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Gamespy Reveals Xbox Next Specs
Gamespy's reporters have been on the ground at the GDC, and managed to wrangle specifications for Microsoft's upcoming next-gen console. From the article: "Xenon's CPU has three 3.0 GHz PowerPC cores. Each core is capable of two instructions per cycle and has an L1 cache with 32 KB for data and 32 KB for instructions. The three cores share 1 MB of L2 cache. Alpha 2 developer kits currently have two cores instead of three."
From TFA: ... incredible textures...).
The Xenon is an extremely impressive piece of hardware. It will allow gamers to see things like complex lighting in gameplay, amazing details through high-level shading (impeccable clouds
WOW! All that, plus superlative superlatives!
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The next geration of consoles, no matter the brand, will be freaking amazing.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
..for a modchip before buying. NOT necessarily for stealing games but for all the third party software. The current xbox shines with a modchip. Emulators galore, xbox media center, etc.
Thief: Deadly Shadows had a pretty bad flaw resuming a game saved at whatever difficulty reverted the game back to normal difficulty. I wrote Eidos Customer Support about an xbox live or physical update to T:DS and received this:
"Microsoft never gave us approval to release a new version". How's that for a kick in the pants? So for this new xbox I'm going to sit tight until a modchip is released and do nothing but "try before I buy".
Trolling is a art,
Maybe I'm behind the times, but this is the first I've heard of a camera as a part of the Xbox2. If they make the hard drive optional, it seems they should make the camera optional.
I can't believe that more people would want a camera in their Xbox2 than a hard drive.
Great. Now I'm going to have to watch idiots taunt me over Live rather than just hear them.
My userid is prime!
This might not work out for some games...
But three 3GHz PowerPC CPUs are not expensive? Oookaaayyy.....
IMO the same mistake as Nintendo did with GameCube's disks. Seems that a PowerPC CPU is not the only thing MS copies from Nintendo.
These days, there seems to be far less pressure on CPU and more ephasis on GFX chips. I, of course, didn't give a toss and never bothered to read to the article so how about someone tells us what chip it is and then we can bitch about that instead? The CPU is non-bitchable IMHO.
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
If all I can do with it is see the perfectly-rendered sweat rolling down the forehead of the Exclusively-EA-Branded Linebacker in front of me, with all the control in the world being nothing but a pair of awkwardly placed sticks, what the hell do I care? I will be buying a PS3 solely because the PS2 controller is the only one with actually intuitive control schemes, because of the symmetrical placement of the sticks. But mostly I can look forward to more sports games, more driving games, more awkward TPS (that's third person shooter) games, or on the PS3, lots of badly-written and acted "RPGs" with stories on rails.
Oh yeah, fighting games and platformers too. Right now I amuse myself with platformers the most, but I keep going back to play Alpha Centauri.
Give me Civilization 5 with a wireless mouse+keyboard interface on one of these, or a Total War title, and we'll talk. As it is, I doubt the next gen consoles will even have VGA outputs (and no, third party scan converters don't count).
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
Was it Freescale (formerly Motorola)? IBM? Or someone else?
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
There are already TVs and projectors that can do 1080p, they just cost several thousand dollars. In three years they'll probably be only a thousand. It would be nice if one of the next-gen consoles includes that capability. For that matter, anyone know if next-gen DVD will store the movies at 1080p, but then use hardware to interlace it for the majority of HDTV sets? I'm keeping my fingers crossed, so I can buy a projector and ditch the overpriced theaters.
Back to the Nextbox, rumor has it there's going to be a Media Center version. What if all versions supported a keyboard and mouse? It would decimate the PC gaming market! No more complaining about using a gamepad for shooters. Yeah resolution would be limited to 1920x1080, but that's not so bad, especially if there's finally a way to hook it up to a monitor. Now Microsoft might not want to hurt the PC market, but I bet Sony wouldn't. Yet Sony is just a bit too strange to try this.
