New Xbox 360 Info

[kuyu]

XNA architect and Xbox 360 big-wig J Allard told Game Informer that there will be multiple Xbox360's that ship over the next five years. He stated that developers shouldn't rely on the HDD for their games. This seems like a step back to me. One of the best parts of the xbox was the HDD. I'm thinking that M$ figured out that the only way to ship the 360 under $300 was to not include a HDD.

This also means that they will likely re-release the 360 with either a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive in the future. Unless there is some sort of upgrade program, the fully functional Xbox 360 is quickly becoming as expensive as the PS3 (if not more so).

At QuakeCon this weekend FPS Overlord John Carmack (Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein) gave his support to the Xbox 360 instead of the PS3. He cited the 360's "thin API" and ease of development as his primary reasons for opting out of Sony's upcoming PS3. However, he criticized both systems for their reliance on parallel-single hardware threads as opposed to multi-threaded computer processors. Basically Carmack feels that the choice of hardware will hamper development until coders can fully understand the most efficient means of using the next-gen hardware.

To me, it seems like we won't see the full power of these new systems unleashed until 2-3 years after they ship. With the Xbox 360's 9-12 month headstart, the more powerful PS3 may not outperform the 360 for quite some time.

Thoughts?

[Mavimao]

Nintendo's Revolution will DOMINATE! :-)

OK, 'fanboy-ness' aside, the Revolution is supposed to be an incredibly easy machine to program for, which will give it a lot of edge compared to the other machines who like to toot their processors in an almost phallic nature. I personally see the Revolution pouncing the others in terms of graphics for the early stages of the next-gen consoles. Let's just hope that they have better 3rd party support. I mean, c'mon Nintendo!

[kuyu]

Yeah, I've heard the Revolution is going to be easy to code for. Unfortunately I don't think Nintendo's non-core developers even have alpha kits yet, so Carmack's comments didn't include the Revolution.

With Zelda pushed back to March 06 I'm thinking we might not get the Revolution stateside until Holiday 06 at the earliest.

[Dagless]

lets not turn this into another which console is best thread.

personally the lack of a HDD is fine so long as its backed up with something like an SD card (NOT the rip-off memory stick pro 2 plus ex alpha). maybe its just me but i never used the soundtrack feature on the Xbox. i figured a game designer probably spent a while getting the music perfect, so why add Britney Spears or Linkin Park to it?

if you have a drive fast enough (ie. GC) then you dont really need to cache to a HDD. they need to make that faster, drop the soundtrack feature, and just use the SD card for save files. which then would make for easy backup too :D

[GFLPraxis]

Hm, I thought I posted this here, ah well:
http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=10265

Gikas told GameDAILY BIZ that he knew with a "high degree of certainty" that the 360 would indeed launch with two SKUs, although he refused to speculate on the all-important question of whether the low-end model would include a smaller hard drive (thereby making it standard) as opposed to not having one at all.

"Microsoft knows $299 is important," Gikas explained. "They know that historically that's been the launch sweet spot, but they also don't want to take such large hardware losses this time. Of the 1 million units Microsoft is expected to have available at launch, I expect 80% of them will probably be the more expensive SKU, because that's what early adopters are going to want."

As for the higher end model, Gikas conceded that it could come in as low as $350, but $399 seems like the most probably price point. He stressed that the model will likely include "all the additional peripherals gamers would want to buy anyway," as well.


Seems there will be two models of the XBox 360.

[GFLPraxis]

lets not turn this into another which console is best thread.

personally the lack of a HDD is fine so long as its backed up with something like an SD card (NOT the rip-off memory stick pro 2 plus ex alpha). maybe its just me but i never used the soundtrack feature on the Xbox. i figured a game designer probably spent a while getting the music perfect, so why add Britney Spears or Linkin Park to it?

if you have a drive fast enough (ie. GC) then you dont really need to cache to a HDD. they need to make that faster, drop the soundtrack feature, and just use the SD card for save files. which then would make for easy backup too :D

Remember that there's a slot for the HDD; you can buy one and add it to your X360 at any time.


Yeah, I've heard the Revolution is going to be easy to code for.

One interesting scenario would be that if the Revolution is vastly easier to code for, then it might become the base system. Everyone codes the game for the Revolution first, as a base sstem, then ports it to the other systems.

We can always hope.

Anyway, the PS3 and XBox 360 are going to be RIDICULOUSLY hard to code for. Let's take a look.

XBox 360: 6 threads (as opposed to one or two on 99% of PC's), no out of order processing (something that PC games will use, making PC ports harder), 512 MB of RAM, but a seperate 10 MB of 10x-faster DRAM on the GPU. So you have to write the code to use that 10 MB of super-fast DRAM correctly. You need a ton of hardware threads. The GPU has a unified shader architecture, something every PC AND console on the planet lacks, making porting XBox 360 games hard.


