Inside the Xbox 360

QT writes "Ars Technica has an in-depth look at the Xenon processor that will power the Xbox 360. It's the first technical look at the CPU itself, its design goals, and some of the differences between it and IBM's Cell processor. The Xbox 360's procedural synthesis capabilities look quite impressive, and I'm not as convinced as I was before that the PS3 would spank the Xbox 360."

Comments

Am I the only one..

[drunkennewfiemidget]

Who finds it humourous that MS is changing from an Intel based CPU to a PowerPC type CPU for their game console at the same time there's rumours that Mac is going to start using Intel based CPUs in place of PowerPC CPUs in their systems?

Re:Am I the only one..

[mrn121]

Am I the only one...?

Clearly you arent, since you are about the 1500th person to mention it.

Re:Am I the only one..

[millahtime]

Yes

Re:Am I the only one..

[Anonymous Coward]

there's a difference between chips and CPUs. learn it!

Re:Am I the only one..

[nb caffeine]

humorous? Maybe. Interesting? Yes. Maybe apple isnt happy with IBM for being so nice to MS. maybe its a sony-apple conspiracy?! Think of the children!

Re:Am I the only one..

[cy_a253]

The computer/electronics industry changes extremely quickly from a historical point of view. We should expect alliances to be made and undone all the time between competitors.

Re:Am I the only one..

[Anonymous Coward]

In the UK we call them crisps.

Re:Am I the only one..

[TheKidWho]

Apple isn't switching their CPUs to Intel, they are using Intel chipsets for other components of their computers...

Re:Am I the only one..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but in the UK you call cigarettes fags, which has a lot of promise for low comedy any time a British smoker visits San Fancisco.

Re:Am I the only one..

[stevesliva]

Bullshit.

Re:Am I the only one..

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.macrumors.com/c.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Frobb ushway.blogspot.com%2F2005%2F05%2Fapple-tablet-pc- sightings.html

Re:Am I the only one..

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA you three star idiot. XENON is different from XEON moron.

Re:Am I the only one..

[Gogo Dodo]

Apple already uses Intel chips in their current hardware.

Re:Am I the only one..

[stevesliva]

There is a difference between using Intel chips in a storage box, and using Intel chipsets in laptops or desktops. Last I heard, Intel wasn't designing PowerPC chipsets.

Re:Am I the only one..

[shokk]

That's very hysterical-like. You are easily amused. Go play with this little red rubber ball. No XBox for you.

Re:Am I the only one..

[Gogo Dodo]

Nobody has said what chips were rumored to be the discussion topic. It's all speculation. For all anybody knows, it could very well be discussions about the RAID controller in the Xserve RAID.

Re:Am I the only one..

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't that some kind of trademark infringement, making a processor so similar sounding? 386!

sounds nice

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds pretty interesting anyway...looking forward 2 both consoles.
http://themeier.de/

Re:*More* XBox 360 stories PLEASE!

[1evilmonkey]

Because its the only M$ product that gets positive attention here :)

So that's why MSFT is hiring in China ...

[WillAffleckUW]

While art asset costs are rising, programmer time is getting cheaper all the time.

We see the above in the article about the chip internals of the xBox 360 ... leading one to conclude that MSFT won't fight Disney et al on art costs and copyright/trademark extensions, but will outsource the programming.

Either that or we're just getting more productive at doing our work ... um, wait a sec, one of my five programs just finished ...

Re:So that's why MSFT is hiring in China ...

[Anonymous Coward]

So why aren't software prices dropping?

PacMan

[callqcmd]

Well since the poster is so unsure, looks like this one has to be settled by a game of Pac Man on both platforms.

bah

[djp2204]

Great, we can watch better opening and closing video clips!!! The colors children!!!

Whats with?

[TheKidWho]

All the fanboyism?

All three of these consoles are going to be wicked powerful, omfg just because ps3 is 1.32012535x faster then xbox360 doesn't mean that it sucks all of a sudden. Fanboys need to take some chill pills!

Anyways, I await the revolution, im going to be dissapointed if its not revolutionary =(

Re:Whats with?

[coop0030]

I agree, the hardware is going to be so close. It is going to come down to the software.

This is what Microsoft is betting on with releasing the console 6 months before. They are thinking that the earlier release is going to give them more time to have a strong library of games before the PS3 ever comes out.

What would you buy? A PS3 with 20 decent launch games? Or an XBox 360 with 80 games, with a bunch of them that are great?

I think most people will pick the second option. Look what Halo did for the Xbox. Now take that to the next generation, and not have any next-gen competition when they launch. People will be awestruck at the Xbox 360, even if the PS3 is more powerful (it won't matter because it hasn't launched yet at the time).

This is going to be huge for Microsoft.

Re:Whats with?

[John Pliskin]

Wrong; the catch is with Name and Branding.

Sony has that; Nintendo still does;
Microsoft doesn't.

Sony still wins this round.

$

Re:Whats with?

[maxbang]

omfg phantom is 1.32012536x faster than both of those so they are obviously teh sux0rtz d00d wtf

Re:Whats with?

[NanoGator]

"All three of these consoles are going to be wicked powerful, omfg just because ps3 is 1.32012535x faster then xbox360 doesn't mean that it sucks all of a sudden. Fanboys need to take some chill pills!"

I'm more worried about price than power. Sony and Microsoft can each bite my butt if the $399 rumor is true.

Re:Whats with?

[C.Batt]

No doubt.

Furthermore, what's the deal with the hype around these consoles?

Yes, they're freaking powerful. This generation appears to be a significant leap from the last; much more of an immediately discernable difference in power between generations since 8bit to 16bit. But what are we going to get that will use that power?

The same old song and dance.

First person shooters. Arcade interaction games (DanceDance Revolution, etc...). 3d platformers. 3rd person action/adventure (Metal Gear, etc...). Fighting/brawling. Racing. MMORPGs.

Better graphics. Better sound. More expansive environments. Same old gameplay with a shiny new coating.

For the first time in forever (and I mean since the 2600), I'm just not excited about the next gen.

Re:Whats with?

[Eugene]

well, it reallly depends on what kind of games you want to play, and what availble for each platform. most gamers has multiple consoles at home already. (and most big titles are availible on multiple platforms too). so the important question will be: if you can only buy ONE console, which one will you buy, and why?

both Sony and Microsoft is trying to place their nextgen console as an entertainment hub, so it might come down to not just gaming hardware/software, rather then it's overall functionality too.

Re:Whats with?

[DrEldarion]

It (as always) is going to come down to the games. Having the most powerful console in the world is pointless if the games on it are horrible. I use my XBox more for NES/SNES/Genesis emulation than I do for actual XBox games.

It'll likely end up like this past generation, where the people who like quirky games and the classics go for Nintendo, the people who like action games go for Microsoft, and the people who like Japanese RPGs go for Sony.

Re:Whats with?

[TheKidWho]

Well I missed this last generation(haven't owned any of the consoles) Although I did own a dreamcast, n64, and psx.

Otherwise, that's why I am waiting anxiously for the nintendo revolution, a new way to play the games =)

Re:Whats with?

[GebsBeard]

Actually it appears this next gen setup is aimed at a well-to-do audience. The ideal experience of HD and 5.1 guarentees a serious outlay of cash on a home theater system that will dwarf even a $599 PS3. The days of cheap gaming are definately coming to an end.

Re:Whats with?

[AngryUndead]

The PS3 will launch with an already impressive library of games as it is fully backwards compatible. The Xbox360 will not be backwards compatible with all games. And the Xbox managed to launch with craptacular titles and keep them rolling.

I've loved my PS2 since I've bought it but lived with a roomate who had an Xbox. The Xbox rocked for modding but the "got to have" games were almost always PS2. Especially RPG.

I've also loved my Gamecube... but I'll admit I'm only going to buy the Revolution because: it is backwards compatible, we'll be able to buy/download older games (sweet sweet classics), and I am a consumer whore. Also there will be Zeldas and Metroids. I imagine. And maybe a return to Final Fantasy for serious.


But seriously... I favor the PS3 for its past library. Xbox360 can wait.

Re:Whats with?

[AzraelKans]

"Anyways, I await the revolution, im going to be dissapointed if its not revolutionary =("

Er.. and you are the one complaining about "fanboyism"?

Revolutionary: Is not, is going a ramped up version of a gamecube with a dvd player (which should've been in the gamecube anyway), you are going to be able to play a few New Nintendo games (Gamecube too) and 20+ years of downloadable N games, from the excusable to the classical. The controler is going to feature some silly gimmick like the DS touch screen which only 1 or 2 games will really use And is going to be ridiculously small and cheap parents are going to love it, N fanboys too, but just about anyone else wont even notice when is released.

Nintendo is not even trying to compete in the console wars, they just want to keep their stablished fanbase and target market and thats all they need to make a nice profit anyway.

Re:Whats with?

[TheKidWho]

heh, I have been paying close attention to the nintendo rumors recently, nintendo seems like they have an ace up their sleeve.

Re:Whats with?

[ultranova]

Otherwise, that's why I am waiting anxiously for the nintendo revolution, a new way to play the games =)

I'm still waiting a console which will automatically switch all characters to buxom female versions and generate and apply nude patches for them.

I wonder if some of the emulators in PC could get this as an additional feature...

Hmm... I guess that picture of Link as a woman affected me a bit more than I thought ;).

Re:Whats with?

[MarcoAtWork]

People will be awestruck at the Xbox 360

no, they won't, especially if Sony 'coincidentally' will release a bunch of prerendered videos and claim that they are actual gameplay footage: people will be ooh-ing and aah-ing and wait for the PS3 launch which will cause MS to lose money on Christmas sales.

I don't really care either way about which brand comes out on top (heck, I have an xbox, a ps2, a gc and a dreamcast to give you an idea) but it would be nice for once not to have to be witness to the usual overhyping (with prerendered videos) and underdelivering shenanigans: you'd expect people to have become a bit more jaded after what happened the last time around with the PS2, but I guess not, considering how many people seem to believe the PS3 videos were real-time.

Re:Whats with?

[tukkayoot]

The Nintendo Revolution apparently will not have HDTV support. A somewhat questionable move, but it at least indicates that the console probably won't be priced quite as high as the other two. Another reason Nintendo probably won't price their console too high is to keep it from becoming too prohibitively expensive for parents to buy their kids.

I'm not sure, but I think there are still some parents out there who don't play games themselves, but have kids who do, and aren't willing to blow $500-600 on a single toy for them.

Re:Whats with?

[elrous0]

I'm not sure, but I think there are still some parents out there who don't play games themselves, but have kids who do, and aren't willing to blow $500-600 on a single toy for them.

Yeah, but what kid wants to be the one without the Xbox 360 or PS3, if one or more of his other friends has one? They'll call him the poor kid.

-Eric

Re:Whats with?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, it's sad that the gaming industry spends tons of money on eye candy for the same old games, yet some of the funnest games to play work on a low powered cell phone, or the 2600 - back when they knew the graphics were going to suck so you HAD to make it FUN.

Please bring back the FUN

Re:Whats with?

[Fr33z0r]

Bear in mind that this is the first generation that's been online out of the box. Sure it's nothing for us PC gamers, but these consoles are going to open up a door for non-PC gamers to play all their favourite games against real people - the difference between AI and real people isn't something to be sniffed at as "same old song and dance"

The past couple of years have been right up there IMHO, where in just a few months we've had the likes of Half Life 2, World of Warcraft, San Andreas, Silent Hill 4, Resident Evil 4, Halo 2, Doom III, Metroid Prime 2, Paper Mario TYD... There have been more great games released in the past year than there have been in any I can remember, and there's certainly enough on every format you busy for a long time, and what's coming up just looks better and better with every passing day (and that's ignoring the PSP and DS). Sure purists will say "those ones above are all sequels" but who cares, they're all great games, (with the possible exception of Doom III, heheh)

Games are still as cool, fun and new as ever, it sounds like you're just getting a bit jaded, or maybe spoiled for choice?

Re:Whats with?

[hords]

I agree, the hardware is going to be so close. It is going to come down to the software.

For me it mostly comes down to the hardware. Sure all the consoles will be able to play games nearly the same, a lot of the same games will be on all of them, but only one will have blue-ray. I think this could be a giant foot-in-the-door for Sony and I'm very surprised at Microsoft leaving out HD-DVD. Some games are already filling up DVDs as it is. I don't want to swap discs or install to a hard drive to play. Another thing that I thought was really cool was the dual HD output which I believe will be another Sony exclusive. Backward compatibility with all of my PS1 and PS2 games is also a huge factor for me. I'm going to wait it out and see what both have to offer, but I think I've already decided. I think Sony did a tremendous job at E3 and some people are going to be persuaded by that. I know a few Xbox fans that are thinking of jumping ship after seeing E3 footage, but not vice-versa.

Re:Whats with?

[tukkayoot]

Eh, I kind of doubt that anybody who has a latest generation console will be getting called "the poor kid" unless he lives in a neighborhood where the other local brats all have multiple consoles of the latest generation.

Re:Whats with?

[hords]

Do you have a source for this information? The Gamecube already does 480P, I have my doubts that they wouldn't at least do 720P/1080i this time around.

Re:Whats with?

[StarManta.Mini]

I think most people will pick the second option.

In my (admittedly limited) sample set, the past has shown quite the opposite.

Dreamcast vs PS2: PS2, hands down. You say that's because the Dreamcast was less powerful... well why do you think it was less powerful? Because it was rushed out the door!

PS2 vs. XBox: It's taken its time, but in the long run (not having any sales figures to go by) people are talking a lot more about the XBox these days.

Genesis vs. SNES: Sure, Genesis had its share of classics - but most of them were Sonic games. The SNES library is overflowing with excellent games.

The lesson is simple: Releasing early may give you the advantage for 6 months, but the later console will have the advantage for the better part of five years. It pays to take extra time at system launch time to design the system more thoroughly.

Re:Whats with?

[monkeyGrease]

Half Life 2, World of Warcraft, San Andreas, Silent Hill 4, Resident Evil 4, Halo 2, Doom III, Metroid Prime 2, Paper Mario

2, 'world of', GTA yet again, 4, 4, 2, III, 2, 'paper'

They are all sequels. They are all "same old song and dance".

Re:Whats with?

