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Tom's Hardware Reviews the Xbox
steddyj writes: "Tom's Hardware released this article which looks deep into the Xbox, its peripherals, and just about everything from every angle, and compares it to the PS. Incredibly detailed article."
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As the article says, the controllers are NOT USB, which is a really bad thing.
I wonder how long would it take for fellow electrical geeks to hack up an XBOX2USB adapter...
But to the point, I find the standard controller to be not big at all, if you forget how ugly it is (I know, I have BIG hands =) )
The Thrustmaster, OTOH, is maybe a little bit small, but it's ergonomically (and aesthetically) much nicer!
I think I'll have to wait for the ultimate controller to be released (the Coleco dual controllers ([pic here] ruled, you could put your hand INTO the controller and use all your fingers and your palms too... but those were the days).
Txurlo
- It has two fully programmable 300mhz T&L coprocessors, of which 1 is really usable, the other just supports the main CPU (but can run independently).
:)
- They wonder what people are doing with the 16 pixel pipelines, as if implying that it renders 16 layers or something. The PS2 fills 16 individual textured alpha blended pixels per cycle at 150mhz. In single texture mode the PS2 has far more fillrate than the XB, but scales linearly with extra passes.
- He complains about the 4mb video RAM. After framebuffers and Z buffer, you're left with about 1.5mb, at which point you realize they didn't intend it for actual storage, it's a streaming buffer. The bus bandwidth to transfer 18mb textures/frame at 60hz also helps make that a possibility.
I think people should take a look at the games and decide which platform they would rather play, and quit bickering over meaningless specs. They're both graphics monsters
-Wade
I knew we'd have this problem, and Tom's doesn't mention it...
Performance sucks on Xbox after a while as it starts to swap on the HD. It looks like stuff becomes fragmented.
Anyone want to comment on how we can correct this?
at the end of the day Games Sell Consoles. Microsoft has made a solid first attempt, but untill the games for the system begun to mature (mature as in quality, not as in pokemon) I can remain comofrtable in my choice to purchase the PS2. What is more interesting is thet the timing in the industry is now off. The game cube & XBOX were released a full year after the ps2, which means
1. The PS2 has more variety of stable, entertaining, and visually stunning games than any other console and
2. The PS2 is significantly behind when it comes to console tech. There is already talk of SONY shortening the PS2's life cycle to come out with a more davanced box earlier to compet with the other consoles that will be most likely coming of age at that time. A shortening of the console lifecycle from 5 years to, say, 3 years may have a detrimental effect ob the console market, much like it has to the pc market.
From the article:
J.M. Anti-aliasing can be adjusted on the PS2 with the motion blur option, but as soon as the camera moves too quickly, there are problems. We choose the technologies for their impact on the player's immersion. If the motion blur is an annoyance, we'll not use it.
There are at least 3 ways to do antialiasing on the PS2. Tekken 4 runs on PS2 hardware and has 2x supersampling. This can be done both by using the dual hardware raster combiner with blending and 2x rendering+stretchblit with bilinear filtering (which can subsample 4 texels into one by design).
This stuff is available with source code in the standard devkit samples directory. Sure documentation and examples are hard to understand and poorly written, but the options are there.
This guy J.M. guy is just another developer that gave up on doing real research on the hardware.
Vector units, not really T&L coprocessors. The difference is that vector units have no specific purpose other than to do lots of floating point math. On the PS2, each VU has 4 FMACs and 1 FDIV (one VU has one more of each), each operating on 4 pairs of 32-bit floating point values stored in 2 128-bit registers, and each capable of operating independently and simultaneously.
MMX and its successors pale in comparison.
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode."
You live in Switzerland and have a hard time understanding why the European X-box might be priced higher than in the US? It's stupid to do currency conversions on the boxes for two simple reasons: cost-of-living and cost-of-doing business. Both are much higher on the European continent compared to the U.S. A simple currency conversion doesn't do justice to the extra costs Microsoft has to absorb to do business in Europe.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
At least as far as I can tell.
I came upon an XB controller last month, and did exactly what you said - hacked a USB connector
on to the cable.
On plugging it into my machine (WXP), it was detected, and two devices showed up:
1) Some sort of hub-type gadget (possibly for the "card slots" on the bottom of the controller?)
2) An "Unknown Device", which I'm assuming to be the actual control interface.
If I knew anything about writing USB device drivers,
I'd try to hack one up, but I don't, so I haven't.
I prolly should try plugging it into a Linsux box just for shits and giggles, might at least be able to get the device ID or something else interesting.
C-X C-S
(Posting with a text browser, so the formatting might be fucked up...)
When it comes to Gaming consoles, looking at what has been done in the past would give you a fairly clear idea that they are all about "one-processor-for-each-medium".
Starting from the NES (or even Atari, for that matter), all these "computers" have different chips to process each element of a game, those being, graphics, physics/gameplay/backend work and sound.
Looking at the original playstation, and comparing it to a PC in the same era, let's see what you get. It had a 33 MHz core processor (CPU) for doing the I/O/Physics/backend work, a seperate GPU with its own memory for graphics, and a seperate SPU (Sound processing unit)for the audio. All well balanced, and each part doing its job individually, controlled and piped by the IO processor, are capable of beating the shit out of a P-200 with a Voodoo graphics accelarator (which was commonplace when the PS-1 came out).
The whole point being, "BALANCE"....
If you look at PS2, it has a very well balanced architecture. The CPU is capable enough to max out the GPU, and the sound engine supports what can usably be classified as "best in gaming audio". The DVD ROM has enough storage to pack in all hi-q cutscenes you would ever want, eliminating the need to have in-game rendering, which is both hard to make, and not so good looking.
XBOX, although flaunts so much high tech stuff, it isn't well balanced. The CPU - a 700 MHz intel P-III equivalent, is hardly capable of pushing the graphics unit to 60% of its usability, so even though the theoretical graphical fill rate/texel/pixel pipelines might be capable of a lot more, it will never actually deliver those rates because the CPU isn't capable enough to pump those bits to the GPU fast enough. Same for sound, XBOX supports "so many channels" of audio, but to put all that through the sound processor, you would need to dedicate a major chunk of CPU processing power to that thread, bringing down the available CPU power once again. Not to mention the overheads the XBOX carries as it has to address far more hardware devices than the PS2.
Well integrated design, balanced specs = cheap/decent performing architecture
high specs, no balance, bloatware = inconsistent performance, scalability issues
you decide....hack your XBOX, benchmark everything, and prove me wrong....i guarantee it doesn't even perform as much as 55% of the claims the specs make..