU is a custom design, not just cobbled together?
Don't thousands of pcs have a) DVD and b) firewire? What's so confusing?
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
With only 64MB of RAM that is (?) shared with the GPU (that's the impression I get from the article..), it's going to be a trick to get PC-level stuff running on it. Textures will need to be mip-mapped so as not to stall the cache. At 32bpp to support the shading engine, that's going to be a lot of space to textures alone. I think the X-Box programmers have their work cut out for them. Simply porting a game released at the time when the X-Box is out to the X-Box from the then modern PC platform will be a real trick. At that time, most GPU's alone will 64MB, + ~256MB for the PC (depending on memory prices..).
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I am the dot in slashdot.org
Uhuh. So long as the engineering and CAD/CAM crowds buy as much stuff as they do, the hardcore graphics support is going to stay in there.
Consoles have always relied on relatively slow CPUs and cutting-edge graphics hardware. On the NES, almost all of the graphics was performed in hardware, even to the point of the video chip fetching the graphics data directly from cartridge ROM with no chance for CPU intervention.
I guess one of my favorite examples is the Game Boy. It has (almost) the same CPU as a TI graphing calculator, but while the calculator can do simple tile graphics at best, the Game Boy can handle smooth scrolling and many sprites with no CPU intervention.
This hardware-centric design has always been the difference between a console and a PC. On a console, games were written in assembler, and they always acessed registers directly. Michael Abrash is talking about programming the Xbox like a console, which should yield very fast, efficient, and nonportable games. Microsoft, on the other hand, is throwing in lots of libraries and OS layers (Directx, WinCE) in an attempt for portability. When the developers bring their games to the Xbox, they will bring the same inefficient CPU-hungry code.
Well, that's why I think consoles and PCs need to be seperate. PCs have always been nice for games, but I still think consoles are best. Now all they need is ethernet ;-)
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2
If it's dedicated, OK it might be more powerful, but will it be upgradable? That's the important thing really. And of course Micro$oft will 'forget' to release half the specification for the APIs (I hope I sound like I know what I'm talking about -- you all know what I mean, I've spent the past two days trying to figure out stuff about how NT services really work) so only their lame programmers will be able to use most of the stuff.
Maybe I'm being unfair but since Micro$oft will control everything the skilled developers will not be able to use it to its full potential.
saying:
"The best thing about Xbox is that it won't change. Ever. Judging by other consoles, Xbox should have a four or five year run"
Is totally wrong. You'd think they'd realise (especially a bright fellow like Abrash) that things change faster than they used to. Cheap 3D graphics cards today blow away cheap graphics cards of just 2 years ago. By the time the XBox comes out, it's performance will be average, but even if it is ahead of the pack it will fall behind in 6-12 months and be obsolete within 24 months.
I understand MS is considering making the XBox upgradeable. A very wise move, but they'd be *much* better off focusing on making DX8 stable for many years, rather than requiring developers to code to a low level to achieve the advertised performance. But of course, this is just the sort of thing MS has shown no foresight for with DX in the past. A very good reason to program the XBox in OpenGL only.
pithy comment
A Pentium III 733, 64Mb ram, Nvidia graphics chipset - sounds remarkably like the specs for a current PC (albiet with a smallish amount of ram), but not for a 'state of the art' console out towards the end of 2001. It's going to be 1 1/2 years before this thing is even out!
The X box looks like a GeForce III with a CPU and peripheral bus tacked on. In six months, it will be state of the art. In a year or so when it's released, it'll still get acceptable performance, and will be dirt cheap - and thus markettable in a console price range.
From what I can see, this looks like a good strategy. My only concern is that the article implied (didn't explicitly state) that the main graphics API would be Direct X.
Hmm. If I understood what I saw at the demos at GDC 2000, the PSX2 will have USB, not Firewire. It will also only have the HD sold as a separate unit (with their networking stuff).
Also, it's really the PSX2 Dev stations that boot and use Linux. Not many home users are going to be able to get one of those.
With consoles, it's all about getting games that you wouldn't, or couldn't get on a PC. MS knows this, and is trying to garner 3rd party developer support early, so they can come out with some really good titles. PSX2 came out in Japan with only a few titles that anyone really was interested in. Then again, they sold 1 million in the first weekend. Don't write off MS too quickly...the XBox will have good hardware and be easier to develop for. However, MS vs Sony (vs Nintendo, etc) is going to be a serious battle.
most copy-protected CD media are recorded with bogus track and data-size information. the drives can't handle being fed incorrect information very well at all... (try making an ISO9660 image and changing a few bytes here and there in the header... it isn't pretty. :) )
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How long until the logo gets hack^H^H^H^Hreplaced? Maybe someone could get the x box to run X, then it might be worth using.
I think he meant that Linux has support for PS2 mice.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
sound effects stolen from LINUX? What the hell are you on, and where can I get some? ;)
...
If they stole it from anywhere, I'd say the Amiga. Actually, the BBC micro had a really cool sound system even before that. It showed how well you could enhance games with a good tune even though you had very little graphics and sound hardware at all
This leads me to speculate - I wonder if he realises that all the cool things he does are probably going to be used by Microsoft as more weapons in their ongoing dirty tricks campaign against anything non-Windows.
I think I would be very peeved if someone used my work for political ends rather than technical ones.
Afraid it was with the expansion pack (but not my N64). Still a great game though, there are lots of things that can be learnt in the PC world from that game (and goldeneye). Things like extras (modes of play, levels, fun mods) for doing challenges, completing levels quickly, etc. These kind of touches Rare put into the game extend the game no end, and make it one of the few games I might consider purchasing a N64 just to play.
I was under the impression that you couldn't get a license from the CCA to build a DVD player which had a firewire output? Or am I confused?
actually MS stole from Apple, who stole it from Xerox.
I know I have trolled here before (even in this very thread), but please take this post seriously.
/.. In fact, I will not be posting here at all. I have realized that it is just plain stupid to troll, and I really need to find something better to do. Hopefully, the other trolls here will follow suit (long shot I know, but you can always hope). Note: I cut-n-pasted one or two of the "beer" posts into this thread (which was a REALLY stupid thing to do), but I am not the same person as [color] syringe.
This post is intended to be serious and not just another troll post.
As of right now, I will no longer be trolling here on
To the entire Slashdot community: Please accept my apologies for being such a jackass and my assurances that it is over.
A Techincal Overview of the Emotion Engine
I think most developers would agree, the PS2 employs a much more flexible architecture than the XBox. While the programmable shaders in DX8 are a great start, they are hardly as flexible as the generic-vector-unit approach that the PS2 employs. The XBox employs a multi-step semi-programmable T&L pipeline with three main components: The vertex shader, the texture unit, and the pixel shader. All three of these systems allow for greater flexibility than DX-compatible GPUs have offered in the past, but it's still not at the level of full pipeline programmability. With the DX8 shader API, you are given control over some aspects of the T&L pipeline, but this approach is ultimately not nearly as flexible or programmable as the PS2's multi-chip architecture. The PS2 doesn't even have a defined "pipeline" per-se; just a series of specialized chips (Emotion Engine CPU, two vector units, and the Graphics Synthesiser, as the main components) that can be utilized in whatever combination is most efficient for the given task. Initially there were reported architecture problems on the PS2 (such as bandwidth issues) but lately programmers are starting to employ new techniques (such as sending a new batch of microcode to the vector units every frame!) and getting around these assumed limitations (the recent "fix" to the aliasing issue is another example.) These techniques were missed initially because of the lack of familiarity with the PS2 and it's capabilities (such as the 2560-bit bus! ;-)
The flexibility of the PS2 comes at the high price of incredible complexity. It remains to be seen whether programmers will thrive on this flexibility as a means to push the system to limits that the hardware designers themselves couldn't imagine (as they did with the playstation 1, n64, etc) or whether developers will prefer the much more straightforward design of the XBox. The current crop of excellent dreamcast games would seem to favor the latter point of that argument.