[rinks]

I don't know about that rumor, but every nextgen game is listed on EB Games at a 59.99 pricepoint, across the board. Also, a majority of future PSP games is 49.99. This hobby is getting more and more expensive...

Re:Whats with?

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is that most of the fanbois who foam at the mouth over this only know that X > Y so it must be better and not even what the numbers represent or anything. They probably wouldn't know a FLOP if it bit them on the nose.

Re:Whats with?

[Inebrius]

"It (as always) is going to come down to the games. "

I disagree with this. It will also come down to the features. Either console will have great games. If the PS3 doesn't have wireless controllers, will not support a keyboard/mouse, is not 802.11X ready, cannot interact with your PC as a media center extender for pictures, music, and movies - AND XBOX 360 can, that may make the difference that will convince people to pay a premium price above the current new system price point. Of course the PS3 is supposed to support blu-ray dvd, which is another feature that may be taken into consideration in the overall value of the new system.

Re:Whats with?

[fanboyslayer]

IMHO, the biggest titles are usually exclusives.

Re:Whats with?

[lotrtrotk]

These aren't 8 bit systems here buddy. How the heck do you expect them to build an entire system for less than the price of a decent PC Video Card? If you bought a gaming PC for the same budget, you might be able to chug away with something like Battlefield 1942 instead of powering through brand new games.

I'd say $399 is a steal!! If you don't like it, go play NES.

Re:Whats with?

[mr_exit]

The slimline ps2 has an ethernet port right on the back of it, 'out of the box' as you say

Re:Whats with?

[Breakfast Pants]

I agree with you on the revolution but as someone with a modded xbox I already have full emulation of every system n64 and below. Suddenly the revolution just isn't so revolutionary to me.

Re:Whats with?

[NanoGator]

"How the heck do you expect them to build an entire system for less than the price of a decent PC Video Card?"

I imagine it's because they've been doing it for the last 2 generations.

"I'd say $399 is a steal!!"

That's a lot of money to spend on slightly prettier graphics that will be dated before too long anyway. I'd rather buy two Nintendo DS's with a copy of Mario Kart than a PS3 or XBOX at $399. Then again, I play games, not graphics.

Re:Whats with?

[enjo13]

The biggest difference has nothing to with graphics. These consoles finally have the power to really do some interesting real time physics. Now environments can be MUCH more interactive than they have been in the past. While the genre might be the same, the dynamic environments will completely change the game. That's what has me excited..looking at some of the videos coming out of E3 (Call of Duty for the XBox 360 for example) shows just how revolutionary this will really be.

I'm definitely excited about this next generation. The graphic enhancements are nice, but the horespower these machines have will allow real environments to be created for the first time and that has the potential to really change gaming for the better.

Re:Whats with?

[lotrtrotk]

Not talking about graphics here. What don't you understand about "entire system"?

$399 gets you better graphics AS WELLL AS... faster framerates, more intelligent AI, Better Physics, more realistic everything. I understand that it also has to be fun, but the less physical limits the game-makers have, the more likely they will make something that IS fun.

If nobody cared about video quality or performance, we'd still be playing games like pong.

Re:Whats with?

[Anonymous Coward]

no, they won't, especially if Sony 'coincidentally' will release a bunch of prerendered videos and claim that they are actual gameplay footage: people will be ooh-ing and aah-ing and wait for the PS3 launch which will cause MS to lose money on Christmas sales.

Dreamcast launch all over again.

Re:Whats with?

[NanoGator]

"Not talking about graphics here. What don't you understand about "entire system"?"

I understand that the GameCube, an entire system, launched at $199. I also understand that the XBOX and the PS2 launched, as complete systems, for $299.

"$399 gets you better graphics AS WELLL AS... faster framerates, more intelligent AI, Better Physics, more realistic everything."

It gets you a LITTLE better. The change isn't all that drastic.

"If nobody cared about video quality or performance, we'd still be playing games like pong."

Funny, that sounds like a rebuttal, except it doesn't actually touch on anything I've said. However, I'll reply anyway: 3DO.

Re:Whats with?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same shit, different hardware.

Hopefully Nintendo will do SOMETHING interesting, because this is boring. Oh boy, it has more powerful hardware, I didn't expect that! They will just pump out the same old crap. The best we can hope for is about 10 good games over the course of 5 or 6 years out of these systems.

All this hype and fanboyish crap is silly. Look at the current generation. A lot of games come out for 2 or more systems. They essentially end up looking and playing the same. The big games that are one-console only end up looking better. What makes anyone think it's going to be any different this generation?

MOGZ LEIK PS3 CAN DO LEIKL 10083 MRE POLGONS THAN 360!!@!

Who cares. Same shit, different hardware.

Re:Whats with?

[Queer Boy]

Look what Halo did for the Xbox.

Um, made sure it was tied for a distant second?

Re:Whats with?

[jr87]

I think you just displayed some fanboyism...why is it so *cool* to bash nintendo these days? The gamecube is still a helluva lotta fun. Oh, GTA is nice, as is Halo, but Super Smash Bros. Melee is like crack with a couple friends around. start playing at 2pm, suddenly it's 2am and you haven't started that effing term paper....
of course FF:(really big number) did that to me too.

when the gaming gets good, my grades suffer.

Re:Whats with?

[jasenj1]

You are what's known as "old". Game companies (and record companies, and movie companies, and ....) don't care about you. You either have better things to do with your money, or give it all to your kids. THEY buy (or pester their parents into buying) the vast majority of video games, etc. If you're out of college, have a "real" job, a car payment (or two), a mortgage, a retirement plan, a college savings account, etc., etc. you don't matter.

Game companies are interested in selling to the 12-18 (maybe 25 at the outside) year old demographic, and kids that age weren't around for any of the things you mention. To kids fighting, shooting, driving, etc. are new and exciting. In ten years they'll have had their fill and the game companies will have another fresh batch of consumers.

MAYBE this will change a bit as those of us who grew up on games continue to buy them into our dotage, but the kids will always be there to lap up the next rehashed twitch-fest.

- Jasen. (Feeling old and curmugeonly.)

Re:Whats with?

[Jeremy Erwin]

These machines haven't yet been released, and are expected to have a shelf life of a couple of years, during which time HDTV is expected to become quite popular (and cheaper)

Besides, it isn't as expensive as it once was. A cheap (but small) 720p display can be purchased for about $400, and a decent "home theatre in the box," is also about $400; less than $200 if you're willing to sacrifice some quality. Yes, you can spend thousands of dollars on a "state of the art" setup, but this has always been true. Besides, many people will have already purchased a "home theater" system of some sort to watch DVDs.

Sony is likely to include a Bluray player in the PS3, and I've heard mentions of Microsoft pushing HD-DVD in its console. The PS2 introduced many to DVD-- perhaps the next generation console will serve a similar function

Re:Whats with?

[Anonymous Coward]

The revolutionary aspects of the Revolution have yet to be revealed. Controllers, man! Specs, online capabilities, GBA/DS connectivity, etc. too.

Modded Xbox (just like any other PC/Mac with similar specs) can do a fair bit of emulation, yes. And if you're doing it legally, as in only emulating games you already own, more power to you. But Nintendo's backwards compatibility with older Nintendo consoles is going to be legal. A lot of people (those who ultimately care about the long-term well-being of the gaming industry) consider this very important.

BTW, you can't emulate a good number of systems on Xbox, particularly Saturn, because the Xbox isn't powerful enough to run current Saturn emulators. So claiming "full emulation of every system n64 and below" is disingenuous, expecially considering Saturn's strong Japanese lineup of exclusives and superior versions of games.

I had my sighted friend post this post because I, a blind user, am no longer allowed to post on Slashdot.

Re:Whats with?

[aussie_a]

Either console will have great games.

I disagree. Xbox really missed the mark with the RPG genre. It had 9 (and these are questionable) RPGs, whereas the PS2 had many many more RPGs (at the very least, 9 definite RPGs ;)). In contrast, Xbox 360 has 2 real RPGs while the PS3 has none. It's still early days yet, but it appears Microsoft has learnt that real RPGs are important, and is working to enter this market.

Re:Whats with?

[zonker]

i'd say that kid needs new friends...

Re:Whats with?

[Anonymous Coward]

i agree. to be honest, following e3 i was not impressed with either xbox 360 or ps3. the 'brute force' trend, i.e. just take take the current hardware and juice it up jason giambi-style, has never done much for me. i apologize in advance for the cliche, but i can very easily get past an underachieving graphics engine; the gameplay issues that plague 99% of the games that have been released over the past 10 years or so, there is just no excuse for some of these games.

so, with nintendo still keeping quiet, i think they still have a very good opportunity to come up with something big this time around, something truly original, a la n64. but the unfortunate truth is, if they don't pull it off, we may have seen the last of nintendo, they showed with the gamecube that they simply can't compete with ms and sony through financing alone.

Re:Whats with?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh boo hoo, you might have to pay $399 for a brand new console.

I payed $Au750 for my PS2 when it came out, and after a second controller, a memory card and a game spent well over $1000 on launch day.

but you're crying because you might have to spend $399.

Re:Whats with?

[NanoGator]

"but you're crying because you might have to spend $399."

Might? There is no might. I *won't*. I wouldn't spend that on a Nintendo console even though I'm an extreme Nintendo zealot. There's no crying about it. If you want to throw your money away, have at it.

Re:Whats with?

[Renegrade]

$399 gets you better graphics AS WELLL AS... faster framerates, more intelligent AI, Better Physics, more realistic everything. I understand that it also has to be fun, but the less physical limits the game-makers have, the more likely they will make something that IS fun.

I'd have to say that -fun- seems to take a back seat when "r0x0r graphix!!11" becomes the focus.

I have to say that playing MULE(c64), Racing Construction Set(c64), or even Turbo(A500) with a friend or two is much more -fun- than .. Doom 3.

I'd go out on a branch and even guess that the better you are at making pretty games, the worse you are at making fun games. It's a very different sort of creativity.

Re:Whats with?

[Renegrade]

Bear in mind that this is the first generation that's been online out of the box. Sure it's nothing for us PC gamers, but these consoles are going to open up a door for non-PC gamers to play all their favourite games against real people - the difference between AI and real people isn't something to be sniffed at as "same old song and dance"

Same old song and dance. Why do you think old home computers and consoles have multiple joystick ports? MANY old games were also multiplayer, and did -not- require high speed internet, and did -not- have any lag at all. One small step for man.. one giant leap backwards.. for mankind. Multiplayer is hardly new.

Re:Whats with?

[__int64]

Games are still cool and fun, your right.

But isn't that just a bit ironic that every great game you mentioned was at least a sequel? Not to contradict you, I've played several of them and they were enjoyable. But I believe it's the industry which is getting 'a bit jaded'.

Re:Whats with?

[TrancePhreak]

Either shut it with the "Same old gameplay" or come up with a better idea. That's what I think. Just as movies/books/etc have been recycled for ages on ages, so will games. Occasionaly there's a new gem, perhaps made possible because of new technology. Just look at Black & White, that wasn't possible a couple years before it came out.

Re:Whats with?

[xero314]

When did Physics make a game? I mean I recall a time when games where, well how can I put this, games. When people came up with uique ideas and where not constrained to real world physics. Sad as it may be, it seems that the more powerful the systems become (XBox 360 and ps3 included) the less interesting the games become because they are clones of real world scenarios. My only hope that is that with all this power available the next generation round of games has at least a few gems in it like Katamari Damaci or Disgae, games that, though may use some interesting physics, that don't have to be real world simulations. Or even something as simple as ICO, which does have a real world enviroment, but also steps out of the common mold and avoid the usual hack and slash (or shoot and run).

Oh and Pong is a great skill game where no amount of button mashing will save your ass.

Re:Whats with?

[TheKidWho]

but you can play videogames?

Re:Whats with?

[networkBoy]

River Raid.
I want River Raid with all its scrolling glory. No extra physics or any other crap, but the graphics . . . make them extra super duper.
-nB

Re:Whats with?

[Tim Browse]

Actually, one of the things that lets the game-makers put more fun stuff in is making the system easier to program.

Compare the ease of programming between Xbox/GC and PS2. The PS2 was unnecessarily poor in its programming environment/libraries. The Xbox and GC stuff stamped all over it.

It all comes down to money in the end, and if it's easier (read: cheaper) to develop for, the devs will get more time to put stuff in to improve the game.

I have a feeling that Sony might be ignoring this aspect with the PS3 like they did with the PS2, possibly due to arrogance. The cell architecture certainly doesn't seem to be easier to program. I hope they have some decent tools/support for that.

I have no hard evidence for this feeling, as I have not seen PS3 devkits - just a feeling. Still, I wonder if they've put a hardware clipper in this time :-)

Re:Whats with?

[Tim Browse]

no, they won't, especially if Sony 'coincidentally' will release a bunch of prerendered videos and claim that they are actual gameplay footage: people will be ooh-ing and aah-ing and wait for the PS3 launch which will cause MS to lose money on Christmas sales.

What? Are you hinting that the PS2 launch video of the anime girl walking up and down a catwalk and flicking her hair was just a pre-calculated stream of triangle/uv data that was thrown at the PS2 graphics hardware from a large fast hard disc, and not representative of the sort of graphics that the PS2 could produce in real time?!

I am shocked to my very core. Surely they wouldn't do that again?

Re:Whats with?

[tukkayoot]

From a New York Times article, HDTV Is a New Reality for Game Developers. Here are some excerpts from the article:

Games created for two next-generation consoles - the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PlayStation 3 from Sony - will display video in wide-screen high-definition format if the console is connected to a high-definition TV. Only Nintendo's entry, code-named Revolution, will not cater to HDTV's.
...
Regarding the increasing development costs of games: To compensate, publishers can be expected to raise retail prices - even Nintendo, though it is forgoing high definition. "We'll see if we can push prices up to $59, using 'Collectors' Edition' content," George Harrison, senior vice president for marketing at Nintendo, said. This Christmas, the company will offer a special edition of its Legend of Zelda franchise at that price.

So it sounds like the cost of the consoles isn't the only thing that's going to be increasing ... the games will be getting more expensive too, though the point of the article being referenced here on slashdot is that this technology of Microsoft's is supposed to reduce the burden on developers somewhat, so we'll have to see how well that pans out.