PS3: 2 normal threads, plus 7 threads which cannot use branching or access the cache or do integer calculations. Meaning you have to specificly use the SPE's for certain types of work, while using the 2 normal threads for the leftovers. XBox 360 ports will have to be seriously re-coded to use the SPE's. The GPU is more normal GPU, making that easier to port games to the PS3, but the Cell is harder.


Developers are used to using a single thread, now they have 6 on the XBox 360, 9 on the PS3 (with 7 only doing certain types of work). They're used to normal GPU's, now they've got DRAM and a unified shader architecture on the XBox 360.

IMHO, we're going to see a lot more exclusives as porting will be hard.

[Mavimao]

What's funny though, I find, is that Microsoft is doing to the XBox 360 what they're doing to Longhorn/Vista. They're rushing a product to get it out the door as fast as possible, even excluding prominent features to meet that deadline. WinFS? Out. Harddrive? Out. "But we'll add it in later renditions!"

Who would want to buy a half-baked product?

What's even more ironic is that Microsoft was wanting this console to be a Media Center-like hub. A centralized area for your photos, music, movies, etc. But how is this going to be possible with the exclusion of a Harddrive?

I guess it may link up to your computer, but why? Just so Microsoft can salvage that whole Home Media Center concept I see advertised in Best Buy but I see no one buying?

My 2 cents.

[GFLPraxis]

What's funny though, I find, is that Microsoft is doing to the XBox 360 what they're doing to Longhorn/Vista. They're rushing a product to get it out the door as fast as possible, even excluding prominent features to meet that deadline. WinFS? Out. Harddrive? Out. "But we'll add it in later renditions!"



Good point. There's also;
HD-DVD; out. "But we'll add it in later renditions!"
Wi-Fi; out. "But you can buy an addon!"

Being the only console without WiFi built in is significant.


Who would want to buy a half-baked product?

What's even more ironic is that Microsoft was wanting this console to be a Media Center-like hub. A centralized area for your photos, music, movies, etc. But how is this going to be possible with the exclusion of a Harddrive?

I guess it may link up to your computer, but why? Just so Microsoft can salvage that whole Home Media Center concept I see advertised in Best Buy but I see no one buying?

My 2 cents.



You know, I actually wouldn't mind. People who want just a console, can just buy the console. People who want a media center, can buy the hard drive. Both win. No complaints about wasting money for media gimmicks from people like me.

EXCEPT...

That the hard drive has the 'emulation profiles' on it and is required to download more.

MEANING...it's impossible to play XBox games without the hard drive.

MEANING...the hard drive-less XBox 360, has no backwards compatability.

And that's a big problem right there.

[Mavimao]

The hard drive has the 'emulation profiles' on it and is required to download more.

MEANING...it's impossible to play XBox games without the hard drive.

MEANING...the hard drive-less XBox 360, has no backwards compatability.

And that's a big problem right there.

Good point. I guess that means more money for Microsoft....

Your talk about the different architectures makes me wonder: whose smart idea was it to use these weird processors?! Was it really all about the hype, the numbers and the hypothetical power?

This brings me back to the days of hte N64 when no developers would touch it due to its incredibly difficult progammability. Are we going to see the same things on the PS3 and the 360? Time will tell.

[GFLPraxis]

Good point. I guess that means more money for Microsoft....

Your talk about the different architectures makes me wonder: whose smart idea was it to use these weird processors?! Was it really all about the hype, the numbers and the hypothetical power?

This brings me back to the days of hte N64 when no developers would touch it due to its incredibly difficult progammability. Are we going to see the same things on the PS3 and the 360? Time will tell.

Anandtech had some theories about that.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.games.video.sony-playstation2/msg/62ff83d96ea78ea9?hl=en



Why did Sony/MS do it?
For Sony, it doesn't take much to see that the Cell processor is eerily
similar to the Emotion Engine in the PlayStation 2, at least conceptually.
Sony clearly has an idea of what direction they would like to go in, and it
doesn't happen to be one that's aligned with much of the rest of the
industry. Sony's past successes have really come, not because of the
hardware, but because of the developers and their PSX/PS2 exclusive titles.
A single hot title can ship hundreds of millions of consoles, and by our
count, Sony has had many more of those than Microsoft had with the first
Xbox.

Sony shipped around 4 times as many PlayStation 2 consoles as Microsoft did
Xboxes, regardless of the hardware platform, a game developer won't turn
down working with the PS2 - the install base is just that attractive. So
for Sony, the Cell processor may be strange and even undesirable for game
developers, but the developers will come regardless.

The real surprise was Microsoft; with the first Xbox, Microsoft listened
very closely to the wants and desires of game developers. This time around,
despite what has been said publicly, the Xbox 360's CPU architecture wasn't
what game developers had asked for.

They wanted a multi-core CPU, but not such a significant step back in single
threaded performance. When AMD and Intel moved to multi-core designs, they
did so at the expense of a few hundred MHz in clock speed, not by taking a
step back in architecture.