Personally (as a game developer) I am a bit more attracted to the PS2. As I'm sure most programmers can empathize with, the lure of a complex and ultimately "hackable" design over a less flexible one, is immense. However, I can't deny the comparative ease of use of DX8 (as opposed to coding to the metal of the PS2), as well as my personal familiarity with using DX APIs. In the end, I find myself more excited by the incredible (as of yet untapped) potential of the PS2.
paulb
But, c'mon Abrash, how far can you toe the Company Line? Is this some new conspiracy between Microsoft and Dr Dobbs? Microsoft publish squat on their website and then allow the details to "leak" out to Dr Dobbs. What a cynical display! Abrash is now the hype mongerer for Microsoft, in league with Dr Dobbs. Abrash, suck Satan's cock!
Other things: Abrash's comments about "allocating memory bandwidth" either presuppose a memory controller that permits this, or else dramatically misunderstands how UMA functions in practice. I would have liked to see more details, since this is the killer or savior of any console system. But does anyone really expect a UMA console to achieve the performance figures they give? I don't, even after Abrash's "analysis".
Mind you, the new GPU architecture looks sexy. Very sexy. If only the console didn't run DirectX. I mean, what is the point of DirectX? It is an abstraction layer. You don't NEED abstraction layers in consoles. But maybe by generation 2 M$ will have wised up and given developers the documentation - the HARDWARE documentation - they need.
That's my $0.02 ;)
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It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Aye to the stability. Even major software releases -- particularly in the gaming industry -- suffer on PCs due to the vast array of hardware. For instance, many DVD and CD-RW drives cannot use certain forms of copy-protected CDs. Many video and sound cards can introduce game-crashing incompatibilities. Other software already existing on the system can cause library conflicts. And so forth.
On a controlled system like a standard console, these problems can easily be caught -- there's ONE basic configuration to work with, and perhaps a few peripherals or minor upgrades.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The psx2 DOES have a hard drive planned for the US release, if I'm not mistaken. Not sure if it will be standard, or an add on, though.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
I am excited to see a console with manufacturers like AMD and nVidia behind it, if they can get enough developers behind it.
Yes, Microsoft is evil, but so is Sony, and the Playstation has been one of the best consoles ever. If you think a 700Mhz processor will become outdated soon, look at the Playstation's paltry 35Mhz processor.
There is no way you can look at Final Fantasy 8, Vagrant Story, Gran Turismo, or Metal Gear Solid, and tell me that the console's hardware is what sells it or not. I bought one of these 35Mhz Playstations when I was running 450mhz in my computer at home, to play the games.
On a fixed console, there is no comparison. Talented developers can do incredible things when they don't have to worry about supporting every single popular video card and API out there. Yes, PCs will march forward into the gigahertz, but I think the X-box will still deliver some pretty impressive exclusive titles despite that.
The X box does not yet exist.
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Indrema has stated that their product will be ungradable, without sacrificing the consistency necessary for a console system.
If this does turn out to work, their system definitely would seem to be the best option of those out there. Has anyone seen any of these articles for it?
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Never trust anyone over 90000.
Last time I heard, Sony plans to have a console development cycle of just over 2 years, and assuming XBox hit the market late 2001, the PSX3 would've been long in the making and probably the prototypes are already in the testing phase in Japan.
It seems M$ is constantly changing the specs on those XBoxes. Last time I heard, it uses a 400Mhz PIII and NV15, (and released mid 2001) now it's been changed to 733Mhz PIII and a NV chip that's still under development. (NV20?)
I guess the only thing them XBox good for is a cheap PC running Linux ^_^
The cool things is, Microsoft will probably loose money on this product, just to spread its use. I cant wait to get my hands on one, and get Linux up and running on it. Could you imagine a Beowulf cluster of Xbox's ..... mmmmMMMMmmm ... s upercomputer of Xbox's. Go Bill!
NoNsense
So there.
..powerful programmable pixel processor..
Microsofts Meglomonical Mechanations.
Lookout Linux's Lackluster Lighting.
Quality Quake Quad.
Thank you for not thinking.
Of COURSE PCs will have more powerful hardware than the X-Box does when it finally gets released. But PC games are almost never written to exploit the latest and greatest hardware, simply because not enough people own the latest and greatest. The point is, the X-Box, being a fixed target for developers, let's them truly push the hardware to the limits because they don't have to worry about multiple hardware configurations, or writing their game to 'gracefully degrade' when run on weaker hardware. X-Box games will probably look/run MUCH better than PC games for the next few years for these reasons.
There's a lot of crap released for PC, true, but I think there's a lot of crap released for console. Probably less, true, but never do you get a game as good as the really good PC games, which are far and few between, granted. I don't find many console games that call for sitting hours and hours at a time to play it. Usually they're a quicker type of game, you start it up, a few seconds you're into the game and don't really have to know much to start in right away. The majority get boring within 1 hour since they mostly involve repetitive tasks.
Though, I've only had 2 or 3 game systems ever. Atari 5200 and Dreamcast, each the games I got I really wanted, which were few. The crap released on the console seems to be bug free or well written crap. The concept is usually where it falls short. A wider range of gamers use console games, for instance, they make Strawberry Shortcake games for young girl gamers, and probably no other group would buy it.
There are people who believe that part of Microsoft's design criteria for active-x was to lock programmers to the Windows system. I'm one of them. The complaint that implementing Active-X would require implementing huge chunks of COM and Win32 makes complete sense within the context of our conspiracy theory.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø`ø,,ø`ø
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Since when has Microsoft or any of its developers done what should be done? This is going to suck simply because no one at Microsoft but Abrash is going to pay attention to the possible bandwidth problem. In the end, Microsoft will have all too many scenarios in which Xbox could run out of bandwidth . The result: the same blue screen and stall to which MS users have grown accustomed.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
If mememory serves correctly, I believe that nVidia has very strong ties with GL. SGI was the one who came up with GL to describe a nice API into their graphics subsystems. nVidia was a company spun from a whole lot of SGI engineers. Grain of salt, please - My memory ain't what it used to be :)
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#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
No, because the Apple Macintosh, for hysterical raisins, lacks memory protection. That, and the fact that their mouse designers can't count to three, makes the platform both unstable and generally unusable.
</RANT>
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Actually, I suspect that the X-Box will not ship with OpenGL drivers, just to make sure X-Box API is incompatible with an open standard.
I suspect that the Nintendo 64, the Dolphin, the Playstation, Dreamcast, SuperFamicom and most other consoles don't support open standards either.
