Xbox sends along word of this Mercury News article that supposedly
reveals the specs on Microsoft's next-generation Xbox system. So what's
the beef? Apparently it will feature three 64-bit processors from IBM
(said to be the same as those featured in Apple's G5 towers), an ATI
processor that's more powerful than the upcoming R400, either 256 or 512
MB of DDR RAM, either DVD or Blu-Ray DVD format discs, and as
rumored...no hard drive. Instead the current plan really is apparently
to ditch it in favor of flash memory in an attempt to keep the price
down. Considering that the hard drive is vital to enable downloadable
content (not to mention caching for games) developers aren't too
thrilled at this idea. Epic's Tim Sweeney is quoted as saying, "For a
console to really have a useful online component, it has to have the
hard drive to store downloaded maps and other data." Also of note is
word that backwards compatibility is not guaranteed at this point, and
that Microsoft is using Apple G5 computers to build game prototypes. Who
says Mac gaming is dead?
Team Xbox has their own story on this, which contains some additional
details, including word that the graphics chip is based on the R500
core. Here's an excerpt of that:
What nobody is telling you and you'll know about this first, here on
TeamXbox, is the revolutionary approach of the Xbox 2 to deal with
today's biggest problem in graphics chips: memory bandwidth. The graphic
chip will contain not only a graphics rendering core but up embedded
DRAM acting as a frame buffer that is big enough to handle an image that
is 480i and can be 4 times over sampled and double buffered. Yeah, we
all remember Bitboys but this time you can bet this is for real. This
solution will finally make possible HDTV visuals with full screen
Anti-Aliasing on. The technology also supports up to 512 MB of external
memory on a 256-bit bus. However, current specs plan to use 256 MB RAM,
big enough for next-generation visuals which are all about computational
power rather than large storage.
---
I think it will be a big retrograde step to ditch the hard disk. They
may intend to force a hard disk purchase with the purchase of Xbox Live
for the Xbox2 though?
I'm also not happy of the shift away from Intel platform, since it would
mean that the easy porting path that PC Games enjoyed going to and from
PC to Xbox would now be gone.
It will take the developers more work to go from a PC title to Xbox and
vice-versa.
But..we'll see how it turns out. Not due until two years anyways ^_^
-Gel
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