Xbox 2 coming in Nov-Dec 2005 - Revolution could be stronger

[London Geezer]

But does she look as good and shiny? I guess she is bumpmapped, but texturing is not so good

Well, the texturing is kinda gritty, rough around the edges, not so shiny anymore. And the bumps... victims of gravity... And the hair doesn't move like it used to...

 

[Jov]

But does she look as good and shiny? I guess she is bumpmapped, but texturing is not so good

Why's that? I'd have thought she'll be the highest res texture u're ever see!

 

[Qroach]

eeewww...

 

[Jov]

I tried to get someone to list a benchmark game for the Xbox, but responses were not that impressive.

I take it that Ninja Gaiden is such a title?

60fps, prog scan, impressive poly counts, beautiful textures, large levels, many characters on screen at once, particle effects, level streaming, etc?

How much better looking is NG compared to say Splinter Cell 2, DOA Volleyball or Panzer Dragon?

Is Chronicles of Riddick another title that really shows off the Xbox?

I'm still waiting for my copy to arrive, thus no comment. Meanwhile have a read of teamxbox's interview with Tomonobu Itagaki late last year. Not a lot of tech info.

Also check out the movie.

 

[GwymWeepa]

I've seen a large swath of games from each platform, though some ps2 games can compete with anything on the other two machines, most fall short from my experience.

You stated:

The ps2 had 16 pixel pipelines, only now is that being matched by videocards, its video memory badwidth was over 40GB/s, which has yet to be matched...but what does that give you? Sub-gamecube looking graphics...I don't know wtf they did with the thing internally, on paper ps2 was going to be a monster lol.

Obviously, you were questioning what the impressive achievements of the PS2 architecture (16 pixel pipelines, bandwidth etc) accounted for and I named you exactly that. The point is entirely that there are games that are very impressive and technically unmatched because they target those specific advantages of its hardware. Of course that doesn't exclude the possibility that all games are coded as efficiently with the same amount of effort, nor should we ignore that the most popular console usually also feature the most low quality software. Compare big name games though and you'll see that those games end up being at the higher end.

Well it was meant to be a rhetorical question LOL. The big name games have the best art-design on the ps2, they really fudge things, now I'll have to hold judgement on the newest ps2 games, since they are supposed to be much improved over the mid-generation stuff, but over-all its taken a long time to finally compete with the GC and Xbox on a regular basis IMO.

 

[wazoo]

I have'nt bothered to read all the posts but has anyone brought up RE4 on GCN? Good gracious a mighty other (3rd party) devs need thier asses kicked if Capcom can put out final product that looks and runs as good as what was at E3. No excuses. Only Half Life 2 looks better from what my eyes have seen. As good as Halo 2's bump mapping is and even taking into account Metroid Prime 2's upgraded smooth ass graphics (which look glorious btw). RE4 is just tops imo. Like I said, other devs need an ass kicking if Capcom gets RE4 near 30fps with graphics like that. Lil ole Cube that could.

The only real problem with the GC is that it gets the least efforts and investment in multi platform games. GC versions always come later, have less features and IMO do benefit from less developpment budget. It is like every 3rd party already think they can not sell software on the GC or whatever they do, GC buyes will not care.

 

[archie4oz]

the PowerPC core features a 4-stage basic integer pipeline which is mostly responsible for the very low clock speeds the core is able to achieve. Most important for gaming performance however are more precise floating point calculations and the Gekko's floating point pipeline is 7 stages long.

Gotta love anandtech... Gee the 4 stage pipeline being mostly responsible for the low clockspeed? :? I guess that's the same pipeline that keeps the FX at 900MHz and the GX at 1.1GHz And since when did Gekko's FPU grow 4 additional stages?

I haven't seen ZOE 2, I've been wanting to though. But anyhoo, PS2 from what I've seen wouldn't be able to handle Ninja Gaiden, but some games really take art design and fudge nearly as impressive graphics, like the Jak series.

Actually I didn't find Ninja Gaiden all that visually impressive myself (although I loved the frustratingly challenging gameplay)... There wasn't a "whole lot" that struck me as not doable on the PS2...

 

[Fafalada]

Rygar on PS2 is the closest to NG you'll ever get. Both are by Tecmo.

Rygar plays like a bad version of PS2s Castlevania - I hope you're not suggesting NG gameplay is in the same league. (I haven't played NG, but I always got the impression it was actually fun).

but some games really take art design and fudge nearly as impressive graphics, like the Jak series.

Opinions differ - Jak always looked all tech and not much design to me. I did prefer design of the first one though.

 

[GwymWeepa]

the PowerPC core features a 4-stage basic integer pipeline which is mostly responsible for the very low clock speeds the core is able to achieve. Most important for gaming performance however are more precise floating point calculations and the Gekko's floating point pipeline is 7 stages long.

Gotta love anandtech... Gee the 4 stage pipeline being mostly responsible for the low clockspeed? :? I guess that's the same pipeline that keeps the FX at 900MHz and the GX at 1.1GHz And since when did Gekko's FPU grow 4 additional stages?

I haven't seen ZOE 2, I've been wanting to though. But anyhoo, PS2 from what I've seen wouldn't be able to handle Ninja Gaiden, but some games really take art design and fudge nearly as impressive graphics, like the Jak series.

Actually I didn't find Ninja Gaiden all that visually impressive myself (although I loved the frustratingly challenging gameplay)... There wasn't a "whole lot" that struck me as not doable on the PS2...