Welcome to the divide. This is where you forget about it being a PC, and remember that it's a closed architecture console designed specifically for games. They can provide whatever APIs they want with it - everyone ELSE has been doing that for YEARS. At least MS's APIs are reasonably similar to those you'd experience if you'd been programming games for Windows; unlike Sony's where you have to relearn everything from scratch.
Grow up. Companies sell these things to make money, not to pander to your wishes to have "open everything".
Coming soon - pyrogyra
The thing has firewire so that it can connect directly to a Sony-brand HDTV set (coming soon).
Sony is slowly pushing iLink across all of its product line as what it wants to be the digital interconnect standard. (A "Sony" plug instead of an "RCA" plug -- Consumers are apparently afraid of a big bunch of interconnect jacks, and they can be replaced by one firewire daisychain, which of course also buys Sony a copy protection system.)
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
By this logic, wouldn't this make the Apple Machintosh (hardware and software made by one company) the most stable personal computer on the market?
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The Xbox is specified to include a custom (=proprietary) video output module, with the possibility connecting the mythical HDTVs of next year. Or next... Anyway, the specified maximum resolution supported is 1920x1080 pixels.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Lighting needs to be computed across each triangle. Each light that you add involves an extra step through each triangle you draw, updating the framebuffer. It's not a terrifically big hit, especially if you cache information (which would happen if you have > 1 light, which is why there isn't a linear drop in performance). Check out Foley & VanDam for lighting equations...
Um, I would like to have a look under the hood of your PC sometime. 200 MHz DDR-SDRAM on a 128-bit bus is nowhere to be seen in mine. ;^( BY the time the Xbox actually ships, though, I hope that will have been resolved... Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that DDR-SDRAM is only found on graphics cards today, not as main (system) memory.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
You know, gcc already supports x86 quite well :-)
APIs? It's DirectX 8. That's all you need to know. If you want to know exactly how bad DirectX 8 will be, read the DirectX 7 docs and extrapolate.
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It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Does this scare anyone else? Microsoft is releasing a console. Think about consoles.. have you ever played Super Mario Brothers 3.11? How about Tetris 98 SP2?
Micorosft is using off-the-shelf parts and modifying existing code to speed their way to market as well, which (as another poster pointed out) indicates they will probably reuse most of the existing windows and driver code as well in their new architecture, which will most probably lead to instability.
The company who can't release a decent product until 3.0 is releasing a console, something that can never be upgraded. Nobody has ever released a service pack for a console game, the only thing you can do is recall, and even then you hold out until your customers sue you.
I'll stick with a console by a company that has some experience, such as the Sega Dreamcast or the Sony PS2. Even Nintendo's vapour Dolphin platform sounds more appealing, and to be perfectly honest I hate Nintendo more than I have ever disliked Microsoft.
To all the companies basing their future generation games around the XBox - good luck! You better make your code portable with at least Windows.
The X-box (provided it's ever released close to what they're claiming it will have now) is basically standard PC hardware. A rule of standard PC hardware is that it decreases in price incredibly quickly over short periods of time, even more than proprietary technology (such as those proprietary chipsets and such used by other consoles).
If the X-box is released in 18 months, it could be set below the cost of the hardware, if the price only goes down gradually (such as that seen by other consoles) the cost of producing the machines will decrease dramatically. So the longer the X-box remains on the market, the more money it makes on each box, even compared to the lifetimes of other consoles.
And about upgrades, I can't imagine MS creating a product without the need for a few software patches after it comes out to fix bugs (and create new ones). We'll see what happens.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Actually, I believe that requiring licences to write for your platform is illegal in the US (Atari versus Activision, and Sega versus EA, both long ago).
The reason Sega/Nintendo/Sony get away with it is that it's legal in Japan, and Japan is a huge market. Of course, it would be almost impossible to produce a game for a complex system like a N64 or Playstation 2 without the official development kits, so that plays into it too.
On the other hand, the XBox is commodity hardware, produce primarily for the US (true?), and uses publically documented APIs. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft handles the licencing issue.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I like the Twain reference, in regards to the GPU specs. Slight shift in phrasing, and it could be a fairly prophetic assessment of the X-box itself.:P
That said, anyone else notice that more people are speaking of this as a real product, instead of quite-likely-vaporware as it was originally (vehemently) denounced? I see a handful of posts talking about how it hasn't shipped yet ("for the record," I think is the phrase being used), but as time goes on, it seems MS marketing is getting this notion into heads all around.
My (arbitrary fraction of a dollar).:)
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
We all know what the advert won't be:
From the company that brought you the GUI (stolen from the Mac), the Point-And-Drool Interface (stolen from the Mac), the ability to multitask (smirk) (stolen from UNIX), the ability to use a value of 0 with sleep (stolen from UNIX), sound effects (stolen from Linux) and the and elements in HTML (stolen from, erm, no-one), perpare to be amazed by the latest in gaming technology. The X Box allows you to play fantastic games from the comfort of your armchair.
Look on in awe as lots of polygons draw (slowly) on the screen! Marvel at the Blue Screen Of Death cheat in many games! Be astonished by the magic of Undocumented API Calls (TM)! Drop dead of boredom whilst the useless piece of trash boots up! (Oops)
Ahem.
The fact that the PS2 doesn't have a hard disk, has FireWire instead of Ethernet, and doesn't use Intel are all good signs to me: Sony knows how to calculate with the thin margins of the consumer market; Microsoft doesn't seem to get it.
However, there is something good about the Xbox: the Xbox seems pretty well specified and PC compatible. It will almost certainly boot Linux. And Microsoft will have to wheel and deal to bring down the price, maybe even subsidize it, because the game market is price sensitive. So, for a few hundred dollars, we'll get a standardized low-end Linux box (although a PS2 with external disk may still be better).
Altogether, this is just business as usual for Microsoft. They do a precompetitive announcement years ahead of having anything real, trying to scare developers away from other platforms. They write a hardware spec that, if they could magically produce it today, would price them completely out of the market, and that will be uncompetitive by the time they get around to delivering it. And you can bet that they will mess it up with an unwieldy Windows-like UI. We already know that the APIs will be DirectX (yuck). We have seen exactly the same thing with PocketPC/WindowsCE, and they just don't seem to learn.
I remember cutting my teeth on 'Zen and the art of graphics programming' years ago. Man, that book was awesome. Programming assembler@ 320x240 or 320x400 or even (gasp) 640*480! All on a 486! Michael Abrash is the man. Along with Tom Swan. Whatever happened to him, I wonder?
Consoles are popular and fun exactly BECAUSE they aren't upgradable. People want to go buy the newest racing sim, pop it in their living room game system, and be off and running. This doesn't happen if their are RAM/CPU upgrades possible.
If it were, games would have to have performance options....too slow on your system? Too bad, turn the texture detail a little lower or spend money to buy some more RAM. Well...should I turn down texture detail and give up a little prettiness or keep the lower frame rates? How far should I turn it down? What about color depth?
This is what PC's are for. Read the article - the guy waxes ecstatic about how great it is programming for a static system. The developers get comfortable with that exact system, and the games get prettier and faster as we go due to code optimization and getting the quirks right.
