An original Xbox can do Doom 3 at 720p natively with extra RAM

How would bandwidth hold back the XBox when it'll do 720p with a lot of games without increasing the bandwidth at all, just the RAM pool. Many just need a patch, no RAM at all. Resolution is directly tied to the GPU so seems there is plenty of bandwidth for something extremely taxing like that.

There was a multiplatform developer on here a while back that basically said most everything you could do on ps2 or GC could you do through brute force or software on Xbox. Most just didn't bother with the time to do it. Or the advantages for the other consoles wouldn't show onscreen because the Xbox advantages would be much more apparent.
Based on PC performance of comparable parts, in many games a Geforce 3 ti 500 was faster than a 4 ti 4200. They both were 250mhz parts, but the fastest geforce 3 had faster memory, while the slowest 4 had the extra geometry shader like Xbox. In the games that can hit higher resolutions (assuming there is no performance penalty) obviously bandwidth wouldn't be an issue. But at the time, Xbox's GPU was top tier. It had high fillrate, fast texture/shader pipeline, and a fast geometry engine that often couldn't reach it's theoretical maximum because of bandwidth.

This isn't to say that it was completely handicapped by it's bandwidth. It's just that when you compare it to PS2 or GC, with their ultra fast embedded memory, they were basically never bandwidth bound. They had bottlenecks elsewhere in the pipeline.
 
Xbox has an IGP somewhat more powerful than a GeForce3 Ti 500, but has less total system memory bandwidth than any GeForce3 card has dedicated entirely to itself. It is actually similar to a PC3200-equipped nForce2 motherboard, but that only has to feed a GeForce4 MX IGP.

On the other hand, ERP has said they didn't find bandwidth to be a major issue. Maybe the 480p resolution is part of the reason for that.
https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/40196/
 
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PS2 had more fillrate, more GPU bandwidth, and a more flexible geometry pipeline. The games that shined on PS2 were ones that were able to leverage those advantages. Looking back, it's easy to see why PS2 was designed the way it was. Bandwidth, plolygons/second, and fillrate were the limiting factors for real time 3d when it was being designed. Xbox had the advantage of licensing it's graphics chip from a forward looking company at a time where the processor in question was cutting edge. Memory bandwidth probably held back the Xbox quite a bit.

PS2 kinda needed that bandwith (multipass renderer), or to emulate effects not present in hw. It made the ps2 more flexible though, in special compared to GC, the xbox was quite flexible aswell (GF3/4 arch).

I think xbox’s memory was quad pumped, even exceeding the ps2’s main rdram config. Not to say it wasnt the consoles bottleneck.
 
I never owned it but I've always thought that this was the best graphical showcase for the OG Xbox when it was all said and done.

Cant say I am that impressed. I think Project Gotham and Burnout 3 looked better. Maybe Wreckless too
 
Xbox has an IGP somewhat more powerful than a GeForce3 Ti 500, but has less total system memory bandwidth than any GeForce3 card has dedicated entirely to itself. It is actually similar to a PC3200-equipped nForce2 motherboard, but that only has to feed a GeForce4 MX IGP.

On the other hand, ERP has said they didn't find bandwidth to be a major issue. Maybe the 480p resolution is part of the reason for that.
https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/40196/
Xbox had essentially a Geforce 4 clocked at 233mhz. Geforce 3 and 4 have basically the same raster/pixel shader performance per clock, with the 4's having a second vertex shader doubling that performance. Both the Geforce 4 ti 4200 (the slowest "real" geforce 4) and the Geforce 3 ti 500 have a 250hmz core clock, but the Geforce 3 used faster memory. 250mhz vs 220 IIRC. Most games didn't leverage the vertex shaders as heavy as pixel shaders and raster, and the faster memory helped the Geforce 3 pull ahead in most titles. "More powerful" on a technical level? Probably because of the extra instructions per clock from the additional vertex unit. But the ti500 performed better in most games than a faster version of Xbox' GPU. That's not to say I would have choose a ti500 over what we got in Xbox, though. I think the lower clocks help with power consumption, and in a closed box designed to last 5ish years, I think the extra vertex shader is a nice, forward looking choice.
 
Cant say I am that impressed. I think Project Gotham and Burnout 3 looked better. Maybe Wreckless too

Yes but all those games are 480p. I'm not floored with the visuals but a huge open world, destruction, native 720p on 2001 hardware is something. There are stretches were there are tons of cars onscreen too with particle effects, explosions, and damage models on each car and the framerate stays rock solid.
 
