Microsoft leaks details on Xbox Next

[Squeak]

Cases such as those you mention like wood and skin is where it is absolutely at its best. Perfect compression just about every time at 4bit quality, no need for alpha, colour animation, etc.

Even better compression for those kinds of textures (if exact reproduction is not recuired, but only the overall "look" of a surface is to be captured), can be achieved by detail texturing a low-res map, an operation that does involves alphablending.
A prime example of that, is the grass in Halo.
But again, question is if xbox, like you claimed, really can take advantage of DXT1?

 

[archie4oz]

Goood tools exist, like ImageStudio (http://www.webtech.co.jp/eng/istudio/index.html)

Its allow good control over manipulating Clut and provide very good results with paletized stuff.
It opens a kind of "Underworld of per pixel features" at very cheap hardware performance price.

Heh... I've seen free tools that will pretty much embarass ImageStudio's quantizers...

 

[cthellis42]

An interesting article on the backwards compatibility situation.

Jen-Hsun Huang weighing in: Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, says his guess is that the next Xbox won't be compatible with the old one. "It's virtually impossible on many levels," he adds. "On an intellectual-property level. On practical levels, too."

When asked to explain (might this be sour grapes talking?), Huang says for cost reasons, Microsoft isn't likely to be willing to put additional chips in the box to ensure hardware compatibility. Moreover, he suggests that current Xbox games make use of Nvidia's proprietary graphics shaders and that Microsoft might have to license them to use them again.

Dave Orton disagrees: By contrast, Dave Orton, president of ATI, says, "It's not outside the realm of possibility to make a compatible Xbox." He didn't discuss specific products his company is making for Microsoft, but he says that if you just consider the timing (about five years) between the consoles, then Moore's Law dictates that the new machine will be eight times as fast as the old one. With such an increase in raw processing speed, Xbox Next should have plenty of horsepower to emulate the old games via software. That is, the new hardware will be fast enough to execute the old games even if they have to run through software translation.

And of course there's the Connectix angle we've talked about before: On the processor side, Microsoft might have to employ its Connectix software to get the Intel code to run on the IBM PowerPC. That problem raises the prospect of additional costs and engineering efforts. "It's not a trivial amount of work," says Dean McCarron, an analyst at PC chip market researcher Mercury Research in Scottsdale, AZ. "It will be a massive task of integrating different technologies."

More to the article than that, so link over. ^_^

 

[ERP]

Cases such as those you mention like wood and skin is where it is absolutely at its best. Perfect compression just about every time at 4bit quality, no need for alpha, colour animation, etc.

Even better compression for those kinds of textures (if exact reproduction is not recuired, but only the overall "look" of a surface is to be captured), can be achieved by detail texturing a low-res map, an operation that does involves alphablending.
A prime example of that, is the grass in Halo.
But again, question is if xbox, like you claimed, really can take advantage of DXT1?

DXT1 works fine on NV2A, it has the same restrictions as on NV30, in so far as it's implemented to the letter of the spec.

 

[DeathKnight]

If crystal dynamics could stream a seemless world off a psx optical drive, Halo could have without a hdd.

With the size of the data for Halo, most likely not. The realtime intro for DOA3 (ie. multiple levels shown one right after the other) is streamed off of the hard drive. Streaming that off the DVD drive would likely be next to impossible, let alone trying to fit all of that in memory at once.

 

[gurgi]

What does showing one level after another very quickly have to do with seemless worlds?

 

[randycat99]

Streaming that off the DVD drive would likely be next to impossible, let alone trying to fit all of that in memory at once.

Those 2 emphasized terms have my eyebrows tilted as well, gurgi. If you can't fit into memory what you are streaming, then a HD wouldn't be any more help than a DVD drive, either, no? Perhaps he was referring to a scenario where your character is able to run really, really, really fast through a level? Then again you could just then scale down the texture detail/size since you won't be able to see much running like a bullet, anyway. :? ...or maybe he is imagining a level where there is a need to continuously stream 25 MB/s (reliably) to sustain level rendering?

 

[DeathKnight]

It's the same situation as in Halo's streaming. It's a large amount of data that would require a huge pause and/or loading screen during gameplay or watching a() realtime scene(s).

Halo's situation: the entire level is loaded onto the hard drive before the level starts (you see this with the loading screen)... segments of it are then streamed into RAM when the time comes (these are the one second or less pauses you encounter during gameplay)... less bandwidth intensive data like music is streamed off the DVD drive during gameplay... without the hard drive there would be large pauses during the gameplay which would kill the atmosphere and seamless feel of the levels... having the data cached on the hard drive like this also allows you to pick right up where you left off if you save and quit.. when you start your saved game back up there are no loading screens.. it starts instantly.