There is no way in hell the PS would be as popular and household as it is now if it were upgradable. People would have stopped buying games a long time ago if they had to purchase a new GPU or something to make them look as good as they can. Consoles are meant to be as simple as possible, like, say, a VCR. Pop your new cassette/cd/dvd and hit power. Boom, it starts up, runs perfectly. It's an entertainment box for the mass market.
What you're describing is a PC. Fine, use your PC for games, add your new shiny NVidia gpu's and compile your new kernels to your heart's content, and be happy. Not everyone wants that. The typical console buyer is looking for simplicity, not figuring out settings to make the newest game run decently on your specific set of hardware.
BTW, you might say something like "well program the settings to detect what you have and run accordingly." If you plan to use cheap aftermarket PC style upgrades, you can count that out. There's no way programmers could account for the millions of possible configurations, not to mention the impossibility of predicting future developments. And if they sell parts specifically for the consoles to keep them simple, the upgrades would cost astronomical amounts of money.
There's a reason consoles have never been upgradable. The Dreamcast does this to the max extent possible - choose your 'net connection. Maybe add a newer HD to your PS to keep more saved games or something, but never, never, never let the user upgrade the console in a fashion that will allow him/her to increase performance. This just creates massive problems for PR and developers.
The PS2 design, having no disk in the box but a standard interface for adding an external one, is the right choice for a consumer product, IMO. It means that people can upgrade the main box without losing their data, and it lowers the cost of the main box. It also means that consumers can buy a lot of other useful external devices and keep using them when they upgrade.
The Xbox design with the disk in the Xbox and some sort of "expansion slot" and Ethernet is altogether much inferior. With Xbox, Microsoft is thinking "in the box".
As for Sony's strategy and corporate citizenship, they are a consumer products company and they make hardware. Sure, they are a big corporation, they do proprietary stuff, and sometimes even plain stupid things (e.g., memory stick). They also push proprietary standards from time to time. But so far, I don't see them trying to take over the world by attempting to put tentacles into every protocol and infrastructure known to man (we can criticize them if they ever get there). And I note that the PS2 already boots Linux and has some gcc support. I don't know where all that came from, but I suspect it involved at least some cooperation from Sony.
Suggestion - Get a fucking life.
The answer is simple: the hardware is mass produced and gives you excellent bang for the buck. And it has all the bits and pieces you need for building a supercomputer: the FireWire provides very fast networking and access to disks (perhaps based on object storage disks), and the PSX2 (*) has two vector processing units that can be useful for scientific computations. That's why people have started looking into building Beowulf-like clusters out of them.
The Xbox may or may not be interesting for the same reasons. Its hardware is more traditional (Intel processor, Ethernet, local disk) and that would make it easier to put together a Beowulf cluster out of them. On the other hand, I remain unconvinced that the Xbox can actually be produced at a price that makes it interesting to use for supercomputing. And what makes it particularly uninteresting is that it isn't going to ship in the near future.
(*) Where did that "X" in "PSX2" come from?
Comment posting software should:
- Generate a random phrase (about 4 words) or number (about 10 digits)
- Render it to a PNG/JPEG/GIF (uncompressed, to be sure) using a random font
- Distort the image slightly, add some noise, whatever
- Show the resulting image to the user
- Require the poster to type in that same exact phrase or number
If your bot can beat this system, its output is probably worth reading.--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
PS2 is *different* to develop for. Not difficult.
The joy is that games are going to get better as the developers get time to try all the different ways of doing things with it.
A lot of the developers I've heard complaining about PS2 development are complaining that they have to have some Linux skills to develop on it.
I predict the EULA would say that the end-user only purchased a license to use the X-Box, and under no circumstances should the user delude themselves that they actually purchased the hardware.
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
with a few exceptions (007, Zelda64, etc)all N64 games are inherently boring. I'd say that 85% of N64 games have a play life of 1~2 weeks. I suppose that this is due to the low storage capacity of the cartridges.
Well, thanks to those exceptions, you've ruled out that the size of the cartridge has anything to do with the quality of the games... If one can do make a great game, anyone can make a great game, given the same constraints.
Maybe it's the game developers faults that their games are so lame?
Running a pretty tight ship there, eh captain? Let's see, 1998? Four service packs and dozens of security patches most of which require a reboot and you've been able to weather two gruelling years as an NT admin with only ten reboots?
..
Fucking armchair MCSEs
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
To sum it it all up: How nice is Half-Life 2 going to be when you're looking at it on a TV? How fun will it be without a keyboard (the flaw inherent in all PC-to-console ports)? How incredibly fun will it be when the person on the other end has a 1600x1400 monitor and can gib your forhead using the sniper rifle without you ever seeing her? How fun will PC games like Roller Coaster Tycoon be without a mouse? How fun will StarCraft be without the ability to message your opponents (or even worse, on a SPLIT SCREEN)?
Yes, Microsoft has a ton of potential sitting here, and the thing looks damn cool. No, they are not (apparently) doing the right things by saying "just port with DirectX".
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
But OpenGL has been supported in Windows for ages...from NT3.51, win95, through to the latest win2k and millenium. Now I know it's not the world's greatest implementation, but it's good enough for id et al to use. So what makes you so sure MS hate OpenGL enough to stop it's use in X-Box?
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I thought that the OS would be on the game CD.
****Gfx Scrollbar Special case hit!!*****
Some of the samples aren't bad either. Have you ever used the MSDN?
Cooool. As a side note, I like how his Linux book has a relatively plain, unobtrusive cover, where the other three have gaudier, flashier ones. But that's probably the /. in my blood talking. :)
That's because it is far cheaper to develop for the PC since you don't need all the fancy dev-hardware you do to develop for a console. Additionally, all the big console companies require you to APPLY once you've made a game to them to get your game approved for sale for their console, so if your game doesn't meet their standards, it's a no go!
While this may make for better game quality overall on average, it also makes for FAR, FAR fewer games overall and correspondingly less interesting experimentation as well!
I used it for three hours until it decided it would corrupt the hard disk and destroyed a bunch of nice data. I guess mileage varies.
The machine never crashed in the two years I ran NT4 on it though, and hasn't crashed again since I put NT4 back on it.
So? Consoles are tuned for game performance in a way that PCs aren't: you can buy a great graphics card for your PC, but the motherboard wasn't designed with the sole purpose of being a raging triangle-slinging red-hot graphics mama. Your game is going to have far better cache performance on a console than it will on your desktop machine, where it has to contend with the OS and whatever else you're running for those cache lines.
And most importantly, the console has a reliable, very regular refresh rate. You know *exactly* how many cycles you'll get for each frame and you can wring every last bit of computation from them. On a PC, you never know precisely how much computation you'll get in -- there are too many unknowns, too many places where you need to contend for resources, or where a random delay might cost you a millisecond or two. This means less reliable frame rate, and a whole lot of overhead in terms of programmer effort in order to carefully monitor your run rate and compensate accordingly.
It's an apples-and-oranges comparision to look at specs on game consoles and desktop PCs. If you look under the hood of any gaming box, it's always slightly scandalous what "slow" hardware they're getting away with. But the consoles are always designed so that good programmers can exploit that hardware to the absolute max, something which is much tougher on a PC, which has to waste some of its raw power on general-purpose flexibility.
kinda hard to 'push the hardware to the limits' through DirectX though, isn't it?
