The Official XBOX360 topic

[Daredevil]

slay ta epixhrhmata sou einai ka8ara atopa mia mou les oti trexoun panw sto sdk thn allh oti h arxitektonikh twn 2 cell einai hdia klp klp kai sou lew an den exeis toulaxiston beta dev sta xeria sou den les tetoia pramata, asxeta pws o cell 2,4 den nomizw na nai pio dynatos apo ton koryfaio dypirino tis amd. den ma8ate apo to ps2 kai peftete 3ana sthn idia management pagida.

 

A dual-core processor will be able to process the software-rendered physics acceleration on the second core, providing a boost in performance.In one demonstration the company showed, 6,000 boulders raced down a slope, colliding with each other and with a polygon "mesh" that served as the slope.On a single-core machine, that demonstration can run at less than 20 frames per second, monopolizing much of the PC, executives said. Running on a dual-core machine, the physics processing required less than half of one core, processing 6,000 boulders at 40 frames per second, they said.

 

hmmm dld h software lysh trexei se 40fps kai h hardrware lysh tous etrexe se 5-7 fps prototypo....

[Slay]

Den exei nohma na diastreyloneis ta logia allon, esy geleiopoieisai, o cell exei thn diplasia isxy se floating point operations(kai den xreiazomai to devkit gia na to po ayto), kati sto opoio basizontai ta physics simulations, kai den einai katholoy paraxeno poy einai poly kalyteros ston sygkekrimeno tomea, paromoio sxolio eixe kanei kai o mark rein apo thn epic edo kai arketo kairo alla mallon to xehases, xehases mallon kai ta entyposiaka real time demos poy deixan sthn E3, thn ekrhxh sto benzinadiko, ta papakia , to vortex me ta fylla.

Epishs den exei kanena nohma na sygkrineis mia general purpose cpu , me mia exeideikeymenh, nai oso kai na mhn theleis na to pistepseis o Cell tha rixnei sta aytia ston dyphryno AMD soy se tasks opos video decoding, physics calculations , kai genika floating point intensive tasks, ton kodika ton windows, kai to excel mporei na ta trexei poly xeirotera apo ton AMD alla den ftiaxan ton cell giayto ton skopo.

Kai parepiptontos ayto to athlio hardware toy ps2 pote tha kataferei na to exomoiosei o super wow AMD soy?

[Daredevil]

den diastreblwnw kanenos ta logia kai nomizw monos sou geloipoihse me tis loumpes pou pefteis,allwste ec exeis paei apo kai kala mia eidhsh sto xbox360 post sto oti o cell mamaei kai dernei egw sou pa oti ayta pou lene se ayto to stadio den einai dynaton na ta isxyristoun, wstoso ta real time demo pou anfereis me afhnoun eilikrina adiaforo gia polous kai diaforous logous pou den einai on topic na to syzhthsoume

 

kai sou 3analew pws enas dipyrinos general purpose amd bgazei 40 fps se software mode ki enas dipyrinos power pc na adynatei na to kanei kapou den stekei etsi? aplws xreiazete na skefteis ligo kai na mhn en8ousiazese kai na aprasyrese

 

o dikos mou prwsopika den 3erw, alla apo oti katalabaineis edw kai to xbox pou einai enas cel sta 733 me gf4 den e3wmeiwnete opoteto emulation den einai ameso me thn isxy enos systhmatos oso me thn polyplokothta.

[Stormwatch]

"Kai parepiptontos ayto to athlio hardware toy ps2 pote tha kataferei na to exomoiosei o super wow AMD soy?"

 

Αν εννοεις γιατι δεν εχει βγει ακομα emulator για PS2 στα PC (η αληθεια ειναι οτι εχει βγει, αλλα κανει λιγα πραγματα ακομα...) θα σου θυμισω οτι ουτε τελειος Saturn emulator εχει κυκλοφορησει (ο girigiri ειναι ο κορυφαιος αλλα με αρκετα προβληματα και το κυριοτερο ,βγηκε χρονια μετα το θανατο του Satun).

Αρα πολλες φορες η καθυστερηση στην κυκλοφορια emulator εχει να κανει με την πολυπολκοτητα του original hardware.

Παντως να εισαι σιγουρος πως καποια στιγμη η τεχνολογια των PC (μαλλον σε αυτο τον αιωνα) θα καταφερει να εξομοιωσει το τεχνολογικο θαυμα που ακουει στο ονομα PS2.

 

Daredevil με προλαβες...

[Pytzamarama]

To PS3 apo oti fainetai tha einai poli kalo gia video encoding...