The question is - how much will it cost, and like the original XBox, will it be subsidised by Microsoft again? If so, then either Microsoft is either willing to take risks, or desperate to take over the console market. Three 3.0Ghz PPC cores can't be that cheap...
I remember something else that sounded great, too: the first XBox. Microsoft released ridiculous specs that gradually became less and less ridiculous as time went on, right up to the point the system was actually released, when it barely had better specs than either of the two main competitors.
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
My home computer can easily kick XBOX ones arse eaaasily and I really hate that. I want consoles to be designed for gaming only. Not a PC in a teeny box (xbox1). It should be able to do something that my PC is unable to do for a very very long time. I upgraded my PC and within 4 months of XBOX 1 release my PC was better than all the consoles on the market. These specs appear very impressive but will I be able to out do it as easily in a years time as I did with XBOX1? Upgrading my current machine to that is impossible.. so that seems like a good step. I'd certainly be interested if the cost of this turns out to be $300 :-D
CPUs are INSANELY cheap to manufacture, almost all of their price comes from the need to recoup on R&D and fab construction costs. It would be very easy for a manufacturer to sell them at a steeply discounted price in order for the publicity that being used in the Xbox2 will bring. HD-DVD drives were probably much more expensive in an actual dollars-per-unit way.
Will there be a Linux port? What good is all those processing power with out being able to tinker with it yourself?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
If the game had been made Xbox Live Enabled like all games will for the new system, it could have been patched through Live and this wouldn't be a problem.
Know what your talking about before you post.
Does anyone know why console makers insist on putting relatively small amounts of ram in their consoles? When the xbox came out, 64 seemed rather conservative and now that 1GB is commonplace, 256MB seems very conservative as well. You'd think since ram is so cheap now that they wouldn't be so frugal.
No, because microsoft will not let developers release patches via live for anything other than multiplayer balance.
Since it was a single player only game there was no chance for a patch.
Maybe when they release the 'platinum' edition it will be fixed but untill then the ai just becomes dumb as soon as you reload or leave a zone.
I'm all for MS's policy. It's my understanding that companies can't release patches via Xbox live which don't include new content (i.e. you can't just release a patch that fixes things). It holds the company accountable to sending out a finished product (or getting tanked in reviews), rather than just figuring they'll release a patch in a couple months.
A: It does. MOL runs for instance on the Pegasos board, the Teron board and on AmigaOne hardware. In short, MOL should run on any PowerPC hardware (with the except of 601-based systems). However, the EULA of MacOS prohibits its usage on non-Apple hardware (it is of course perfectly legal to use MOL to boot a second Linux though).
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"No more complaining about using a gamepad for shooters."
Okay okay... but is someone going to make PC class shooters for the Nextbox? No... do not say Halo2. PLEASE do not say Halo2.
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
Why don't you just go buy a computer if you want to play computer games? I know it would cost more but you can also do a lot more with a computer. The more Microsoft incorporates into the Xenon the more expensive it will be.
OK, what's the main difference between PC and Console game? Give up? It's not the graphics, gameplay, etc - it's the BUGS!
When Half-life2 came out, there was practically a patch made that day. Same with Battlefield 1942 and most other PC games I buy. This encourages games to be shipped out only 80% done. Console games (used to) never have this problem. They have usually been (for all intents and purposes) bug free. Remember that silly Madden 2005 error? That was ONE bug and made national news! But the game was still 99.9% fine. It's NOT uncommon to see PC games come shipped and you can't even install them! Imagine that!
So yeah, be warned. If Xbox2 has "Live-enabled for ALL games (i.e. 1-player, puzzle, RPGs, etc)" then you can be sure that most games, like PC games, will come bug-ridden. (Hey, but at least the sale-dates will be met! Too bad the game's finish-date won't though...).
(Last thing - is XBox2's online gonna be free? If not, and these games have bugs, you'll be REQUIRED to be online to get the fix. $50 a year for the 4 years you'll own the system makes this machine's cost go from $299 without games to $499 without games)
Went over like a lead zeppelin.