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
With MS, it's all just bluster until we actually see something. From the looks of things, that's over a year away. By the time that thing ships, I'll have a PS2 and probably a couple of dozen games for it. I'm sure I won't need it (the XBox). By the time my PS2 becomes dated, one or two more generations of consoles will have come to pass.
The people that XBox will be good for is the people who just decided to get into gaming when it comes out, or the ultra-gearheads who have to have all the different consoles.
I'm just not going to get excited about a product that, even according to MS is at least 15 months away, especially when you consider how much longer it takes them to ship their products than they first imagine. (That's not really a slam against MS directly when you consider how much longer kernel releases, and releases of Debian take than the initial estimates from those teams. The real problem with MS is that they use those delays to try to keep people from buying other products, whereas the Debian and kernel teams are just perfectionists. They don't really give a rat's hiney what you use [more or less}).
Cheers..............
Come on, you fantastic /. developers: figure out a way to add kill files to /. user profiles. I want to put "Whatever happened to beer" in my kill list. Splice it into the moderation system so that if a particular user is in the kill profile of more than 90% of the users who use kill profiles, that user loses karma or gets posted at a lower level.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Everyone is forgetting that in 6-12 months, a PC that will be able to turn out the performance of the X-box will still be over $1000. Plus, you have to factor in the cost of a monitor.
No one will ever have a few friends over playing some action game on a 17" monitor hooked up to the computer. My friends and I have a blast playing the N64, where I just drag my controller and plug it in to the box, on a 20" TV. Plus there are few things nicer than playing Ridge Racer with my friend Carl on his 55" Hitachi.
Fact is, most PC games are single user (multiplayer through the net at best). The PC has never been a good platform for having a few people play at once - just look at how hard it is to hook up the controllers. Unless everyone happens to have an MS Sidewinder or some other controller that can be daisy chained, it's impossible. Even given that, its a pain to configure and set up to even start playing the game. Look at the N64: plug it in the TV, plug in however many controllers you want, hit power. THAT'S IT.
It doesn't matter if PC's are faster. My PC is sure as hell an order of magnitude faster than the Dreamcast, and it cost me about $1500 with a 19" monitor. Has that stopped the DC from selling? Hell no.
Read my other post: consoles are all about simplicity of hardware. People who buy and enjoy them usually want to just plug in and go. They don't want to have to read manuals and figure out how to get the damned controllers to even be recognized by the game, or tweak performance based on your current hardware. They want to plug into the TV and go.
Performance vs. PC is not an issue at all - they're totally different platforms that don't compete much. Performance vs. other consoles is what's important, and it seems like the X-box is going to kick the ass of whatever else is out there come launch time. This, MS' name, and massive developer support will make it a winner, provided they can release it on schedule at a decent price.
That was ms vaporware layed a turd.
___
Sony isn't pushing firewire because it's cheaper.. Ethernet is dirt cheap right now, and alot more widespread. Firewire is attractive to sony because the PSX2 is a way to get digital sony-branded storage into the home; All of their higher-end digital toys support it, from the sony vaio (mmm, my baby), their digital camcorders, and IIRC most of their products have firewire plans.
I suspect this is the reason the PSX will support hard drives - they want a way to monopolize your digital entertainment, as the kids they weaned on the PSX are now starting to make some money, and might want a camcorder for the pr0n/kids whatever. The PSX would be a good place to store all that, now, eh?
Sony isn't much better than MS, but they don't claim otherwise, either. Ever try getting vaio tech support out of 'em? And I don't want to know what kinda trade you'd have to make for the programming specs on the vaio C1 embedded camera. :)
..don't panic
Admittedly there will be less time needed for writing for the X Box with every machine being identical, but again, how many developers are there around who will be writing *original* (ie. not ports) games for the X-Box? With the likes of Sony/Sega/Nintendo and the PC around I shouldn't imagine too many for quite a while. If they don't get lots of industry support quickly, it could go the way of the N64 and find itself with very few games.
I'm not sure if it is the "cutting-edgeness" of the specs that really matter. Think of it this way: I run a 1 GHz Athlon (thunderbird) with a 64MB Geforce 2 and 512 MB RAM. Using the Quake3 timedemos I can only keep around 45 FPS at 1280x1024. Now the X-Box for most everyones intents and purposes will never go above 640x480. Now if I take another machine, 600 PII, 128 MB RAM and the 64MB GF2. Do the same test at 640x640 and I keep around 60+ FPS.
The resolution is what determines the speed of a console machine. TV's cannot top 640x480, so if your console has a 120 MP fill rate (ala N64) then regardless of how tight the code is there will be some speed.
It's similar to the quake addict who plays at low resolutions so the only lag comes from his connection and not the hardware.
The N64 is upgradeable, you know that little slot in front of the cart slot? Last December, Nintendo released a 4 meg Ram upgrade.. Doesn't do much for older games, but it does increase preformace on newer ones, allows for better graphics, higher frame rates and what not. Only one game I know of requires it(DK64) so most of your arguments are still valid, but PC aren't the only ones that can be upgraded. The Saturn also had a ram upgrade for the slot behind the CD. I believe there was a 1 meg released in the US and a 4 meg was released in Japan. A lot of the Capcom OTT 2-d fighters needed this. Look at the Japanese Marvel vs. Capcom for Saturn and the PSX version.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
I'd bet the present high end gaming PC is a 256Mb system with a 32 or 64 meg video card. Not to mention the fact that there's another few megs of cache on the disk controller.
;)
Cosidering a year and a half ago you were doing well to have any more than 64, I reckon that by then high end pcs will have 512Mb of ram and 128 for graphics.
Of course that will be a graphics system that can service a decent monitor, not a tv
From the second to last paragraph of the article
Yes, boys and girls, this is the shining city on the hill brought to you by your good friends at Microsoft®: pay no attention to the rats, or to the raw sewage flowing in the streets, or the bands of armed thugs lurking in dark alleys to rob or murder innocent passersby. Without Microsoft® none of these great innovations(TM) would have been possible.
Simplicity is a massive advantage to consoles yes, but with the huge hype surrounding the PS2, is there going to be much room left for the 'casual gamer'. Going from what I've heard and read (and hey, I sure could be wrong) the people getting most exited about the X Box are PC gamers. Say X Box to half the population they will blank you, say PlayStation 2, they'll be saying "Oh those, yeah I wouldn't mind buying one of them". Performance is an issue with people playing from a PC backround. For example, I played Perfect Dark the other day on the N64 (it's just come out here in the UK). One of the first things I noticed was horrible slowdown just on two player games, 4 players with bots got much much worse, and in my view the game suffers from this. Performance can't be dismissed as there will always be games that will push a console up to, and beyond breaking point. There are people who will migrate from the world of consoles to PCs because they will see the advantages. The X Box is by far the closest anything has come to a PC, and it's even easier to compare like for like.
As I said earlier, the causal gamer will probably have settled in with a PS2 by the X Box release and be happy with it. How come you think the PlayStation kept selling despite far superior (in virtually every sense) consoles?
Okay, yeah, implementing ActiveX on a platform other than Win32 would require implementing lots of other stuff - but this discussion is about DirectX.