Ta 256mb+256mb tha einai fovera perioristika (idiaitera gia graphic engines opos tin Unreal3 pou kanei caching ) - to modelo tis unified memory tou xbox360 einai to pleon evelikto kai an skeftoume oti tha iparxei kai to eDram...,

i pliris elleipsi sklirou diskou,

i diskoli arxitektoniki tou,

to gegonos oti i Sony den einai MS gia na vgalei ena XNA - na egiate diasindesi me zonta leitourgika etc,

to aniparkto antistoixo LIVE ,

o makris xronos mexri to launch ,

ta foumara me tous valistikous piravlous kai to PS2 pou exoun ponirepsei to kosmo,

to gegonos oti i 7800 mbike otan eidan oti o cell den ta vgazei pera monos tou kai den tha exei tin apoliti allilokalipsi pou prosferei to didimo xbox360CPU-Xenos,

to oti tha einai akrivotero

kai arketa alla pistevo tha feroun tin MS me ti Sony sta idia epipeda pwlisewn (kai afto logo gigiadwn kai megalis user-base tou PS2)

[Pytzamarama]

Oso gia tis vlakeies gia tin mi pliri ipostiriksi tou ASGEIA sto xbox360 XDK

 

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Kim Stowe <[email protected]>

Date: Sep 1, 2005 8:52 PM

Subject: RE: Clarification of Company Comments

To: Hasan Ahmad <***@***.com>, [email protected], [email protected]

 

Hello Asand:

We appreciate your asking about this subject. From what we gather, being that it is 3am in Europe, is that this was a statement taken out of context from a presentation at GDC Europe.

The Xbox 360 currently processes our SDK, and therefore supports the simulation of fluids. We believe this statement was refering to a generic long term statement about types of architectures for handling certain types of fluids. I know of no detailed analysis regarding the advantages or disadvantages of the different architectures in physics processing. We will be getting in contact with the presenter in Europe to get further clarification tomorrow when everyone is up and about.

 

Does this clarify things for you?

-----------------------------------------------------

Kim

From: Hasan Ahmad [mailto:***@***.com]

Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2005 5:18 PM

To: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

Subject: Clarification of Company Comments

 

http://www.extremetech.com/article2...,1855078,00.asp

 

Although the PhysX libraries accelerate a host of technologies, from physical object interactions to fluid-based particle effects like water and smoke, only the PlayStation 3 and a PhysX PC will have the horsepower to process all of the technology's features, Ageia executives said. The Xbox 360 will not be able to process the fluid-based technology, because of the limitations of its architecture.

 

This was stated from a Tech company extreme Tech. I want to get clarfication as to what limitations in the Xbox 360 architecture are there which will not be able to process the fluid-based technology for particle effects like water and smoke.?

 

Thank you

TeamXbox

Hasan

[Slay]

Oso gia tis vlakeies gia tin mi pliri ipostiriksi tou ASGEIA sto xbox360 XDK

 

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Kim Stowe <[email protected]>

http://www.kimstowe.com/

nice try

 

About Stowe Consulting.

Located in San Jose' date=' California, Stowe Consulting provides project-based and ongoing public relations and marketing consultation.

pistevo tha feroun tin MS me ti Sony sta idia epipeda pwlisewn (kai afto logo gigiadwn kai megalis user-base tou PS2)

etoimasoy apo tora na apogohteyteis

 

EDIT:

O xrhsths poy ekane post to sygkekrimeno e-mail poy epikaleisai egine ban apo to teamxbox giati kai sto parelthon eixe kanei post pseytika mails

http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?t=370239&page=1&pp=15

[privateer]

Mark Rein on Unreal Engine 3 & Xbox 360 HDD

TeamXbox: How does the "virtual" lack of a hard drive affect the Unreal Engine 3? Would that force Epic Games to cater the UE3 to the lowest spec SKU, in this case the Xbox 360 Core System, or would you allow the developers to take advantage of the hard drive when present?

 

Mark Rein: We've designed the streaming system in Unreal Engine 3 with the expectation that we wouldn't have a hard drive at our disposal so there's nothing that needs to change at this point. Developers can take advantage of the availability of a hard drive in numerous ways. That's not really an engine issue but more about what a particular developer decides the functionality of their particular game should be. I would certainly expect many games to be able to take advantage of the hard drive.

 

TeamXbox: As soon as we heard that Microsoft informed developers to not rely on a hard drive, being mandatory for games to work without one, we wondered if that kills the Seamless World Support feature found in the UE3 that allows the engine to anticipate the content that will be needed and stream it in advance?