Three 3.0 Ghz PPC cores. Wow. And I'm sure it'll be at a standard console launch price point, about $300. That's a whole lot of power. Of course, people said the same thing when the Xbox first launched. 733 megahertz for $300 seemed like a great deal then. But, that was back when becoming obselete used to be a concern when buying computers. Remember when Moore's Law was being upheld? I bought a Pentium IV 2.4C about 2 years ago for $180 dollars. Today, $180 dollars buys you a PIV 3.0. An incremental leap forward at best. If the Xenon really has 3 PowerPC 3.0 GHz processors, that thing is gonna be one hell of a bargain at $300 dollars. Five years from now, a Xenon is still going to be relatively impressive, unlike today's Xbox, unless we manage to invent some radically new technology that lets us get back on track with Moore's Law.
I care about the games, not what they're played on. I don't expect Xenon to come with a keyboard and mouse, but since the xbox used modified USB, it would be easy for them to sell an adapter to use any keyboard, or gouge me an extra ten bucks for their own Xenonified version. If MS actually releases a more expensive Media Center version with Tivo functionality and word processing, they'll have gotten people to buy the both the software and hardware from them. That's owning the PC market. MS bought WebTV and it failed, but this could succeed, and I won't have to pay $200 every two years for a new video card, and $300 every three years for a new CPU, mobo, and RAM. Just $400 every five years for a console, and if I keep a PC, it won't need the latest video card.
False. Many games have had patches released for not only multiplayer issues, but also single player issues. For example, Crimson Skies has a problem where if you changed something in the multiplayer settings, it made you unable to play the single player game, so the patch for Crimson Skies fixed that and some other minor issues, but there was no "multiplayer balance" issue to be fixed in Crimson Skies.
Other games have also had issues with their single player games patched on XBL. Halo 2, for instance, had its 480p mode fixed that affected both single and multiplayer where the HUD was cut off on the far left side of the screen.
Hey Dumbass. 1080p has been around for a long time now. By my count at least two years. Also 1920x1080 isn't a limited resolution. And yes high def DVD's will be available with the release of HD-DVD players, but your are going to have to re-collect all your movies again in the new format. Same thing when they changed from vhs to dvd. just another way to spend money
599USD at first of course, like all console release in the chrismas time.
Also, there is no PPU in there?
No sig for now.
Exactly. 750mhz was okay back in the day of the Xbox, in fact my computer's CPU was that fast. Not amazing.
Three 3ghz cores today? You won't find that in even the standard super-duper $3000 gaming computers, and you definately won't find a card that's one generation over the X800 line.
There're still quite a few Xbox games that are Japan only, or take several months to reach America. Of course, for someone living outside of America, a modchip is essential, given the leadtimes America gets over Europe with most games.
Dunno if I'll be waiting tho. I plan to buy an American Xbox 2 on day one (I live in the UK), and just send it off to get chipped when the opportunity arrives.
"Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?"
Define been around. HDTV broadcasts in either 720p or 1080i. For fast motion 720p looks better. The low and mid-range HDTV's cannot handle 1080p. I know hi-def DVD's will be available for the players, but will they be interlaced, like the early DVDs were? Will they be progressive, but only at 720 lines? Moron.
I'd rather we have the console makers as is. When you have people who can deny you a licence to a console, you can enforce certain minimal standards. Yes, even though no one pays lip service to these (although Nintendo still has the Nintendo seal of quality, despite their willingness to vet shit like Superman 64), it's still a point to consider.
... in the DOS days, at least having a GUS and a VGA card meant you got great support in primo games, but that required its own set of problems.
A DVD is an MPEG2 movie with some interpreter code. This should me simple, yet I've had to deal with tons of movies which force me to sit through previews or other things I don't want to watch because the people who make the DVDs think they're smarter than me. At least with game consoles, I have that layer of abstraction between me and the content providers that hopefully stop the most evil of content fuckups.