On the other hand, I can also beleive that parts of that are tightly tied into Win32, too...
In fact, I refuse to believe that it is otherwise, unless someone can show me that it is - Microsoft are not known for giving the competetion any way in, let alone a relatively straightforward one.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Realize that game developers are only taking advantage of a fraction of the power of the average PC at the moment. Wanna specifically support Katmai instructions? Only if you want extra QA headaches and don't care about processors prior to the Pentium III. Wanna support Matrox bump mapping? Only if you want extra QA headaches and think there are enough Matrox owners to make it worthwhile. Wanna support 3DNow? Wanna support GeForce T&L? Wanna support the 3dfx T-buffer? Wanna optimize texture handling for a particular card? Same answer to all of them.
We just give up and support a generic subset of what's out there. We could push the two year old Voodoo 2 beyond what people expect from a GeForce 2, but there's no incentive. Crazy geeks never say "forget it, my graphics card is reliable, and I'm gonna stick with it." They'll upgrade at any cost, even if a new card is priced as much as a PlayStation 2 and has horrible drivers (as anything from nVidia does).
Yes, and it will still be able to do FAR LESS than that $1000 computer. Please, do you really want to try to surf the web on your computer. Have you SEEN what fonts look like at that resolution??
Fact is, most PC games are single user (multiplayer through the net at best).
Please! Consoles are JUST NOW starting to get net-saavy? Define multiplayer, because to me, being able to play Starcraft with 7 other people or Quake3Arena against 30 -- THAT'S multiplayer. Yes, consoles are admittedly better if you all want to be playing on the same monitor, but half the time I hate that anyways, because when the TV screen gets divided up, it gets really hard to tell who's doing what. But I'm getting off track...In any case, admittedly there are some types of games I would definitely rather play with others on a console -- BUT NOT ALL. Sports games (football, basketball, etc.) are a perfect example. Racing games are another. However, there are LOTS of games that I would never in a million years want to play on a console. Starcraft for instance. Quake3 or UT for another example.
You've got to remember, that with all this "plug n go" you're talking about, your making a number of huge hardware sacrifices, foremost being resolution. I don't know about you, but would I want to play Quake3 with a gamepad and at 640x480 when I can play on my PC at 1280x1024 -- FOUR TIMES the resolution, and with a mouse! Hell, no. And lots of others feel the same way...
It's interesting that, for the longest time, expandability was seen as the way of the future. That's part of why the PC clones killed earlier machines, like the Apple II and Atari 800. But we've come full circle, and we're not so sure. There's much to be said for fixed hardware. Heck, you could have taken an Atari 800, shrunk it down to a small unit that could run on AA batteries, and you'd have something comparable to a Game Boy. 1978 hardware would still be selling in 2000.
There are some lessons for Linux in here, though I don't know if they'll ever help the cause. There are many stories about how companies doing development for the original IBM PC or Apple or Atari computers used VAXen or other minicomputers for development. After all, a hulking machine with gobs of processor and storage, a real multitasking operating system, and optimizing compilers just *had* to be better for development than an 8-bit machine with 48K RAM, right? But it turned out that assemblers written for those 8-bit machines were outrunning the minicomputers by a factor of 2-10 times. Why? Because lots of the standard goop that 1970s geeks thought was necessary turned out not be so. We're coming around to that point again, as lots of people don't know their computer history.
What could a programmer do if Linux were to be ported onto this box?
Please point me to any of these.
P.S. BTW there's no need in distortion if you use jpeg.
Since the DirectX API is public knowledge, are there any open source projects to implement that API onto Linux? (If that happened, wouldn't that open up XBox games to Linux machines?)
The bump mapping on a G400 isn't too bad, but from the uses I've seen of it are pretty cheesy. It's almost as if it's thrown in to satisfy a check-box on the box (Yes! We have bump mapping).
Of course, Matrox could start doing the Right Thing and also expose bump mapping as an OpenGL extension (nVidia does this with all of their nifty-new features), but I'm not holding their breath considering they can't even get basic OpenGL functionality working.
Feh.
Well, that's just it. It's a vapor box. Anything is possible. Do you honestly think MS will release this without some kind of OS check in the boot cycle?
___
I'm not a gamer. Games tend to suck too much of my time away into the black void of oblivion, so I stay away from them.
Having said that, I really don't care one way or the other about the PSX2, Dreamcast or the X-Box. They're interesting in an academic sense, but not much else.
The X-Box scares me. MS is using COTS hardware to speed R&D time and ultimately, time to market. For a company brand new to the gaming world, I'm worried. They're going to integrate existing hardware and software together into a package that will be a gaming console. This means there will be problems. It will crash. I really believe that it in order to have a successful, long-term gaming platform, it is worth the R&D time to build it, fro the ground up. Then your engineers know the hardware, in and out. Your programmers know the code, in and out. You're not selling a piece of hardware that's been cobbled together into some semblance of a working gaming console, you're selling a machine, designed and built to play games. When Sony introduced the PSX, industry was skeptical. At that time, it was Nintendo and Sega, the game console giants. But Sony introduced a quality machine, with the capability to run games from CDs. They had good APIs, and other solid developer support. And now the Playstation is a force, and Sega is struggling to catch up.
But no! I hear the proponents scream. The X-Box will be on known hardware - Windows only crashes because of the infinite combinations of hardware and software that it must work with! This is a good point. But MS tried this with the Palm/Pocket PC - and failed to create a solid, stable platform.
The only saving grace that I see is MS's Hardware division. Pocket PC aside, I really like MS pepherials. Their mice are unsurpassed, IMHO. Someone in this story has mentioned their "daisy-chain" joysticks. Etc, Etc, Etc. MS Hardware has had a solid history of producing good hardware. I'd like to see them involved in the X-Box development.
Unfortunately, I think that the XBox will go the way of the Palm PC, the Pocket PC, the Active Desktop, '96 "Push" technology, and a number of other Microsoft innovations.
But it will be fun to watch.
J.J.
What's to stop a smart engineer from taking all 64MB of XBox functionality, placing the whole thing onto a PCI card and calling it a "super hardware accelerated" graphics card? Wouldn't that just be an extreme example of hardware acceleration? Shouldn't all graphics cards in the future handle on-board all the stuff XBox is going to do as a stand alone product? I would pay for one.
Let's see... As soon as it's released and GCC supports its CPU, NetBSD and Linux will be ported to it. Then somebody will port the XFree server for it... instant cheap X box! (No wait, that's what it's called.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
This means that as the X-box actually gets released it will have the same processor as a low end desktop.
Now consider that the X-box has, as people have suggested, a 4 year product life. This means that towards the end of that span it will be using a 6 year old cpu. And 6 years ago from today the pentium 60 was just coming on the market (I think)
Part two - this WILL converge with part one
From what I can see this product uses the same DX api's as Windows will, presumably so that games authors can write software which runs on both platforms easily.
Now if we assume that the X box was actually released 4 years ago from today, this means that game authors would be writing the latest games with the level of optimization required to have them run on a p60 (albiet at 640x480). Now I dont doubt that with really tight code that sort of performance can be realised but it will certainly be nice to be able to run the latest games on a 4 year old computer at full speed.
