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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KristopherKubicki - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
AnandThenMan: Who said Anand didn't just capture the images? What makes you think they are warezed?Kristopher
knitecrow - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
First and foremost, the MTV special was targeted towards casual and/or non-gamers. The readers of anandtech and other technies should just realize they are in the minority. Lowest denominator wins here.The MTV special sucked -- I wouldn’t go around making concrete conclusions based on that.
The full details are going to be released at E3
Staples - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
#6There will be no web access. Go to teamxbox and read. Seems a lot of sites made articles based on yesterday's specualtion.
Staples - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
The MTV showing was super mediocre but I am glad TXB filled in with most the details.Shinei - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
Well, I'm grateful that AT put this article up in the first place, warez pictures or not. Some people just don't like the icky feeling of stupidity they get whenever they watch MTV, and so they, like me, didn't see the MTV "unveiling"--this compresses the show into a tolerable tidbit of tasty data, and confirms/disproves a number of rumors. gg :)AnandThenMan - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
WOW I'm kinda shocked. Anandtech has resorted to taking screenshots from torrent releases????? Dayum. Posting screenshots from a warez group release is bad for a commercial hardware site Mkay?phaxmohdem - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
IBM must realy be sitting on some gold here. They've got their hands in nearly every upcoming gaming rigs processor it seems. Can't wait for the XBox cluster to top the supercomputer chart now :)barnett25 - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
Um, the Xbox 360 has USB ports that can have both a mouse and keyboard plugged in, HDTVs are almost as good as monitors (I know they're expensive, I don't have one either), and the Xbox has a hard drive.IceWindius - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
I'll be buying one, getting kinda tired of the continual PC upgrade process just to play games, gets old after awhile.....UzairH - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
Blah. Consoles suck. Unless they come with keyboard, mouse, can hook up to monitors, and have fast hard disks.