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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!
Live enabled != Live play. I won't be giving anything about the next xbox since I don't know anything, but even in the current generation a game being Live enabled means that you can receive invites to play games on Live even if the game is single player only. Play Sands of Time and your friend can see you are "Live enabled" and invite you play Halo 2. Its pretty freakin sweet.
GameCube's disks were a mistake? Last I heard they made load times faster and helped prevent piracy...
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
--
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).
Actually, GameCube supports 6:1 hardware texture compression. You are correct on that. And the audio is usually compressed as well.
What you fail to realize, is that texture compression is much like a PNG. It compresses it to 1/6 the size you would find a texture on a PS2, with no loss of quality. You feed that into the GPU on the GameCube, and the GameCube can decode it for you. On the PS2, it takes up valuable clock cycles to decompress the texture. So a lot of developers don't do it.
As for the audio... well, most audio is tracked, same as the PS2. The stuff that isn't, is of course sampled. Much like playing an MP3 or OGG on your computer, it's a good idea to compress the audio. Storing and playing back raw wave files seems a little needlessly excessive to me, if the processor can decode compressed audio in real time.
I'm sorry, I just don't get what you were getting at. It's a good thing that game console hardware is powerful enough to handle compression these days. Even the GBA supports compression of sprites.
But if you mean that the GameCube has bad looking/sounding multiplatform games, I would really like to know which ones. But even if they are slightly lower in visual quality, I can still load the game a good 10 seconds quicker on a GameCube than a PS2 for the most part. That's truly more important to me.
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.