OG XBox was planned to launch with an AMD CPU until last minute.

One title I always feels get overlooked from the Xbox era is Far Cry Instincts Evolution. The world was opened up a bit compared to Instincts and the world felt quite big, and the graphics still felt impressive for the Xbox.

Gameplay wise I even prefered both Instincts and Evolution over the PC release.

 

Oh seems im not the only one then. It still looks nice today (considering the hardware then), The xbox versions had some effects not present in the pc version if i recall correctly. very impressive for 2001 hardware (and even older). Unreal championship the liandry conflict was one of those aswell taking advantage of the xbox. It did graphics not seen anywhere else on any 6th gen machine, all at a fluid 60fps (and it was fun as hell).

People think its a 360 game.

 

Looks like I've two OG Xbox games to play when I'm done with Conkers Bad Fur Day.

 

This started before Microsoft. There were plenty of games that launched on saturn , playstation and n64 along side pc releases. What changed things really was going from a general purpose cpu to a general purpose cpu with a dedicated graphics chip. See before 3d accelerators pcs sucked at doing sprite scaling and other things that consoles were specifically built to do. It's why such a big deal was made of ID's super mario port. But then the graphics accelerator came and the pc was jumping leagues above what the console hardware could do and was refreshed extremely often.

Also at that time you'd see companies like sega flirt with western 3d accelerator companies first with almost putting out a saturn with silicon graphics gpu and then with the dreamcast having a power vr gpu and the ability to run windows ce. Then microsoft came with the xbox and by the next generation of sony consoles they had gone to nvidia and thus it was extremely easy to port games between the systems.

But I still believe someone coming out with a part that performs like the big players can make great headway in the market. Esp if they were able to strike now when graphic cards are so hard to get .

 

This may have been because the since the i386, scaling bitmaps (incl. rotation) was relatively simply to do on the CPU. You tended to do this on the graphics chip when the CPU was fairly low-powered. The 1990s were an interesting time for graphics techniques with methods bouncing between graphics hardware, software on the CPU and a bit-of-both.

 

No it didnt because thats not what I said. With Microsoft the console was designed with portability in mind and PC<->Console portability and hardware unification became a standard.
If some games were being ported to multiple consoles back in the 32-64 bit days it is irrelevant.
Overall the console and PC space were more distinct and despite the fact that PC surpassed consoles during the 32 and 63bit era, nothing stopped developers releasing exclusive titles on consoles and not bothering with PC and vise versa for a lot of popular titles. The console space was still owning the gaming market.

That was a change, but an irrelevant one to the point I made. Back then there were multiple and more diverse participants in the hardware acceleration.
Even after graphics cards came along, the DC, the GC and the PS2 chose different logics and architectures and they were state of the art when they were released, each with different logic and focus.
Especially the PS2 and the GC were designed with what the platform manufacturers wanted the console to output and less about portability.
The "game" changer is nothing else than the market's effort to strive for standardization with MS leading it in the console space for it's own business purposes, which succeeded.

 

Before PS2 you had the seeds of middleware already bearing fruit in the PC space. Unreal and Quake engine games were relatively easy to port to exotic hardware once it became powerful enough, like Dreamcast and PS2. And then came Renderware. I don't know if Microsoft's action really had the impact of standardizing hardware in the console space as much as the cost of developing custom hardware becoming much more expensive (look at the consolidation in PC graphics chips compared to what we had in 1999 when PS2 launched), and custom hardware's advantages being held back by one size fits all middleware with the goal of feature parity among the platforms.

 

This is reason we now have x86 and standard PC GPU's in consoles.

It's just not practical from a cost point of view to develop your own these days.

Although as tech slows down and becomes much more expensive there might come a point where going custom is the only option to increase features and performance while being cost effective.

 

Unreal and Quake engines back then werent fully suitable for all types of games and werent fully compatible with hardware like PS2. Developers were relying more on custom engines.
The costs of R&D became more relevant, when the feature sets and the technology became more standardized. You ve got NVIDIA and AMD setting in stone the technology which was progressing constantly between every generation. You ve got engine developers like Epic developing around those GPUs their software. Then you have a platform holder like Sony that needed to spend R&D and compete with these specialized GPU companies for one next gen refresh. How could Sony ever create a GPU of their own that had to be as feature full as an NVIDIA or AMD, have full featured SDK on release plus more that would enable full and perfect portability, and not worry losing support knowing the 360 would guarantee full compatibility with any PC release and vice versa because it is essentially a customized PC? That didnt make business sense.
The Cell itself was a spectacular piece of hardware that could do amazing things in the right hands but also made things difficult for developers because it required more manual work and new kind of thinking.
The PS3 wasnt attractive to developers. And it was that time that exclusives were becoming less common on PS3.

 

Are you sure? Doesn't some insane percentage of games on PS2/XB/GC run on Renderware? Like 20-40%. There weren't engines with that sort of adoption on PS1, N64 or Saturn. And that doesn't even count the Unreal powered games.

 

Again this didn't start with Microsoft. You already had companies releasing on multiple systems and pc. Tomb Raider released on Saturn , Playstation and PC. Shadows of the empire was n64 and pc. Developers were already starting to put titles on multiple platforms , heck it happened back in the 8 bit days too and even my intellivsion will strait up play atari games that were never designed for it.

Again the dreamcast shipped with a version of windows on it , it had a pc graphics chip inside of it. It was the first console to do so and it got tons of pc ports of games like unreal and quake. They even ahd their own ISP in the states for the dreamcast.

