Digital Foundry Retro Discussion [2018 - 2020]

[Mobius1aic]

Personally I was very underwhelmed by the first wave of 360 games and was zero excited with most of it's launch line up. The 360 looked like a beefed up XBOX to me. It's the games that came a year later that begun defining the console. Games like Gears and Bioshock. Now these were really special
I was barely giving attention to the console at launch. The absence of competition for a year (almost a year and a half in EU) really helped the XBOX gain momentum.

I think Oblivion dispelled the beefed up Xbox delusion. I will say I really felt like I graphically entered nextgen when I first stole a plane in Just Cause. I climbed up to a high altitude during a sunset with volumetric lighting and Crepuscular rays casting off the plane, the archipelago's big volcano was visible miles away, and I had Motorhead playing in the system's background off a USB drive. I was blown away with the experience.

I always feel I need to hand it to ATi for doing such a damn good job with Xenos. The entire system was really a good fit for it's generation, despite some shortcomings and the difficulties devs had in the early years.

 

[dogen]

They could do a chip music special! From C64 to the Saturn!

Don't forget the GBA and DS

 

[eastmen]

I think Oblivion dispelled the beefed up Xbox delusion. I will say I really felt like I graphically entered nextgen when I first stole a plane in Just Cause. I climbed up to a high altitude during a sunset with volumetric lighting and Crepuscular rays casting off the plane, the archipelago's big volcano was visible miles away, and I had Motorhead playing in the system's background off a USB drive. I was blown away with the experience.

I always feel I need to hand it to ATi for doing such a damn good job with Xenos. The entire system was really a good fit for it's generation, despite some shortcomings and the difficulties devs had in the early years.

xbox 360 came off a poor first console in terms of sales. So of course it would take time to get a lot of devs on board with the system. This is true even with the successful switch as the majority 3rd party support is still older games getting ported. Its just that the switch is in a unique postion as a part handheld system and the games are still great on the go.

The launch titles were nothing to write home about , although my friend and I played perfect dark co op. However with oblivion hitting and ghost recon the system really came into its own and then gears hit and it truly showed itself as a power house

 

[Cyan]

They could do a chip music special! From C64 to the Saturn!

that would be very interesting, but also modern consoles could make into such a special, or for another sound special.

The original Xbox was probably better than the X360 in terms of audio, since the later used the CPU to produce sound, iirc.

I think Oblivion dispelled the beefed up Xbox delusion. I will say I really felt like I graphically entered nextgen when I first stole a plane in Just Cause. I climbed up to a high altitude during a sunset with volumetric lighting and Crepuscular rays casting off the plane, the archipelago's big volcano was visible miles away, and I had Motorhead playing in the system's background off a USB drive. I was blown away with the experience.

I always feel I need to hand it to ATi for doing such a damn good job with Xenos. The entire system was really a good fit for it's generation, despite some shortcomings and the difficulties devs had in the early years.

Oblivion was it, yes, imho.

PGR3 and Condemned, along with Kameo and CoD 2 to an extent, showed the true potential of the console in the very early stages.

However, when Oblivion came out I was like.... "The Xbox could NEVER run this". You saw a mountain in the distance, and there wasn't the typical fog trick to hide the upcoming terrain and save resources.

Plus, you could travel there, and go to the top of that mountain you had first seen from some kilometers away. I had never seen something like that before.

 

[Mobius1aic]

Oblivion proved the system could handle massive open worlds, while showing how necessary the HDD really was to the entire 360 experience (is that a good thing though?). Dead Rising realized massive amounts of NPCs with alot of interactivity.

I think not enough people give enough credit to the Xenon CPU to make these games possible so early on. Yeah, it's cores were relatively narrow in execution width and in-order, but they were homogenous full fledged cores with excellent Vector/SIMD. Not too hard a transition for Xbox and PC centric developers, especially when they were beginning to multithread code with the first Pentium Ds and Athlon 64 X2s.

 

[Cyan]

Oblivion proved the system could handle massive open worlds, while showing how necessary the HDD really was to the entire 360 experience (is that a good thing though?). Dead Rising realized massive amounts of NPCs with alot of interactivity.

I think not enough people give enough credit to the Xenon CPU to make these games possible so early on. Yeah, it's cores were relatively narrow in execution width and in-order, but they were homogenous full fledged cores with excellent Vector/SIMD. Not too hard a transition for Xbox and PC centric developers, especially when they were beginning to multithread code with the first Pentium Ds and Athlon 64 X2s.

now that you mention it, what was most impressive at the time of the X360 was the fact that it had a 3 cores and 6 threads CPU, which at the time was totally out of this world. In addition, the GPU was based on an ATi arquitecture which could perform HDR and antialiasing at the same time, something that wasn't possible on the PC back then, for obscure reasons.

The X360 was a machine to be proud of and show to your friends.

 

[vipa899]

the GPU was based on an ATi arquitecture which could perform HDR and antialiasing at the same time, something that wasn't possible on the PC back then, for obscure reasons

Couldnt the R580/X1900 series do that?

