Adding a multi-vector processor to X2 a good idea?

babages were bought before funcoland . Also funcoland had a big name and was huge for trade ins so they kept it , babages had been dieing for along time .

When they took over they sent me to the one of the funcolands in the area to fix the place up and turn it around ... it was a mess and poorly managed . After that i was a little less than a year and they moved them over to gamestop .

Its a bit wierd . It used to be that the stripmall stores since they were normaly bigger and had lower sell through on new products carried nintendo games. But we no longer take anything older than playstation and nintendo 64 games . about a year or so into the ps3 we will stop taking n64 and psone games . The reason is inventory . No one buys regular nes or gensis or superness games and at one point our store alone had 38 supermaio / duck hunt carts ... even at 15cents ... yes 15cents they wouldn't sell and they took up room we sorely needed .

 

I am fairly certain that Microsoft expects the entire Xenon to provide over "teraflop" of computing performance when all the processing performance of the CPUs and GPU are added together. even though they probably have not locked down the final clockspeeds, they know the minimum they will get, and therefore, what they can claim performance wise.

the GPU will have the lionshare of this floating point performance. its shader units will all be floating point even IF they are not unified shaders (current pixel shaders are fp based) but anyway the GPU shaders are expected to be unified, so they ALL could be used to crunch geometry / lighting / vertex shading data. this has to be how they can claim more than a "teraflop".

The original Xbox GPU alone was first rated at 120 to 140 GFLOPs and then downgraded to 80 GFLOPs. the CPU is rated at about 3 GFLOPs (regardless of what they can actually do, and actually sustain in realworld)


Xbox's polygon spec was and is as follows (AFAIK and IIRC)

original 300 MHz GPU:
300 million micro polygons per second
150 million transformed or T&L'd polygons/s
over 100 million textured polygons/s with all effects on, sustained

first downgrade to 250 MHz
125 million transformed or T&L'd polygons/s
100 million textured polygons/s with all effects on, sustained

second downgrade to 233 MHz
116 million transformed or T&L'd polygons/s
100 million textured polygons/s with all effects on, sustained



AFAIK Microsoft never gave their "micro polygon" performance figures when XBox GPU was downgraded to 250 MHz and then again to 233MHz.

at 250 MHz, the micro polygon count should've been listed at 250 million micro polygons/s and at 233 MHz, it should've been 233 million/s.

because of that, people thought the polygon downgrade was alot larger than it was: they thought 'oh that sucks, look, Xbox downgraded from 300 million polygons/s to 125 million (or 116 million). when in fact they were comparing the micro polygon count before downgrade (thus the HIGHEST figure) to the transformed / T&L'd polygon count after the downgrades (the smaller figures) it was Microsoft's fault for never clearing up that bit of confusion. I suppose they should have, it could've been to their (slight) benefit.

the actual drop was from 150 down to 116 million.
(or 300 million micro polys down to 233 million)

notice that the "sustained polygons/s with all effects on" figure basicly never changed with the downgrades. that was kinda curious.

obviously ALL of these figures are stretched, best-case polygon performance figures, if everything is superefficient and perfect, no bottlenecks, perfect programming, theoretical etc. Xbox games only push a fraction of Microsoft's smallest figure (100 million sustained), I don't know of any Xbox game that reaches even 30 million polygons/sec, the highest ones are all probably 15-25 million or less.

 

Not only do those vertex throughput figures assume near perfect synchronization of GPU-CPU but they also imply that you're willing to forgo such excessive luxuries like "texturing" and "light."

 

I can't believe (or don't want to believe, actually) people are still comparing theoretical Xbox specs to anything. Hasn't that boat sailed years ago?

 

So, is this the mark of a new era of peak, complete, component specs? Will graiphcs cards be rated their perfect world performance ignoring system limitations?

Can anyone come up with a suitable performance measure?

 

Yah, I don't think they just started to doing this...

However, it is certainly the era where they will surely shout the loudest, with the most over-optimistic numbers ever, in a bid to beat the ultimate level boss that which is Sony.

 

sure,

PS2 - ok graphics.
PS3 - awesome graphics

Xbox - good graphics
Xenon - wonderful graphics

 

Consolemark'06? */me ducks and run*

 

Bitch-slaps-per-second (TM)

 

Looking forward to seeing new realtime demos for next-gen consoles.

Several movies from Japanese news programs about the March 2, 1999 PS2 realtime demos including Ridge Racer Girl, FF8 Ballroom and Duck in Sink...
http://ps2movies.ign.com/media/news/video/ps2demos/psx2_1.mpg
http://ps2movies.ign.com/media/news/video/ps2demos/psx2_2.mpg
http://ps2movies.ign.com/media/news/video/ps2demos/psx2_3.mpg
http://ps2movies.ign.com/media/news/video/ps2demos/psx2_4.mpg
http://ps2movies.ign.com/media/news/video/ps2demos/psx2_5.mpg
http://ps2movies.ign.com/media/news/video/ps2demos/psx2_6.mpg

 

Hey, to this day no one beat me at that!! No way a machine can do better than me, it's MY territory.

 

This talk about PS2's 66 / 75 million pps numbers is all really rendundant when you go back and see that the original press release that went out did NOT limit itself to those peak numbers, but had a range of them showing the performance under different circumstances:

Graphics Synthesizer PR:
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/1q99/playstation2-gfx.html

Design revealing of the PlayStation 2 (Overall specs):
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/1q99/playstation2-pr.html

These weren't just random numbers thrown out into the public. Magazines citing those numbers as fact that future games would be pushing those figures is certainly not Sony's fault - in fact, something that is bound to happen with any sort of PR that has numbers in them (that they are pulled out of context by people that have no clue).

And besides, what good discussion / speculation would we be having going on around here if all console makers would be as secretive as Nintendo is when it went about publicising its console's SPECIFICATION?

 

...how neon the colors are in the games...