"If and when video game consoles work like that, I'll no longer be cursing Sega for picking the wrong box to put Panzer Dragoon on, or find myself dropping a couple hundred extra dollars so I can play Metal Gear Solid."
If you're a real gamer, you'll own them all anyways. Game consoles (buying all in a generation with games and peripherals) are still cheaper than keeping 1 PC up-to-date for PC games, let alone buying the games and dealing with patches, Windows, and general fuckery.
3D0 tried to make a game console that was a standard which lots of people made in different versions. Philips tried to as well (CD-i). Yea, those really didn't pan out, and it's not because of the technical hurdles.
There are just too many fundamental differences in world views on games and interfaces, etc, for all companies to agree on a gaming standard like you suggest should exist.
I think the "one-gaming-platform" you suggest is the PC, and its generality is a curse that has led to constant bugs, patches, Windows, etc. Even with DirectX, that's no good, because you now need to add "install latest DirectX and pray older games don't break" into the list next to "buy well-supported hardware"
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Symmetric stick placement is only good for people who have thumbs that are an equal length to their fingers (IE: no one).
Having to shift my hands around and curve my holding so that my thumbs are forced to the middle, instead of having a direct line on the left stick + a direct line on the right stick (with a set of face buttons above) is downright painful.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Definitely agreed that less ram is needed on a console than a pc for a variety of reasons. You don't have nearly as many concurrent processes, you typically deal with lower resolutions (even 1080i will be lower than what most pc games can run at nowadays) and a console game doesn't have to use less efficient code in order to handle disparate hardware configurations.
That said, PC's have video RAM and (sometimes) audio RAM. So, even though you have windows and it's background processes crowding the system RAM, you probably have an extra 128MB video card holding textures and geometry.
So, even though 256MB is more than it seems for a console, I still think they should have included more. Consoles are always held back towards the end of their lifecycle because of it. Programmers are able to eek every bit out of the cpu, but in the end they just need more RAM (Halo 2's popping textures, Majora's mask requiring the 4mb expansion back, etc. etc.)
Now, 384MB would have been perfect. But nothing is set in stone -- when developers squaked at the 8MB originally planned for the PSP, Sony upped it to 32MB just months before the launch date.
I've watched the same thing happen with PSP launch titles; two or three bugs were fixed just after sending things in to Sony for final approval, but they'll likely never be fixed even in post-launch copies just because that requires a resubmission, which costs a fee and needs to be approved again by Sony (and they're likely to be harsher when they're not gasping for launch titles).
..but I'm worried it will be shown up later by competitors. Of course this thing looks great when compared to current consoles, but unfortunately it won't be competing with Xbox and PS2 and GC.
On the CPU side I can see this being easily outclassed by the PS3, as impressive as a tri-core CPU now is. As I understand it, the chip going into PS3 isn't that far off the mark from what was shown at the ISSCC in Feb - it's a little less powerful, but not by much. I'd conservatively guess that in terms of floating point performance, the PS3 CPU will be ~2x that of MS's chip (i'm assuming there's one "regular" VMX unit and one FPU unit per core in Xbox2, but maybe MS will surprise us with a more custom vector unit).
Of course, that's just the CPU side..certainly the X2 GPU should be very impressive. Hopefully we'll get more detail on that today at Allard's keynote.
I'm not too fussed about the next XBox being "just" DVD. Most of the current games on the market are below 3Gb anyway.
Did you get that thing I sent ya?
Why can't I play pretty much any DX game released between 1996 and 1999? Because the track record isn't so hot. Only the APIs relating to the keyboard and the mouse (IE: the stuff that didn't change much) works well. Games like FF7 aren't playable on the PC unless you have a very specific mix of drivers.