 

Mark Rein: We designed our streaming system around the optical disc. While we would have loved to have a hard drive on every machine getting 512MB of memory, rather than 256MB, was a far bigger win for us. The additional memory allows us to produce scenes with truly next-generation visuals and provides room to buffer the data that is being streamed in.

 

http://interviews.teamxbox.com/xbox/1281/Unreal-Engine-3-and-the-Xbox-360-Hard-Drive/p1/

[BlizardBill]

Ta 256mb+256mb tha einai fovera perioristika

i pliris elleipsi sklirou diskou' date='

i diskoli arxitektoniki tou,

to gegonos oti i Sony den einai MS gia na vgalei ena XNA - na egiate diasindesi me zonta leitourgika etc,

to aniparkto antistoixo LIVE ,

o makris xronos mexri to launch ,

ta foumara me tous valistikous piravlous kai to PS2 pou exoun ponirepsei to kosmo,

to gegonos oti i 7800 mbike otan eidan oti o cell den ta vgazei pera monos tou kai den tha exei tin apoliti allilokalipsi pou prosferei to didimo xbox360CPU-Xenos,

to oti tha einai akrivotero[/quote']

Η sony δεν είχε ποτέ πρόβλημα με μνήμη -Hd , όταν οι ανταγωνιστές είχαν τεράστιο πλεονέκτημα... οπότε και σίγουρα δεν θα έχει τώρα .

Η αρχιτεκτονική του είναι το μέλλον που θα ακολουθήσουν όλοι σε λίγο, και βάζουν όλοι τα δυνατά τους να την στηρίξουν από τώρα, δεν είναι "δύσκολη".

To live δεν αποτελεί πρόβλημα πιστεύω, ενώ ο χρόνος είναι υπέρ της Sony.

Θα την βοηθήσει να βγάλει καλύτερο μηχάνημα, και κανείς δεν θα θέλει να αγοράσει μια consola που θα ξέρει ότι είναι υποδεέστερη.

[iSpO_fAcTo]

Scott Henson Interview about Xbox 360 SKU's

 

>> TeamXbox.com had the chance to interview Scott Henson, the Director of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, to discuss the two Xbox 360 SKUs, the price, massive storage, peripherals, HD DVD and much more. Here 's a short excerpt:

TeamXbox: Of the two SKUs, the hard drive have proven the most controversial difference between the Premium and Core editions. What happened to all the things we heard Microsoft stress about Xbox’s built-in hard drive and its vital role to the games we’ve been playing for the past 4 years?

Scott Henson: Our goal with Xbox 360 was to enable as many of these scenarios if you had a memory unit or if you had a hard drive and to make this transparent to our developers so they did not have to think about where things were being stored. This includes the ability to store things in other locations in the future as well like somewhere in your home network.

To address load times which are enhanced by caching information to the hard drive, we’ve invested in a super fast DVD that is more than two times faster than the first Xbox (Xbox was 5X andXbox 360 is 12X). It’s also important to note that in the beginning we sat down with game developers and proposed the choice between 512 and a hard drive, and without question developers said very clearly that RAM was much more important than a hard drive. It makes the biggest impact and fulfills the vision of their games. More RAM provides significantly more opportunity for developers to innovate in manners that require extremely fast access time which only RAM can provide. Just about everything falls into this category – world size, complexity of geometry, audio effects, AI maps and behavior patterns, collisions maps and most noticeably animation data. (Actual quote from one of our developers: "I would trade a HD for RAM in a second if ever asked again – It’s a no brainer.")

 

 

TeamXbox: Long before last month's announcement, there were rumors that Microsoft decided to raise the price of the Xbox 360 at the last minute and create these two SKUs after Kutaragi confirmed that the PlayStation 3 will be an expensive console and also that it won’t come with a hard drive. What would you say to that?

Scott Henson: We have our own game plan independent of competitive rhetoric. Our pricing was determined well in advance of competitive comments and was made with the customer first and foremost in mind. When setting our MSRP, we looked at the impact that it would have on our own internal production costs and most importantly, the impact it would have on the bottom line of the consumer.

 

Read the whole interview on http://interviews.teamxbox.com/xbox/1289/Xbox-360-The-SKU-Interview/p1/

[BlizardBill]

Ισως έχει ξαναειπωθεί, αλλά εγώ τώρα είδα αυτή τη συνέντευξη και έμεινα με ανοιχτό το στόμα για αυτό που μας περιμένει.