DOA3's situation: when you first start it and are going through the scrolling legal crapola the DVD drive is going to town loading the startup sequence onto the hard drive... a hefty chunk is loaded onto the hard drive before the sequence starts... when the sequence is running it's streaming data off the hard drive into RAM as needed (constantly) and the DVD drive is also sending the rest of the data for later in the sequence to the hard drive... without the hard drive you'd have pauses in this seamless realtime sequence because there simply isn't enough ram to accomodate all of that data at once, and the DVD drive isn't fast enough to stream it in realtime to RAM... later on if you haven't gone over all three game cache slots on the hard drive with new games you won't see the legal screen when you start DOA3 up since all of the data is on the hard drive already.

 

[Lazy8s]

Xbox's custom soundtrack functionality is convenient. Not only do you not need to have a CD/MP3 player with independent speakers set-up on hand, nor worry about integrating the music and properly balancing the volume levels of the two sources, but the Xbox's soundtrack manager affords space for lots of tracks and allows you to rearrange them into lists specific for games/game-situations to your heart's content (in the games that have the feature). It wouldn't be too practical to try to mimic that convenience on a CD player by burning a new CD for every new mix you wanted to create.

The hard drive has been invaluable in enabling important play mechanics in titles like Morrowind, enhancing the depth of play in Halo (Warthog jumping exploits), and will be used to realize the design of future games like B.C.

The hard drive has been worthwhile simply as a massive memory card, great for multiple seasons of multiple sports games. What game creators can do with a massively sized, fast-access read/write space, though, is certainly rife with possibility.

archie4oz:

In fact lots of the early Playstation games you could do the same thing since the entire game would load into RAM and you could just swap out the game CD for the music of your choice

Yeah, that was a neat feature in Ridge Racer. Out of curiosity, which other ones let you swap to a music CD?

 

[randycat99]

If there are pauses, at all, that doesn't strike me as particularly "seamless". Sounds like a bad streaming system altogether. Additionally, it doesn't quite embue the potential advantages of a HD when you have PS2 games running large, "seamless" levels off a DVD drive w/o any pauses, at all.

 

[PARANOiA]

archie4oz:

In fact lots of the early Playstation games you could do the same thing since the entire game would load into RAM and you could just swap out the game CD for the music of your choice

Yeah, that was a neat feature in Ridge Racer. Out of curiosity, which other ones let you swap to a music CD?

I believe Daytona on the Saturn let you do this... which was a blessing, since the music in Daytona was bloody awful! Day-tooooonnnnnaaaaaaaa, etc, every race, every lap... *shudder*

 

[DeathKnight]

If there are pauses, at all, that doesn't strike me as particularly "seamless". Sounds like a bad streaming system altogether. Additionally, it doesn't quite embue the potential advantages of a HD when you have PS2 games running large, "seamless" levels off a DVD drive w/o any pauses, at all.

I don't see a game the calibur of Halo (on every possible level) on the PS2 with no pauses during an entire level for loading, so I think your "point" is rather moot. The pauses are so friggin' minute too in Halo that it is seamless. It'd be far, far worse on the PS2 so that doesn't help your case much at all

The amount of data that's streamed off the hard drive in Halo with nothing but a stutter is quite impressive.

 

[marconelly!]

Except for the texture quality (where Xbox has an obvious hardware advantage) Jak 2 on the PS2 pretty much does everything I can think of Halo does, with more detailed world and characters (as far as geometry goes) AND streams the whole game with very different looking areas and cutscenes, without percievable pauses (whereas you have to wait for approx one minute to load each new level in Halo)

 

[Qroach]

well I'd firmly disagree with your jak2 statement. I have jack 2 and it is pretty simple on the texturing. They certainly don't use a whole lot of detail texturing in jak 2. I don't even think they are drawing nearly as many polygons as halo.

Jack 2 is using a streaming engine. They do short loads when you pass into certain areas, but for the most part they the characters movement is predictable and slow enough that you can stream data in when needed. First person shooters can't do this in a reliable way. You really shouldn't try and ocmpare a first person shooter to a 3D platformer, they are two different breeds of games.

 

[randycat99]

I don't see a game the calibur of Halo (on every possible level) on the PS2 with no pauses during an entire level for loading, so I think your "point" is rather moot.

