Enter the 360 beta kits

[deathstar121]

I am not sure if this old, but then again it was posted friday on IGN, and the console forums has been down, so if anyone else posted it i am sry.

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/636/636018p1.html

 

[_leech_]

Did they really need to write up a 5-page article to tell us that better devepment kits = better looking games? :?

 

[pc999]

There i a few points of interesst in there

"You've seen the answer to (all of your) questions. It's called Gears of War. What you've seen is just a tiny sample of what we'll be able to achieve in our first generation Xbox 360 title and clearly we're pretty darn excited about it. More will be revealed over time."

"Right now, we're still wrapping our heads around them, but I have to be honest, I'm a bit disappointed with the Beta Kits. Microsoft still has a lot of work to do in terms of optimization. Also, the Beta Kits are loud to a point of distraction."

(meybe not yet water colled ?)

With the exception of the audio chips (this chipset isn't complete), the Beta Kits contain about 90% of the console's chip set.

:? What they mean with that?

It is the most interessting parts IMO

 

[Farid]

Did they really need to write up a 5-page article to tell us that better devepment kits = better looking games? :?

Slow period, they have no story to cover, they need hits therefor ethey write 5 pages of useless fluff just to say: Beta Kits have been delivered to developers.

 

[AlNom]

A nice read.

here are still some speed issues with the GPU we're told

What does this mean? Clock-speed? Other hardware issues?

 

[Tap In]

well I thought it was an interesting read cosidering it wasn't ground breaking. (and I'm staved for Next Gen news)

Nice to hear some Devs comments in there with hands on.

"The major difference is in the video chipset, which is pretty different from anything you can find on the PC (or alpha hardware). It does some slick bits of load balancing between pixel performance and vertex performance, which helps us make sure that we're maxing out the video hardware no matter what we're doing. HDTV looks spectacular on this thing.

 

[Pozer]

Also the 'GPU being twice as powerful as the Alpha kit' is impressive considering the x850 is a pretty powerful gpu.

 

[c0_re]

nice read thanks for the link

 

[scificube]

A nice read.

here are still some speed issues with the GPU we're told

What does this mean? Clock-speed? Other hardware issues?

It also think it would be interesting to know what exactly this meant.

 

[c0_re]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say they mean the new beta GPU has alor most l the fatures of final hardware but not clocked as high as the final hardware wil be.

 

[Powderkeg]

With the exception of the audio chips (this chipset isn't complete), the Beta Kits contain about 90% of the console's chip set.

:? What they mean with that?

The audio chipset which converts the digital data to either an optical or analog output for your stereo isn't complete.

 

[dukmahsik]

2x the power of X850 XT is no joke

 

[pc999]

With the exception of the audio chips (this chipset isn't complete), the Beta Kits contain about 90% of the console's chip set.

:? What they mean with that?

The audio chipset which converts the digital data to either an optical or analog output for your stereo isn't complete.

Ok, thanks.

 

[aeriic]

With the exception of the audio chips (this chipset isn't complete), the Beta Kits contain about 90% of the console's chip set.

What they mean with that?

I don't think they were talking about the DAC, as they could have used an off-the-shelf part in the mean time. The SiS I/O chipset for X360 will house hardware for real-time XMA audio decompression into PCM in RAM. This part is probably not in the Beta kit...

 

[3roxor]

What I get from the article is that they are very happy with the performance of the GPU which will be roughly 2 times as fast as the RadeonX800. On the other hand they aren't nearly as excited about the CPU's performance though.

 

[jvd]

With the exception of the audio chips (this chipset isn't complete), the Beta Kits contain about 90% of the console's chip set.

What they mean with that?

I don't think they were talking about the DAC, as they could have used an off-the-shelf part in the mean time. The SiS I/O chipset for X360 will house hardware for real-time XMA audio decompression into PCM in RAM. This part is probably not in the Beta kit...

Unless they decided on an upgrade SiS I/o chipset with dedicated sound ?

What I get from the article is that they are very happy with the performance of the GPU which will be roughly 2 times as fast as the RadeonX800. On the other hand they aren't nearly as excited about the CPU's performance though.

I get that they are pissed off that its not x86 and can't be lazy .

 

[Farid]

Unless they decided on an upgrade SiS I/o chipset with dedicated sound ?

Nope, the sound chip is just an audio output chip.

 

[ERP]

Unless they decided on an upgrade SiS I/o chipset with dedicated sound ?

Nope, the sound chip is just an audio output chip.

It does quite a lot more than that

But you're right it doesn't do mixing or encoding.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

What does it do then? MS said sound would be handled on CPU. I'd have thought all you'd need is a DAC.

 

[mech]

I get that they are pissed off that its not x86 and can't be lazy .

Spoken like a true non-programmer who hasn't seen the XCPU specs.

The XCPU is slower for FLOPs than the G5s from the previous alpha kit, and IIRC doesn't support out of order instructions - forcing the developer to worry about optimising that rather than letting the CPU.

You may call this "lazy", but until you've seen how god-awful it can be to optimise code, especially multi-threaded code, you may want to hush up.