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X-Box Limitations (Hemos Is Dumb) (Yes, I am)
Fervent writes: "Daily Radar has an interesting article with Michael Abrash, one of the lead XBox technological designers. What's fascinating about this article is not what the XBox can do, but what it can't do. Abrash talks about programming limitations, HDTV, and goes against the NVidia ratio quote (the one where Gates said the GPU would be 3 times as fast as current NVidia hardware). Get your fill of the talk here." Update: 10/03 03:54 PM by CT : hemos was out of town all weekend. He missed this story when we posted it the first time HAHA! Update: 10/03 07:33 PM by H : /me hangs head in shame.
Actually... if you have a NVidia-card, you might as well run it under Linux now.
Look at this.
The miniscule performance difference is not really worth the reboot, if you have ok hardware that is.
Who wants to bet that someone will try to squeeze Linux on this thing?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Though you'd start to have a problem if half the stories actually were OT. It's just a simple solution for a hopefully simple problem.
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but that moderate percentage of pro-Linux anti-M$ people just ready to jump on the X-box and hack it _must_ have M$'s attention, at the very least.
You're right. Microsoft is smart enough to know how to court developers -- they will encourage the cottage-industry guys, not stop them. If you hack PSX, you get a cease-and-desist letter. If you want to hack X-Box, here's some free tools! For a few bucks, here's a whole development kit. Philosophical differences aside, you give a toy like X-Box with the tools to do whatever you want with it, and hackers/developers will go wild with it.
Does anyone know whether Lego uses child labor? Or maybe they ruthlessly ran the Bric Blocs people out of business. Who cares? They make cool inexpensive toys and let me do what I want with them. And if it's the same with X-Box, you'll see a lot of people say, "well, they're not all bad"...
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The truth is out th- oh, wait, here it is...
From the original post:
And then, from the actual interview:
<sarcasm>
Ooh. Now there's a juicy scoop for you. The Big Cheese at the company says their technology is three generations ahead, and the lead tech guy on the project says it's more like two. What next?
</sarcasm>
Oh dear, another clueless idiot bashing the Mozilla project for no good reason. Oh well, someone has to dispell the myths...
Did you know that the vast majority of the code in Mozilla was written by somebody with an @netscape.com address? If you did, then you're just slagging off Netscape for no good reason. If you didn't, you are a clueless moron who should not be making such comments as you did.
Now, let's also not forget that Netscape have generously given us so much free code. Thanks to Mozilla now also being under the GPL (Or soon will be), a lot of open source projects will be able to benefit (Nautilus or Galeon anyone?).
Next time, please operate the strange device known as your brain before posting.
I have a TNT2 : every few months I try to get it to work but end up with a little box moving around my monitor saying "Horizontal Sync Out of Range."
:(
The refresh rates are all fine, I really don't understand what's going on.
:wq
yeah, Jesus Christ, for the amount of money the programmers got paid, and the amount of money the CONSUMERS paid for Office, you'd think they'd put a little more effort into fixing bugs. Or at least providing accurate and timely documentation on the file-format to ensure interoperability.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
For example, would such effort have been put into finding holes in DreamCast's ability if it were not spearheaded by Microsoft? While I dislike M$ as much as anyone else, I do like being my own devil's advocate... good for keeping from becoming narrow minded I believe.
Regards
It says 1.5 to 2 generations as opposed to 3 generations. That does not imply any particular speed ratio.
or what do you think?
it's in my head
It seems that in the PC gaming world, there are many "disjointed" efforts that haphazardly come together to make a game; programmers optimizing their code (or not) for the latest in OpenGL or Direct3D, then you've got the API handlers written by NVIDIA, ATI, 3dfx, et al translating them as best as possible to the graphic chipsets' native language.
And, of course, all of this works on top of Microsoft's OS. That's 3 pretty big things that are unable to be tuned properly. They must have generic interfaces due to the plug-n-play nature of the PC business. The solution has always been to say stuff like "Pentium II 300MHz, 64MB RAM, 3D Card w/16MB required". With the Xbox, it seems like the designers will have control of 2 of the 3 items listed above, and with a standard set of hardware, optimizing 3d engine/game code has got to become a lot easier. Suddenly the requirements can easily transform from a PII 300 to a Pentium 166, the 64MB RAM turns into 16 MB RAM, and the Video Memory gets to drop considerably as well considering the target is NTSC/PAL output.
