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!"

Comments

Torrent link to the video

[AIX-Hood]

Here's a torrent link for the OurColony video: XBOX360Vid.wmv.torrent

Details

[CleverNickedName]

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

Re:Good start

[UnknowingFool]

At these specs, there's no reason why a hardware emulator couldn't emulate an older Xbox.

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.

It was widely believed, however, that Microsoft had retained a team of hardware emulation experts to work on the problem - although concerns over the viability of such an endeavour were voiced by some experts, especially regarding the company's ability to emulate the functions of the graphics unit in the Xbox without violating NVIDIA's intellectual property rights.

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.

Re:Massive processor, not much for graphics though

[imsabbel]

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.

Re:boy did it suck!

[kidgenius]

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)

Re:PowerPC CPU?

[inkdesign]

According to the NYTimes, "The heat generated by all that power will be drawn off by a water-based cooling system, something usually seen only in high-end PC's."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/13/technology/13xbo x.html

Sounds crazy to me, but there it is...