Re:Whats with?

[slashdot.org]

Bear in mind that this is the first generation that's been online out of the box

Wow, for a second there I was thinking you were talking about this generation kids. Was kinda wondering how 'mom' would appreciate that expression.

Re:Whats with?

[AaronLawrence]

Sounds like they are doing better: for example, a version of OpenGL for their graphics API, instead of some wacky home-grown thing.

As a rather nice by-product, this will encourage many more developers to learn a graphics API that is implemented on lots of other platforms besides Windows.

Re:Whats with?

[elrous0]

Eh, I kind of doubt that anybody who has a latest generation console will be getting called "the poor kid"

He will if his costs $100 less than his friends' PS3's and 360's and he's the only one without HDTV.

He'll be the kid with the Colecovision hooked up to the old black-and-white.

-Eric

Re:Whats with?

[Vexar]

You so nailed it on the head. The stink of it is, according to a friend of mine, who ran Mindesign, Sega(?) decided not to permit him to publish his game, which was some sort of 3D break-out puzzler, because it didn't fit into the five tired genres of most console games. I will say this much, the game would have been an instant cult hit, as was Defender 2000 on the Jaguar.

blame the powerful companies individually, they have final say on lots of things, but each platform is different, and executive changes occur over time, for little to no reason at all.

the right direction is to allow the door to be opened by anyone. I can't count how many games were written with the "SEUCK" and "AMOS" systems on the Amiga. Sure, your games were somewhat limited, but that gaming community received several enjoyable, free games because someone wanted to make something that other people could enjoy.

Re:Whats with?

[FictionPimp]

Wow, now thats addiction. I'll do like I always do, I'll wait for them to come down. I got my xbox for 149. I got my gamecube for 99. And I got my ps2 used for under 90.

I buy all my games at the price point of 19.99 or lower as well. Until they go down I can always rent them or barrow them from a friend.

If I was going to spend 1000.00. I'd build another computer. At least with that I can do more then watch dvd's and play games.

Re:Whats with?

[FictionPimp]

Kotor and Jade Empire are 2 of my most favorite RPG's. It seems that most of the ps2 rpg's are more of the sit here and watch this movie FFX kind of game, or the lets play little girl dress up FFX2 kind of play. Sure, there were a few good ones, but nothing like nes, snes, and ps1.

Re:Whats with?

[pnice]

I agree, the hardware is going to be so close. It is going to come down to the software.

Thank you captain obvious! No seriously, you are correct, and I'm sure it will come down to the software. Hasn't this been the case all along though? I can't remember a game that I've tried and continued playing only on the graphics of that game alone. I guess if two games had exactly equal gameplay you might choose the game that had prettiest visuals although I would choose the one that had a theme/character that I enjoyed the most.

"It is going to come down to the software" gets my vote for most cliched video game statement...and while I'm at it, "Katamari Damacy" gets my vote for most overused example of a, "see, it's about gameplay, not graphics" game.

Re:Whats with?

[pnice]

you left out Sega!!

"Sega does what Nintendont!"

Re:Whats with?

[lotrtrotk]

OK, I dont know where you got that quote from. I never said that nor do I remember anyone else saying that.

But anyways, you are missing the whole point. The hardware in these machines actually cost that much money to make. They can't just make it cost less. They already sell it at a loss. What more do you want them to do? It really drives me nuts when people complain to game companies saying "we want this" & "we want that" and when they GET IT, they then say ".... we also dont want to pay anything for it.... oh, and add this too". Seriously.... Gamers (in general) are the whiniest(sp?) people I've ever seen.

Before you start going "oh, just another xbox fanboy".... I'm not. I don't even own an xbox. PC Gaming is far better. But I still see the value in this system. I probably wont go out & buy one the first day they are out (mostly because I can't see myself playing a console enough to make it worth-while). But if I WAS going to play it enough, $399 (for a system with $700 worth of hardware) would not drive me away.

Re:Whats with?

[Anonymous Coward]

You, sir, are the fanboy.

"you are going to be able to play a few New Nintendo games (Gamecube too) and 20+ years of downloadable N games, from the excusable to the classical."
You could say the same thing about the Xbox 360 and PS3, except for the 20+ years of back catalog. Surely that's not a disadvantage simply because there might be a few bad games.

"The controler is going to feature some silly gimmick like the DS touch screen which only 1 or 2 games will really use"
Wrong. Nintendo has already confirmed that there won't be a screen of any form on the controller. And if you think that only 1 or 2 games will use any new feature of the controller, might I direct you to the N64's analog stick or the Super Nintendo's shoulder buttons? You know, the ones that are standard in every current controller?

"And is going to be ridiculously small and cheap"
Only a fanboy would claim that a compact size and low price point are disadvantages to a console.

Yes, the PS3 and Xbox 360 both look amazing, but dismissing the competition before you know anything about it (specs, controller, games) just reeks of ignorance.

Re:Whats with?

[NanoGator]

"They already sell it at a loss. What more do you want them to do?"

Cut down the specs a bit and make it AFFORDABLE.

" Gamers (in general) are the whiniest(sp?) people I've ever seen."

Um, okay. Thing is, I didn't say all that. $399 is out of my price range. I want less power for cheaper.

You're sick of people wanting too much, I'm sick of over zealous twerps intentionally ignoring what I'm saying. At the very beginning of this discussion, I was clear on my point that I wanted a cheaper system. Not a cheaper system without any sacrifice to it, a cheaper system with lower specs.

Before you hit reply, re-read what I said and LISTEN. I don't care if you agree with me or not, but for fuck's sake, LISTEN. I really am tired of arguing over things I didn't say and having what I did say tossed out the window. It's fucking irritating.

Re:Whats with?

[hords]

Hmm, that's interesting. I'm still skeptical that they won't have it as an option for games that support it. I haven't seen Nintendo release any specs as of yet, here's hoping.

Re:Whats with?

[Jarlsberg]

Better graphics. Better sound. More expansive environments. Same old gameplay with a shiny new coating. For the first time in forever (and I mean since the 2600), I'm just not excited about the next gen

This is the first time in quite a while that *I* am excited about a new console. Ever since the Playstation arrived with its frankly unimpressive specs we've been stuck with a bunch of consoles that have been restricted by the consoles poor hardware. For the first time we'll get consoles that are more powerful than your average PC, and with enough RAM to boot. Yes, the games may not break new ground genre wise, but it's a huge step forward never the less.

Re:Whats with?

[Is0m0rph]

And I'll mod mine so I can play MAME and SNES games on it like I do my current Xbox ;) I think my son spends more time in the N64 emulator than playing any Xbox games on it.

Re:Whats with?

[lotrtrotk]

"Before you hit reply, re-read what I said and LISTEN. I don't care if you agree with me or not, but for fuck's sake, LISTEN."

Read once. Re-Read. Re-Read again.....
Ok then.

"$399 is out of my price range. I want less power for cheaper."

Sounds to me like you want this to be a regular xbox & not an xbox 360. So buy a damn xbox!! I don't know about you, but I see no point in having to pay $199 for a new system that is exactly the same as what we already have. I'd say THAT is more of a waste than shelling out $399 for something that actually advances the technology.

The bottom line is, They are packing a lot of punch into this system for a good price, and if that's not what you are looking for.... nobody is forcing you to buy it.

Re:Whats with?

[NanoGator]

"Read once. Re-Read. Re-Read again....."

You fucking Liar. Heh. You went straight into argue mode. Now I've got to repeat myself, yet again.

"Sounds to me like you want this to be a regular xbox & not an xbox 360. So buy a damn xbox!! I don't know about you, but I see no point in having to pay $199 for a new system that is exactly the same as what we already have."

Yeah, just like the GameCube wasn't much of an upgrade to the N64. Heh. You're trying just a little too hard to shoot me down here. (what's even funnier is that Nintendo didn't sell those at a loss.) Well, you know what they say about a fool and his money. ..

So, I gotta ask, why are you taking this so personally? Why are my views so threatening to you? Why are you going as far as putting words into my mouth? Why do you think I'm an idiot for wanting to keep my spending under control?

Re:Whats with?

[lotrtrotk]

This is going nowhere, so this will be my last reply, regardless of what you say. Wasted too much time already.

"You fucking Liar. Heh. You went straight into argue mode."
Hrmmm... I guess you are right. I should learn to reply with such calm & rational responses as you've just demonstrated.

That's it, I'm done. I'll just re-state my main point rather than dragging in more stuff to argue about.....
The bottom line is, They are packing a lot of punch into this system for a good price, and if that's not what you are looking for.... nobody is forcing you to buy it.

Re:Whats with?

[NanoGator]

"The bottom line is, They are packing a lot of punch into this system for a good price, and if that's not what you are looking for.... nobody is forcing you to buy it."

That's a great point, or at least it would be if I said I was being forced to buy anything.

"This is going nowhere, so this will be my last reply, regardless of what you say. Wasted too much time already."

Cute way of dodging my questions. So, why did you basically just repeat yourself, claim you're wasting time, then avoid answering my questions?

Personally, I think it's because you're an insecure fan-boy. I know because I'm like that about Nintendo. Prove me wrong.

Re:Whats with?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow you're a dumb ass.

Re:Whats with?

[jimi the hippie]

If you do a little research you will realize that the PS2 has sold MANY more units than the XBox 2.

Re:Whats with?

[mink]

Dreamcast was last generation.

Re:Whats with?

[mink]

Is everything you have ever done or ever will do new and unique, or have you ever done/created the same thing in a slightly modified form?

Re:Whats with?

[mink]

I almost agree with you on the RAM part, but more powerful then the average PC? For that price highly unlikely. It's not like we are ending up with Pseries IBM machiens when we buy these.

Re:Whats with?

[mink]

The problem is people use RPG for 3 different (at least) gametypes that should be differentiated.

Japanese RPG (your square/enix type games).
CRPG (pc style rpg like bauldurs gate or might and magic).
Action RPG (Morrowind Jade Empire).

Each tends to have a diferent audience that follows it. Often one group does not consider the other groups games as true RPG.

Xenon vs Xeon

[timeOday]

Why would IBM name a PowerPC chip "Xenon", when Intel has been using the confusingly similar "Xeon" for years now?

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[vought]

I can't answer your question, after a moment of confusion (during which I chalked up a seeming "mistake" to the quality of Slashdot's editorial staff) I figured it out.

I do have to give IBM credit for naming the processor after something that actually exists, rather than formulating a marketing driven non-word for their new product. Xenon is a gas that when excited, produces brilliant light...not a bad association.

I mean, what the hell is a Xeon anyway? Xenon, now that's something we can all relate to. Perhaps the name for IBM's new XBox processor was chosen after perusing the Greek root of Xenon xenos, which means "strange".

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[hotdiggitydawg]

Given that Xenon is one of the noble gases in the periodic table, would it be appropriate to suggest this may be "vapourware"?

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[coop0030]

I was also wondering that same thing.

I think they are running out of strange words to use for naming CPU's.

They could try:
the PowerPC "superchip"
the PowerPC "asdf"
the PowerPC "snizzap"
the PowerPC "crazyfast"

Those would impress me!

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[blackicye]

"Xenon is a gas that when excited, produces brilliant light...not a bad association.

Gaseous like vapor?
A brilliant light when the CPU is excited, followed by a loud poof and smoke?

Xeon is pretty stupid, but Xenon really isn't that imaginative.

Neither is Pentium, though PowerPC is an even stupider name. I guess Athlon isn't that great of a name either and Sempron is downright stupid.

The point really is, marketing names are all stupid, and to decide whos got the less stupid product names is just totally pointless.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[bheer]

IIRC Xenon is only a codename for the IBM POWER chip, whereas Xeon is an actual trademark of Intel's.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[th0mas.sixbit.org]

iirc intel started making up words once they figured out they could not trademark/own the number "486".

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[NavyShirt]

Xeon is probably somewhere near Radeon on the marketing table of imaginary elements.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[lawpoop]

Xenon, now that's something we can all relate to.

Yes. Xenon is something we can *all* relate to.

What is it, again?

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[Borg453b]

Silence! -

We all know that Xenon is the mega blast.

great.. now i cant that old bomb the bass track out of my head.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[nacturation]

I do have to give IBM credit for naming the processor after something that actually exists, rather than formulating a marketing driven non-word for their new product.

"Marketing words" are specifically chosen to be different because it's easier to enforce a trademark if it's unique. Hence, we don't have a type of fabric called Expand, it's Spandex... and so on.

I mean, what the hell is a Xeon anyway?

Same thing as what the hell a Slashdot is (dots which slash you?), or Microsoft (small and not very rough?), or PalmPilot (I won't go there!).

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[Eric Giguere]

rather than formulating a marketing driven non-word for their new product

And yet, if you read articles like Strength of Trademarks you'll see that those "non-word" (aka "fanciful) trademarks are the strongest to protect. So there's a reason for formulating them.

Of course, the challenge with the fanciful names is linking them to the product/service.

Eric
Latest book: I've written an AdSense book for non-techies

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[zerocool^]

puts on classics hat

xenos more accurately means "foreign" than "strange". It would be a word used by an Athenian to describe a Spartan, for example. Hence xenophobe. It also means "guest". Generally "someone or something who does not belong where they currently are", but without an always negative connotation.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[Eric Giguere]

Sigh. I meant "easiest to protect".

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[Anonymous Coward]

"Xenon is a gas that when excited, produces brilliant light..."

I have flatulence and a set of matches, will that work?

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[Disk Pickable]

More importantly, might this new Xenon run Xenix?

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[Anonymous Coward]

what?

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[NitsujTPU]

Xenon, now that's something we can all relate to.

Perhaps if you just at a burrito... then you might feel quite gassy I suppose.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[NitsujTPU]

Slashdot is rather simple.

Go to a unix prompt and type CD /. and see what it does for you :-)

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[Wesley Felter]

Xenon was the codename for the whole Xbox 360; the processor chip has a different codename (at least within IBM).

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[Surt]

Actually, it's something none of us can relate to, because its an inert gas.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[vought]

A brilliant light when the CPU is excited, followed by a loud poof and smoke?

No, but then again, people who take everything literally usually aren't ever going to admit they're swayed by marketing anyway.

Neither is Pentium, though PowerPC is an even stupider name. I guess Athlon isn't that great of a name either and Sempron is downright stupid.

