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Company Sells 'Turbo' 1.4GHz Xbox

Posted by simoniker on from the all-about-the-bells-and-whistles dept.

cdneng2 writes "The Inquirer has an article about a TaiPei company that is selling a modified Xbox running a 1.4GHz Celeron, versus the console's 733MHz Pentium III. The firm, Friendtech is also offering an Xbox Mod that provides S-Video, 5.1 Surround, and a hard disk upgrade in one package." There are some pictures of the prototype on the official site, although it's unclear if the legally uncertain mod will make much practical difference to native Xbox games (Polygonmag claims "the prototype loaded data at nearly twice the speed of a retail Xbox.")

3 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Timing issues? by antin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder if it will impact on games in terms of timing. Some games are programmed without any timing enforced (still?), they just ran as fast as the console can pump them. I remember that back on the Nintendo 64 X-treme G (the super-fast bike racing game) ran much faster (and therefore played harder) on my brothers console, than on my friends - it seems that in the year between them each buying consoles Nintendo had improved the processor.

  2. This this will probably not help. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, this will probably break most games. In the Xbox games that I've been involved with (two of them), we have hardcoded our timers. The technical details:

    There's a standard Intel CPU instruction that returns a clockcycle count (the RDTSC instruction). The Xbox is a 733MHz machine, so the number returned by RDTSC advances by 733 million every second (eventually overflowing).

    If you subtract this number from the number you got on the previous frame, then divide by your clockspeed (in this case 733 million), you get the number of seconds that have elapsed since the last frame - it's a solid timer, and very accurate.

    Here's the catch: On the PC you have to calibrate this value, which can take a few seconds. On the Xbox we hard-coded the value of the clockspeed - at 733 million cycles per second. If you change the CPU to 1.4GHz, calculations will still be made for a 733MHz CPU.

    Most likely case in my games: the game will not know how to throttle itself correctly. It will try to run the game at twice the speed (think a videotape on fast forward). The video hardware won't be able to keep up and graphical details will be dropped because the CPU thinks the video hardware is taking twice as long to render a scene (as it thinks it's only managing 15fps rather than 30fps).

    Best case in other games: Less frame hitches, but nothing much happens because it's still waiting for the vertical sync of the screen at 60 or 30 fps.

    Absolute worst case: Microsoft will detect the larger 80GB drive (or the enhanced CPU speed) in an Xbox Live update. Your Xbox will be banned from Xbox Live forever, or possibly nuked so that you can't even boot it up anymore. If you attach it to their network, you play by their rules - period.

    Besides, If a game is CPU bound, it's not been optimized properly. My recommendation: The "Turbo" Xbox will not be worth it, and may not work at all. Get a regular Xbox or save your money for Xbox 2.

    1. Re:This this will probably not help. by EduardoTheBastard · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Having just shipped an Xbox title that uses RDTSC for timing, I'm sorry to say that you are misinformed. It takes nowhere near a couple of seconds to determine the timing, and it is even possible to do it while other initialization is processing -- thus costing you no time at all.

      I also have to repectfully disagree about your CPU-bound comment. The Xbox GPU is far more powerful than the lame PIII CPU it is saddled with (although I was continually thankful that it's not a stall-prone P4!) In most cases, the GPU ate the triangles as fast as the CPU could throw them at it. We were constantly CPU bound, and no slackers on optimzation.

      I will grant that some types of games, specifically ones with large triangles where fill-rate is the determining factor, will almost always be GPU bound. But that is not all titles. A game that features good character models and animations will be processing more bone animation and denser geometry meshes than one featuring expansive terrain (for instance).

      One other thing to note: The Technical Certification Requirements include making sure the title runs with faster (or larger) hardware, including hard drives. I don't recall any specific requirement about CPU speed, but didn't you at least consider that when designing your timing code? If nothing else it makes porting and upgrading your engine a lot easier.