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The Xbox 360 Unveiled
You may or may not have caught the Xbox 360 unveiling on MTV Thursday night, but the internet will provide. A plethora of sites have photos, videos, commentary, specifications, and interviews about the new system. Your fellow readers have pulled together to provide links to: 1up.com, Joystiq, Gamespot, The BBC, CNN, NYT, Gamespy, Team Xbox, Voodoo Extreme, Anandtech, and eToyChest. The official Xbox 360 site opened last night as well for word straight from the source. For more official images Ourcolony.net has been 'solved', and now features an OurColony specific video preview. Finally, for commentary on the event, the Video Game Ombudsman provides an alternative to the press releases. From the post: "Kyle Orland (9:28:42 PM): The future of gaming is a girl in a blue dress?
Dan Dormer (9:28:47 PM): The future of gaming is a girl with a bag?
Kyle Orland (9:28:57 PM): She's the Xbox! OMG!"
Here's a torrent link for the OurColony video: XBOX360Vid.wmv.torrent
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From the BBC:
- CPU with three IBM PowerPC 3.2Ghz cores
- ATI 500MHz graphics processor
- 48 billion shader operations per second
- 512Mb GDDR3 RAM of memory
- Removable and upgradeable 20Gb hard drive
- Three USB ports
- Windows Media Extender built-in
- Support for DVD-video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD+R, CD-DA, CD-R, WMA CD, MP3 CD, Jpeg photo CD
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
The official detailed info and specs for the xbox 360 can be found at http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox360/factsheet.htm/ and http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox360/peripheralsfacts heet.htm/
From the article:
The heart of the system itself is made up of a custom-designed IBM PowerPC-based CPU with 3 symmetrical cores crunching data at 3.2GHz each (for a total of 6 hardware threads) at any one time.
The problem is with nVidia, and it's not technical but legal. This is an older article describing some of the problems. While some of the hardware challenges have been overcome, the nVidia problem remains.
IIRC nVidia has patents on some GPU algorithms in their chipsets that the Xbox used. ATI can't simply copy them without permission, and nVidia is unlikely to give them permission. So the problem is that the Xbox 360 GPU will not respond correctly to an Xbox 1 game. Technically Xbox 360 could emulate the functions before passing commands to the ATI GPU, but it's quite a technical challenge to do this.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
How do you think its "now much in graphics"?
The 10MB is EDRAM, (just call it cache:) ), and the gpu also has the 20GB/s access to the 512MB main memory.
Plus it has 48 Shader pipelines (although not comparable with cureent GPU numbers because this are unified shaders), so it should be al least GF6800 level.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
You know, I saw the Perfect Dark pics and was rather underimpressed as well. But, if you looked closely, you could tell it was unfinished. Most of the surfaces had no textures on them. They only had a simple, flat, single color applied to all the surfaces. So, that's why it looked like a hybrid PS1/PS2 quality game. If you look at the ghost recon pics though, they are rather impressive. Personally, I'm waiting for the PS3 because I enjoy Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy, and Metal Gear Solid (which usually comes out first on Sony)
> There is a reason MS bought Virtual PC.
And it was x86 server virtualization. If the xbox was to be back-compatible, we'd know by now, so it is time to stop pretending it could be possible.
Not much of a GPU? it has 10MB of EDRAM, and it has 256GB/sec of bandwidth in to it! That's ALOT of bandwidth. No, it's fucking HUGE amount of bandwidth! And in addition, it has the regural GDDR3 at it's disposal as well.
And it has 48 pipelines running at 500Mhz. Current top of the line PC-GPU's have 16 pipelines running at around 500Mhz. So I think it's pretty safe to say that the GPU on this this is a real monster!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
It *is* backwards compatible. Part of the show talked about being able to download maps for Halo 2
What do you mean that they're making it difficult? Microsoft has developed Xenon, which is a base platform under which games can be developed so that they will run on both XBox 360 and any Windows XP PC. It's basically extensions to DirectX, which is what the regular XBox used.
The idea is that the XBox hooks up to your Windows Media Center PC which acts as a PVR
The 30 minute show was awful. It can be summed up thus:
8 minutes of the Killers
+
13 minutes of ads
+
3 minutes of talk
+
6 minutes of actual xbox 360 related stuff
And I thought it was going to be an uninterrupted 30 minutes of revealing inside info on the product.
Nintendo is also using PowerPC, I believe they're using 4x 2.5 GHz
Chris Morris is one of the better writers out there. He stay's pretty connected to gamers via the shacknews comments community.
This does differ from what can be done with 'a regular wired ethernet.' How many people have their wireless networks hooked up to their living room entertainment center? To be able to do something like that without 3rd party software or hardware mods is nice.
No chance that Halo2 won't be ported to the xbox360?
It's not blacked out. It's black. That's a custom video port, into which you plug whatever custom adapter/cable you purchase seperately. Exactly like the current Xbox. Expect COAX, Composite (included in the box), S-video, Component, and hopefully DVI/HDMI.
Why is Microsoft making it difficult to write games that run on both PC (Windows XP) and XBox 360?
Read up on XNA -- they have a new architecture they're pushing that'll do just that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/13/technology/13xbo x.html
Sounds crazy to me, but there it is...
Your assertion isn't backed up by your evidence. Here:
halo2 map = data
halo2 executable = code
data != code
It's much more likely that there's an early version of Halo 2 built for the 360 which (unsuprisingly) works with Halo 2 maps.
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Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Not quite.
The Xbox360 CPU's are general purpose, and have the full PPC and Altivec units for each core.(well, almost, some altivec instructions are missing and many more were added, but this is just for x360). The Playstation3 on the otherhand has 1 general purpose PPC CPU and 6 to 8 cell processors, which are SIMD vector (but not altivec) units and not general purpose in the least.
The Xbox360 is quite capable of running any C++ game logic, while the SIMD nature of the playstation3 cells make C++ not a good choice at all. Your original assesment about it being only a good number crunching machine is not quite right for x360 but totally fits the Playstation3.
I'm honestly not sure how well this processor would work in a more general purpose PC setting though, mainly due to the fact that each core is running two threads (also issues 2 instructions per clock) so cache space is a bit of a concern. In games its easy to put 2 like threads on a CPU because we have very explicit control over it. On a PC this isn't really the case, and massive cache thrashing would be had.