This may also have some fairly negative effects on intel. Imagine the home market only upgrading every 5 years rather than every 2 or 3. Also they'd be forced to carry on making PIII733's to keep up with microsoft's demands... and hopefully quad and eight processor mobo's (cue Abit) will pop up to use thse dirt cheap chips :)
Certainly a development to keep an eye on.
Consoles are really easy to upgrade. For less than $250, you can upgrade your processor, graphics card, and memory all at once and without opening the box--by buying a new one. On the PS2, the stuff you want to keep, your network connection and disk, are hooked up to the FireWire port, so you get to hang on to them (the Xbox, OTOH, has the same design flaw as PCs by putting the disk into the main box).
Usually served up with a side dish of sexual innuendo. At least this (real) version has some internal rhyme.
Wah!
nVidia's been pretty good with OpenGL (at least on Win32 platforms -- nVidia on Linux is not something I've tried before). I've got a nVidia TNT2 card at home and it's got the best OpenGL drivers I've seen on a consumer card. They're stable and I've not seen any visual "weirdness" that I've seen on other cards when using OpenGL (the G400 comes to mind as a particularily bad example). You've got to remember that nVidia scooped up a lot of SGI people to work on their OpenGL drivers, and it shows. Plus, a lot of the technology demos nVidia puts out use OpenGL.
In other words, nVidia is the good company when it comes to OpenGL. I'm not sure, though, who'd be the bad company (3dfx? matrox? ATI?).
Yeah it's all perl generated anyway. I dont see any major reason why we cant each chip in a list of regexps that we dont want to see...
:)
and they could always be put on a page so that uninitiated users could copy the regexps of the more god like ones
P.S. Moderate parent message up anyway.
Nowhere does he talk about what this means for our little pet operating system(s), and what the possible implications are. If it's running a custom architecture, it's quite likely possible that it might not be portable to the degree we'd like - for instance, to get a linux kernel on one of these fabled boxes. While I'm personally not the target market for one of these machines - I'd much rather learn all the intimate details of a nice open API like OpenGL, rather than waste my life on a propietrary piece of hardware that will be junk-ola in 5 years - This would have been most nice. And I don't think the generation has come (yet) never to see a Dot Matrix printer.. still have some of those in service around here, excellent for firewall log reporting :). (albeit in a sound dampened enclosure..)
So, we've got another microsoft product where you can bow down to BillyG or get the schlong. Anyone know which half of the micro-bells will be getting this particular evil-empire to be? Or how microsoft gets another leg up on us wanting open APIs - you think this thing is going to run OpenGL? Forget that, and forget ports to linux, too. But there will be a greeeaaat path to get stuff running on Windows 200x! :)
Anyhow, some observations. It would have been nice to hear the man himself talk about the APIs a little more, and maybe throw some weight around for us little people.
kudos
..don't panic
I agree completely about priorities, but don't underestimate MS here. I've been predicting they would collapse under their own weight since I downgraded from WfW 2.0 to 6.0 and in the end, I do have to respect them. Gaming is one of their lines of business where they face actual competition, and it's growing twice as fast (I think) as the rest of their business. The best of these (AoE) don't rely on insider windows knowledge, but on simple good game making. Everyone knows they can push crap with a monopoly, but they can still put up a fight where they have to.
As far as third-party development I *believe* they'll get it early just because the game co's will want to ride the Microsoft gravy train. If that doesn't happen, they can buy enough companies or properties to prime the pump for launch.
Also, from what I know, having Abrash on the team is a great asset. Not three feet from my monitor sits "The Zen of Graphics Programming", a book I read over and over though the technology is hopelessly outdated. A guy who gets that much joy out of squeezing every cycle from the VGA isn't just going to start writing fatware just because he's got the extra power. Check out the book. The guy's got juice.
Kill, Tux, kill!
The beauty of /. is that you can read it wherever you can get web access: work, home, the library. I don't feel like trying to persuade the library system or my boss to install and maintain a slash client.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Wow, that's gotta be one of the worst trolls I've ever read. I guess a good troll is hard to find these days...
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Er, it never occurs to you to actually get technical support from either Microsoft or your hardware manufacturer? If you're getting 5-10 BSODs a day, then there is a problem. If you worked for me, and never tried to fix the problem, you would be out on your ass.
Or, possibly more likely, this is a baldface lie.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Yeah, perhaps I got a bit carried away by suggesting it should get mixed up with the moderation system, which I agree works pretty well.
As for browsing at level 2, well... I have to admit. Some of the trolls are amusing.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Do hardware lights really hit performance THAT much? With 8 local and 1 infinate, the performance drops from 125M polys down to 8M polys! Can anybody elaborate on just why that occurs?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Also for the record, jerk, I have a Pentium III 450Mhz, not some 1Ghz super powerful machine.
Seriously though, look at what companies have done with PlayStation's crappy GPU. Even games like Road Rash on Genesis are amazing when you consider that it was running on a Z80 and a 68000. Microsoft may have the most powerful console when it comes to graphics, but if the developers aren't writng tight code, then it won't matter too much. Sony Sega and Nintendo are capable of getting the major 3rd party developers and making games for themselves, and by making their own games, they have a team who knows all the ins and outs of the system. However, the ability of the game writer to easailly port DirectX games to X-Box *may* provide MS with some good games, but look at how much crap is released for PCs that would never sell on a console. Graphics aren't everything people.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
But at least other companies can and do make Firewire/iLink/1394/whatever equipment. And the specs are available. Most of the 1394 interfaces even support the Open Host Controller Interface, which means the same driver binary works on nearly any 1394 card and peripheral!
Take a look at:
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
These days, NVidia is pretty good with OpenGL.
Unfortunately, their OpenGL drivers for Linux are not completely free software, but they are very fast.
3dfx is the "other company". They came late to the open source revolution, but have jumped on board pretty well. Unfortunately their hardware is not as good, and neither are their drivers, even the open source ones.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
That is, if you avoid to say that in 1986 the Commodore Amiga had UMA, a programmable (2D, ok) blitter chip that could be used to achieve complex results such as hardware-assisted 'life' cellular automata that run at 1000 generations per second on a 7.14MHz machine, and had a display list processor that was able to alter a lot of the HW registers of the chipsets according to user-defined "programs".
Interestingly enough, somewhere in all the chaos surrounding Amiga, there was also a German company (phase5) that planned to release a new and improved version of the Amiga. The name of the thing? A-Box...
Ciao,
Rob!
AniToolBox! An Open Source animation program!
The X system indeed is out performing any other gaming console at this point...But it's not even on the market...By the time it does get on, theres a chance that it could be out played. The hype is getting amplified by facts that cant be applied to something that I cant use.
;)
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When I buy a console, I want something that will be easily upgradable; More ram/cpu's...Make gaming consoles more like computers, minus the need to maintain gaming console like a computer, and youve got a good looking piece of equipment, IMHO.
Oh, And it should run on a linux kernel.