I don't know if you're really thinking this one through. PowerPC seems to be the most descriptive of all the names you cited. PowerPC is the name for the chip architecture that brought a subset of IBM's POWER instruction set architecture to personal computers, using elements of Motorola's 88k RISC bus...hence PowerPC. Subsequent versions of the chips have all followed a relatively consistent naming convention, like PowerPC 601, 603, 604, 740(G3), 750, 7400 (G4), and 970.

Pentium, I'm assuming, was meant to take the Greek root for five "pente" add "ium" an produce a connotation in the consumer's mind that it was the fifth iteration (or fifth element, if you will) of Intel's X86 architecture.

I agree that Sempron is a stupid name - and just as I noted in my first reply, it is a word entirely made of up marketdroid "good sounding" syllables - unless, that is, AMD meant for it to be associated with the Italian word Sempre, used in music to mean "throughout" or "always".

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[Borg453b]

ok - so I exaggerate with the 'all' bit :D

It's reference to the old Amiga Shoot'em up: Xenon II: The megablast.

It featured a track by Bomb the bass that contained a sample that went 'It's the megablast!'

Back then, it felt pretty cool to have a computergame featuring a popular song.

Yup.. I know all sorts of useless stuff about games of that era.. if only my memory served me as well with stuff I could actually use *sigh*

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[RavenSlay3r]

or (as I think it's explained in the FAQ) try telling someone to go to http://slashdot.com/ over the phone, without spelling the whole thing out!

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[snuf23]

You're not the only one. If I remember correctly the actual gameplay on Xenon 2 wasn't that great. Nice flashy effects and cool song though.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[snuf23]

Typing "cd /." takes you to the root - just as typing "cd /". There is no point to typing the dot.
The real reason for name is outlined in the faq:

"Slashdot" is a sort of obnoxious parody of a URL. When I originally registered the domain, I wanted to make the URL silly, and unpronounceable. Try reading out the full URL to http://slashdot.org/ and you'll see what I mean. Of course my cocky little joke has turned around and bit me in the butt because now I am called upon constantly to tell people my URL or email address. I can't tell you how many people respond confused "So do I spell out the 'dot' or is that just a period?"

As in telling someone got to "h t t p colon slash slash slash dot dot org" is very confusing.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[J.R. Random]

Well, some years ago a famous picture came out of IBM's labs showing "IBM" spelled out with xenon atoms on a nickel substrate, produced with a scanning tunneling microscope. It was one of the first demonstrations of the new found ability to push atoms around, one by one.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[erdna]

IBM didn't name anything Xenon. Xenon was Microsoft's internal code name for the entire platform - not the CPU.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[NitsujTPU]

Ahh. Cool. Yes, that makes sense. I think that I had heard that one as well.

Well, glad that that's cleared up. I feel silly for my alternate explanation now.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[Borg453b]

True - it was a mindless blaster with pretty graphics. The one cool feature besides the song and sprites was the alien merchant inbetween levels. Never that I got any far.

The thing about bitmap brother games was that while only a few were a big hit in the gameplay department, they were all stylishly executed.

I was never that big a sportsgame fan, but I had fair share of speedball II games in my time. Xenon I actually featured a brief video sequence (and was one of the earliest game to do so, as far as I recall. It was only a face moving slightly.. but nevertheless).
Magic pockets was also alright with its catchy tune but it was pretty difficult for a platformer. Z is supposed to have been good, but I never got into that. Gods got rave reviews.. sure it was beautiful.. but entertaining?

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[KDR_11k]

Xenon is also the name of the evil machine race that tries to wipe out mankind in X - Beyond The Frontier.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[VAXcat]

Xeon was that woman from that TV show - you know, the one that spun off from Hercules' series...Xeon the Barbarian.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[snuf23]

I'd have to say Speedball and Speedball 2 were the best games to come out of the Bitmap Brothers. I thought the Chaos Engine games were pretty fun too. And of course had that distinctive graphic look.
Speedball still lives on in GBA and Pocket PC forms.
Interestingly, while we are on the topic of Xenons - there is a downloadable Xenon 2000 game at the Bitmap Brothers website:

Xenon 2000

Looks like something they put together for the UK PC Format magazine.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[ignorant_coward]

And when it gets hot it expands. Just like me!

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[mrsev]

...Ah those were the days.

512k Ram.
No hard drive.
Mountains of floppies everywhere.

I even remember not being able to afford to upgrade to a whole Mb of RAM.

As a side note I saw some Dungeon Master java versions floating around the net.

. /childhood

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[chavo valdez]

I mean, what the hell is a Xeon anyway?

Xeon is the new processor for the Xbox 360.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[Pope]

Nah, Xenon was an old pinball game: http://www.ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=2821&picno=3174/

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[Anonymous Coward]

if you're talking about xena the warrior princess you need to be shot for your mistake

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[doxology]

Xenon actually forms 80 or so compounds, including my favorite, Xenon Tetraflouride (which has a square planar molecular structure!)

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[krunk4ever]

The IBM Xenon wants to piggyback off Intel Xeon brand name. Honestly, when I first heard of Xeon, I was googling Xenon cause that word was more familiar with me. After google suggested "Intel Xeon" was the only then I realized that Xeon was the correct spelling.

Re:Xenon vs Xeon

[Phishcast]

Ugh. Xeon is already constantly pronounced as "Xenon" in my workplace. It drives me crazy. I imagine I'm not the only one who has heard this. That fact in and of itself is enough to make Xenon a bad name choice for IBM.

What's the deal-yo?

[Gizzmonic]

The Xbox 360's procedural synthesis capabilities look quite impressive, and I'm not as convinced as I was before that the PS3 would spank the Xbox 360.

What the heck? This is 99% speculation. Is there any reason to start off with a fanboy potshot?

The only power that any next-gen system needs is the power to output an HD resolution. None of the graphics I've seen so far looks like they couldn't be done on a Gamecube or Xbox.

Hopefully, now that we've got this nearly photorealistic power at our command, games will evolve the way that painting did when the camera was invented. Realism just becomes another style (and a boring and lazy one at that). Let's see some avante-garde approaches to video games for once. Stylistic innovation that I can butter my teeth with.

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[MoonBuggy]

While they're not entirely inovative, I reccomend you take a look at both Viewtiful Joe and Alien Hominid (which started life as a flash game). They're excellent examples of great fun, great looking games that forego realism and even 3D graphics.

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[justforaday]

Hopefully, now that we've got this nearly photorealistic power at our command, games will evolve the way that painting did when the camera was invented.

Perhaps you meant camera obscura rather than camera.

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't say logical stuff like that; you are going to hurt the feelings of the insecure, rabid fanboys!

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[m50d]

Fuck that. The only decent art you see is stuff that was done before "artists" decided they didn't have to try and look like anything. Give me a leonardo or turner or some random kid on a street corner over what passes for "proper" art these days.

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[Irish_Samurai]

Hopefully, now that we've got this nearly photorealistic power at our command, games will evolve the way that painting did when the camera was invented. Realism just becomes another style (and a boring and lazy one at that). Let's see some avante-garde approaches to video games for once. Stylistic innovation that I can butter my teeth with.

Amen Brother! Games like Grim Fandango, Eco, and Killer 7 need to come more often. I can appreciate the labor that goes into creating hyper realistic graphics, but they are no substitute for substance. For some genres this is a must. Who wants to play SOCOM or CS with crazy concept art? I don't, but I would love to play a Dali-esque survival horror spinoff.

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[ciroknight]

While I get your point, it seems both companies are going for the same goal, just in different ways.

Microsoft is pushing their "procedural synthesis" into extremly parallel processors, to offload work from artists, and still make games look better. Sony is pushing their Cell chip as an extremely parallel processor to offload the work of the game, putting all the weight on artists, and still making the games look better. None of this, however, helps gameplay, which is the reason I don't even own a current-gen console.

Secondly, what would stop Sony, or anyone else for that matter, from making a "proceedural synthesis" system of their own? Really, the whole concept is to unroll the concept we had when we first started making video games ("Oh, computers are too slow, let's pre-compute everything for them" vs "Oh, computers are so fast they can afford to compute the data on the fly"). Instead of running your vector algorithms on the production-side, run it on the client side. The machines are there now.

It's funny how the early paradigms for optimization in computers are now starting to work in reverse.. quality verses cost curve is reversing I guess.

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[argent]

Let's see some avante-garde approaches to video games for once. Stylistic innovation that I can butter my teeth with.

Legend of Zelda - Wind Walker has a very distinctive and stylised look. Screen shots don't really do it justice.

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hopefully, now that we've got this nearly photorealistic power at our command..."

Anyone who says that about video games should try looking out of the damn window sometime. Or even download some non-animated TV, they have it on bittorrent and everything. Photorealism is a decade away at the very least.

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[Wescotte]

Amen Brother! Games like Grim Fandango, Eco, and Killer 7 need to come more often.

Psychonauts for the Xbox just recently came out and it's by the guy who brought you Grim Fandango and Full Throttle. It has a very Tim Burtonish style to it's character design and I very highly recommend checking it out.

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[medgooroo]

"None of the graphics I've seen so far looks like they couldn't be done on a Gamecube or Xbox." Are you for real? have you seen the videos? Have you see the gears of war trailer? If by on a xbox you mean rendered across a cluster of xboxes, maybe..

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[Anonymous Coward]

The graphics aren't "impressive" on the 360 because the developers have yet to recieve the full dev kits. The games are currently running on 30% of the final 360 power.

Regardless, check out an in-game video of "Gears of War", and tell me you aren't impressed.

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Silent Hill fan, then?

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[thesandtiger]

There are many games that do just this.

XIII used cel shaded graphics to look very much like a comic book rather than just another FPS. World of Warcraft uses rather stylish graphics. I seem to remember a few games for the PS2 that were also cel shaded, though the games themselves sucked pretty hard, so I can't remember their names.

I'd love to see the user be able to tweak the rendering settings for their games - I'm imagining a game rendered with a Frank Miller Sin City style - hardcore noir.

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[Irish_Samurai]

Used to be, then it just became formula.

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[Queer Boy]

Let's see some avante-garde approaches to video games for once.

That torch was passed from the Dreamcast to the Gamecube and then to the NDS. Companies like Sony and Microsoft are shooting for lowest common denominator.

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[MrScience]

This is not flamebait, it is a serious question:

Have you been to the PDC? Or are you basing this opinion on web broadcasts?
I haven't been to PDC. But if you have, you're the first person, out of around a dozen that I've read, that would claim that the XBox demonstrations, in person, were not HD quality (let alone much better than Sony's).

Here's just one example.

Re:What's the deal-yo?

[mink]

Also available on the PC.

My first thought too...

[jawtheshark]

I actually read the submission and my first reaction was "Wasn't the XBox 360 going to have a PPC processor?". Then I noticed that I misread the name.

They'll have to dig up a few coders...

[Anonymous Coward]

360 coding?
I always loved 360 ASM....

Re:They'll have to dig up a few coders...

[icebattle]

And I just threw out my MVS and POP manuals...

So what is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

So What is it?
"When the Xbox 360 was launched two weeks ago amid much brouhaha over its custom-designed IBM PowerPC-based CPU with 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2GHz each"
http://games.slashdot.org/games/05/05/25/1456237.s html?tid=211

Or

"Ars Technica has an in-depth look at the Xenon processor that will power the Xbox 360"

Multi-purpose CPU?

[coop0030]

Isn't this CPU more like a "do everything" CPU compared to the CELL which is focused on entertainment media?

I thought that was the biggest difference between the two.

Re:Multi-purpose CPU?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they're both designed to play video games, but I could be wrong...

Re:Multi-purpose CPU?

[bdcrazy]

They're both designed to take input and create output. I hope they made it so I play video games, not the other way around (ick, another 5 minutes of fmv...)

Re:Multi-purpose CPU?

[2ms]

As I understand it, games these days need CPUs that are good at everything. Especially now that vector computations are overwhelmingly performed in GPU, there really isn't any single particular area where gaming CPUs should be optimized at the expense of strength in other areas. In other words, if a gaming cpu isn't good at everything, then it isn't good.

Re:Multi-purpose CPU?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they're both kind of "Do Everything CPU's" compared to x86. The Cell is theoretically more powerful than the XBOX360's processors for multiple things, but I doubt most games could use the full potential of those processors until a year after release and the market can gauge what the hardware is best at.

What about security?

[The Woodworker]

I'm wondering if this chip is vulnerable to the Xeon hyperthreading registry flaw I was reading about a couple of weeks ago. I hope so, as I want Duke Nukem to forever destroy those teletubbies!

Re:What about security?

[Soul-Burn666]

Why would it?
You're refering to Intel's Xeon.
The XBox 360 has IBM's Xenon CPU.

Hope this clears it up.

Re:What about security?

[The Creator]

It won't have a hyperthreading registry flaw... it will have a hyperthreading reginstry flaw however.

Re:What about security?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a registry flaw you idiot. It's a potential flaw which COULD allow PIDs running on the same CPU to gain information required to decrypt an encrypted data stream based on the info left in the cache.

and it only effects INTEL XEON non IBM XENON. Idiot.

Re:What about security?

[The Woodworker]

It's a joke. A play on Xenon and Xeon. Characters battling eachother in my head!! Link vs. Jax!! Oh, what's the use.

(Just to head you off at the pass, I know Link is for Nintendo platforms)

For the same reason I hate video card Marketting

[mindaktiviti]

nVidia & ATi: If you look at video cards today (and a few months back) you would see something like... ATi: 9200 9600 9800 and then there would be a few different things like "XT" or other letters in front of them, but when you look at the actual cost of the video cards there are some 9600's that are more expensive than some 9800's so it's very confusing which one is better. nVidia: "6600" brand of cards can actually be priced below and above the "6200" and "6800" cards, so it's a real pain in the ass when you're looking for a video card. I guess it finally came around for CPU's.

CPU so what?

[logik3x]

who gives a damm what their console runs... the point of a console is playing games... I had way more fun on my SNES & N64 then on PS2 and PS2 is like a 99999 times faster... ok you can have better graphics WOW but really the point his to have fun not make a reality "show" game... the most popular game in pc history where never the pretiest ones... for shure the engine was powerfull but the details were no that impressive... you think people played CS for graphics ...lol?

