I don't see why X-Box would be more vulnerable to aging than other consoles just because it's parts are more 'off shelf' than other's.
Homogenous setups will allow us (pc-)gamers finally see those promised framerates and effects same way as coders planned them. And if a game is made for the pc-like X-Box it isn't far from being 'native pc' -game. (not! add infinite amount of betatesting with infinite amount of different configurations to get it as stable as with xb) On the other hand MS will face a whole new bunch of problems with continuity and portability as consoles don't and won't and SHOULDN'T be needing any patches. If MS can keep it's mind and not alter or make new versions of HW or SW(!) every second year, then X-Box could be the first platform to house MS software AND 0 viewable bugs since..(what?)
With NVidia+other included HW becoming stronger standards (as I believe), X-Box game developement could bring more effective coding to PC-world too, provided pc-gamers move towards same brands or coders and btesters continue their efforts to make games equally appealling for users with different pc-setups. We just might see a year old 600MHz X-Box performing better than brand new 1GHz Athlon using same benchmarks, because of buggy new-feature-kablooie-3dwhatever-screamer-hw constantly popping up for PCs.
Who knows, maybe MS is seriously trying to prove that it isn't their OSs or SW producing BSODs.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see why X-Box would be more vulnerable to aging than other consoles just because it's parts are more 'off shelf' than other's.
Homogenous setups will allow us (pc-)gamers finally see those promised framerates and effects same way as coders planned them. And if a game is made for the pc-like X-Box it isn't far from being 'native pc' -game. (not! add infinite amount of betatesting with infinite amount of different configurations to get it as stable as with xb) On the other hand MS will face a whole new bunch of problems with continuity and portability as consoles don't and won't and SHOULDN'T be needing any patches. If MS can keep it's mind and not alter or make new versions of HW or SW(!) every second year, then X-Box could be the first platform to house MS software AND 0 viewable bugs since..(what?)
With NVidia+other included HW becoming stronger standards (as I believe), X-Box game developement could bring more effective coding to PC-world too, provided pc-gamers move towards same brands or coders and btesters continue their efforts to make games equally appealling for users with different pc-setups. We just might see a year old 600MHz X-Box performing better than brand new 1GHz Athlon using same benchmarks, because of buggy new-feature-kablooie-3dwhatever-screamer-hw constantly popping up for PCs.
Who knows, maybe MS is seriously trying to prove that it isn't their OSs or SW producing BSODs.