[kode]

Originally posted by Deepblue
Wait a second... I think that says Halo 3 is slated for a 2005 release.... MOMMAA!!!! *celebrates ecstatically*

I just skimmed it through, but where I read, it said halo3's coming for the 360, but failed to mention anything resembling a launch date or period. but like I said, I just skimmed it through, and I don't read norwegian or danish that well. or ehh, it's more like I find it annoying to read. it's like reading badly spelled text. at least it's easier to read and understand danish than to listen to and understand it.

[Zarax]

http://msxb.wmod.llnwd.net/a274/o2/ourcolony/TheColony_v1_750k.wmv

[Ransom]

Well I must say I'm impressed, but I'll wait to see if any games I'm interested in get scheduled for it.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Krackers87
personaly i believe little of what Nintendo says they will do, *cough* 64DD *cough*

Well, nintendo haven't actually said what they intend to do; all the info has been leaked so it's not really concrete.  It's interesting to note how quiet the Japanese manufacturers have been in  this regard.

The review I read - on teletext - of the xbox360 unveiling described it as 'dodgy', actually; that Perfect Dark was 'ugly' and Kameo looked like an Xbox game, and that a surprising number of high-profile games had varying framerate problems (Q4, Call of Duty 2).  Which'd be surprising given that the latter 2 appear to run comfortably on modern PCs and, more importantly, you wouldn't expect the company to show off games that weren't running perfectly.

[Ransom]

Originally posted by Krackers87
personaly i believe little of what Nintendo says they will do, *cough* 64DD *cough*

I'm pretty sure they did actually release that, but didn't sell it anywhere but Japan because of poor sales there or something. It was a bad idea anyway.

[Descenterace]

So... games for the XBox 360 will be massively parallel, huh? Must be, otherwise two of those CPU cores are utterly useless.

Writing parallel software is very difficult. Exactly how many games do you think will make full use of this console? For that matter, how many will make use of even 60% of its capabilities?

No. I'll stick with my PC for a while longer. I can't see any point in having more than 2 cores in a gaming machine at present.

And don't give me that 'next generation' crap. Parallel processing is still difficult to get working correctly. I sincerely doubt MS have produced an XBox 360 compiler which intelligently multithreads a singlethreaded process.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Descenterace
So... games for the XBox 360 will be massively parallel, huh? Must be, otherwise two of those CPU cores are utterly useless.

Writing parallel software is very difficult. Exactly how many games do you think will make full use of this console? For that matter, how many will make use of even 60% of its capabilities?

No. I'll stick with my PC for a while longer. I can't see any point in having more than 2 cores in a gaming machine at present.

And don't give me that 'next generation' crap. Parallel processing is still difficult to get working correctly. I sincerely doubt MS have produced an XBox 360 compiler which intelligently multithreads a singlethreaded process.

I think parallel processing is primarily being used as a way of overcoming the difficulty of increasing speeds on a single core; I wouldn't underestimate the ability of programmers to write multi-threaded / multicore programs, though - there are already many machines existing that use this type of structure, notably the PS2 (which is IIRC comprised of multiple pipelines and 4 excecution blocks rather than a PC-eseque CPU/GPU setup).

IIRC the general impression is that the multi-core setup is ideal for graphics related tasks, but not so good for the rest of the game code because - again IIRC - it's not as sequential or predicatable (and hence balanceable) as rendering.

Worth noting that writing the games/programs to parallelise would not be essentially compiler dependent, though; it's also the programmers responsibility to load-balance work being sent to each processing unit.

 An alternative - possibly with its own performance drawbacks - is to use the OS to allocate processors to tasks and load balance (I was working on something similar a while back, albeit it was on a distributed system intended to reallocate and split/combine processing tasks onto machines to load-balance, rather than working across cores on a single machine).

[Nuke]

Originally posted by Andreas
I don't know about you, but I'm NOT paying 600$ (it's pretty much equal in euros, isn't it?) for a console, and certainly not 1000. That said I wonder how much Revolution is going to cost?

wouldnt be the first time they over priced a product. this IS microsoft you know. the console markiet is knowd for selling machines they cant possibly profit from, making profits mostly from sdk and accessory sales, but still this IS microsoft.

i see the tripple cpu thing as being kinda responsible for the shortened load times reported. one cpu would begin loading textures and models while another starts running game code. the third would be busy controling whats being loaded, so essentually you are still loading when you start playing and its seemless cause there is another cpu managing what gets loaded. so you only have to load the first room so to speak to play and by the time you get to the door the next room is loaded as well. i doubt the cpus just split the work between them, but rater can have independant control over resourses as needed. trivial things like cd spinup and such dont cause the cpu to halt while it waits for the cd to get ready to be told what to do with itself. this sugest they have done away with the ever ineffietient interupt controlers and implemented a better system.

i figure the less but faster memory is better for games. 512 is more that enough to cover a detailed area, especially with compressed texture, model, and audio formats. at the core of the system sound and eye candy stay compressed till they get to the apu and gpu respectively. audio formats do a 10x reduction, textures 8x and models im not sure about (compairing pof to freelancer's cmp format shows about an 10x compression). surely they came out with new ones that far excede what we use now. they raised the bar everywhere else.