DX7 and up have been the ones which seem relatively stable, but even the DX7 emulation in DX9 has the odd bug in it.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"Xenon's CPU has three 3.0 GHz PowerPC cores. Each core is capable of two instructions per cycle and has an L1 cache with 32 KB for data and 32 KB for instructions.
.. and the latest EGM reports that an insider has told them that there is no competition between the specs of Xbox2 and PS3. PS3 is supposed to be "insanely powerful". It would be very interesting to see what the actual specs would be for them.
Anyway, I am starting to save money as I want all three of them, no compromise. I hope the other two support a good Live! like service. Otherwise it is going to be a very difficult decision, especially for people like me, who do not fall in any fanboy category.
The xbox has two other advantages; hard drive, and unified memory.
This means that textures can be stored on the HD, read into main memory, and there's no additional 'copy to the video RAM step.'
This is leaps/bounds over, say, the PS2, which wants you to be streaming textures, constantly, off of the DVD drive.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
This could possibly mean that the PS3's (according to early reports) has the potential to have more processing power then the XBox 2.
8 072.html):
XBox 2 PowerPC:
- 3 cores
- 3Ghz
- L1 cache with 32 KB for data and 32 KB for instructions. The three cores share 1 MB of L2 cache.
PS2 Cell Processor (http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/02/07/news_611
- 8 cores (This can be scaled from 1-8 depending on the device, so Sony has the potential to use more cores then the XBox 2, but there will be trade-offs for using more)
- The first version of the chip will run at speeds faster than 4GHz. Engineers were vague about how much faster, but reports from design partners say 4.6GHz is likely.
- 2.5MB of on-chip memory
Its still too early to tell since Sony has yet to release the final specs of what will be used and how many calculations\instructions per second each can do. I just think it is funny how the PS2 is the current system lacking in power, but come time for next generation systems it has the most potential to be the most powerful.
Clicky.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Specs, whatever. On the Xbox site today they released some screenshots of the upcoming interface for the Next-Generation Xbox Guide.
Highlights include:
My guess is that this kind of circumvents the whole hard drive issue, and also explains why they want all titles to be Live-enabled, so that players can acces music and game saves from their pcs, and possibly Xbox Live. On top of that, some of it looks pretty cool. Liked playing with a certain person? Check their profile, see what other games they play, how good they are, and how often. Check their slogan, and maybe they've got a link to their site/blog/whathaveyou. Personalizes the experience a lot more, letting you know better who you're playing with, instead of just looking at them as random cannon fodder.
gyroscopic controllers. Sounds likely to me. Very Nintendo-ish, and the original quote said it *wasn't* new technology, just tech that hadn't previously been applied to gaming.
Those specs are very, very impressive. It's quite a bit more powerful than anything Apple has out now. Given that the 3 core PPC will be more like the IBM Power5 (dual core) than the PPC970, I wonder how hot this thing will run?
I suppose though that Apple will have by then released G5 Macs with similar speeds, since there hasn't been any update to the tower line in a while now.
What is interesting is that Microsoft is doing its level best to capture the game market, and not only the game market. I see where Microsoft is going with the built in media player and camera, obligatory online experience for all games and minimum HDTV resolution. They are trying to do to the market what Apple has done with stuff like iTunes, iChat and iSight. I would be very surprised if Microsoft is not going to try and use the XBox2 as their way of capturing the integrated experience that Apple has had a lock on with its own hardware and software, except that Microsoft will be able to lock out the competition even more thoroughly with the console.
I fully expect Microsoft to offer video chats, instant messaging, its own music store etc through a monthly subscription service such as Xbox live. Your average user doesn't care as long as it's easy to use and works. If the device includes a browser then you know that it is indeed aimed at Apple's iMac and Mac mini as well.
I think this is aimed squarely at both Sony and Apple, not because it uses a PPC but because of the feature integration and the sheer speed it will offer. I think Sony might just suffer heavy loss of marketshare unless the PS3, with its Cell processor really is so much faster that there's no competition and if Sony manages to get its online integration and feature set at the same level, which I doubt they will do.