Re:CPU so what?

[m50d]

You mean you're not thinking of running linux on this thing? Turn in your geek card immediately.

Re:CPU so what?

[Soul-Burn666]

Graphics/Sound are important for immersion in the game world. But more important than "pushing pixels" is the game's aesthetics. When everything in the world fits...
For example Metal Gear Solid 1 on the PS1. If you pay attention, you see the graphics are really crappy, pixelated and have a lot of Z-buffer errors. But you can't ignore the fact the game just feels good. The character animations are excellent, voice acting superb and the areas, while low detailed, feel "right".
Surely this is not such an old game, but compared to today's standards, its graphic qualities are poor.
Compare that to Doom3, which has a beast of an engine and each scene looks very good by itself. But in general, it's not aesthetic. The areas seem forced with a lot of detail that seems just out of place. All the walls are so high detailed, but it just becomes an eye-sore and doesn't feel like a mars station. And the animations aren't that smooth either.

Heh... another example is one game I play a lot lately, which is the open version of StarControl2, The Ur-Quan Masters. The graphics are pixelated, options are eventually rather limited, but the game looks good. The team did an extremely good job on the dialogs which really immerse you in the game. Each race is really different from the others and has certain interesting points to their character.

Oh and don't get me started on the amount of games I played on various console emulators!!!!

Re:CPU so what?

[mrchaotica]

I know excatly what you mean. Ecco the Dolphin, Tyrian, Half-Life (1, even before Source)... they all still have great immersion and art, even though their graphics are very obsolete.

Re:CPU so what?

[snuf23]

If you're a person like myself, you aren't using the hardware information to make a purchase decision. You are just interested in the technology. There is some pretty cool technical design in the hardware for these next generation consoles.

Re:CPU so what?

[Queer Boy]

The best-selling video game of all time is still Myst. It also holds the best-selling PC game of all time to this day. There is no debate that the main draw of Myst was the gorgeousness of it (most of the puzzles were too hard for it to have been for the puzzles).

The best-selling video game cartridge of all time is still Super Mario Bros. 3.

You can get all this info from IDG, it's their job to track that kinda stuff.

Re:CPU so what?

[dragoncortez]

Actually, the Sims is now the best selling PC game of all time, and that's definitely because of gameplay. There were much better looking games that came out at the same time.

In any case, I disagree that the attraction to Myst was the beautiful landscape. Everyone I know that fell in love with the game say it was the immersion. Think about it: this was the first game for most people where they walk around and have this great story and feel like they're really a part of this strange world.

Super computer on a stick?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this really the super computing on a chip that we have been promised. I guess only time will tell. I for one want to believe but am afraid it may be a little naive to believe the marketing hype.

dumb @ss

[Anonymous Coward]

PS3 cell CPU is a paradigm shift. The impact is way way beyond a game console such as XBOX. I plan to use the PS3 for neural networks..

Re:dumb @ss

[TheKidWho]

Ohh, so you weren't born with a brain... That explains it all.

PS3 fanboys need it to grow some nueral network tissue so that they can actually think for a change!

Re:dumb @ss

[Anonymous Coward]

"I plan to use the PS3 for neural networks.. "

That's not going to happen. Sony has put the Cell CPU in their games machine, and they'll pretty much decide on how you use it. Given the hype around Cell itself, you're more likely to use a TV, hi-fi, DVD player or computer for your neural networks. And if the cell CPU is in those kind of devices, I think you'll find that it's either an incredibly cheap and rubbish neural processor, or not neural at all...

Put bluntly, the Cell CPU is not a paradigm shift, it's a different CPU design based on current technology. It has transistors in it, doesn't think for itself and it won't become self-aware on August 27th.

Scrap your plan.

Re:dumb @ss

[TerranFury]

Doesn't matter how many neurons you add; he'll still only be able to solve linearly-seperable problems.

Should I not make references to Perceptions on Slashdot? :-)

(Silly ANNs.)

Re:dumb @ss

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that you mean "Perceptrons", not "Perceptions" ;).

Re:dumb @ss

[Anonymous Coward]

You can solve higher order problems if you use a non-linear transfer function.

These articles are crap.

[ARRRLovin]

None of these morons have even seen a single frame of video generated by EITHER the PS3 or the XBOX360. It's nice to see the ancient art of "mag-racing" still being practiced.........but not really.

Re:These articles are crap.

[radish]

There's plenty of footage out there of games running on the Xbox360 dev kits, which are essentially slower versions of the same architecture. I watched Morgan Webb [;ay a very cool looking driving game live on G4TV just the other day.

Re:These articles are crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh what?

I played two Xbox 360 games at E3...they may have been running on dev hardware, but they were definitely Xbox 360 games. They had the nifty new controller and everything.

I think it was Call of Duty 2 and something by Sega.

Re:These articles are crap.

[ARRRLovin]

They were running on PowerMac G5 dev kits, not the CPU/GPU combo the XBox360 will have. Again, nobody has seen frame one come from either of these systems yet.

Re:These articles are crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Again, your complaint has absolutely nothing to do with Hannibal's article about the PPC Xenon CPU.

Mac OS Xbox 360?

[ndansmith]

Codenamed Xenon, the multicore PowerPC CPU that IBM designed for the Xbox 360 . . .

OK, now that we have a PowerPC chip here, who thinks they can port what to the new XBox 360?

Re:Mac OS Xbox 360?

[1967mustangman]

Lets port DR-DOS to it. No wait OS/2. Or how bout NeXT Step (and I don't mean what they made into OSX)

Re:Mac OS Xbox 360?

[hotdiggitydawg]

Personally I'm hoping for a pile of old Amiga titles, so I can play Xenon on the Xenon...

Re:Mac OS Xbox 360?

[1967mustangman]

How could I forget the Amiga. Did you ever here of the Fish Disks for Amiga. It was like 150 floppies full of freeware

Re:Mac OS Xbox 360?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you ever learn to use question marks.

Re:Mac OS Xbox 360?

[1967mustangman]

?Nope?

Re:Mac OS Xbox 360?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you would be interested in my purely original product "CarrotOS-360," it will be ready in a few days.

Sincerely,
Arben

Spank?

[richmaine]

So you thought "the PS3 would spank the Xbox 360." Do you have to have both consoles to run that game? And is it X rated? :-)

Or I guess the rating I'm asking about is NC-17 these days. My mention of X ratings probably shows the time frame in which I saw much of that kind of flick. :-)

Re:Spank?

[FuturePastNow]

I think that would be an "M" rating (Governer Rod wants to ban console spanking! The horror!).

Re:Spank?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most worthless comment ever. Not funny, not interesting, not insightful. Not even a troll.

Re:Spank?

[richmaine]

That AC comment, however, is hilarious in its self-referential contradiction. After all, if the original comment was worthless, then it must be even more worthless to say so. Therefore, if the original comment was the most worthless ever, then pointing out that fact made it no longer true.

Re:Spank?

[mink]

I thought AO was the X for consoles.

I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken

[garagekubrick]

Because every developer on the floor knew that the most impressive demos for the PS3 were totally prerendered. They could even name the people who worked on them. And for some reason no one in the games journalism community would point blank persistently ask Sony and groups like Axis Animation what the deal was. Look at this article where it's all speculation and guessing. The public deserves to know that what they were shown is not exactly how a game is going to look on PS3. Meanwhile, closed door demos of the Xbox 360 were actually impressive. I don't work for either company or work in games for that matter, though I do love them. I am totally neutral about both machines. My bias is negative towards Microsoft as I'm a Mac zealot and my Xbox is my least favorite console. I went into E3 feeling Microsoft had blown it. Then I saw what it could do, held the controller in my hand, and now am impressed and rather excited about the Xbox 360. And privately a developer told me that they aren't anywhere near having the machines run full speed or utilizing their full power in the very obvious Mac G5 dev kits they're running everything from. But I will say this: HDTV is going to be a requirement. The PS3 remains vaporware in my mind - I recall claims of rendering scenes of the Final Fantasy movie on PS2's "emotion engine". And ultimately what's even sadder is there were a mere handful of games at E3 that made me excited. Okami, the new Zelda, We Love Kattamari, Shadow of the Collossus, Stubbs the Zombie, and that's pretty much it. Horsepower may be here, but games are as stunted, as juvenile, and as retreaded as ever. Future marines vs. monsters and bimbos galore. Meanwhile next gen gaming is going to cost more, Microsoft have shunted most PC development to the Xbox, killing the richness of PC games for the most part other than MMORPGs. And now we're going to have live updating advertising in games, along with additional content that will have to be purchased. Want that sword +2? You can buy it for $4.99. Welcome to gamer hell.

Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why people only believe 'real reviews' and not corporate-produced reviews - they know the pundits are all full of $hit.

Reviews don't matter until the product hits market, and consumers test them and generate reviews. Grassroots reviews are the only ones *I* trust! That's why thereg uses 'Trusted Reviews'

The truth hurts before it heals. Corporations don't give a $hit, however, therefore I don't buy things when they hit the market - especially electronics.

Sensibility isn't difficult.

Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken

[Slashcrap]

Because every developer on the floor knew that the most impressive demos for the PS3 were totally prerendered.

While I generally frown on blatant karma whores who post links to Penny Arcade strips in the vain hope that some of the humour will rub off on themselves, I think that this one is particularly appropriate :

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-05 -23&res=l

I will now spend the rest of the evening frantically flagellating myself with barbed wire in an attempt to atone for this act of rank hypocrisy.

Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken

[KillShill]

"My bias is negative towards Microsoft as I'm a Mac zealot and my Xbox is my least favorite console."

and yet you don't have any bias for sony , a member of the RIAA and MPAA...

you're welcome to your biases, no matter how irrational it may seem to others.

Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken

[Anonymous Coward]

the new Zelda

Oh, you mean Ocarina-of-Time-with-a-new-graphical-look? Yes, I suppose that's innovative.

Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken

[nobodyman]

Finally! Someone else gets it! I couldn't agree more. I went to E3, but I refused to wait in a 4 hour line because it only looked like they were showing off the physical design and some pre-rendered movies... but not one piece of journalism (gaming or mainstream) would say otherwise. Sony showed off a hollow plastic box and some CG animations, yet everyone happily ate it up.

For some reason, the media and the geek community are giving Sony a pass, in spite of being shown next to nothing, and in spite of Sonys semi-obnoxious level of overhype. All we really know is that the ps3 is at least as powerful as the Sega Saturn, which can also playback pre-rendered animations.

Xbox 360 was also a dissapointment but for different reasons. Prettier, derivitive games that, and nothing to address the very real threat of spiraling development costs and development cycle times.

Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken

[Trogre]

Of the 3 questionable demos shown on the PS3 at E3, (hey, 3^3), only one was actually pre-rendered.

Of course we all know gaming journalism is broken. But if you think it's biased toward Sony then you've really got your head in the sand.

Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken

[MBraynard]

I saw your gamer hell link. I have played relatively few games, especially compared to you, but have noticed rather excellent AI in Halo 2. Island Thunder is also decent.

Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken

[Anonymous Coward]

This can be the truly ipod killer. You can download movies to play on your HDTV, or time shift or god knows what else they can put on this system. So far by demos, they plan to throw at you trailers of movies, that is just a short step of tv and movies on demand. And why not, videos and music.

Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken

[TrancePhreak]

You obviously haven't heard of XNA.

Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken

[Archibald Buttle]

If you're right that HDTV is going to be a requirement then Microsoft have lost the battle for this generation of consoles already. This would be a recipe for them selling only a few thousand consoles.

There's not all that many HDTV sets in North America right now, and they're expensive - very few people are going to spend thousands of dollars for a TV for their $300 console.

Europe is behind the game on HDTV too - you can't buy an HDTV set here right now, and even if you could there's no broadcasts to watch anyway. They won't even start to take off for over a year, meaning that the XBox 360 could be on the market for 6 months until there's TVs available for them.

Microsoft aren't stupid - XBox 360 must be capable of working on standard definition TVs, otherwise they might as well not bother.

Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken

[dangitman]

This can be the truly ipod killer. You can download movies to play on your HDTV, or time shift or god knows what else they can put on this system.

And how exactly does that help people carry their music around in a small, easy-to-use package?

Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken

[Hast]

Actually you can get HDTVs in Eu now. Most of them in the form of LCD-TVs though. And a couple of channels will begin transmitting HDTV in Eu during the autumn. (At least in Sweden. But I believe some other countries are doing it as well.)

Re:I was at E3 and gaming journalism is broken

[garagekubrick]

To clarify: oh yes it will work an SDTV... But the 360 sure looks a hell of a lot better on HDTVs. A hell of a lot. It's going to be the only way to get the beautuous resolution and 16:9 framing that all games will have ready if you have an HDTV.

Make no mistake, both Xbox 360 and PS3 were designed to sell more HDTVs.

You can get decent HDTV sets now for $500 by the way.

OS/360

[ntufar]

Amazingly nobody mentioned OS/360 released by IBM exactly 40 years ago http://ldworen.net/fun/os360obit.html and still downloadable from http://www.cbttape.org/os360.htm

Re:zonk, you're a fucking retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 for being redundant
-NaN for revealing the slashdot secret.

Xenon?

[Shadow Wrought]

You mean all these years I've been trying to figure out the composition of the magic smoke that makes my machine run and its been Xenon the whole time!?

Undercut Intels brand

[HornWumpus]

Pretty smart for IBM, make a games processor that sound just like intels overpriced server processor.

Does'nt hurt that the Xenon has 1 meg of shared L2 cache. How much are those Xeons again.

procedural synthesis

[LWATCDR]

I don't get how this could be patented? How is this different than any of a 1000 fractal plant or landscape programs that are out there?

Re: procedural synthesis

[Scorchio]

I've been trying to figure this one out... the article describes it in a way that leads you to believe it's a process that only the Xenon can do, and will do it for free. It's a common technique used in many games. It doesn't mention anything about the Xenon that would significantly improve the process - I'll bet my lunch it doesn't have a BLOW_IN_WIND operator in the silicon. Unless I'm very much mistaken, the whole process will still need to be programmed much the same as it is on other machines.

Reminds me of some of the fluff that came out about the Emotion Engine in the run up to the PS2 release.