No.
There were seven 1080i games on Xbox. Enter the Matrix and Syberia scaled their resolutions up to 1080i (and 720p). The other five (Atari Anthology, Dragon's Lair 3d, Double Steal, MX Unleashed, MX vs ATV Unleashed) were native.
 
Xbox had essentially a Geforce 4 clocked at 233mhz. Geforce 3 and 4 have basically the same raster/pixel shader performance per clock, with the 4's having a second vertex shader doubling that performance. Both the Geforce 4 ti 4200 (the slowest "real" geforce 4) and the Geforce 3 ti 500 have a 250hmz core clock, but the Geforce 3 used faster memory. 250mhz vs 220 IIRC. Most games didn't leverage the vertex shaders as heavy as pixel shaders and raster, and the faster memory helped the Geforce 3 pull ahead in most titles. "More powerful" on a technical level? Probably because of the extra instructions per clock from the additional vertex unit. But the ti500 performed better in most games than a faster version of Xbox' GPU. That's not to say I would have choose a ti500 over what we got in Xbox, though. I think the lower clocks help with power consumption, and in a closed box designed to last 5ish years, I think the extra vertex shader is a nice, forward looking choice.


There's also this curiousness
https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/247906/
From the information here, it seems that NV2A also featured NV30's double pumped Z/Stencil, had more FX units per pipeline and NVIDIA also themselve made note that NV2A would feature some of NV3x's vertex processing capabilities (but I don't know what that was).
That's true, with no color writes NV2A can easily achieve a real (measured) fillrate above 1 GPixel/s (where theoretical maximum would be 933 MPixel/s). It's pretty simple to achieve that..one have just to disable color writes and switch on multisampling.. ciao, Marco
 
I think GT4 did something close to 720p. And.... thats about the highest it can render at. You can upscale using fmbc though.


To me, their 1080i wasn't native and always looked a touch better than 480p




Whereas 720p native over 480p seemed massive.
 
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their 1080i wasn't native and always looked a touch better than 480p upscaled.

I had the same findings back then and two years ago on a modern oled tv. The 480p is actually an improvement over the usual interlaced output the ps2 had for many of its games, in special the earlier ones.
Also to note, not really chipset related, but the og xbox had a better component/DAC output aswell. Not sure, but i think later model PS2's had this resolved? (scph 39004 and later?)
 
No.
There were seven 1080i games on Xbox. Enter the Matrix and Syberia scaled their resolutions up to 1080i (and 720p). The other five (Atari Anthology, Dragon's Lair 3d, Double Steal, MX Unleashed, MX vs ATV Unleashed) were native.
I've tried the MX games, and they looked good at 1080i, but I never really thought the games were real lookers. The texture quality still felt a touch low. Does the NA release of Wreckless/Double Steal have 1080i support? Or is that only the sequel. Atari Anthology, though... Other than the interlacing, those vector games look great. The modern collections are probably better, with their CRT shaders and everything, but I remember the first time I fired that up at 1080i.

Also to note, not really chipset related, but the og xbox had a better component/DAC output aswell. Not sure, but i think later model PS2's had this resolved? (scph 39004 and later?)
I don't know if this is true or not, but I always believed it to be the case. Also of note, Xbox changed it's video encoder at some point and it broke compatibility with a handful of games' "HD modes". They were all Sega games IIRC, Panzer Dragoon being one of them. I also think those games only supported 480p, but I could be wrong there also. I'm not sure if modern HDMI solutions circumvent this problem, either.

Also, random note, IIRC Sony used a really old video encoder for early PS1s and switched them out later as well. Early PS1s used a SONY CXA1145 I think, which is the same as a 1989 Model 1 Megadrive/Genesis. I think it was 3 or 4 hardware revisions before they replaced it.
 
Also of note, Xbox changed it's video encoder at some point and it broke compatibility with a handful of games' "HD modes". They were all Sega games IIRC, Panzer Dragoon being one of them. I also think those games only supported 480p, but I could be wrong there also. I'm not sure if modern HDMI solutions circumvent this problem, either.


Yes there were a handful of games that had a scrambled image at 480p but they could be fixed through a patch. I had that issue but was pretty easy to fix.
 
GTA 3 running at native 720p stock Xbox. It has some slowdown at the beginning but pretty smooth after that.

Of course, this is without developer optimization.


 
I wonder if games like oblivion or mass effect would have been possible on OG xbox 480p with a RAM increase?

I imagine a reasonable facsimile of Mass Effect would be doable on the Xbox. Oblivion on PC with everything dialed down to minimum settings (esp no distant lands rendering) seems definitely within the Xbox's reach too from a graphical standpoint.

I bet a port of FEAR was in the works but seen as too potentially compromising or not worth the effort with the 360 soon to be around.
 
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