Οι άνθρωποι στην Microsoft θα κάνουν την επανάσταση στο χώρο των κονσόλων, και από 20 εκατομμύρια κόσμο με το xbox1 , θα πάνε στο1 δις !!!

 

Αξίζει να τη διαβάσεται όλοι .... άλλοι μπορεί να “ενημερωθούν” για το όραμά τους , και άλλοι να γελάσουνε μέχρι δακρύων

Robbie Bach, J Allard, Peter Moore: Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2005

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/rbach/05-16-05E3.mspx

 

Welcome to the future of gaming. We're here tonight to offer new ways to experience games and entertainment, to redefine what it means to have fun...

It is a world where our partners will create unbelievable game experiences that will transform the very idea of entertainment.

 

In the HD era, we are going to reach 1 billion people with our medium. (Cheers, applause.)

A billion people this generation; well, that's a big number but I know we can do it.

 

We believe that when you unlock the power of human energy we're going to bring everybody back to the living room...

Next generation, a billion people will play our games and it's not just because they've figured out the latest combo move or they've figured out how to get past level 14 but because we've unlocked the secret to creating games and entertainment experiences that they can call their ow...

 

here's no doubt in my mind Xbox 360 is going to thrill the hard core gamers that live and breathe video games. But that's not going to get us to a billion. Not every one is driven by the need to crush their opponent on the field of battle. So we've also built in experiences for the casual gamers and the non-gamers of our world.....

[BlizardBill]

Ισως έχει ξαναειπωθεί, αλλά εγώ τώρα είδα αυτή τη συνέντευξη και έμεινα με ανοιχτό το στόμα για αυτό που μας περιμένει.

Οι άνθρωποι στην Microsoft θα κάνουν την επανάσταση στο χώρο των κονσόλων, και από 20 εκατομμύρια κόσμο με το xbox1 , θα πάνε στο1 δις !!!

 

Αξίζει να τη διαβάσεται όλοι .... άλλοι μπορεί να “ενημερωθούν” για το όραμά τους , και άλλοι να γελάσουνε μέχρι δακρύων

Robbie Bach, J Allard, Peter Moore: Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2005

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/rbach/05-16-05E3.mspx

 

Welcome to the future of gaming. We're here tonight to offer new ways to experience games and entertainment, to redefine what it means to have fun...

It is a world where our partners will create unbelievable game experiences that will transform the very idea of entertainment.

 

In the HD era, we are going to reach 1 billion people with our medium. (Cheers, applause.)

A billion people this generation; well, that's a big number but I know we can do it.

 

We believe that when you unlock the power of human energy we're going to bring everybody back to the living room...

Next generation, a billion people will play our games and it's not just because they've figured out the latest combo move or they've figured out how to get past level 14 but because we've unlocked the secret to creating games and entertainment experiences that they can call their ow...

 

here's no doubt in my mind Xbox 360 is going to thrill the hard core gamers that live and breathe video games. But that's not going to get us to a billion. Not every one is driven by the need to crush their opponent on the field of battle. So we've also built in experiences for the casual gamers and the non-gamers of our world.....

[iSpO_fAcTo]

Epic Received Final 360 Dev Kit Only Yesterday

 

Cliff Bleszinski currently developing "Gears of War" on Xbox360 for Epic informed on his 1up.com blog that he finally received the final version of the Xbox360 development kit on September 2nd. The beta dev kits started reaching the developers early June (before that developers used alpha kits based on G5s) and it looks like only now all developers are getting the final dev kits with the final hardware.

As far as I know the pictures released last week by Smartxx are pictures of this final Xbox 360 Development Kit (XeDK).

 

News-Source: cliffyb.1up.com (via gamersreports.com)

[iSpO_fAcTo]

Epic Received Final 360 Dev Kit Only Yesterday

 

Cliff Bleszinski currently developing "Gears of War" on Xbox360 for Epic informed on his 1up.com blog that he finally received the final version of the Xbox360 development kit on September 2nd. The beta dev kits started reaching the developers early June (before that developers used alpha kits based on G5s) and it looks like only now all developers are getting the final dev kits with the final hardware.

As far as I know the pictures released last week by Smartxx are pictures of this final Xbox 360 Development Kit (XeDK).

 

News-Source: cliffyb.1up.com (via gamersreports.com)

[Stormwatch]

Full transcript της video συνεντευξης του Gabe Newell της Valve στο 1up.com.

To κομματι στο οποιο αναφερεται στο Χ360 και στο PS3.

 

 

 

Gabe: I think what we have to do is continue to look for ways to make Steam more valuable to people, to solve problems for people. There are huge numbers of support problems that we can just make go away by proactively solving them.