Re: procedural synthesis

[iplayfast]

Didn't Issac Newton discover this? Isn't it called calculus? (Passing a formula when describes a curve instead of the curve itself?)

Then again. It seems obvious to me as well.

Re: procedural synthesis

[guitaristx]

I was wondering the same thing. The only thing that comes to mind is that it may introduce some level of abstraction via a new primitive data type. I do, however, think that most of it is over-patented.

The concept, however, I agree with. The fact that most aesthetics of video games are generated solely by artists does lead to a rather disappointing world. I would like to be able to generate a forest-full of trees that is exactly the same every time, with every tree different, and not have every frickin' tree generated by an artist.
(as necessary, s/tree/house/, s/tree/planets/, s/tree/asteroids/, et. al.)

This type of concept ought to give a whole lot more control (and value) back to the programmers, and away from the artists. How wonderful would it be to have a function that would generate a tree based on 8 bytes of input (essentially making 2^64 different trees) possible?

Re: procedural synthesis

[LWATCDR]

I have to wonder if it has more to do with the transfer of data to the GPU than the synthesis. I also have to wonder what cross IP agreement IBM has with Microsoft on this? Could we see the G6 be a Xenon core with Cells????

I'm happy all over, from head to toe

[l3v1]

Why am I so happy ? beacuse with such game consoles out there (despit the fact that I'm a full fledged PS3 fan, coolest thang, great stuff) Linux has a greater chance than ever.

I, for one, will probably no way buy PC games in the future. Why the hell would I do that when I can have a quite powerfull and nice looking console hooked up to a hdtv in the living room. I ain't gona need no PC to play my brains out, the wish should arise.

And, added to the above and returning to my Linux idea at the beginning, don't forget that very very very many average clicking guys come with the "argument" that they won't even consider chaning or even trying Linux, because all the games run on Windows.

All in all, these consoles will probably be great, I hope so. Given the specs, the reviews, etc., I'm still nto convinced any bit of XBox's superiority over the PS3, but that's no problem if I can buy which I want and play, play, play :D

Re:I'm happy all over, from head to toe

[DarthVain]

I realized this years ago. I am sure there are many like me who at the thought of upgrading their computer syetem for 3000$ to play games balked. Why do that when you can buy an xboxen for 300$. The ONLY negitive is that you can't rip off games. Of course people got mod chips to do even this. I for one didn't go that far as I can just rent the game. I have yet to play a game that keeps my attention longer than a week anyway (perhaps Halo2).

This also means that I don't have to run windows in my PC as I don't need to (can't really) play games on it. So its a Linux Boxen for computer, and Xboxen for games. Besides all the really good games you can play on Linux anyway. I can still get my Enemy Territory fix. It may be a bit of a bugger to get some of them working, but hey I used to live in the 286 world back in the day. You had to learn your computer just to play games, and we were glad. Hell thats how I started learning about computers in the first place. The diveragance from PC to console has been a long time coming.

Actually now that I starting talking about it, it kinda makes you wonder. I bet there was some genius working for MS that saw the divergance growing, like probably what is going to happen in this next round of consols (increased penatration). They probably know that a great deal of the reason people still use windows is because you can play games. With PC getting more expensive and the console technology climbing they must have known that they will loose MASSIVE market share when the divergance (or is it convergance, whatever) happens and tons move to console and no longer need a gaming PC... I guess it is no surprise that MS made such as big move or bid into the console market, they are just protecting market share.

Look at me, I now run Linux like all you zelots out there, but I am still getting my Microsoft fix from my xboxen and i happy to do it.

Anyway thats eff from me.

Re:I'm happy all over, from head to toe

[gid-goo]

The only thing you should be convinced of is that this generation is completely about Marketing and Games. Tech will have little or nothing to do with it (unless the PS3 is a complete nightmare to develop for). Both consoles will be awesome. It'll be up to MS and Sony to line up the devs with the killer titles.

Re:I'm happy all over, from head to toe

[techguy911]

Consoles will always be limited by their simplicity. Games on all consoles are limited to gameplay based on a simple axis and a few buttons. MMORPG's, complex, and interactive games are much better suited to a full PC and can only be played with limited functionality on a console. Both have their advantages, but PC games will never be eliminated. In fact, I forsee PC games growing in popularity as next generation web speeds and technologies are introduced.

Re:I'm happy all over, from head to toe

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, will probably no way buy PC games in the future. Why the hell would I do that when I can have a quite powerfull and nice looking console hooked up to a hdtv in the living room.

Because you don't have to buy a new computer every coupla years. Seriously, you can play games on your computer for a fair chunk of time, and then throw down $170 for a new video card and play for another chunk of time.

Not on consoles, yo. As the Sony/MS war continues its course yeah, machine spec will rise, but so will cost, and system lifetime will only decrease. New gen of consoles? $400. And each time a new one comes out everyone stops making games for the old one.

Now I'm not saying that the bleeding-edge computer game junkie spends less on his addiction than the console player pays for his. But with computers you can take your own pace, and play the new game on your out-of-date machine with the detail turned down. But if you're still lovin' your PS1 there is just no Katamary Damacy for you, even with the detail punched all the way down.

I like consoles, I just wish they didn't become worthless every 2 years. They'll probably overtake computer gaming just because they have a planned obselescence that is harder to make work on the PC platform.

Re:I'm happy all over, from head to toe

[spyder913]

This will be much more likely for me when they actually come out with a mouse/kb input for FPS games. I can't stand using gamepads for those kind of games.

Another problem is the resolution -- HD offers up to 1080 lines, wheras my monitor has been doing at least that for 8 years. Lots of mmo games have text for chat, and it's hard to replace with voice-com (it gets annoying, or you want to listen to music, or watch TV while playing, which I do).

Either way I enjoy my console for my console type games, and my PC for FPS and MMO games.

Who cares, just buy both

[llZENll]

both will have some great games

Re:Who cares, just buy both

[incom]

Just buy both? That's alot of geek cash. What I normally do is prioritize consoles, and right now the score is PS3>Rev>360 .

Re:Who cares, just buy both

[Anonymous Coward]

Go with (PS3 OR Xbox 360) AND Revolution. You get Nintendo classics and the (fewer but awesome) gems that they put out for their main consoles, (as well as whatever the "revolution" is,) and you get the normal games you expect from (Sony OR Microsoft). Win-win, no?

Re:Who cares, just buy both

[llZENll]

ok, i stand corrected, buy all 3 then :)

Why use 3d in games?

[filesiteguy]

I'm curious why anyone would use 3d in games? I find my NES works just fine without 3d. In addition, I've been really deep into Planetfall lately and that has no 3d.

huh?

[cryptochrome]

Procedural synthesis and Level of Detail (AKA rendering vertex data on the fly from generated objects)? I'm reading the article, and I'm amazed most of this really, really obvious stuff wasn't being done already. guess the old consoles just didn't have the power.

Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xbox?

[bmajik]

You didn't think you were watching real footage of _anything_ from Sony did you? You didn't think that the PS3 they "showed" would be final form of the box, did you ? Do you think the "dualshockboomerang" is the final form of the controller?

You don't actually beleive that giving the 7 SPE's hand coded routines to do (that accomplish nothing, btw) and then proclaiming it is the tflops king makes a better video game machine, do you ?

Which of those 7 SPE's is going to run the IP stack for all the networked games (that wont have an online service comparable to xbox live).

None of them.

Sony made _ridiculous_ claims about the PS2, the fanboys ate them up, and sony way, way underdelivered. "The PS2 will do Toy Story in real time!!". Riiiiight. What part of Toy Story did Sony do, exactly? What do they know about making a Pixar quality film?

For that matter, if the PS2/PS3 are so great, why aren't they _actually_ in the Top500 list? The best supercomputers from Japan aren't made by Sony - they're made by NEC. Where is their supercomputing architectural experience? How is it that a stereo/walkman manufacturer gets by claiming that it is building a faster machine than just about anybody thats been doing it for 30 years, and that they'll sell it for $300 to boot.

The real tragedy here is that Sony fanboys didn't learn from PS2. Sony has the hype cranked up to 11, and people are eating it up, just like they did last time.

I am sure that the PS3 will allow you to have fun playing games.

I am also sure that it will NOT be the hardware equivalent of the return of Christ. Please see through the BS.

The parent post is crap.

[shrubya]

ARRRLovin has never even seen a single page of detailed chip ANALYSIS generated by HANNIBAL at ARSTECHNICA. It's nice to see the ancient art of "trolling" still being practiced.........but not really.

(IOW, RTFA)

Linux?

[stevenm86]

Okay, so it's PPC based? How soon do people expect to see Linux on this thing? Granted, it will be more difficult to get it running on the 360 than on the original xbox, but still..?

Stop the rumors!!

[datbox]

rumours that Mac is going to start using Intel based CPUs in place of PowerPC CPUs in their systems?

Stop the rumors and repeat after me: Mac is not going to use Intel-based CPUs over the current PowerPC!

Re:zonk, you're a fucking retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this a secret???

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[Anonymous Coward]

"The real tragedy here is that Sony fanboys didn't learn from PS2. Sony has the hype cranked up to 11, and people are eating it up, just like they did last time."

No, they learned very well, and this precisely shows it. PS2=~70% of the current console market, no? Expect PS3 to do the same.

Procedural scenery is not new

[Animats]

"Procedural synthesis" has been around for a while. First came fractal synthesis of mountain ranges and clouds, then came L-system for trees and shrubbery. SpeedTree has been doing this for years, and has the best production system. Here are high resolution screenshots. "Windblown trees and grass, subtle lighting effects and hundreds of thousands of trees, plants, palms, cacti, grasses, spread across vast terrains covering hundreds of square miles." One of their older demos is the "million tree forest". The grass, trees, and leaves sway in the wind, just like the claims for the new Xbox.

Yes, this is real time. You can download the demo. That demo requires a high-end PC, and will give you a sense of what SpeedTree will look like on the new XBox.

Because that's what the somewhat clueless original article is about. SpeedTree will be available for the new XBox. This was announced back in March.

The trick is cramming something like SpeedTree into a wierd architecture like the new XBox. That's a headache, but not a breakthrough.

Re:Procedural scenery is not new

[alexhs]

Then there is the third page and "Real-time tessellation".
The author seems to imply that this technique wasn't used before because, well, nobody tought about it ?
While this is because real-time tessellation requires more computing power that wasn't generally available before...

Re:Procedural scenery is not new

[Animats]

Games have been using "real time tesselation" for years. It's part of subdivision surface and level of detail processing. Here are some background papers. Or see these course notes on subdivision surfaces. This technology appeared first in animation rendering, and it's been in games for several years now.

There are many approaches. A big problem has been avoiding "popping", when an area suddenly is rendered with more detail.

Again, this is well understood. It just takes plenty of computer power to drive it.

Microsoft seems to be paving the way for game developers to use their specialized hardware. When the PS2 first came out, the development tools were weak, and it took about two years for developers to get the tools in place to use it effectively. The original XBox is basically a PC; you can develop, test, and debug on Win2K, then rebuild for the XBox target. The new XBox won't be like that; the target is drastically different from the development environment. So Microsoft has to do and promote more middleware development.

Re:Procedural scenery is not new

[caswelmo]

It's seems like every time I hear about something "new" in the computer science field (like procedural synthesis) it is actually an idea that some smart dude thought of 40 years ago and just couldn't implement on vaccuum tubes. I don't think we're as smart as we think we are.

Re:Procedural scenery is not new

[dmccarty]

Talk about a contrived press release!

SpeedTreeRT(TM) Named Sole Foliage Middleware Partner for Next Generation Xbox® Platform

When you have to invent titles like that for exclusivity that should be a sign that something is wrong with your exclusivity. You won't find it in IDV's press release, but here are some of MS's other "Next Generation Xbox® Platform Middleware Partners":

• Khazad Co: Sole Subterranian Middleware Partner for the Americas
• Gollum NTerprises, Inc: Sole Subterranian Middleware Partner for Middle Europe
• Lockheed-Martin Corp: Sole Airborne Projectiles Middleware Provider
• Smith - Wesson: Sole Provider of Right-Handed Handheld Weapons Middleware Partner
• Tom Skilling, Inc: Sole Precipitation Between 0 - 10 km and Middleware Partner
• NOAA: Sole Atmospheric 11 - 50 km Middleware Partner

And the list goes on, ad naseum

Re:Procedural scenery is not new

[adam31]

Right it's not new. The big difference now is the memory bandwidth between where the geometry is generated and where it is transformed and lit.

On a PC, you have that puny little AGP 8x bus running at just 2 GB/s on a high-end system. Next-Gen consoles both have > 20 GB/s bandwidth to the video card. As an added bonus, there are additional processors that can be devoted to the geometry generation, but that hasn't really been the bottleneck in the past.

The golden rule of "Put it on video card once, don't read it back" no longer applies, so this is the first consequence. Other things that have suffered from this memory bottleneck, such as framebuffer computations will be next. After that, you'll see the GPGPU crowd release some monster computation demos... And the Real-Time Raytracing community as well.

None of these are new ideas, they're just useful ideas finally.

Re:Procedural scenery is not new

[MrScience]

The trick is that the new XBox was designed from the ground up for games to use SpeedTree-like technology. That's the breakthrough.

Re:Procedural scenery is not new

[Animats]

And the list goes on, ad naseum

Yes, it does. There's the terrain engine, and the foliage engine, and the physics engine, and the AI engine, and the sound engine... And as a game developer, you have to make it all play together.

That's the reason for RenderWare, which is basically a collection of mediocre middleware for all of the above. For everything RenderWare does, there's something else that does it better. But RenderWare has it all in one expensive box, and it sort of plays together.

RenderWare is that it has been bought by Electronic Arts. Other game developers are reluctant to get their crucial middleware from a direct competitor. Yet it gets you onto a new platform faster. Tough decisions lie ahead for game developers, and many of them have little to do with the game itself.

Quick Summary and opinion

[uigrad_2000]

Summary of article:

When traditional games need artwork, the illustrators draw it (with curves), and then use fancy software to make sharp polygons out of the curves (process called tesselation). When the add this information to the game database, it's a large list of verticies, which is unweildy to handle.

With the xbox 2*pi, the tesselation will be delayed until runtime. The data will be stored as curves[*], and will not be converted to polygons until it needs to be displayed. This won't affect the GPU, since the tesselation will happen earlier in the pipeline.

