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Tom's Hardware Reviews the Xbox

Posted by michael on from the borg-nanoprobes-entering-the-home dept.

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."

3 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. They're wrong about the PS2. by wadeb · · Score: 5, Informative

    - 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

  2. They are USB. by Pope+Slackman · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...)

  3. Kichir Kichir Bom Bom Taay Taay Fizz by PhrozenF · · Score: 5, Informative

    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..