 

[Mobius1aic]

now that you mention it, what was most impressive at the time of the X360 was the fact that it had a 3 cores and 6 threads CPU, which at the time was totally out of this world.

Well they were relatively weak cores compared to Athlon 64 and even Netburst. But Xenon was a Vector/SIMD monster, and that made it useful for almost a decade, whereas Athlon 64 X2s, Pentium Ds, and even Core 2 Duos would have trouble with games later in the generation. I remember reading that big part of the reason for dual threading the Xenon cores had to do with the dual VMX units, and MS wanting to be able to use procedural rendering to save on system memory.

In addition, the GPU was based on an ATi arquitecture which could perform HDR and antialiasing at the same time, something that wasn't possible on the PC back then, for obscure reasons.

The ATi X1000 series could do HDR + MSAA at the same time. The main X1000s released in Oct 2005, a month before the 360 launched, with the X1900s releasing in 2006. Accordingly, games like Oblivion needed the X1000 series in order to enable HDR + AA on PC, until the arrival of the Geforce 8800.

I think the X1000 series went pretty underappreciated, and it surprises me ATi didn't make it unified shader, though many of the GPUs did have seriously decouple config ratios that exemplified future emphasis on pixel shader loads.. I bet they thought PC developers were not ready for unified shaders, along with balancing issues. The X1900 already had a pretty hefty dispatch engine but perhaps it wasn't what they needed for what became R600. AFAIK the X1000 series did serve as the parent architecture to Xenos. The pixel shaders are pretty damn similar to Xenos' unified shaders (both are Vector4 + Scalar). Obviously Xenos differs highly with not just the unified configuration, but the eDRAM die that houses the ROPS.

 

[vipa899]

Well they were relatively weak cores compared to Athlon 64 and even Netburst. But Xenon was a Vector/SIMD monster, and that made it useful for almost a decade, whereas Athlon 64 X2s, Pentium Ds, and even Core 2 Duos would have trouble with games later in the generation.

I actually remember reading that somewhere, that the 360's CPU wasnt all that capable, A64/C2D much faster in general, with the Xenon outperforming pc cpu's by large in some specific areas, abit like Cell?

People generally thought the PS3 was faster overall, i think it was the other way around though

 

[Mobius1aic]

I actually remember reading that somewhere, that the 360's CPU wasnt all that capable, A64/C2D much faster in general, with the Xenon outperforming pc cpu's by large in some specific areas, abit like Cell?

Pretty much. You wouldn't want to use Xenon as a PC processor, it was definitely geared for gaming and media. IIRC the Xenon's PPE had an even more enhanced form of the Altivec/VMX found in the PPE on Cell and in the PowerPC 970. And I believe Altivec/VMX at this point was superior to w/e form of SSE was available on x86 processors, it featured more capabilities and instructions. Xenon was a pretty small package too, I think 165 million transistors even with the 1MB cache counted. Dual core PowerPC 970s, Athlon 64 X2s and Pentium Ds featured larger cores with more execution units and consequently would be higher in transistor count and physical size per core by a fairly large margin. They also probably had more cache space though owing to their more general purpose use.

Xenon was geared for gaming, but better balanced for traditional workloads versus Cell, with it's singular PPE and massive SIMD array. Any PC centric developer would've gravitated to Xenon much more than Cell. It was a very good solution for it's intended era. Small, fast SIMD, straight forward capability, that likely required few tricks outside of the early years as devs got used to multicore.

 

[Mobius1aic]

Part 1 2005 Arstechnica article on Microsoft's intention's for how the Xenon CPU could be utilized.
Part 2

Classic Arstechnica! Reading it emphasizes that vector/SIMD was a BIG deal on the 360. Though publically it was vastly overshadowed by the Cell's much larger ambition. This is why I love Xenon even though hardly anyone remembers it.

 

[vipa899]

The 360 had amazing console hardware for its time, was the PS2 even more advanced for its time though?

 

[bgroovy]

I don't know. The fact that Xbox One is able to emulate the xenon CPU with Jaguar cores suggests to me it was far less capable in practice than it seemed at the time.

 

[vipa899]

Really dont know either, but its GPU was quite comparable to X1800 series which was high-end by then, X1900 came just after 360 and was much faster though.
Much like the OG xbox having a GF3 with twin vertex shaders, high end by the time, but its CPU wasnt that special. GPU was and perhaps still is the most important chip for good performance?
No idea what to compare 360's cpu to, is a C2D or C2Q, or even a FX60 faster?

 

[Garrett Weaving]

I really enjoy the Digital Foundry Retro vids. I'm not hugely into Digital Foundry's other content, although I do watch some of the comparisons with great interest, but the Retro stuff is absolutely great, never a dull episode. John Linneman, the person behind most of these, seems to have a great passion, but also extensive knowledge on the titles he covers. I'm especially impressed with his technical analysis and assessment whenever he busts out the odd emulator and takes a look at what a game is actually doing.