[*]Specifically, humans will be stored in separate poses, where a bone structure (and other solids) is saved for each pose. The skin, of course, is a deformable covering that will be added during the tesselation process. An intelligent algorithm will be used to fill in the segments of time between 2 given poses.

Lastly, Microsoft has received a patent for this idea of runtime-tesselation. My opinion

1) Is this really better? They emphasize the reduction in hours creating the vertex database, because the quantity of information is reduced. Is it really easy for a graphic designer to fit a mathametically curve to a particular line in his drawing? Is it really less information?

2) How did they get a patent for this idea? I'm sure there are lots of 3d games, probably even back to the 90's era, that used a similar princicple of representing objects with curves, and then displaying them at runtime with polygons. The patent is probably not really for that idea, but just for the architectual design (hardware) to handle such software.

Re:Quick Summary and opinion

[whizzter]

1: If used properly, yes. ever heard of NURBS ? it's there in basically all modelling packages. The problem of modelling with nurbs is that you can feel a slight loss of control until you master them, and when going to really highpoly meshes you don't wanna be flipping tri-edges to get nice shading.

2: True, i think that MotoGP or some other motorcycle game on the PS2 actually did the same thing (tesselating smooth curves for meshes in realtime) by using the VU chip, maybe somebody could look at that and try to get the patent invalidated? depends ofcos on if you want to classify the VU chip as "hardware".

Re:Quick Summary and opinion

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how applicable this is to a patent on this, but CAD software has used something similar for years. One of the worldwide standards for storing 2D data is the IGES format, or Parasolid for 3D data. Both systems, I believe, store a mathematical representation of curves/volumes/surfaces which is converted to polygons on the screen as the view is rotated around. The IGES uses 14th order polynomials if I remember correctly - don't know the details on Parasolid.

Re:Quick Summary and opinion

[gatkinso]

"2*pi" is one more keystroke than "360".

Dweeb.

Re:Quick Summary and opinion

[DCstewieG]

Can I get the proof for 360 = 6.283185307179? I always knew my math professors were keeping something from me.

Re:Quick Summary and opinion

[Keeper]

1) Yes it is better. The designer doesn't "fit" a mathamatical curve -- the software handles that under the hood for them. They choose a circle and manipulate it, or they choose points to deform on a line and manipulate it.

It is definately less information ... one "shape" may have more data than a single vertex, but it has far less data than a similar shape made out of vertexes. This reduces the amount of data that must be transfered over the system bus, which is critical in this context.

The other advantage to this methodology is that the rendering software can dynamically vary the number of vertexes it generates based on the rendering load.

2) They applied for one and got it. Remember, patents don't cover ideas -- they cover how you implement an idea.

Re:Quick Summary and opinion

[farley13]

wow. So there are NURBS then there are Sub-D's. Pretty Different. If x-box 360 can store the mathematical model for a Sub-D built from a polygon mesh, then tesilate that well, it might be kinda neat. Dito for tesilating NURBS.

Now some neat tessilation might be displacement based on a normal map. That would be real neat!

BTW illustrator != modeler.

Re:Quick Summary and opinion

[Anonymous Coward]

Noone will use this feature for the sake of portability (because most xbox games also have PC port). There are also issues like above, but there probably will be some tools to handle it.

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[jvmatthe]

The PS2 will do Toy Story in real time!!". Riiiiight.

Without taking a position on the claims Sony's made about the PS2 or PS3, I'd like to note that my recollection is that NVIDIA was the one that originally said they would be rendering Toy Story in real-time, with one of the GeForce processors.

Did Sony ever mention Toy Story? Was it perhaps Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within that Sony had mentioned?

Procedual Synthesis, why?

[HelloKitty]

anyone plan to use this feature? really... there have been support for features like this in the past, but they've been largly ignored. hardware bezier or nurbs come to mind. art creation using these methods isn't there, artists don't want to give up the level of control over the content.

why would I want the system to determine my surface when I can tweak it out exactly the way I want? Both will run the same, or close enough... especially on xbox 360, we don't need any 64k demos...

Re:Procedual Synthesis, why?

[djbentle]

I think the idea is that in future generations of games, worlds will be so complex and large that it's simply not possible to hand optimize the required number of models. Additionally, even assuming you had infinite artists, the memory and bandwidth requirements for storing and transferring that number of models to the graphics card are prohibitive. Therefore you must either have many duplicated models to reduce the total number necessary, or they must reduce the memory and bandwidth footprints of dealing with that many discreet models.

I'm not commenting on the validaty of this thesis, I don't really know, but I believe this is why the article feels it may be more attractive than in the past.

The Wheel of Life

[argent]

It's funny how the early paradigms for optimization in computers are now starting to work in reverse.

"Starting to"? As long as computers have been around, the trade-offs between the CPU, coprocessors, and I/O processors have been changing.

The earliest reference to it that I know of it dates back to the early '70s:

cycle of reincarnation
[coined by Ivan Sutherland ca. 1970] n. Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again. Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. Also known as `the Wheel of Life', `the Wheel of Samsara', and other variations of the basic Hindu/Buddhist theological idea.

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never read anything this ignorant, this misguided before. And I'm a regular /. reader!

Before your embarrass yourself in another post, see this (WMV, I'm so sorry):
http://media.ps3.ign.com/articles/615/615000/vids_ 1.html

Ever project manager, CEO, etc. make stupid comments. The Toy Story comment was very, very stupid. But anyone with half a brain knew it wasn't possible. MS is constantly making stupid comments, yet you mention NONE OF THEM. On top of this, Microsoft is the KING of hype. Look at the MTV Xbox load of crap. All hype, no substance. These tech demo show the true power of Cell and RSX in REAL TIME. The video shown at E3 were real, and I don't care if you do not believe me. Anyone with a trained eye can see this by merely comparing the videos against the released screenshots.

Cell is the revolution in computing, Cell is the supercomputer killer. The PS2/PS3 ARE NOT SUPER COMPUTERS! They are game consoles, they may compare some of the power to those of super computers. But super computers don't have TV and digital audio outputs. Stop over reading into what people say.

And the fan boy comment is proving that you are exactly that, a fan boy yourself. The PS2 has sold over 90 (I think it's 90) million consoles worldwide, and all this while pulling a profit. In fact the PS side of Sony is keeping them alive (at least to investors).

I won't begin to even get into how much the PS2 has evolved without evolving. It's got 24 mb of fucking RAM!! DUDE, do you not see the games it can push?! How dare you disrespect such an underpowered machine, and what people have done with it!

I'm not explaining this any futher...

-mo

Procedural Synthesis?

[chill]

From the article In a nutshell, procedural synthesis is about making optimal use of system bandwidth and main memory by dynamically generating lower-level geometry data from statically stored higher-level scene data.

Patent? Sorry, but I was using a plug-in for Lightwave 3D back in the mid-1990s that did that. I could swear that was a popular technique used by a variety of 3D animations software a decade ago.

-Charles

Re:Procedural Synthesis?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your right, it is exactly what 3DStudio Max, Lightwave, Rhino, Maya, etc. and their plugins have been doing for more than a decade. I think the MS patent is for the hardware architechture, not the software concept...

Re:Procedural Synthesis?

[ifreakshow]

I think that the difference is in the way the hardware handles this. IANAE on this but it looks like vertex data is never being stored in main memory, but is "streamed" to the GPU via the processors. The main memory only gets a description of the object to be rendered instead of the whole object. This reduces the bandwidth overhead and frees up more room for object descriptions.

So basically instead of 10 trees rendered 40 times a piece we may get 40 trees rendered 10 times. This should make a huge difference in any scene that has hundreds of similar objects.

Re:Procedural Synthesis?

[Keeper]

Patents cover the process of how you get from point A to point B. Patents do not cover "point B".

Re:Procedural Synthesis?

[TerranFury]

More on modelers: I've been using SPatch forever, which is a wonderful little freeware spline based model. Hash Animation Master uses nothing but splines. 3dsMax has had support for splines and NURBS since forever.

And on games: Quake III did this. Curved surfaces were stored as such, and tesselated, with LOD, at runtime. And this is an old-school BSP+PVS engine!

Agreed: This is not new.

Re:Procedural Synthesis?

[Lisandro]

And on games: Quake III did this. Curved surfaces were stored as such, and tesselated, with LOD, at runtime. And this is an old-school BSP+PVS engine!

Thank God SOMEONE finally brought this up. One of Quake III's selling points was how the engine could do this and other neat stuff not possible before. This is hardly a new thing.

Re:*More* XBox 360 stories PLEASE!

[willisbueller]

What are you talking about? Plenty of people love notepad.

Re:For the same reason I hate video card Markettin

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats your point? You can also pay more for a fully loaded Explorer (mid sized Ford SUV) than you can for a stripped Excursion (full sized Ford SUV). If you actually took 10 minutes to go look at the VGA charts at any hardware site you'd know exactly what the difference is. Bigger numbers stomp lower numbers across the board. The price depends on the amount of extra crap video card makers feel like gluing onto the board. For example you can get a geforce 6600 with "extra uber fast overclockinating superfeatures" for $300, or a plain jane geforce 6800 for the same price. The 6800 will shitstomp the 6600...

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[grumbel]

No idea about the ToyStory claim, but the FinalFantasy one came from Nvidia and was real, since they actually did render some scenes in realtime, however with quite a lot less detail and low framerates, Wikipedia has some screenshots:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy:_The_Sp irits_Within

Not sure why...

[froghermit]

but I feel like my pride is on the line here. Xbox is a computer without monitors, mouse, and keyboard. PS3 is a real gaming console. But seriously, Xbox got Halo. PS3 got FF7, MGS, and Gran Turismo. Revolution's got Mario and Zelda. Your going to get the console not because of the just the hardware but because it's got the games you want to play.

Insightful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dang, I guess you could say that, but I was really shooting for Funny.

PS3 Devkit

[Anonymous Coward]

http://streamingmovies.ign.com/ps3/article/614/614 943/sonycon_demos_unreal_02_wmvlow.wmv

I find it interesting...

[JawzX]

That Microsoft seems to have done some real inovative code and process work on the X-BOX 360. The whole prodedural sythesis system as described in the article should proove to be a real boon to developers. On the other hand Sony has thrown a hell of a lot more esoteric hardware at the problem...

One thing's for sure, IBM has proven it's not affraid to do some unique things at the request of paying customers. Cell or Xenon with Procedural Synthesis, either way IBM has learned a LOT from these game system deals. Don't think they aren't counting on using some of these tricks down the road for other things...

Waste

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait for the nation-wide blackouts on debut-day! What a grand waste of energy. I severely doubt that all the hardware is necessary to render a few bouncing boobs near a volleyball net.

Maybe I'll hold out for the Sempron or Dothan version... it'll save me money and energy (more money).

Oh wait, I don't care about console gaming or giving Bill Gates my income.

Touchdown or Fumble?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Despite the fact that Microsoft scored a touchdown with the Xbox..." Hmmmm..... I agreed with his "leveraging their... deep pockets" comment but somehow I can't justify a billion dollar a year loss as a "touchdown" in my mind. Regarding their "2nd place acheivement": There's only 2 other competitors, and Nintendo's been on a downward sprial for 2 generations now! I would attribute Microsoft's 'success' (as judged by market-share) more to Nintendo who simply screwed up MORE, rather than to any actual acheivement of Microsoft's.

Not convinced?

[Marthisdil]

Dude, this is Slashdot. Where if Microsoft is associated with your product in any way, everyone hates you, thinks you're taking over the world, and pirates your software.

Re:Not convinced?

[Anonymous Coward]

also not forgetting; you are a communist

have a nice day... ;o)

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[Anonymous Coward]

One big difference between PS2 and PS3 is that IBM co-developed the PS3 processor, and IBM does have the #1 computer in the Top500 list.

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[imsabbel]

Interesting to see that all the sony fanboys dont want to out themself.
Hint: posting as AC automatically reduces your credibility to about 10% of what it would normaly be if it isnt justified (leaking insider stuff, breaking NDA,ect)

Wash-Rinse-Repeat

[Anonymous Coward]

Finding new ways to make you buy a virtual murder machine! Thanks to networking, you can now chat in realtime about how best to murder people and non-people.

Gates bless America.

Cell can do this too, probably better

[irritating environme]

Procedural synthesis basically involves moderately simple code generating 3D objects on the fly.

That's something Cell's 7 SPEs would kick ass at. Nice idea, but not like this is something the 360 is exclusively capable of. I'd guess that the Cell should be able to do this better, if properly harnessed.

Re:Cell can do this too, probably better

[ad0gg]

Aren't SPU's just the marketing speak for SIMDs? Being a simd wouldn't make them that great for anything thats complex(AI etc). Look what MMX is used for in the pentiums.

Re:Obligatory Austin Powers reference

[Fussen]

What?? Why is parent been troll modded? Obviously some people on slashdot can't tell humor from a foot in their ass.

Mike Myers, we apologize for the moderators that just came out of their linux shell yesterday.

Re:Obligatory Austin Powers reference

[Anonymous Coward]

Offtopic, yes, but Troll? Definitely not. It just goes to show you that posting more than 4 capital letters in a row automatically gets you labeled as a troll around here. Geesh.

Re:*More* XBox 360 stories PLEASE!

[Anti_zeitgeist]

And plenty of people love clippy.

Re:For the same reason I hate video card Markettin

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats your point? You can also pay more for a fully loaded Explorer (mid sized Ford SUV) than you can for a stripped Excursion (full sized Ford SUV)

And what's your point? The Explorer and the Excursion both suck ass...

Amiga Anyone?

[Nom du Keyboard]

...the hardware that powers the Xbox 360 is custom-made from the ground up to run games, high-definition video, and digital audio.

Sounds like the Amiga approach to me.

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[Slashcrap]

I won't begin to even get into how much the PS2 has evolved without evolving. It's got 24 mb of fucking RAM!! DUDE, do you not see the games it can push?! How dare you disrespect such an underpowered machine, and what people have done with it!

You seem to be getting extremely upset about something utterly trivial. If you ever hear voices in your head telling you to pick up a gun and settle some scores with all these people "disrespecting" the PS2, it may be better to seek help instead.