[Rictor]

[l]some[/l] most of the screenshots look positively mediocre. The new Perfect Dark game looks not one single bit better than Halo 2, and they're supposedly running 5-6 times the hardware. With the possible exception of Ghost Recon 3, all the screenshots I've seen could easily be done on a current, mid range computer, certainly not putting the triple 3.2Ghz processors and 500Mhz video card to work.

Maybe I'm just jaded, but next-gen usually means revolutionary leaps, not evolutionary.

[Clave]

There are a lot of G5 parallel-processing apps already made, not that many games, that's true, but the ability and technology to write blisteringly fast software to make use of these cores already exists...

I just a bit peed off that Apple have capped the new G5s at 2.7GHz, when it is now obvious that dual 3.2 should be the new top-end machine

But anyhoo, the 360 *should* kick sand in the faces of everything else right now.

[Setekh]

Those screenshots... sweet. I'm grabbing the launch video from OurColony.net now.

[MicroPsycho]

wait...so the thing is powered by G5s, as in Apple G5s? How does that work? This thing sound more like a needlessly fast computer without the keyboard and mouse, 9GHz is wasteful. What will this thing play? Will they be discs specific to the Xbox 360 or will it have the ability to play PC games.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by MicroPsycho
wait...so the thing is powered by G5s, as in Apple G5s? How does that work? This thing sound more like a needlessly fast computer without the keyboard and mouse, 9GHz is wasteful. What will this thing play? Will they be discs specific to the Xbox 360 or will it have the ability to play PC games.

Modified G5s; probably has specific FP or 64 bit instructions, different manufacturing process and pipeline or similar.  Indications are it'll as usual be Xbox360 games, not PC; simply because it's a dfferent architecture (not PC; parallelized, different memory bus setup et al).

Define needlessly fast, though; no-one 'needs' better graphics, physics, etc, but they help sell the next generation of machines.

[Clave]

The processors are IBM PowerPC - the same as the G5, but there are fundemental differences, this article explains a few things:

http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/05/13/xbox360/index.php

[kode]

G5's as in Power PC G5 after which the apple models are 'named', yes. well, kind of. not the exact same, of course. the nintendo rev will run on PPC' processors too.

and no, PPC's don't really run i386+ based software. at least not natively.

[Rictor]

Needly fast as in: no game is likely to come out in the next few years which will push the system to its limits. The launch titles, from what I've seen, are only incrementally better looking than Xbox1 games. A 3 Ghz system could easily, easily handle everything I've seen so far.

[Deepblue]

Meh, PDZ doesn't look the best, not surprising since it started out being developed for the 'Cube... Here's hoping it has great gameplay to make up for that. On the other hand, games like Gears of War, Ghost Recon 3, NBA2K6, Dark Sector, Call of Duty 2, etc. all look very good.

@Rictor... That means a long life, which is good. Plus the launch titles SHOULD run smooth as butter. We only saw the best the Xbox had to offer towards the end of its life.

Does anyone else find it somewhat ironic that it seems that the mac crowd seems to favor the Xbox consoles above the others? Especially the new one?

And those of you that are tired of screenshots can have gameplay teasers:

http://www.fileshack.com/file.x?fid=6955

This zip file includes brief gameplay movies from the Xbox 360 games Call of Duty 2, Gears of War, Kameo: Elements of Power, NBA 2K6, Project Gotham Racing 3, Quake 4 and Ghost Recon 3.

And yes, I am excited. It'll wear down though, considering the console won't come out 'till November probably. Oh wait, there's E3, where we get to see more of the games...

[Taristin]

So... How well will Linux run on one of these

[Deepblue]

Download that video I posted (on Fileshack)

Ghost Recon 3 and NBA 2K6 look bloody nice...

[Flipside]

But how well do they play? It doesn't matter how nice a game looks, if it doesn't have the gameplay, it aint worth the DVD it's burned on. Notice how nearly every game mentioned so far has a number 2 or above behind the title.

If I wanted to play a sequel, I'll wait till Nintendo release something like this and put a Zelda sequel on there, then I'll start getting excited

Sorry, but all I've seen of this so far is an effort to make the graphics look as pretty as possible. Theres more to games than that,