Even now there are multiple participants in hardware acceleration . All along we have had intel , nvidia and amd but now we have apple and we had samsung and qualcom and power vr making the apple stuff. Its just spread out over my types of components.

Power vr / video logic or whatever they are called now never really stopped making graphics chips they just made them for phones and tablets. But with apple making their own stuff what market will they go with ? So I'd love to see them take another crack at pc add in boards. Like I said with a $500 video card going for $1k right now its a great time to try to jump back in

 

Wiki shows 274 games running on Renderware, so depending on the platform it can be as low as 5% (In the case of PS2's library)

 

Unreal Championship 2 is not a solid 60 fps. I think it also runs without vsync so lots of tearing. I was playing that about a month ago and reading old threads here about how it's probably very cpu limited.

I also put a lot of time into Cold Fear. A somewhat mediocre but fun RE4 style game but it has some visual issues and the multiplatform nature seems the culprit.

I think my favorite thing about the old Xbox is the Dolby Digital 5.1 output. Some games have by far their best audio work done in the Xbox version. Call of Cthulhu and Arx Fatalis are some interesting examples of that.

 

I must have played the matches/maps that didnt stress the system as much as the ones you have. It felt like a solid 60, but then again i never exploited the game so much when i re-played the game again (offline against bots). Im sure if i would blast some hours on different maps etc i would notice the same problems.
'Constant 60fps' titles where not all that common anyway for the 6th gens, not i know off atleast. ZoE2 (60fps) did see serious drops, so did Transformers 2004. MGS2 PS2 could see drops too. Maybe tekken tag/dead or alive.

 

I was just playing thru the "campaign". It is fast most of the time but it can drop severely. I just wish they had left vsync enabled because tearing really sucks. I guess triple buffered w/ vsync wasn't an option for some reason. Maybe they just didn't want to devote memory to it.

Old Xbox in this too

 

Yea its not all that solid of a 60fps at times indeed. Ive never had any framerate counter which explains alot aswell.

Still a nice looking game especially on OneX. MS's decision to have a solid BC with og xbox 2001 titles was one of the best so far. This way those titles are preserved atleast. Most xbox rom sites vaporized after Nintendo's lawsuit, aswell as most xbox's are timebombs with bad clock capacitors.

 

Cool. Too bad that list isn't complete. Doesn't have Tony Hawk's Underground 2 on it, which I'm pretty sure runs on the same engine Underground runs on (and it's on the list). Wiki also says Need for Speed Underground 2 is Renderware, but I'm pretty sure that game runs on EAGL like most of the NFS games on PS2. And ET for PS2 isn't on the list, either.

Here's a wayback link with a quote that puts some context to my 20+% claim:

This was from when EA purchased Criterion, and Lau-Kee is saying Renderware has a 20-25% market share.

Also, here's a link to some slides from 2002. It looks like a sales package for licensing out Renderware. Slide 10 shows "80 games shipped" and "300 in development". There has to be more than 274 Renderware games.

 

There are always exceptions. Plus:

Windows CE (Which was barely used for game production on the system mind you) is in support of my argument because that was one of MS's initial efforts. They even approached Sony for the PS2 and were rejected and thats one of the reasonts they made the XBOX. The DC went for Power VR since they didnt have the funds, and yet that was still a state of the art custom hardware. Power VR doesnt exist in either PC or console space.

And how these are relevant in the console and PC gaming space?

 

Apple is everywhere, apple is believed to be the end-all and their going to take over the entire world.

 

1) I think if you look from the past forward they aren't exceptions they are a continued build up to the point we are at today. Companies always want to maximize profits and for 3rd parties the easiest way is to release on as many platforms as possible. This was true in the past and is true now. The difference is that the big players are now all using the same few companies for hardware which makes it even easier to port it to everything

2) Apple has one of the largest gaming platforms in the world. Why would it not be relevant ? Companies who supplied hardware to apple would still need software teams to ensue it works and those teams can create software for any platform.

3) Sega had two boxes in the running. An american version with 3dfx and the Japanese version with power vr. Those prototypes were dural and black belt. Sega even bought 16% of 3dfx in 1997 because of this. Ultimately 3DFX sued Sega and NEC due to them doing a back-room deal and it was settled out of court with 3dFX getting 10.5m. There is speculation that EA who also invested in 3dfx at the time was not pleased and its why dreamcast got no ea support. Even before the dreamcast prototypes there were saturn 2 prototypes using Real3d chipsets.

In the mid 1990s what did Lockhead Martian , 3dfx and video logic all have in common ? They all made pc graphics boards. So right there you can see sega as early as 1995 and the Lockheed Martin talks were already starting to move to the model that Microsoft and later Sony would adopt which is to make miniature pcs.

Heck we can add nvidia in there with the NV1 which was based off the saturn and even got saturn ports if you want to go console - pc for hardware.

But lets not forget Nintendo who released the gamecube using an IBM Power PC cpu and an ATI / Art-X gpu.

In that generation of machines which is the dreamcast , gamecube , playstation 2 and xbox only the playstation 2 used its own custom hardware for both gpu and cpu. The dreamcast of course used an updated version of the SH line of chips with the sh-2 in the saturn and sh- 4 in the dreamcast.

In the next generation sony would use custom power pc chip design in cell but an nvidia gpu.

The take away is that almost over night from the release of the first 3d accelerators on the pc , the consoles jumped onto the band wagon. Which made quick ports much easier. This wasn't microsofts doing. It was technology changin. Fast forward 20+ years later and with only two major players and a tightly controlled api in Direct X the two players are making similar enough hardware that its never been easier to make ports.