 

We still aren't getting display drivers out to people automatically, which makes me crazy. It's like one of the biggest problems our customers have is the fact that they don't have an automatic update facility for display drivers, and it's been obvious for a couple of years that needs to happen, and yet we still don't have that...

 

Editor: Isn’t Microsoft trying to address that with Longhorn?

 

Gabe: Great!

 

Editor: I mean, have them been talking to you about this? I figure they’d probably be talking to game developers….

 

[…interlude: Steam is the Future... the next-gen headache…]

 

I’d be more likely to be excited about NVIDIA or ATI saying they were going to have solutions than expecting that Longhorn is going to wave a fairy wand over anything. They keep cutting and cutting and cutting, and I think expectations for sales of Longhorn are getting less and less…

 

But that's an example of something that would be clearly be valuable to customers, would solve problems for our customers, and would globally reduce everybody's support burden and yet we haven't done it yet.

 

…Like I had a conversation with people at Microsoft recently, and I said "I cannot point to a single feature in Longhorn that I care about. There is nothing in Longhorn at all that solves any problems for us at all.”

 

You know, I had the same conversation with the xbox 360 guys. It’s like “The xbox 360 doesn’t make my life any better, and in fact it makes it a lot worse and you’re telling me I can’t rely on having a hard drive.”

 

When I look at what I need to compete with, the most interesting game property right now is World of Warcraft. Huge retail sales and huge recurring revenue. Not only that, but they have a great experience wrapped around it, whether it’s their forums, or community art, or whatever, they’re not only getting their customers to play the game, they’re getting their customers to make the experience more valuable for other people who play the game. So I’ll go up and download music and watch the movies that people have created, and see fan art and do all these other things.

 

So when I look at, sort of, what a platform needs to help a software developer do right now, it’s figure out how to beat World of Warcraft, and when I look at the strategies that are being put forward by Microsoft on the system side or the xbox side, or Sony, or Nintendo, they’re not making my life easier.

 

Like the Playstation 3 makes my life as a software developer much harder. All of a sudden I’m supposed to figure out how to have this asymmetric multithreaded game, right? And I’ve never written a single line of multithreaded code, ever, right? It’s not like I was lying around saying “I need to re-architect every line of code I’ve ever written in order to get it to work.”

 

So one of my junior programmers, who’s writing game code (rather than system code), could slow things down by, in a real world case, by a factor of 80, because they’re doing something out in the AI, or in the game DLL, which used to be totally safe, and now all of a sudden the whole system just slows down. And the one of the really experienced programmers have to go in and say, “Oh, you can’t tell but you’re doing this, you ran out of register space, and this other thing happened, and no there’s no debugger that shows this to you.”

 

Writing for SPEs and writing in a Playstation 3 environment, there are incredibly few programmers who can safely write code in that environment. You make tiny little changes to code running on one of the SPEs and the entire thing will grind to a halt. You have no visibility into why that’s happening -- it’s just sort of magically running really, really slow. It’s also incredibly hard to architect things at the beginning so that you can distribute all of your functionality on all of these different processing units.

 

This was not a problem that we were lying awake late at night saying “oh we would really like to take this on right now.” You know, we were worried about little things like billing, and forums, and wikis and things like that.

 

I totally see why Sony wants people to write code that runs on 7 SPEs and a central processing unit -- because that code is never going to run well anywhere else.

 

They’re saying “make your code not run on anything other than one of ours and we’re betting that we’ll have market share that’s so high that everybody will have to write code for our platform, and other people, you know, “we’ll just starve the air from other platforms by absorbing everyone’s R&D budget and making their code less portable.”

 

[...edit?...]

 

Steam was essentially “here is this set of tools that software developers need, focused on solving the problems we have with these next generation of games”. You know billing, updates, product support, connecting our customers together, and things like that.

 

I would think that for a lot of developers, things like Steam are going to be more interesting than and solve more problems to them than this next generation of hardware and operating systems platforms.

 

You know the Saturn came out, and that was intended to take this previous generation of games, and create this super complicated chunk of hardware that would help you make the ultimate sprite oriented game. And Sony came along and said “no, no, no it’s not a sprite problem any more, it’s a 3D graphics problem”…

 

I think a lot of developers are going to say “that’s not the problem, it’s another Sega Saturn". It’s "how do we connect to our customers?", "get data from our customers, get updates to our customers?", "have closer relationships?", "how do we compete with the customer experience that you get out of being a WOW customer?” more than “how do we blast another set of pixels at what is essentially a 640x480 screen?”.