We suspect that a big part of Microsoft's decision to go with the Xenon core
was because of its extremely small size. A smaller die means lower system
costs, and if Microsoft indeed launches the Xbox 360 at $299 the Xenon CPU
will be a big reason why that was made possible.

Another contributing factor may be the fact that Microsoft wanted to own the
IP of the silicon that went into the Xbox 360. We seriously doubt that
either AMD or Intel would be willing to grant them the right to make Pentium
4 or Athlon 64 CPUs, so it may have been that IBM was the only partner
willing to work with Microsoft's terms and only with this one specific core.

Regardless of the reasoning, not a single developer we've spoken to thinks
that it was the right decision.


That last point is a very good one; Microsoft doesn't want a repeat of what happened before. They used almost off the shelf Geforce 3 and Intel Pentium 3 (well, with slightly less cache), plus an NForce motherboard that uses an Intel processor instead of AMD, and as a result, don't have a right to keep using that stuff in their new console without paying more money in licensing fees to NVidia. So they want to own the design.

Anyway, it's an interesting read, I just quoted one part.

[rockthecasbah]

Good point. I guess that means more money for Microsoft....

Your talk about the different architectures makes me wonder: whose smart idea was it to use these weird processors?! Was it really all about the hype, the numbers and the hypothetical power?

This brings me back to the days of hte N64 when no developers would touch it due to its incredibly difficult progammability. Are we going to see the same things on the PS3 and the 360? Time will tell.
I doubt it. Im sure by now Sony and Microsoft would understand how to make a system that can be programmed at a moderate difficulty. I'm sure it won't be easy by any means, and certainly more difficult than The Revolution (if speculation is true), but I would be stunned if either system became an 'N64'.

[persianpunisher]

What people dont understand is that the PS3 WILL NOT be more powerful than the Xbox 360. It is actually the opposite. The 360s GPU SLAUGHTERS the PS3s.

[GFLPraxis]

What people dont understand is that the PS3 WILL NOT be more powerful than the Xbox 360. It is actually the opposite. The 360s GPU SLAUGHTERS the PS3s.

That's not exactly true. They're about equivilant overall. The PS3's GPU has a higher clock speed, while the X360 has DRAM. The PS3's processor will give it an added boost with rendering, as well. Overall the graphics are about the same; the 360 might have a slight advantage with 4x AA @ 1080i resolution because the DRAM makes AA not have an effect on performance, but the PS3 will be better at physics, so that makes up for it. The XBox 360 has a unified shader architecture, the PS3 has TurboCache. The PS3's GPU hasn't been fully unveiled, anyway.


There's no "slaughtering" involved anywhere. Power-wise, the systems are about the same. The only difference is that the PS3 is more expensive, has Bluetooth (wireless peripherals), WiFi (not standard on X360), 1080p output, dual screen support, 7 players instead of 4, slots for standard CF/SD/MS/xD cards (verse proprietary memory cards on XBox 360, and only one type), and a Blu-ray drive that fits 12x the data.


So power-wise and RAM-wise they're equal, and the PS3 trounces the XBox 360 in all other aspects BUT costs more.


Besides, this isn't a debate thread. In fact, you're the first person in the thread to try to say which is better. We were talking about pricing and development difficulty.

[persianpunisher]

I apologize, I shouldnt have done that. BUT, the 360s GPU does slaughter. Check out cnet.com if you wish.

[EvilDoc]

have they started to presale xbox 360's yet??

[reberto]

have they started to presale xbox 360's yet??

No, but when they do look here! http://www.xbox360preorders.com/

[wrxguy]

same situtation with PS though, the new slimmer PS's kick the old ones asses!! Either way i will be gettin an Xbox 360...anyone know when we can preorder?

[EvilDoc]

No, but when they do look here! http://www.xbox360preorders.com/

thnx for the link

[Dagless]

What's funny though, I find, is that Microsoft is doing to the XBox 360 what they're doing to Longhorn/Vista. They're rushing a product to get it out the door as fast as possible, even excluding prominent features to meet that deadline. WinFS? Out. Harddrive? Out. "But we'll add it in later renditions!"

Who would want to buy a half-baked product?

What's even more ironic is that Microsoft was wanting this console to be a Media Center-like hub. A centralized area for your photos, music, movies, etc. But how is this going to be possible with the exclusion of a Harddrive?

I guess it may link up to your computer, but why? Just so Microsoft can salvage that whole Home Media Center concept I see advertised in Best Buy but I see no one buying?

My 2 cents.

I never saw that, so true. M$ dropping features left right and centre. i suppose if it reduces cost then its good, but its like a compromise. and going off how much pre-orders are going for the consumer is seeing little benefit.

Wouldn't online stuff be saved to the HDD too? like rankings, personal bests etc... the big database stuff. what about downloaded maps for Halo-like games?
I always thought they were using SD cards but if its propriety... oh dear.

[GFLPraxis]

Microsoft mentioned that you could save your Live profile to the memory card.


Yeah, they showed off 64 MB memory cards. They're proprietary; not sure if they're the same as the first XBox.