Xbox 360 to have HD-DVD, Eventually

thebaboon writes "Bill Gates announced that the Xbox 360 will have an HD-DVD drive, just not for launch. From the article: "According to the statements made by Bill Gates in Japan, Xbox 360, the new gaming console, will include HD-DVD drives. Considering that such a decision would postpone the launching date, Microsoft will equip the initial models with classic DVD drives, and only after the new HD-DVD are ready, the Xbox will incorporate them."

Comments

Re:Not a good choice...

[Mandoric]

Neither the XBox internal HDD nor the PS2 peripheral one can be upgraded officially.

News wrong and over 1month old

[NiteStar]

Wha! Slashdot did it again. http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Microsoft-Toshi ba-HD-DVD-Alliance-Changes-Xbox-360-3902.shtml This article was posted on 28th of June 2005, 16:45 GMT ... juNE juNE juNE. On a 2nd note ... softpedia is wrong too. Bill Gates said it (over 1 month ago): ``The initial shipments of Xbox 360 will be based on today's DVD format,'' Gates said. ``We are looking at whether future versions of Xbox will incorporate an additional capability of an HD DVD player or something else.'' It's not confirmed what-so-ever! see: http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/8591/Xbox-360-Might- Incorporate-HD-DVD-Drive/ or http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000101&si d=aIoj6W6mNl_M&refer=japan

HD-DVD "Games" are the problem

[cgenman]

I've written this before, but there are a million ways to fill a HD-DVD. You could, for example, render out a version of all of your textures with time-of-day effects, and swap between them mid-game. You could add modifiers to all of your audio streams to get audio for various locations. You could pregen background or in-game assets, like applying a movie to a wall texture to make it appear that it has more depth than it does. You could pregenerate a thousand different havok crash animations, and randomly select between them. You can use a slow algorithm to populate a forest, make a few large-scale, adjustments, and save out the results as a sectionally loaded world the size of montana.

When the transition was made between CD and DVD games, it was said that a DVD would never be filled. Well, they're filled. And BTW, nobody would accept a Dual-Sided DVD. Do you know how annoying it would be to be told every few minutes to flip your disk over?

The question, really, is will anyone release games on HD-DVD instead of DVD? I'm betting so, as there will be blue-ray games getting ported from the PS3. And when that happens, whoever bought the DVD version of the Xbox will be screwed out of playing the lastest Final Fantasy, or Gran Turismo 5, or Fable 2.

As a HD-DVD player I could care less. But as a game console that is supposed to play HD-DVD games, this will anger a lot of suddenly ex-customers.

Re:HD-DVD "Games" are the problem

[Sycraft-fu]

All you ideas are interesting, but you quickly discover they aren't worthwhile in a game, epsically one on modren hardware like the Xbox is going to have. You just can't render enough textures to truly account for every situation, every angle, etc, and even if you could you can't swap it off disc fast enough (HDs are too slow for it and DVDs make them look downright speedy). So what you do instead is write mathematical formulas that describe the surface, and have the card render them. That's the procedural textures you often hear about.

Net result is the textures look more real, and properly react to the environment, they change as the light does and so on. That's actually how it's nearly always done on for high-end rendering. You don't texture map something, that won't look good, instead you use material shaders to describe the surfaces, and the engine calculates how it all looks.

For games this kind of thing is still in it's infancy, but it's growing fast and will be big on next gen consoles. On the Xbox, the graphics card had the capability to do this, but in a pretty limited capacity, so it only got used for certian things (like a specular layer or for water or something). The 360 is on par with the latest nVidia 7000 series chips, and it has the shaders to do a whole ot of this.

Sound is likewise handled like this. The sound processor convolutes teh sound in realtime in reaction to the environment. That actually works really well even on older hardware like the Xbox. It'l even take in to account the number and locations of your speakers if you like.

I'm not saying it's impossible to fill a DVD, but doesn't seem likely. Like I said, average game today is running maybe 3-4 CDs in size. You get about 12 CDs worth of space on a DL DVD, so that's some room to grow.

The Osborne Effect

[nathanh]

A number of people have already commented that this is a dumb marketing move - announcing "a better product coming out Real Soon now" - because at least some purchasers will wait rather than buy the first generation and get an inferior product.

This marketing mistake has a name; The Osborne Effect. Apparently an urban legend but never the less a good one, it describes how a similar announcement crippled Osborne Computers in the 1980s. Nice to know that even 20 years later, Microsoft is still copying ideas from competitors <g>.

DVD space usage

[dafing]

Im sure many games are close to filling a DVD, once when I had my Grand Theft Auto San Andrea ps2 disc in my computer, it showed up as using something like 7GB, sorry I cant be specific on exact usage. This is surely dual layer. I hear xbox discs have around 6GB of storage, so all xbox discs must be dual layer?

Re:You keep saying that...

[Wesley Felter]

No, HD-DVDs actually have more space (30GB) than regular DVDs (8.5GB).

Re:You keep saying that...

[crashelite]

HD - DVD 15 GB single layer... 30 GB dual layer... triple-layer disc is in development, which would offer 45GB of storage... Blu-ray 1.0 25 GB single layer... 50 GB dual layer... and i heard somewhere they have the 100 GB disks and still are working on the 200 GB version... also data transfer rate is 36 Mbit/s (54 Mbit/s for BD-ROM) and 72 Mbit/s transfer rate are in development (could not find that data transfer rate on the HD - DVD drives so umm ya... oh well) boils down to what one will suit them best... in my opinion blu-ray is amazing... less bottle neck = faster game play (not to mention load times would be WAY less when ever i play halo its like LOAD COME ON!!!)