-Swift
-Swift
Not necessarily. Nothing beats a fighting game where the person is right next to you. Ditto for coop play action games. Even games like Golden Eye are a lot more fun than a bout of Quake because you are actually playing with people. The TV really doesn't constrain games that much. For example, I have a 53 inch TV. Playing StarFox or GoldenEye multiplayer with four people still leaves a screen about the size of a 25inch TV for each person. As for N64, most N64 games are meant of 6 year olds, so no surprise you find them boring.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I predict the X-Box will have a "no hacking" EULA.
When you consider that the XBox is made of standard PC components, and will probably be sold at a loss (profits are made from the games), what is to stop someone from buying an xbox just to rip the guts out of it? Seems like a nice source for some cheap components.
When it comes out, the hardware won't be worth as much as it is today, and its possible bits of the hardware won't work in regular PCs, but I for one look forward to voiding my warranty and plundering the contents.
but look at how much crap is released for PCs that would never sell on a console
Well, having a couple of friends realy into the N64 scene, and thus having seen a lot of games that were made for the N64. Let me just tell you that there are far more "low cost, quick and dirty" titles on consoles that on the PC. There is a virtual infinity of crappy japanese games out there. Another example is the Dreamcast, one of the first title released on it was "Pen-Pen" (a racing games except with a peguin), which clearly would never have existed on the PC market, yet it was one of the best selling titles.
Now don't take me wrong there are numerous excellent game on consols, probably considering all the different consols more than on PCs.
I think the trick Mircosoft will run to is how to keep licensed X-Box developpers from releasing games on the PC as well. Because it's the game that sell the consol and not the other way around (I bought my Playstation just for Wipeout).
Murphy(c)
It seems that AMD is close to breaking the Intel / Microsoft hegemony for PC designs. Witness the success of Slot A (Athlon) machines, which use a very different architecture than Pentium II/III machines, an architecture not initially designed by Intel. However, it looks like NVidia may be succeeding in taking the place of Intel. Witness DirectX 8. What originally started as an API to abstract gaming hardware, has now turned into an API designed around NVidia's next generation of video cards. This will force the other video card makers to always play catch up, being a generation behind. Sounds like the AMD of old, and sounds like a recipe for failure. Has Microsoft just selected the company to form the next monopoly, just like IBM unwittingly selected Intel & Microsoft? -- Bryan
According to Microsoft, this is one hell of a machine. According to the spec sheets, this is (almost) available today. What Microsoft is doing is building a console from what appear to be off the shelf components. P3 for CPU, ordinary RAM, A graphics chipset that I'm certain will be availble in AGP flavor when the X-Box is released, and possibly even SoundBlaster for sound. Heck, it even uses USB, although Micro$oft changed the shape of the plug so they can get money from periphs.
With all of the use of standard parts, it isn't inconceivable that someone could make an X-Box clone. With clones come upgrades. Perhaps we will start to see hopped-up X-Box clones? At the very least, I would expect to see plug adapters so we can use our PC parts with the non-standard X-Box plugs.
--Jeff
The article says that nVidia will be doing the OpenGL support for the XBox. I can't remember and perhaps someone can elucidate for me - is nVidia the really good company with OpenGL or the really bad one?
I seem to remember that nVidia is really bad with OpenGL. It seems to me that this will kind of force the hand of developers to DirectX 8. And that may or may not be a bad thing - if DirectX 8 is better tuned to the hardware, it could be better, but it probably reduces code portability.
This is where ms would, yet again, as it has done for years, exercise it's monopoly position and not licence the OS to anyone cloneing the box.
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Does anyone know if MS will act the way Sony, Sega, and Nintendo do, and demand both approval and a hefty cut of the royalty stream from game publishers?
Lets hope not. While one can argue that the production values of games have improved since the Japanese takeover of the console industry - one can only imagine the cool games that would have existed if the barriers to entry were less, and if freedom of expression prevailed.
For a humerous indictment of the corporate game censorship mentality, check out Doug Crockford's story about Maniac Mansion.
You are right, but in the way that you think. Multiplayer_over_network==the_only_multiplayer_wor th_playing. Split-screen sucks, and any multiplayer game that uses them is fuckin' worthless (except for 007, but it would have been 100x better on a PC/LAN combo).
Pricing is of course an issue. PC's are roughly 10x more expensive than N64. My issues w/ N64 are that:
That's all I have to rant about for now.... back to my cell....
Microsoft won't kill the PC -- the only thing they can do is change it. They didn't spend the past 10 years working on Windows and building up a monopoly just to turn around and scrap it. What Gates is doing is simple...
A few months ago, I was watching CNN. Some guy from Sony was talking about how they were going to replace the PC with the Playstation2. Microsoft took this personally and is now Jihading against Sony for the console market. The scaring thing is, they probably will win.
I know some people will disagree, and I personally hope this will not come to pass -- but didn't we say the same thing about Netscape four years ago?
Why using an XBOX instead of a PC? 1) First of all, you wanna play a game and not spend any time configuring it. 2) Internet access will be much smoother too and you won't need a 4 year network degre to configure it. 3) Since it is dedicated hardware, the game shouldn't crash and the console will not either since there is a very limited OS in there and it's burned in hardware, not loaded into memory. 4) The game console should not cost 2000$ or more like a computer. There isn't any price yet, but if we look at the PSX2 from Sony who do about the same job, it's around 400-500$, maybe less(But since it's coming from Micro$oft, you can bet it'll be more ;-). The BIG question here that no one seems to ask is: Since Ms will get to build the console, why not build computer components too? There isn't much difference between the 2 and why not building a computer who is 100% micro$oft(Hardware and Software)? If that happen, then truly hell will have fallen on earth for many users(But it will be paradise for Teks since we'll have jobs forever!)
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The PC, judging by todays rates of change will be lightyears ahead of this. Nvidia release new chipsets every 6 months and with Intel and AMD both already at 1Ghz, it's going to look like a old, slow PC in a pretty box.
Sure it will get more mass media attention than the PC, but from what I've read most of the games are going to be ports of PC games. The PC games of 2001/2002 are probably going to need a lot more power than this..
- A Microsoft logo at boot.
- A blue screen.
- A white font, no anti-aliasing necessary.
Other than that, there's not a whole lot that the card has to do. Expect maybe be replaced when a virus overwrites it's flash biosGo figure out something funny, or at least inciteful, then come back. In the mean time please refrain from posting this dull, stupid redundant shit.
I dunno if I'd go that far, but I can see some of the apps we do (VR for teaching dr's how to do needle sticks) being greate canidates for the x box. Right platform for other things than just games.
Dracosystems - Virtual Reality Engines and Applications
Good suggestion, except...
if a particular user is in the kill profile of more than 90% of the users who use kill profiles, that user loses karma or gets posted at a lower level.
You seem to be suggesting a way to moderate w/o recieving moderator points. What's to stop me from creating 100 accounts and slapping you on 100 kill lists to get all of your posts moderated down. Leave the moderation alone--don't fix what ain't b0rked.
You could also just browse at +2. -Erik
1) can't buy it.
2) can't see it.
3) can't get it.
4) can't touch it.
5) can't develop for something that doesn't exist.
Some statistics to back up my claim.
Number of units produced by ms = 0
Number of units shipped by ms = 0
User base = 0
In other words, what part of "no such thing" don't you understand?
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Now, this isn't to say Microsoft will do everything it can to "encourage" the use of Direct3D instead...
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I am the dot in slashdot.org