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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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It's been out for ages. Why no version of Linux for the box yet? I remember lots of little penguin people claiming it wouldn't take long to crack the box and get their favorite kernel running on it. So where is it? Or are Microsoft actually smarter than the smelly unwashed masses?
Implied: Nintendo is not a player in the console market.
"Nintendo... attacked the market with the GameCube. This console, based on an ATI graphics chip, surprised the whole world with its capacity. However, it targets a younger audience that remains faithful to the Nintendo tradition with its Mario Kart-inspired key titles."
Implied: Nintendo is only for Pokemon and Barney loving children.
Good God - it seems like any time anyone mentions a Nintendo system, they need to put in an aside about it being for kids. You never even see a shred of a veiled compliment suggesting that Nintendo might focus on gameplay, and not on making the most "mature" game. The mass media seems intent on further pigeonholing Nintendo every chance they get, is it any wonder that they are perceived as "kiddie" and that it's tough for them to shake the image. Photorealism and gore have their place in games, as do style and gameplay. When it comes down to it, the latter two have the bigger influence on my enjoyment of a game. Even on a Nintendo system, I'd rather play the latest Mario game than Turok 12, because while one has the wow/blood factor, the other is much more polished all-around.
I'd like to see media writers focus on the enjoyability of the games, for just once, instead of leaning on the tired-but-apparently-mandatory "Nintendo is for kids" appositive.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
The only problem
with Tom's hardware is
the ammount of information
that they display
per page, in order
to get as many
advertisment
views as possible
.
sig?
- 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
Games are what matters on a console, not how many polygons it can push. The Japanese launch lineup for the Xbox is pathetic. There are 4 snowboarding games, DoA3 (a practical port of DoA2, a launch game for PS2 a year ago), and Genma Onimusha, when Onimusha has been out for more than 6 months on the PS2.
When the Japanese launch of the Xbox flops, the Japanese developers will jump ship. When the Japanese developers jump ship, the Xbox will lose about 60% of its title lineup. When 60% of the titles go to other platforms, people will stop buying the Xbox. When people stop buying the Xbox, the other 40% will jump ship to either the PS2 or the Gamecube.
To be a big player in the console industry, you have to have both countries. As a corollary, just because something does well in one country does not automatically spell success in the other country.
In 2 years, nobody will remember the Xbox. It will have entered the Gaming Lore books right along side the 3DO, Atari Jaguar, Atari Lynx, Tubro Grafix 16, and dozens of other systems that went obsolete because they had no games.
Indeed, condidering $1 = 1.15 at today's rate, that's $417. In the USA, the Xbox is $300, which is 345. This is a complete ripoff! The days electronics were over-overpriced compared to the US are gone, this is pure extorsion(sp?)! How do they justify the extra $117? Shipping fees? Let me laugh...
For this price I can build a complete PC with a Duron 1GHz and a good graphics card (GF2 ultra or so), so COME_ON! Who's gonna pay that price for just a game console? PC prices have crashed to a point the PS2 itself is now a mere $235 where I live (Switzerland, outside the EU, I know :) so it can be sold, but the XBox will be twice the price with a hundred times less games to start with... The PS2 is hugely popular whereas Microsoft is still unknown on that market... No doubt the Xbox is a lot more powerful than the ps2, has a HD, etc... But when for the same price you could get a real PC that'll play games even better, and with which you can do whatever you want, I think M$ is trying hard to rip-off markets on which it can (still) freely impose its monopolistic dirty hands.
/jabba
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
I was repeatedly dissapointed on each and every repetitive page of prediction after prediction of what the XBox *WILL* be and what it *WILL* do, and how cool games *WILL* be. It all adds up: Xbox is SUPPOSED to be the coolest console ever, but even Tomshardware.com can only say that it's SUPPOSED to be the coolest console ever. There is precious little hard empirical truth to demonstrate any of the projections made in the pages. Here's what I mean. If these way-cool features are really available, where are the games that demonstrate them? How do we know it works as described? If a feature never appears in a single game you want to buy, then it doesn't add to the value of XBox does it?
Having read a good many well informed articles there, I kept clicking the next page links thinking Tomshardware was teasing me before he got to the meat of the article, but I wore through 2/3 of it before I gave up looking for the gritty pull-no-punches analysis. This is NOT journalism, it's advertisement, and it's wrong to print it without the "Sponsored by Microsoft" disclaimer. I will never feel the same about Tomshardware again.
I've read past Slashdot flames toward Tomshardware, but I had to reserve judgement for myself. Granted, I deserve it; you told me so., but please try to add something more if you reply to this.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Network Gaming is *so* important: It didn't save the Dreamcast though, did it? The PC will always be the superior online gaming platform, unless the Xbox suddenly grows a keyboard, a dozen well-established MMORPGs, and a modding community. Also, bear in mind that Allard's "broadband vision" will exclude the vast majority of gamers especially in Europe (only 50% can get broadband in the UK, at a massively optimistic estimate).
Discounting Nintendo out of hand: The largest games publisher in the world, the only games company to make a consistent profit throughout the market 'downturn', a company shipping a console at half the price of the bloated Xbox. They're not aiming it at kids- no Nintendo console ever has been- they're aiming at *everyone*. If you think a game is 'kiddie' because of its graphics, you shouldn't be playing games, you should get a hobby you can easily understand.
None of the games covered were evaluated by any metric other than their 'dazzling' (640x480) graphics. No games were compared to the benchmark titles in their genres. (As always, DOA3 is taken on face value to be any good- which it might be if Tekken, VF, Soul Calibur didn't exist.) Blinkered, to say the least.
It really is Atari all over again. The pushing of gimmicks like the Game Voice is especially reminiscient of a company floundering for a new angle, while ignoring the fact that they need decent games and have priced themselves out of the market. Outclassed, outgunned, only selling to the most credulous of casual gamers. I'll be picking up a Gamecube, then a PS2 if I have any spare cash, then upgrading my PC, then picking up a DC with a dozen quality titles on ebay, before even considering an xbox.
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"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
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..