What are the chinks in XB360's armour?

[Acert93]

The wireless lan connector hooks up to usb. They can simply upgrade the wireless hook up or as has been done this generation linksys has wireless lan connectors for the x360 . I don't see the big deal.

I honestly do not see the 10/100 Ethernet port an issue. It wont be fast enough for 720p uncompressed video (~26MB/s), it should be enough to stream compressed formats (which are a little under 30mb/s it seems).

As for the wireless addon... I believe USB 2.0 High Speed is rated at 480mb/s (if memory serves correctly). But the problem with a wireless addon is the nickle-and-dime issue (especially if your competitors are all offering it out of the box) and that wireless is usually less than ideal for gaming. Workable--definately. But with latency already a big issue in fast online games (like Halo 2) adding another 5-10ms in ping just sucks!

Again, I really do not see it as a big issue. BUT we are looking for all possible holes to poke Sometimes you cannot see them unless you prod some. And who knows, maybe Sony has a good idea that requires 3 Gbit ports...

 

[jvd]

As for the wireless addon... I believe USB 2.0 High Speed is rated at 480mb/s (if memory serves correctly). But the problem with a wireless addon is the nickle-and-dime issue (especially if your competitors are all offering it out of the box) and that wireless is usually less than ideal for gaming. Workable--definately. But with latency already a big issue in fast online games (like Halo 2) adding another 5-10ms in ping just sucks!

For some people buying a 30$ would most likely cost less in time and money than buying the wiring and running it to another floor and across a house (my case ) So it really has to do with the person and what the requirements are .

We just upgraded to that new linksys router that has the high speed and we started upgrading to the new wifi adapters on the pcs and out pings dropped 20ms . From the 70s down to the 50s . If in another year they come out with a faster version i like that i can buy one (on either system) and upgrade. To me its not nickle and diming esp if the system a is cheaper than system b by more than the amount of other things i have to buy .

 

[aaaaa00]

If x360 has analog outputs like original xb - and everything points to this being the case at the moment - nothing can be done to change the fact the machine doesn't support HDMI/DVI. If it doesn't have digital output, then it can't support these output options. You could jury-rig it with an additional ADC and DVI transmitter logic, but that's not the same thing as supporting it.

I really don't see why it would be so hard to design the AV output chip to have a mode where it just shoves bits out the port, and put the TDMS transmitter hardware in the output pack, and just bypass the TV encoder entirely.

After all, we already know the xbox 360 graphics chip itself doesn't have the output hardware, it just dumps to another device of Microsoft's choosing, which actually does the TV encoding.

Not that I actually know what they're doing, but it'd seem to be a logical thing to do. Why make everyone pay for a TDMS transmitter that only a few people are actually going to use?

 

[Arty]

Chap will tell you how anal retentive i am . This is jvd btw .

Why are you insulting yourself. :?

Its not an insult . Its the way I am . This is your last post untill you shape up.

 

[Acert93]

To me its not nickle and diming

But it is nickle-and-diming if MS is the only product this generation that does not include it out of the box. Which it is.

esp if the system a is cheaper than system b by more than the amount of other things i have to buy .

Two assumptions:

1. That the competing systems will be more expensive. Rev almost surely wont, and PS3 may be the same. Consider the PS2 launch when everyone fretted how would Sony ever get the beast to be affordable, when in fact in the first year they began to break even. So it may not be as bad as we think, especially if Xbox 360 ends up at $360.

2. I have heard that wireless chips will be $1 in quanitity starting 2006. this dovetails nicely with the fact Rev is using Wireless as standard (i.e. Nintendo would not probably use a heavily expensive chip based on their tract record). So the cost of wireless is not a huge factor in the cost of the system.

Like I originally noted I think MS made the right choice. Most people wont use wireless IMO. You need a router (extra $) on top if it all. For cases like yours where you need one it is nice to have the option. But with an online centric device, like Xbox 360, getting more people to hardwire (and thus better latency) by making the wireless feature extra is a better decision IMO. But market perception is another issue... and I wonder how people will feel knowing everyone else has wireless for free. If you are plopping down $300 for a console, another $20-$30 is money not spent on games.

MS has been very open about the fact they are accessorizing the Xbox 360 and opening new revenue models to offset costs. This is part of the motivation behind face plates, and definately the motivation behind micro transactions. Similarly their online service requires payment for online play 7 days a week, while Sony and Nintendo are offering it for free. As a consumer, I am not too fond of paying extra when I do not need to. e.g. I do not play MMOs for that very reason.