The levels are certainly big enough to get me lost. Is that big enough? Besides, if it is streaming, it can be effectively as big as you want, anyway. There's a point where you are just making big levels for the sake of being big, when you run out of artwork to really populate a big level convincingly/nonrepetitively, or you just frustrate the player with way too much space to work with. I'm sure there is a comfortable "bite size" for level size, and a good streaming setup should be quite adept to handle it.

The pauses are so friggin' minute too in Halo that it is seamless.

They don't sound minute the way you described earlier (up to 1 sec?! C'mon now! If you were streaming video off the Internet with 1 sec skips, would you consider that seamless?). A pause is a pause, hence not really making a good case for effective streaming off a HD. At the very least, it might as well be "overtaxed streaming" for all we know, in which case the game developers did not seem to scale their data demands to suit available resources (or maybe this PC-based XBox system doesn't necessarily like hefty data accesses off the HD w/o disrupting other CPU driven processes- not that implausible a scenario, at all, if actual desktop PC's are an indication). Pick whichever you wish...

The amount of data that's streamed off the hard drive in Halo with nothing but a stutter is quite impressive.

How did you quantify how much data this really is? Is it a guess?

 

[nelg]

Would IBM’s license to x86 microcode from Cyrix help them solve the backward compatibility problem or I am just talking out of my ass?

 

[marconelly!]

well I'd firmly disagree with your jak2 statement. I have jack 2 and it is pretty simple on the texturing. They certainly don't use a whole lot of detail texturing in jak 2. I don't even think they are drawing nearly as many polygons as halo.

Yes, I have mentioned textures, but Jak 2 almost undoubtely draws more polygons (frankly it makes me wonder if you even played Jak 2 if you can make such claim - not only there's more polys on the screen, but it runs at 2x halo's framerate). Halo actually has pretty simple geometry most of the time and relies on really high quality textures. Xbox has more memory and texture compression - it simply can afford for more textures, but we are talking about streaming engines here, and their reliance on Hard Drive.

Jack 2 is using a streaming engine. They do short loads when you pass into certain areas, but for the most part they the characters movement is predictable and slow enough that you can stream data in when needed. First person shooters can't do this in a reliable way. You really shouldn't try and ocmpare a first person shooter to a 3D platformer, they are two different breeds of games.

Not really true. Cops will chase you through the whole city in Jak 2, new ones will join in, you can follow the vehicles as they go around. All the characters have ther AI, some more basic than the others, but they will run away or atack and whatnot (and there can be tons of them at the same time) All the vehicles have physics model applied to them. I don't see how is first person shooter much different in this regard, and the segment of Jak 2 that I'm describing is not even a platform game - more like GTA game, where you can drive vehicles (which you can do in halo as well, when the game stops being 1st person, btw)

As for the geometry comparision, if you don't trust my word, look here:
Your typical outdoor scene in Halo is rarely more complex than this:

Now compare that to this, imagine the 2x difference in framerate and it should be pretty clear that I'm not just pulling things out of thin air.

It actually gets *a lot* more complex than these screens can present. I wish I had a capture card to grab some of the screens where you hover over the slums area and can see far in the distance, with all those crazy detailed huts below you, with dozens of vehicles whizzing by and people walking around.

 

[_phil_]

Heh... I've seen free tools that will pretty much embarass ImageStudio's quantizers...

I'm interessed ,even if i praised there ImageStudio as a whole package ,not only as a quantizer.

 

[chapban.]

TOO bad Jak2 textures is tEH suck. Worst than Jak1. R&C-erized! The framerates is tEh suck too. Worst than Jak1. Peak 60fps it mayB but it drops -A- lot. TEARING is SEVERE! AND you KNOW when they are doing the loading. Not really seamless.....I ain feeling the so called 1 minute Halo load...The AI is well.....let just say be FAR smelling Halo1( FIRST FIRST, did i say FIRST gen Xbox game) behinds.

OF coz, ain surprising to see such FUNNY comparison by some AGAIN...FUNNIER still with 1024x768xFSAAAAAA screenshots.....

mayB if we wait on Halo2 vs Killzone if be talking about large seamless teamless games...... :?

 

[London Geezer]

God, looking at those screens, Halo almost looks like a Dreamcast game with higher res textures...

Really, i think Marconcelli's point is clear. Anyone saying that Jak2 is in anyway less detailed than anything released this generation must really give it a try and look for themselves... Jak2 is a masterpiece of programming, especially since it's running on the "oldest and underpowered" console of the 3...