Of course, like the Dreamcast, we'll be seeing VGA output boxes so we can play the newest games on our 21" monitors. And since NTSC resolution is hard on the eyes on a 21" monitor, the Xbox will need variable resolutions, forcing faster processors, bigger 3D cards, and more RAM, bringing us full circle to where we started. :P I think the Xbox will be wildly successful if users treat it as what it is: a closed-box console used for gaming, not general applications + games.
No-one can buy one. Stop fussing about something that won't arrive until at least Christmas next year (and that's just in the US), if it arrives at all.
I can just go back to the older story, cut and paste all the high-scoring comments, sit back and watch the karma just roll in. Thanks Hemos!
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Might I sugest that some kind of story warning system be implemented wherein the story would be showen to say 100 randomly selected readers, who loaded the main slashdot page at the right time, before it is actually posted.
Unfortunately that would delay the stories significantly. (This IS a NEWS medium, after all.)
A simpler, faster, and more automated method would be to have the posting software check any hyperlinks in the story against those in the other stories posted in the last week or so, and bring them to the editor's attention.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And that's why Bill Gates will personally install booby traps in EVERY X-Box that will go off if anybody tries to open it. That'll be his revenge against those Linux haxors.
Carmack stated that he's designing for hardware that doesn't exist yet. The XBox hardware *does* exist.
I would like to point out that NTSC has a total of 640*480*30fps=9,216,000 pixels per second,.... [snip] ... With that in mind, and neglecting overdraw, you don't need more than 12,000,000 polygons/sec anyway. If your rate is steady, that is.
I don't think Microsoft is stupid enough to limit the Xbox only to TV resolutions. If I get one (which is doubtful, but let's assume so for the sake of argument) there is no way I am going to plug it into a TV. A consumer TV is an outdated, horrible, blurry, flickering display platform. It sucks bowling balls through a garden hose. The only reason it is used as a computer display is because it allows people NOT to buy an expensive computer monitor with a smaller screen.
In any case, if I get an Xbox, it's going to get plugged into a decent computer monitor. And, of course, if the highest resolution it'll support will be 640x480 with 60Hz refresh rate...
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Xenex, check to make sure those HREF tags are closed before you hit the sumbit button, man!
Putz.
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
It was hardly a slight simulator. It was more like "asteroids" in the first person. There was no physics modeling or anything like tht - VERY code light. Calling it a flight simulator is like calling Wolfenstein-3D Quake3.
Okay, fine, it's not a real flight sim. _But_ that doesn't change the fact that it was a useless inclusion.
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- The memory devices and other componenets used on consoles are patented; only the console maker can authorize production of console software. For example, there wasn't an NES demoscene until the NES patents expired.
- Console makers are suing manufacturers of cartridge and disc dumping hardware (such as Bung) out of existence.
The Xbox seems more open-spec than traditional consoles (it's quite like a PC) but it can only be truly open if it becomes the X11box (as has happened to some i-opener models).<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
they will take a loss with the hardware and make their $$$ with the software.
Hence, the inevitable linux hacks are a very serious threat. Imagine a kickass web server/firewall for $300 running only open source software subsidized by Mr. Gates and company.
They are in the identical situation to CueCat. We can expect them to behave just like CueCat, if not worse. There will definitely be great entertainment when they attempt to clamp down on us hax0rs.
Taco could do with hacking a script together that scans each story post for 'furby autopsy' and 'textmode quake'. That would probably cut redundant stories at a stroke.
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And, considering that you've been moderated up, perhaps you could give a reason *why* Microsoft "wanted to cause problems for the PS2," a product currently not competing with any MS products.
First, I wasn't moderated up, I simply posted at "3".
I highly doubt that M$ is just causing problems for the PS/2, that was offered as a paranoid sort of statement. My point was that people are _already_ proclaimin the X-Box as the saviour of the ocnsole-world. However, the X-box is little more than a comples "thought" right now. It doesn't really exist to the public,and we have NO realistic idea when it will exist. However, thousands (hundres of thousands) or sheeple will wait and wait and wait until M$ get's the X Box done. In the mean time, these people aren't buying competitive products because they are buying into the hype of M$. _If_ the X Box is like any other major M$ product lately it will ship Wayyy behind schedule (probably 3 weeks after X Mas), and will only support 3/4 of it's stated features in the first version.