These DF Retro Extras are also pretty awesome, ain't they? I especially enjoyed the one on the PS3's reveal, loads of laughs in there.

 

[Mobius1aic]

I don't know. The fact that Xbox One is able to emulate the xenon CPU with Jaguar cores suggests to me it was far less capable in practice than it seemed at the time.

I bet the 360 games are giving individual execution threads their own Jaguar core, and we know it's not straight up emulation either. There is an obvious re-tune.

Really dont know either, but its GPU was quite comparable to X1800 series which was high-end by then, X1900 came just after 360 and was much faster though.

I'm actually a bit wrong on the Xenos shader being based on X1000 pixel shader. It's actually the vertex shader it's likely based on since the vertex shader is Vect4 + Scalar (just like Xenos). The pixel shader is actually two paired up ALUs, 1 with Vec3 ADD + Scalar1 ADD and the second ALU with Vec3 ADD/MULL/MADD + Scalar1 ADD/MULL/MADD.

Anyways, Xenos' overall capability was really in a class of it's own, even compared to the X1800XT. Calculated out, the X1800XT @ 625 MHz has 170 GFLOPS total in theoretical performance (vs 240 for Xenos), and you have to remember it's got fixed function vertex and pixel shader pipelines, 8 VS and 16 PS respectively. Xenos' unified shaders will get better balanced utilization, and it has 48 of them to boot. So 2005 and 2006 games were probably fine with the X1800XT but into the years as devs and drivers switch to only supporting DX10 class GPUs and beyond, the X1800 and it's family got left behind pretty quick just like the Geforce 7000s.

No idea what to compare 360's cpu to, is a C2D or C2Q, or even a FX60 faster?

Xenon general IPC is on par with FX60 in the 19,000 MIPS range IIRC. Higher clock Core 2 Duos were about 50% higher, closer to 30,000. Wider cores man..........but theoretical vector performance would be in Xenon's favor since it has three cores each with it's own VMX unit. Not sure if a Core 2 Duo can later gen games like BF3 and AC4 Black Flag all that well.

 

[dogen]

I don't know. The fact that Xbox One is able to emulate the xenon CPU with Jaguar cores suggests to me it was far less capable in practice than it seemed at the time.

XB1 doesn't emulate the 360 CPU for BC.

I bet the 360 games are giving individual execution threads their own Jaguar core, and we know it's not straight up emulation either. There is an obvious re-tune.

They statically recompile the power pc code. The CPU really isn't being emulated. The GPU is though.

Xenon general IPC is on par with FX60 in the 19,000 MIPS range IIRC.

According to sebbbi, MS said the xenon was clocked at .2 IPC on average. I'm sure it can peak a lot higher for highly tuned SIMD code. But an average would take that into account I think.

 

[vipa899]

Wasnt the x1800xt 270gflops?
A x1900xt is about 400+ gflops, and more advanced then x1800.

For cpu FX60 was quite speedy for its time but intel set itself apart with its C2D and C2Q series.

If optimized sure BF3 could run on a c2d setup. I mean its even lower then lower settings on pc on 360, with that framerate and lower player counts.

X360 had impressive hw for its time sure, but got outpaced rather quickly, if not allready at launch, not talking price/performance ratio.

PS2 seemed to hold the performance position longer?

 

[see colon]

X360 had impressive hw for its time sure, but got outpaced rather quickly, if not allready at launch, not talking price/performance ratio.

PS2 seemed to hold the performance position longer?

I think the thing with Xbox 360 is that it didn't have any one bottleneck holding back it's performance. You could relatively* easily optimize code to play to the strengths of the CPU, and the GPU had plenty of bandwidth to render the pixels it needed to at the target resolution. Sure, Cell could perform better in specialized cases, but PS3 as a whole could be held back by memory segmentation and bandwidth limitations. In my opinion, 360 is one of the most balanced pieces of console hardware ever. Probably my top pick. When comparing PS2 to PC at the time, I ran every PC game back then at 1024*768. PS2 never competed with PC in terms of render resolution. I know a few games supported 1080i on PS2 but they weren't rendered at that res, or anywhere near it usually. 360 was competitive in resolution, feature set, and performance to higher end PC parts at the time. PS2 was never competitive in feature set beyond it's geometry engine, never competed in resolution and rarely in performance.

*compared to PS3, and later WiiU which took more effort to optimize for.

 

[vipa899]

Yeah i gotta agree on that, PS2's advantage to pc was effects/particles, though im sure something could have been done with GF2's NSR, primitive pixel shader, was that ever taken use of? With GF3 a year after it was better in about all areas though, much more so. Xbox with its GF3/4 hybrid was a beast for its time like the 360, would have been cool if it got as much attention as the PS2.

360 was the more powerfull console compared to PS3, allmost all multiplatform titles did better on MS's console. PS3 had blu-ray wheras on 360 HD-DVD, which you had to buy seperately