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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."
Clearly you arent, since you are about the 1500th person to mention it.
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 =(
Why would IBM name a PowerPC chip "Xenon", when Intel has been using the confusingly similar "Xeon" for years now?
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.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
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?
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.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
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
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.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
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)
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.
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.
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"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: