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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."
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!
The next geration of consoles, no matter the brand, will be freaking amazing. The specs are amazing, but of course you could homebrew your own with similar specs provided you have enough money. I'm interested to see if the console prices stay low enough ( $300) for regular folks.
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.
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.
That'll never happen. Capitalism actually benefits from this product differentiation: This toy plays this set of games, that toy plays those. The economy actually sees more labor demand and more sales with these non-universal game systems.
Simple way to verify this: How many people do you know have more than one of the current trio of major consoles?
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).