Codename Vejle: Xbox 360 S combined CPU/GPU
- Thread starter AzBat
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My guess is that they are trying to avoid fragmentation of the platform. If you allow performance difference between SKU's it is likely that some developers would choose to make use of the extra performance which would make other SKU's look bad.
corduroygt
Banned
Did you miss the part where I said "as long as validation/testing is on older 360s"? If the game won't run well on the older 360's, MS won't allow it, plain and simple.
It's not just fragmentation of the platform folks or making the older 360 "look bad", some games can depend on hardware timing tricks to eek out the performance.
You don't want to changing latencies on a fixed hardware platform, doing so could induce the possibility of compatibility issues. The last thing you want is games breaking on the new system for pete's sake.
You don't want to changing latencies on a fixed hardware platform, doing so could induce the possibility of compatibility issues. The last thing you want is games breaking on the new system for pete's sake.
Is that still true? Back in the days of simpler hardware, simpler software, it was, but developing to that low a level now would be very costly and time consuming and only possible with a sophisticated in-house engine I'd have thought. There's enough optimsiation to be done with job balancing and managing workloads and datastructures and whatnot, that I wouldn't think poking around with clock timings would even be considered!
I haven't had a 360 for a couple of years now. I had borrowed a friend's back in 2007 (he went to China for a year) and the drive made me crazy. It's cool to hear that you can run games off the HDD finally. Maybe one day I'll grab a 360 again (probably when they've been forgotten lol).
I'm currently busy with my "new" Dreamcast and 3DO.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
Doesn't sound very tasty to me, more like a nightmare Gamecube to Wii type of a situation. You are basically descriping X360 X2... with what 7-8 years between the consoles, that's pitiful. If it launches in 2012-13 it better have 3-4GB of ram and 8-10x the transistor budget of X360.
corduroygt
Banned
Exactly, especially with Microsoft and their insistence on DX9 instead of a lower level. I don't think even with PS3 they don't go any lower than assembly level.
brain_stew
Regular
I'm talking about a 2011 launch for the successor to the Wii, not the next 360 in 2013. Expecting 4GB of RAM and 10x the 360's transistor count is a complete pipedream. Delivering ~3x performance of the current generation consoles 2 years before they release a successor, which are also bound to be scaled back compared to this generation, die sizes will go down next generation, not up. The amount of cash Sony has bled and the success of the Wii has guaranteed that.
I'm not certain they will go down. Gamers still expect a certain level of jump with the next coming consoles or they wouldn't be complaining about the X360/PS3 tech lasting so long. However we can be fairly certain they won't go up if only because process shrinks are slowing down and there is not that much left in the way of cost cutting by that way left in future generations.
Vejle... i know that place.. nothing there reminds me of cool running CPU´s
Pretty close to Legoland though. You know putting chip... eh.. bricks together.
Awesome article, love those pictures, thanks.
The 360 permits much lower-level development than "DX9" as we know it on the PC.
I am doubtful if it is possible to go any lower level than assembly.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
Yeah I thought you were talking about the next Xbox. For the next Wii, that doesn't sound bad
There was never any such insistence from Microsoft. Even on XBox1, direct hw access was not limited, only GPU documentation was (because of NVidia, not MS).corduroygt said:
There's machine code - which usually boils down to writting DMA chains and direct register access code (both of which is at least somewhat accessible on PS3).rpg.314 said:
Of course PS3 is kind of pussified by the fact you can actually debug all this stuff.
I was thinking a simple priority split for individual buffers could provide some benefit even when oversubscribing eDRAM. Say you have enough eDRAM to keep a forward renderer with 2xAA happy. Adding MRTs you keep your MSAA Z-buffer and one RGBA in eDRAM but spill the rest to UMA memory. At 4xAA all but the Z-buffer goes out to memory. Something like that.
Needs significant hardware support though. Duplicating a lot of ROP functionality.
Not that I don't believe you and have no reason to argue, but I have to ask if what you say is true then where do reports such as this come from?
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-directx-360-performance-blog-entry
corduroygt
Banned
Is this a new thing, because EG reports from 2009 (that kagemaru linked) say that MS won't certify a game that goes outside the DX apis?
Well that's what always confused me, I've read about developers "coding to the metal" on 360 games but then we see reports like the one I linked above.
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