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

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".

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?

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.

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: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.