As an online gamer, if I have to pay $50-$100 a year for Live, that is $250-$500 in 5 years. If Sony will give me online for free, 7 days a week, then guess what? That may be a very convincing arguement to go with Sony. I know you have the cash for a lot of consoles and TVs and such, but I don't. So those nickle-and-dime charges (like paying extra to use a wireless LAN) add up.

 

[wco81]

About wireless access, I'm running a 25-foot Cat-5 to my console. It's not too bad as I can keep it out of the way of areas where people walk.

But you hear about other people having problems getting connectivity in a bedroom or the living room since the PC and cable or DSL modem are in a den or a study.

MS wants over 50% of X360 owners to be on XBL. So it will affect a lot of people who can't or won't run Cat-5 to the console. Some people want to hide the cables in the baseboards and find out that contractors want some ridiculous sum to hide it in the moulding.

So maybe MS is counting on incremental revenues from selling x number of wireless adapters. Add that to XBL subscriptions and microtransactions.

Or a certain number of people will say screw it, they won't go online, it's too much of a hassle or they'd rather spend the money it would take to buy the wireless adapter or XBL subscription for more games or movies or other expenditures not related to gaming.

 

[jvd]

But it is nickle-and-diming if MS is the only product this generation that does not include it out of the box. Which it is.

Depends on the situation . Like i said . If the standards ps3 has on it aren't what i need then it does me no good . I would have to upgrade on either of them . So depending on the situation of the individual it may or may not be nickel and diming .

Rev almost surely wont

Except that wil not be hd quality , so its not really fair to compare . As ms may be nickel and diming you on wifi capabilitys but it has hd quality games that the rev will never have .

Consider the PS2 launch when everyone fretted how would Sony ever get the beast to be affordable, when in fact in the first year they began to break even

except it cost a 100$ (or was it 150$ at the point ) more than the dreamcast .

But market perception is another issue... and I wonder how people will feel knowing everyone else has wireless for free. If you are plopping down $300 for a console, another $20-$30 is money not spent on games.

Your right . However some people wont mind a 30$ device vs having to buy a hardrive.

Not only that but some people like my father would rather have the same components across the network . My father doesn't want anything but linksys on his network. Which means when linksys comes out with a wifi connector for the x360 that is what we will have . And also at some point we will want the newest standard in which case i would have to buy one for each of my familys 3 next gen consoles

If Sony will give me online for free, 7 days a week, then guess what?

Perhaps . But we know nothing of its plans . It may be like saying hey netzero dial up is only 10$ a month , why would i spend 30$ for dsl .

If live is feature rich , has tons of features and is easy to use and easy to hook up to my windows xp box , that 50$ a year is nothing to me . that would be 4$ a month. Which is one game rental at block buster or a third of a month of gamefly rentals . Which sony may or may not make up in other areas by nickle and diming us . For example if the ps3 does carry a price preimum i may be able to get the x360 with live for a year for under the price of the ps3 , it may not seem like nickel and dimeing

 

[Sis]

If Sony will give me online for free, 7 days a week, then guess what? That may be a very convincing arguement to go with Sony.

This is a big "if" though, since Sony has said they plan to offer a competitor to Xbox Live. It would seem to me that the cost of doing this would need to either be accounted for up front (as in a subscription), in the price of the console (already a money loser), or added to the cost of all video games. (Or potentially through some other unique mechanism, such as advertisements.)

I would not be shocked if they made the service free, but the cost of running it is accounted for somewhere.

.Sis

 

[ralexand]

If their numbers are correct, MS is claiming 500 million polys per sec. which mean the xenos will only be able to render 8 million polys per frame at 60fps? That doesn't seem like alot. What are the frame poly counts of a high poly game like Half-life2 or Farcry?

 

[Rockster]

I would venture a guess that a game would be doing well to have 100 to 200 thousand.

 

[Acert93]

If their numbers are correct, MS is claiming 500 million polys per sec. which mean the xenos will only be able to render 8 million polys per frame at 60fps? That doesn't seem like alot. What are the frame poly counts of a high poly game like Half-life2 or Farcry?

Well, 8M triangles per frame (@ 60fps) is a lot when you consider 480p (640x480) has ~300k pixels. That is ~26 triangles per pixel.

720p (1280x720) is ~900k triangles per frame which is ~8.5 triangles per pixel.

Obviously 500M is peak, but it is unlike past claims (which are usually degrees of mangitude greater than real life in-game performance). Xbox 360 is setup limited and the 500k number is said to be with non-trivial shaders. I believe ERP has said that some games, if using Xbox1 level shaders, may get close to the limit.

I also believe Dave mentioned that the Xbox 360's tesselation unit can output 250M triangles/s. Still very impressive.

