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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HardwareD00d - Monday, May 16, 2005 - link
I'm still waiting for the Intellivision II-HD :Pxsilver - Monday, May 16, 2005 - link
I think the water cooling solution is a good substitute for a giant copper/alum heatsink, which will be expensive.... what they might do is have a zalman reserator type thing going but with the water all inside, filling up all the air gapsthe whole xbox will then be warm and only a small fan or no fan will be needed
ImJacksAmygdala - Sunday, May 15, 2005 - link
Has anyone found out if you can surf the web using a wireless router? I have read rumors of this on the web. I have also heard rumors of DVD video being upscaled to 720p.Can anyone confirm these rumors? I would actually be surprised if microsoft got this part right.
Zebo - Sunday, May 15, 2005 - link
ATM - you need to chill. Anand is as straight laced as they come I've witnessed this 4 years now..unassailable (no offence anand:P)miketheidiot - Saturday, May 14, 2005 - link
#51the 1 teraflop claim includes the GPU performance. GPU's have incredible floating point performance, a 900+ gflop graphics chip is not completely unreasonable, although still rediculous
Cdeck - Saturday, May 14, 2005 - link
I thank #35 for providing the links referencing the one teraflop claim. I find it very hard to believe. I know the PowerPC is a very capable processor but this would mean a 30+ fold increase per node over the current. I am a retired software developer and i am not buying it. It's simply marketing smoke and mirrors.Currently, a one teraflop workstation/server is in the $100,000 to $200,000 range. If IBM could have developed a 333 gflop core, they would have kept it for themselves. I would expect these general purpose cores to be about 1/10 of what they claim or about 100 gflops for the 3 cores.
Nonetheless, they have built us an impressive game rig and i am looking forward to it.
sprockkets - Saturday, May 14, 2005 - link
the cosoles of course always lose moneyI'm just curious to see if all this power acutally translates into anything.
dreamcast used heatpipe cooling, not water cooling.
Not entirely related, but it sucks that Conker's bad fur day for the N64 and for the xbox came out and again will come out as soon as the console it came on is replaced by the next generation console that same year.
finbarqs - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
water cooling (from my experience) does not cool better than air cooling. Well.. that's not entirely accurate. Depending on what fan we're using! For watercooling, i think i got it to be the same temperatures as a 4000 RPM fan on my northwood proc. Hrm... but what watercooling does excel is when i had a peltier in it... WOO WEE!!! then it got cold!!! water cooling is over rated, unless you want a quiet system. I think that's why they went this route. Also, i've read that this console will be under $300. For something this powerful, it is cheap. You can't even get a video card this cheap!Swaid - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
creathirAnd in the real world we call that a heat pipe, that is a far shot from a water cooling system as heat pipes consist mainly amonia (or any other liquid with simular properties) and yes there can be some h2o in it for a greater specific heat index.
artifex - Friday, May 13, 2005 - link
ANY word on price?Also, many modders of the current box just use it for media center type stuff and linux stuff. If they never play games, who cares about the mod restrictions? :)