Rumor Control, further Xenos capabilities to be 'unlocked' ?

[A176]

Hi guys, this story seems to making the rounds and I'm wondering if there's anything to it?

I asked him about unified shaders with the 360's gpu he says a lot of people asked him the very same question all of the days he's been at the event, but all he could say on the subject is that there will be a VERY important update going out to developers relating to the 360's videocard which developers have been asking for since launch he couldn't give a date on this.He says long story short developers have the 360 gpu, but they don't REALLY have acess it until these updates go through

From a poster on xboxyde, after visiting digital life.

While this may all be much a-do about nothing, there was a recent post by jawed that sparked my particular interest in this (of course, assuming this goes beyond the 1080p stuff and regular xdk updates).

 

[pakotlar]

Hmm sounds interesting. Keep giving us updates!

 

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

Obviously scaling is handled by the quantum anti-magnetizing ring belt inside Xenos, and this is the capability unlocked.




I'll bet on finer control as referenced in Jawed's post, more of those lovely attributes, better PIX stuff. It is indeed very possible that they're still rolling out GPU-specific features into the HLSL compiler, as it was only in August of this year that they moved out the generic old backend (which supposedly lacked support for GPU-specific functions) for a newer one focused on Xenos. In that time they also added things like partial support for constant buffers, among other things. Both that and many attributes were developer-requested features, so perhaps there's been more mail filling Microsoft's box regarding that lately.

 

[LightHeaven]

I think he's probably talking about features we already know like automatic tiling (something llike caling a function doTiling() and all the magic happens), memexport, the hardware tessalator in xenos, cache-locking, cpu slaving... Maybe they are going to give more control in the hands of the developer to manage their resources on Gpu (I remember jawed saying that right now its much you can see but you can't touch)...

I mean those are all features we know that are in the box but i dont think anyone is even touching them yet, let alone squeezing something nice from it

Another guess of mine would be a new api version with some similarities with Dx10 (just on an Api level, so porting Pc <-> 360 could be easier)

 

[Platon]

The developer tools are always being refined and there are many things that will be getting better and better, I don't know about "unlocking" stuff though, but sure, for example tiling wasn't even really possible in the early dev kits because they lacked the software for it, so no doubt some functionality might still be restricted, but on the other hand I don't think there is some ubersuper power in there that are just waiting to be unlocked and the chip will then be like 10x better...

 

[Arwin]

Probably there are some functions left that haven't been supported by the SDK.

 

[Guden Oden]

The topic is pure hyperbole, was it the register or something that first posted about this?

It's the devkit that's getting an upgrade. Nothing NEW or SECRET is going to be 'unlocked' in the 360 after almost a year on the market already, that's just dumb.

 

[groper]

Hi guys, this story seems to making the rounds and I'm wondering if there's anything to it?

but all he could say on the subject is that there will be a VERY important update going out to developers relating to the 360's videocard which developers have been asking for since launch he couldn't give a date on this

Not really surprised. This GPU has the name "Xenos" for a reason

 

[22psi]

2160p confirmed!