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.

Comments

Do you guys think stuff like this is biased?

[Operandi]

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

Re:Do you guys think stuff like this is biased?

[Evangelion]

Goddammit people - the flight sim in Excel was put there as an easter egg by the programmers, so thier names would show up *somewhere* in the goddamn product. This was not a Microsoft thing, this was not in the design document. It was a nifty little extra put in by the programmers so they could actually leave thier names in the prodcut. For fuck's sake, if you're going to attack MS, at least attack them for something they did.

--

Deja v�

[Troed]

or what do you think?

Misinformation

[CaseyB]

It's an interesting story, but the lead-in above is entirely misleading.

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. :)

Duplicate/really old stories WAS: Re:Deja v�

[milkman1]

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.

Xbox Beyond the limitations of TV displays

[CandyMan]

I would like to point out that NTSC has a total of 640*480*30fps=9,216,000 pixels per second, and Pal has 720*576*25fps=10,368,000 pixels per second. (Please don't knock me over the specifics, I might be slightly wrong about NTSC -being European, I've never actually worked with it- and I know that Pal has a "square pixel" mode where horizontal resolution is 768, right? Just trying to give you nice thousands here.) 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.

This is why I think Abrash's words are very revealing:

MA: It's impossible to tell what performance developers will get until people are actually programming the hardware. It's also hard to evaluate because the chip is so programmable; how do you compare 125 mtris/s with 1 texture to, say, 12.5 mtris/s with a custom lighting model, along with 4 textures doing reflective bump mapping and a combiner program doing custom shading, plus shadows done on a second pass? It's not a matter of raw polygons anymore, but rather of the impact on image quality of the intersection of many factors: polygons, vertex shading, multitexture, texture lookups, pixel combiners, antialiasing, and multipass.

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!