Bringing Gaming Mainstream - The Xbox 360 debuts on MTV
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 12, 2005 11:18 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
HD Everywhere
The most welcome requirement of the Xbox 360? That all games must support 720p.
The Xbox 360 was undoubtedly made for HDTVs, with all games supporting 720p, you will truly be missing out without a HDTV. The support for 720p in all games is quite important as it marks the first time that a game console will have games that renders frames internally at resolutions greater than 640x480. The resolution gap between PC and console gaming has been huge, remembering that 640x480 was a resolution that PC gamers were enjoying back in the Voodoo1 days. Especially on larger TVs, the very low resolution of 640x480 is even more pronounced - but with Xbox 360 (and presumably, Sony's Playstation 3) the days of low resolution gaming on large screens is over.
The MTV special started with a 3D rendered performance of the band - The Killers. The rendered graphics of that performance were better than anything we've seen on the PC thus far, even better than what we've seen in tech demos by ATI and NVIDIA. Not surprising given the level of the GPU in the Xbox 360, there was only a short part of the performance that was 3D rendered but it was quite convincing.
In a stroke of genius, Microsoft managed to demo their first console with a minimum of 720p support on a standard definition cable channel. It looks like we'll have to wait for E3 to see the Xbox 360 in its 720p glory.
ugh...displaying a 720p game over SD cable
The rest of the games demoed looked extremely PC like, thanks to their 720p resolution. Of course we won't see the best use of the Xbox 360 hardware (in particular the physics capabilities of that 3-core PowerPC CPU) until well after the console has launched. Until then, we will most likely have to rely on fancy graphics and extensive online support as the main attractions to the new console.
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AnandThenMan - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
Anand here's your screen grab:http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v295/skynet107/c...
and here's mine, probably the same frame
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v295/skynet107/s...
and another one a few frames back
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v295/skynet107/s...
damn they sure do look similar. you must have exactly the same capture hardware. 8>)
But I believe you.
One thing that really bugs me is how 3 3.2 gig processors can reside in a small enclosure like that without going thermo nuclear. I just don't see how it is possible, water cooled (I also doub't that) or not.
bldckstark - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
#22 - According to whatis.com at the following link;http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gc...
"A teraflop is a measure of a computer's speed and can be expressed as:
A trillion floating point operations per second
10 to the 12th power floating-point operations per second
2 to the 40th power flops
Today's fastest parallel computing operations are capable of teraflop speeds. Scientists have begun to envision computers operating at petaflop speeds."
If 333Gflop processors only exist in Star Trek then I guess warp drive for my car is just around the corner!!
Houdani - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
22: Anand yanked that stat out of the fact sheet. Of course, they don't explicitly state whether all of those flops are occurring solely within the CPU or a combo of the CPU & GPU.http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox360/factsheet.htm
Son of a N00b - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
ill stick with my PC, FPS's are alwas better on them....anyways looks good though, did not think it would be this powerful. but it cannot go as planned and MS makes tons of money, so something will go wrong b4...it seems to perfect of a plan/product....welcome to thw world of MS ig guess...
xpose - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
ummm, Why did they not show, or talk about the controller more closely. LameAtropine - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
Well.............actually never owned a gaming console but the Atari 2600 and Sega Genesis.......oh yeah and the original Nintendo gaming consoleAtropine - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
I never owned a gaming console, always stuck with PC gaming, but reading the specs on the XBOX 360, it sounds very tempting to get one..........................very nice system.fitten - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
"It will be a waste if these aren't used for some type of distributed computing when they are not playing games."Depends on which DC project. There are some DC which are considered by some to be a waste of electricity.
Kishkumen - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
Nice summary article. Is it bad that I'm looking forward more to the possibility of having a cheap PowerPC system on which to run Linux than a new gaming machine? In Microsoft's opinion, probably so. Nevertheless, if the XBox 360 turns out to be anywhere as moddable as the XBox One, I will be thrilled.Dukemaster - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
''There's a lot more to this powerful new console, and we will be covering it as well as the hardware behind Sony's Playstation 3 during next week's E3 expo in Los Angeles.''And againg Nintendo's new console isn't even mentioned. It just shows how much most people are interested in that console and how low expectations are...