The only real problem might be price. I can't see Microsoft selling this at a very low price (under $300) unless they're willing to take even heavier losses than they do with the XBox.
Instead, it has one PPC core, and 8 Vector Processing Units (IIRC). This is still insanely powerful, but not as powerful as 8 full-fledged CPUs.
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Bagagagaga, BC is back, under http://www.4pirates.com sign up while there are still places left.
Moores Law is still valid, how else do you think they fit 3 PowerPC cores on a single die?
Using the P4 to say that Moores Law is no longer valid is a bad analogy, as the P4 architecture was strongly based on getting as high a clock speed as possible. The roadmaps of CPU manufacturers point pretty strongly to multicore as being the future of processing, for two reasons:
We can keep cramming more and more transistors into the same space (Moores Law), so we might as well use that space.
Critical paths can only be so short (i.e. you can only have so many pipeline stages until you get diminishing (and negative) returns)), before you have to come up with other ways to improve speed.
Oh and at the same time you also had laserdisc competing and of course the even older format of simple film reels.
That you now think of DVD or any of the others as a standard format independent of brand shows you either got a very short memory span or just don't pay much attention. For a more recent example look at the different formats depending on brand that DVD burners came in.
In the days of betamax you could pretty much count that every sony movie also came out on betamax. You are also far more likely to find sony music available on minidisc.
Further more your suggestion would ruin competition. The PC is like this were it doesn't matter wich brand PC I got I can play most games for the PC platform.
Sadly this also means an awfull lot of PC games are still compatible with old hardware. Consoles don't come out all at the same time and so will have very different hardware capabilties. I prefer my games to make the most of the hardware. Not for them to limit themselves to the most restricted console out there. The most obvious restriction being memory or the presence of a harddisk. Just because 1 console would not have a harddisk we would still be in the days of savepoints vs save anywhere on consoles like the x-box?
Your argument is both not true and would limit game developers. Just ask youreselve this. Is it a waste of shelve space for a supermarket to carry both Coca Cola and Pepsi? It is called choice. I prefer having it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
in fact if you had bought 64mb strips then you were being overcharged if you count the price per megabyte.
Does it hurt? Well yes. Look at the x-box/pc game morrowind. On the PC there was an awfull lot of loading for very small game zones. This was the same as in the x-box version. However the PC only expansion packs had much larger zones using the easily double amount of memory a PC has.
The x-box had 64mb total. PC has its main memory + video memory for the same job.
It is also the reason people complain about the small levels in games like Thief 3 and Dues EX 2 when compared with their PC only ancestors.
Speed matters little for this. Complex open levels (you can save memory by making only a small portion of a big level available to be viewed. Quake and doom used this an awfull lot) require lots of ram. Consoles don't have that.
I am most amazed by sony's reluctance to add more memory. Their own PC games EQ2 and Star Wars galaxies are memory hogs working only well with 1gb. Either the code is horrible OR they never want to put these games on a console.
True PC have higher resolutions wich means more space needed for textures BUT the gap between the 1gb that their own PC games require and the amount on offer in the current consoles is a bit big.
I guess memory is just to expensive. Oh and speedy stuff being more expensive? Well not entirely true. Don't forget the massive discounts you get when you order your memory by the truckload vs stick.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As for 1080p games vs 720p, you're right -- there need to be more 1080p games on the market considering the only ones that exist now are Syberia, Dragon's Lair, and Enter the Matrix (I don't recall others - there are websites that have complete lists), and there's a small handful of 720p games like Tony Hawk and The Sims.
I probably couldn't tell you the difference between the 720p and 1080p games, but there is definitely a diff below 720p.
It was inevitable that Sony and MSFT would roll out strong HD support. What will be interesting is Sony's use of the Blue-Ray format vs whatever MSFT is using. Could be a mistake on MSFT's part to not go with a better DVD standard.