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wash away all the hype and what do we have? we have logic.
it is however many 'generations' away that nvidia wants it to be. if they want to release 3 new 'generations' of cards between now and then, they can.
but in reality, it exists now, it has been thought of now, it is of the current generation. they are just choosing to hold it back, or maybe it's still super buggy. my guess is the hardware is pretty much ready and they're giving software developers more time.
in any case, we've gone over before how stupid the x-box is. anyone who buys it is a moron. use your money for a PC which you can upgrade, not a small crappy PC which you cannot (which is what the x-box is.)
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
But yeah... I think readers should be able to vote a story as "old". To avoid trolls from taking over, perhaps preference could be given to people whose ratio of offtopic-votes to comment-posts is lower.
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I'm not much of a gamer, so my comment may be totally off-base...
Doesn't it seem like the X-box is going to be marketed directly toward a crowd with a large population of anti-MICROS~1 people? Sure, there's lots of people that have never heard of Linux, and think that Bill Gates is a visionary, but that moderate percentage of pro-Linux anti-M$ people just ready to jump on the X-box and hack it _must_ have M$'s attention, at the very least.
The thing that worries me, I remember when M$ release the first version of IE, and thinking "there is NO WAY this thing can be a threat to Netscape". I certainly don't want M$ to become the dominant set-top box company...
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read the slashdot discussion on this here
can entire news posts be set to -1, redundant?
fear is the mind killer
I saw the same article two days ago on slashdot please this stuff needs to stop.
It's a glitch in the matrix, it usualy happen when they change something...
Be afraid, be very afraid....
Just another coder...
BG said that the new nVidia chip would be three *generations* ahead of current chips, not that it would be 3x as fast. There's a VERY big difference.
Abrash said it would be 1.5-2 *generations* ahead of current chips.
-JF
MrJoy.com -- Because coding is FUN!
Abrash has nothing but good things to say about the new hardware. Granted, he works for the company, but he has more than enough credibility outside of the Microsoft arena for me to listen when he speaks.
He talks about the constraints that ALL hardware-level developers have to deal with, but he says nothing that indicates the X-Box hardware is especially limited.
To wit: "the bottom line is that this is the most powerful chip I could imagine anyone getting into a console in 2001"
"Ratios" in processing power are not mentioned anywhere in the article. Apparently some overenthusaistic PR guy (probably not Gates) said it was 3 generations ahead of current parts, and Abrash says that's a bit of an overstatement. It's merely 1.5 or 2 generations ahead. Wow, that really sucks. :)
So far, the PSX 2 has yet to prove itself. The X Box is already there. I can't wait. :)
It would seem that you are caught in MICROS~1's hypnotic rays. If you'll take a journey down to the local toy store, you will find that the X Box is not "already there". It's no where, it's nt sold yet, and it very well could be a HUGE, elaborate hoax by M$. Maybe there IS no X Box, maybe M$ just wanted to cause problems for the PS2.
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It seem like there is a redudant story post every day or two these days.
Might I sugest that some kind of story warning system be implemented wherein the story would be showen to say 100 randomly selected readers, who loaded the main slashdot page at the right time, before it is actually posted. I would suggest a system where the main page is randomly replaced with just the prospective new story. Comment posting would be disabled. There would also be several options for moderating the story. I would suggest:
Redudant
Ancient
OT (Not relevent to slashdot)
Great story
It would also have a box for explantion (forinstance to link to the older story)
The results of the moderation would be fed to a real time display shown to the poster of the story. This would allow them to cancel or delay unneeded redudant/otherwise bad postings.
This is why I think Abrash's words are very revealing:
I am not a graphics überhacker, and don't have the answer on that comparison, but the second option (the way the Xbox design team have taken) sure sounds nicer to programmers. And you don't really need any more triangles anyway. Hmm. It will take Playstation II hackers many headaches to do what will come naturally to the programmers of this simpler-yet-more-complex approach.On a related note: In a recent interview, John Carmack revealed that the Doom 2000 engine will have eight texture passes per polygon. (I am adding the emphasis). What, the Xbox can only do four? It is clear that id wants us PC gamers to keep our leer on when talking to those lowly conlosers. Hah!
http://barrapunto.com/ - News for nerds, en español
Um, hello? Abrash works for Microsoft, OK? In fact, as he states in response to the first question, he's a "Software Development Engineer (the generic Microsoft developer title), Xbox Advanced Technology Group". I don't think the motive behind the article is a direct attack against MS, although the Slashdot editorial team seem to enjoy such attacks as much as the next geek. Rather, I think the interview (which was posted by Daily Radar a few days ago) is cool, since it really asks someone who knows his stuff when it comes to graphics hacking.
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