All of this is theoretical. We will need to wait for realworld performance to see how it all works out. Two things: Triangles take up a bit of memory (and thus bandwidth). Also, a lot of triangles may be smaller than a pixel, so just having more triangle thoroughput than pixels does not mean we will never see a polygon every again.

I am not sure about FarCry (it seems to have some geometry instancing on some cards for the lush vegitation), but Hal-Life 2 is fairly low polygon (relatively). But that is a design decision. Doom 3 is also relatively low polygon also, at least on the characters and that is a design decision as well (due to the choice of the stencil shadows... I believe D3 uses the CPU a bit for helping with shadowing... interestingly Xenos has pretty good stencil performance it seems).

I do not play enough games to know what PC games do have a large poly count. From what I have heard top end GPUs frequently underutlize their VS in general which would indicate to me that most PC games are not moving a ton of polygons around.

 

[ralexand]

Thanks, Acert. That puts things in perpective.

 

[Rockster]

At 32bytes/triangle (assuming mesh + basic attributes) 500million polys/sec would require 16GB/sec of bandwidth. The setup limit makes sense because its pretty much non-blocking before tesselation because of bandwidth restrictions. You could hit that without tesselation by using a combination of fetches from main memory plus a cpu push buffer. But like the rest of the Xenon design, it's a well balanced, practical limit.

 

[passby]

Ya I don't understand the argument for 1080p.

Not for games, but HD media. For the rich videophiles who have a 40'-50' display. From the bits I can pick up from videophile forums, 1080p does not make much difference on smaller displays, but makes a difference with the large displays - quite logical and understandable.

 

[pc999]

But market perception is another issue... and I wonder how people will feel knowing everyone else has wireless for free. If you are plopping down $300 for a console, another $20-$30 is money not spent on games.

Your right . However some people wont mind a 30$ device vs having to buy a hardrive.

To add one more thing, this way it is worst for PS3, because without the HDD, tou need to buy a memory card (at the same if you want to play the game), and not only one but a lot of them, in that point smart people do the maths and think what cost more.

If Sony will give me online for free, 7 days a week, then guess what?

Perhaps . But we know nothing of its plans . It may be like saying hey netzero dial up is only 10$ a month , why would i spend 30$ for dsl.

If live is feature rich , has tons of features and is easy to use and easy to hook up to my windows xp box , that 50$ a year is nothing to me . that would be 4$ a month. Which is one game rental at block buster or a third of a month of gamefly rentals . Which sony may or may not make up in other areas by nickle and diming us . For example if the ps3 does carry a price preimum i may be able to get the x360 with live for a year for under the price of the ps3 , it may not seem like nickel and dimeing

That is a big IF.

But I hope they do that (like Rev ), at least to drive a price war, but we must consider, that we dont know the price that they will put it at 5$ a year, I doubt that people would prefer Sony, but they would win (or not lost) up to 10M year, at the very least (suposing the same 2M of live users), and that is if they keep the same numbersthan this gen.

 

[wco81]

$25 only got you an 8 MB Memory Card for the PS2.

Now $25 will get you at least a 32 MB Memory Stick Duo at retail, probably 64 MB or 128 MB by mail order.

Probably bigger capacities if you just get Memory Stick for the same money.

And even bigger capacities if you get SD or Compact Flash, assuming you can do game saves to cards other than Memory Stick with Magic Gate DRM.

The point is, unless game save file sizes are out of control, you will likely not need more than one memory card. And there's a good chance you can use a portion of the memory card you're using for your camera or phone.

 

[scooby_dooby]

The point is people hate buying memory cards when they don't have to.

Also, no one wants tp share memory cards between devices, that would just be a PITA.

One of the coolest things about the XBOX was that you got the equivalent of 1000 PS2 memory cards for free.

That's $40-80 extra dollars to spend on an extra controller, game, cabling, hubs, wireless adapter, especially now that you don't need to spend it on a $50 DVD dongle

i think it's one of the biggest selling points by far.
edit: CAD prices 8)

 

[Magnum PI]

One of the coolest things about the XBOX was that you got the equivalent of 1000 PS2 memory cards for free.

nothing is free, without the HD the xbox would have been cheaper..
i don't think so many people spends 80 € in memory cards btw.

 

[ralexand]

One of the coolest things about the XBOX was that you got the equivalent of 1000 PS2 memory cards for free.

nothing is free, without the HD the xbox would have been cheaper..
i don't think so many people spends 80 € in memory cards btw.

It''s free in comparison to what you got with the ps2.

 

[pc999]

The first may not be free but the others 999 are.