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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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 bios