I also enjoyed the way you lambast the original poster for daring to suggest the PS2 thecnology was overhyped and then finish by calling it "such an underpowered machine".

I'd like to end by stating that I have never owned a console, have no intention of ever doing so and couldn't give a flying fuck which of the "next gen" consoles sell the most units. So please don't include me on your hitlist.

I do however enjoy taunting people who believe any sort of corportate PR or hype, just in case you're wondering about my motivations.

Hope this helps and hope that you seek help before it's too late.

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[KillShill]

in order for one to see through the BS, one would have to possess a functional brain.

hence, the current responses.

as always, general (aka non gfx, sound) Multi-processing is VERY HARD. none of the consoles will be able to deliver what they've shown on paper with the effeciency you may be salivating over.

and thats not even counting the massive butt-busting DRM that will take away your rights to the hardware you bought.

thinking about using those 8 vector processing units in your ps3 to do faster than realtime encoding of h264 video? tough luck. those processors belong to sony even though you paid the money for the hardware. and thats just but one example.

i have this old fashioned nonsensical habit of wanting to own stuff i pay for. it's a human failing, assuredly.

I agree. IT'S NOT A XENON PROCESSOR!

[DurendalMac]

Sheesh, what was he thinking when he wrote that? It's a PowerPC CPU.

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[LttleStrummerBoy]

Not that I'm a PS3 Fanboy myself (I'll allow Excited Potential Next-gen Console Owner. I still don't have my own PS2 or XBox...My desktop is sufficiant.), but I don't think we saw much, if any, real footage from either console.

Also, a greater number of TFlops for one machine over another doesn't make it a better video game machine, but greater potential for being a better video game machine.

I know you're being sardonic with your notion of PS2/PS3 being listed in the Top500, but that's just an incredibly silly notion. A video game console isn't going to be listed, much less running Linpack.

Sony didn't create the Cell processor alone. It was an alliance between Sony, IBM, and Toshiba. Sony doesn't even associate itself with building supercomputers (although their own supercomputer listed on the Top500 is comprised of 568 IBM procs). IBM's technology comprises 17 of the top 30 Supercomputers (including #1). NEC was responsible for only 1 of the top 30 (#3).

Also, both consoles' TFlops numbers are so high (although I'm not completely sold they are accurate) because the hardware isn't general purpose, it's highly specialized. This is the reason why you need a computer roughly 3 times the power of the original console to run an emulator and have the game perform decently.

Personally, I am still waiting for footage from actual renders from both consoles to allow my mouth to begin watering.

Patents

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems I was the only one who noticed that MS seems to be patenting generating game models on the fly. Seems they wish to force Sony and Nintendo to do games the brute force way by using individual models for everything. Expect Sony and Nintendo to fight those patents. They're improperly granted anyway. Dynamically generated 3D game models has been popular in the demo scene for years. Yet another example of the failure of the USPTO.

Inside the Xbox...

[Great Briton]

can you still swing a cat?

Re:Inside the Xbox...

[Frogbert]

You might be able to, however if you open it to check you'll change the outcome.

What the...

[Trogre]

What's with all these XBox articles? I see it even has its own /. icon now.

The Playstation 3 is also coming out and with much more interesting technology than this XBox, but we haven't been bombarded with as much PS3 propaganda, have we?

Do we really think that Sony is more evil than Microsoft that we ignore them, or are we simply keeping a closer eye on the enemy?

I think it more likely that the editor, Zonk is a Microsoft shill.

Okay so we're not completely ignoring Sony, but their console isn't getting anywhere near the level of exposure as MS's offerring. IMO MS and their ventures are far more worthy of our contempt than just about any other company.

Re:What the...

[Anonymous Coward]

We have no been bombarded with that much Microsoft stuff. Take the articles from one day before E3 and on, and the difference is not big.

Anti-monopoly sentiment as usual.

Re:What the...

[TrancePhreak]

The PS3 is also much farther off as far as release time. When it gets close to release I'm sure there'll be plenty of ads..... I mean articles about it too.

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[dr.badass]

For that matter, if the PS2/PS3 are so great, why aren't they _actually_ in the Top500 list? The best supercomputers from Japan aren't made by Sony - they're made by NEC. Where is their supercomputing architectural experience?

What exactly is your point here?

*Nobody ever claimed that that the PS3 would make the Top500.
[Even IBM has stated that it would take at least 8 Cell processors to make the Top500 -- the PS3 has only one. Perhaps you're confusing the architecture with the product?]

*NEC built the Earth Simulator, yes, but most of the Top500 machines in Japan were built on HP, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and IBM.

*Why aren't you bitching about Microsoft and Nintendo not having "supercomping architectural experience"?

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple responses. First, if you're going to argue how could Sony, who doesn't build supercomputers, build such a fast machine, then you could say the same for Microsoft, who doesn't build any hardware at all save the the XBox. Of course, you're ignoring the fact that neither of them is actually producing the chips that are what we are actually measuring. In both cases, IBM is making them, and IBM, incidentally, has *several* of the top500 spots, several in the top 10, in fact. According to the latest list, they actually have the number 1 supercomputer, beating NEC by 2 spots...Of course, they're not, like you say, claiming to have the fastest computers ever seen. They're claiming to have the fastest game consoles, which one of the two (Sony or Microsoft) is right about having.

Also, that is the final form of the PS3. That was the *whole point of the show*. To show what it's going to look like.

I agree that they're overhyping and that it probably won't live up to everything they say, but I just don't see how a post that's 9/10 incorrect bullshit go modded +5 Insightful...

Barf -- Ars is Shilling for MSFT Now

[Anonymous Coward]

Get real! The XBOX a "touchdown?" PS2 spanked the daylights out of the XBOX...sony shipments didn't slow down one bit...LOL

All the money thrown at XBOX by MSFT just to price war on PS2 and still PS2 won...

The public deserves to know - Earth to dweeb

[glrotate]

The phrase "the public deserves to know" belongs in conversations regarding issues like public health, official corruption and the like. This discussion is about a sillly box that puts shiny things on TV.

Get a grip.

Eh?

[glrotate]

Bear in mind that this is the first generation that's been online out of the box.

The Xbox has built in ethernet and the dreamcast had a modem and PPP.

Haven't you noticed all of the Microsoft ads?

[glrotate]

I'd say 25% of the ads run on /. now are MS ads.

You don't think the editors are stupid, do you?

Re:Haven't you noticed all of the Microsoft ads?

[IntergalacticWalrus]

Speaking of which, does anyone else here find it completely outrageous and unacceptable that the OSTG sells ad space to Microsoft? Yeah, the OSTG is here to make money, but Microsoft's "Get the facts" campaign speaks against the very essence of what the OSTG stands for. If that's not hypocritical, then I don't know what it is.

Re:Haven't you noticed all of the Microsoft ads?

[BenjyD]

Well, you could say that as all Slashdot readers are intelligent enough to recognise Microsoft's propoganda for the crap it is, why not let MS waste their advertising budget supporting pro-Linux sites.

Of course, I doubt the OSTG thought that deeply about it.

Regardless..

[Smobien]

I'll never let Micro$oft take over my living room. Ever.

Beyond photorealism

[Morgaine]

Photorealism is a decade away at the very least.

I think you're wrong, but for a reason that I haven't heard expressed by anyone else. I think that photorealism is going to be skipped.

You see, the problem is that reality is not pretty. From gardens to fashion models, people are always striving for something "better than reality", even though it's rare to hear anyone say that this is because reality is ugly. It's the truth though.

Machine-generated graphics will be capable of vastly higher quality than real-world imaging within your 10-year deadline. This would allow total photorealism, if it were desired. But it won't be desired, believe me. :-)

Re:Beyond photorealism

[argent]

This would allow total photorealism, if it were desired. But it won't be desired, believe me. :-)

Actually, photorealism is exactly what WILL be desired. Not because people want reality, but because reality is precisely what photorealism isn't about.

Kodak almost from the start adjusted their color film to be just a little brighter and more vivid than life. They make custom films for people who really need accurate color reproduction. Silver halide looks "better" than desaturated color images, even though desaturated color images more accurately represent the response of the eye... and filters in image editing programs strive for the look of silver halide, not the eye. Speaking of which, what do so many people use photoshop and iPhoto for? Touching up pictures to match what they think they saw, as opposed to what they really saw.

Photorealism doesn't mean "like reality", it means "better than reality". It doesn't mean "what we see", it means "what we want to see". What we're going to get is not just going to be photorealistic, it's going to be more photorealistic than any camera could possibly manage.

Re:Beyond photorealism

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, you agree, photorealism will be skipped. :-)

You can't redefine photorealism to be "better than reality" and yet deny the claim.

spanking

[Anonymous Coward]

when it comes to 'spanking' the ps3 doesn't have to be technically better to give the xbox 360 a spanking, their marketing department just have to make people think it will.

The real question is...

[jonwil]

Why neither Sony or Microsoft had actual silicon on display showing what the system can do.

They should have both taken a devkit and given it to whoever (either inside MS/SONY or inside the GPU companies) can push these things to the limits and had them produce the best possible tech demo for these things, complete with full high-definition graphics. And then hooked them up to the best output device money can buy.

Then, the world would be able to see exactly what these impressive new systems are capable of.

Only problem is that if they do that, everyone will expect every game on the new systems to be as good as the tech demos :)

Re:The real question is...

[TrancePhreak]

MS had some dev boxes there in place of actual hardware to show off. Sony had who knows what running stuff (DVD player?).

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[doxology]

"The real tragedy here is that Sony fanboys didn't learn from PS2. Sony has the hype cranked up to 11, and people are eating it up, just like they did last time." Yeah, but can it do Stonehenge?

Thats what "they" said about the last generation.

[Anonymous Coward]

And the generation before that. And the generation before that. Starting to see a trend yet?

The fact remains that every console generation has brought many things to the table that the previous didn't. I am very willing to bet that you own a PS2, Xbox, or Gamecube. I'm also willing to bet that you said the same thing about them before they came out.

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[macshit]

For that matter, if the PS2/PS3 are so great, why aren't they _actually_ in the Top500 list? The best supercomputers from Japan aren't made by Sony - they're made by NEC. Where is their supercomputing architectural experience?

BTW, an interesting tidbit I've heard: the "father" of NEC's supercomputer effort was hired by Sony, and was basically responsible for the PS3's design.

It's hard to say what it means for the PS3 -- there's certainly a vast difference between a sub-$500 consumer device and cost-is-no-object room-filling massive machines like the NEC supercomputers. His experience with high-end machines may even be a liability because of the incredibly different constraints on the PS3. I agree that Sony/SCE often serve up more hot air than they do substance (the PR benefit was no doubt a part of the reason for hiring this guy). Still, it shows they did try to do something to avoid an embarrassment like the PS2.

[Take all this with a grain of salt; I work at NEC, and know people who work at Sony (SCE) on the PS3, and this is the scuttlebutt...]

PostScript rides again!

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like Postscript for 3D graphics. PS describes fonts abstractly and the printer turns them into reality and renders them.
This procedural rendering appears to steal a page from that playbook.

Anyone think its strange...

[alcmaeon]

that IBM would give a code name to its PPC processor that is the same as Intel's trademarked name for a processor it ships?

Proceedural Synthesis is Good Tech

[Corpus_Callosum]

The endgame of proceedural synthesis is that you have a dabatase of known objects (man, woman, tree, car, ...) and through the use of semantic instructions alone those objects can be made to create scenes.

So, for example, a script might describe a scene with a man with short brown hair dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt running along a curve.

Those instructions, alone, would be enough for the system to generate the scene (it would make guesses about variables not supplied and interpolate all actions, modify all models, etc...).

This may not sound that revolutionairy to you, but it is. It is quite profound what such systems are capable of. In the limiting case, you could make a movie by descriptions of the scenes alone (in english, no less). This is why the datacompression angle was hit so hard in the Ars article - you could fit a full-length animation in about as much space as it would take to store the text of a novel plus the unique models and textures that occur in the story.

The research that sits behind such tech is also related to machine vision systems where the machine attempts to guess at objects in a scene, slowly forming a mental semantic "image", that when rendered, looks the same as what is being received through the cameras.

Such semantic representations of scenes and actions also provide an infinite upgradability path as the more powerful the hardware and more detailed the databases it runs against (and the better the interpolation and imagination of the synthesis engine), the better the result will look. A game built now will be playable and on par with games built 50 years from now on then modern hardware.

Last, but not least, using such techniques should make spitting out complex 3D game scenes a breeze... Microsoft may have a developer model that is hard to beat with this tech...

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[Slothy]

That was a NVidia doing a tech demo, not a PS2 demo.

Because Xenon is actually a word?

[cfalcon]

Just my $.02 there...

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[metricmusic]

Show proof from a reputable website quoting a sony rep saying that.

You won't be able to because you're just another poor victim of fanboys twisting facts around linkage

Nope...

[ZxCv]

Xenon != Xeon

Re:*More* XBox 360 stories PLEASE!

[Rick the Red]

The story's first post (and it's not a "First Post!", even) is modded Redundant?

God, I love Meta Moderation. Payback's a bitch.

Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb

[Jarlsberg]

the FinalFantasy one came from Nvidia and was real, since they actually did render some scenes in realtime, however with quite a lot less detail and low framerates

Takes a certain point of view to claim that's real, doesn't it? ;)

Re:Obligatory Austin Powers reference

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, welcome our new Austin-Powers-downmodding overlords.

Give it a rest, Meyers. Jeeze.

Let's start modding down all the stupid Simpsons & Futurama quotes as well. Jesus fuck, is Groening STILL cranking out that swill?

XBOX 360 through gift sites

[blaqueice]

I got my xbox through Gratis and I got my PSP through earnfreegamingsystems.com. Althgouh 360's pricetag has not been revealed I'm guessing we can expect it to put a fair dent in out wallets...seeing as the first xbox summed up to around 500$. Since I got my Xbox from a gift site I fiqure why not get my 360 the same way and save myself a good 500$..or more...anyways check me out http://www.earnfreegamingsystems.com/?x=420/ and if you decide to try it yourself good luck and enjoy your console http://www.earnfreegamingsystems.com/?x=420/ ...if the above link doesn't work copy and paste this into the address box http://www.earnfreegamingsystems.com/?x=420