Ninja Gaiden would look pretty terrible on the ps2 next to its Xbox cousin IMO, if a real good studio ported it and were efficient in using ps2's resources it would look good for a ps2 game, but I think the effects the Xbox can churn out really make the difference, but opinions vary.

 

[GwymWeepa]

Rygar on PS2 is the closest to NG you'll ever get. Both are by Tecmo.

Rygar plays like a bad version of PS2s Castlevania - I hope you're not suggesting NG gameplay is in the same league. (I haven't played NG, but I always got the impression it was actually fun).

but some games really take art design and fudge nearly as impressive graphics, like the Jak series.

Opinions differ - Jak always looked all tech and not much design to me. I did prefer design of the first one though.

Well, the engine is superb, and I'm not fond of the art design, but considering the look they were going for, everything was modeled beautifully. I remember playing the first game, and there's this area full of these large bones, they weren't perfectly curved, but the way they were designed, you almost fooled yourself into believing they were...there were also enemies on the water in the level, they were flying around in sort of balloons right near the surface, with these metal spiked balls hanging down...everything was modeled to perfection.

 

[ninelven]

Gotta love anandtech... Gee the 4 stage pipeline being mostly responsible for the low clockspeed?

What he is saying is that by having only 4 stages the core can be clocked very low (saving power/heat) and still get great performance. Similar to the Athlon 64 vs. Pentium 4.

 

[Fafalada]

I remember playing the first game, and there's this area full of these large bones, they weren't perfectly curved, but the way they were designed, you almost fooled yourself into believing they were...

Well thing is, fast polygon drawing was the primary highlight of Jak's tech (particularly the first one) - so it's not like the game lacks the poly detail and design would have to work around it - rather the opposite.
I agree though, the better the tech is used by designers, the better the result.

What he is saying is that by having only 4 stages the core can be clocked very low (saving power/heat) and still get great performance. Similar to the Athlon 64 vs. Pentium 4.

So what you're saying is that when they write crap like this:

...so theoretically Gekko could be more than enough for the GameCube but we have a feeling it's not.

Instead of being a processing powerhouse, Gekko was actually chosen for its physical characteristics.

However from all of that data that we have seen comparing the PowerPC 750 to even the desktop Intel Celeron processor, it does not seem that the Gekko can compete, performance-wise.

...what they REALLY mean is that Gekko is a high powered CPU? :?

That paragraph Archie quote is pretty explicitly stating that 750cx cores don't clock high, and the main culprit for it is short pipeline.

Now maybe you were refering to this one sentence...

The benefit of a shorter pipeline is of course, an increased number of instructions that can be processed in those limited number of clocks

But it's not like this is actually more correct then the rest of jumbled stuff in that article.

 

[Squeak]

I remember playing the first game, and there's this area full of these large bones, they weren't perfectly curved, but the way they were designed, you almost fooled yourself into believing they were...there were also enemies on the water in the level, they were flying around in sort of balloons right near the surface, with these metal spiked balls hanging down...everything was modeled to perfection.

Morphing LOD, that's the secret! Or at least part of it.
If you look carefully at some of those polydense objects when they are far away, you can see how they are really made of much coarser meshes than when up close. If you slowly walk closer you can see how the mesh seamlessly warps from low-poly to high-poly.

 

[ninelven]

So what you're saying is that when they write crap like this:

No, I meant exactly what I said, though perhaps I need to clarify.
...and still get great performance (for its clockspeed). I assumed this implication was clear, and you actually quoted AnandTech with regard to my point:

The benefit of a shorter pipeline is of course, an increased number of instructions that can be processed in those limited number of clocks

Given the nature of the other quotes, it seems the author wasn't a fan of the architecture. However, I was not addressing this. I was addressing what I believed to be a misinterpretation as to the author's meaning with regard to this particular quote:

the PowerPC core features a 4-stage basic integer pipeline which is mostly responsible for the very low clock speeds the core is able to achieve. Most important for gaming performance however are more precise floating point calculations and the Gekko's floating point pipeline is 7 stages long.

Gotta love anandtech... Gee the 4 stage pipeline being mostly responsible for the low clockspeed?

I generally interpret achieve as being positive in context; however, archie4oz seemed to regard this statement as a criticism (on the four stage pipeline and low clockspeed), which I don't believe it is in this instance. I wasn't trying to and won't speculate on how AnandTech feels about Gekko or the validity of their statements.

 

[GwymWeepa]

I remember playing the first game, and there's this area full of these large bones, they weren't perfectly curved, but the way they were designed, you almost fooled yourself into believing they were...there were also enemies on the water in the level, they were flying around in sort of balloons right near the surface, with these metal spiked balls hanging down...everything was modeled to perfection.

Morphing LOD, that's the secret! Or at least part of it.
If you look carefully at some of those polydense objects when they are far away, you can see how they are really made of much coarser meshes than when up close. If you slowly walk closer you can see how the mesh seamlessly warps from low-poly to high-poly.

Well that's lovely tech...but the way the designed what they had was also impressive, everything seemed to be given proper attention. I remember playing a bit of morrowind on the PC, very nice looking game, came to Xbox, everything was pretty beautiful...except the characters, they were not designed well in the least, which of course affected asthetics...why not allocate some more polygons to those darn character models...impressive engine, crappy modeling heh.

 

[Fox5]

NES was the most powerful console at the time of its release...sure beat atari at least.

SNES was the most powerful console of its gen, not including add ons for other systems. It always had the best versions of a game, and it graphics were sharper, more detailed, and had more effects than the genesis or neogeo. Better looking 3d games too.

N64 was the most powerful console of its gen, it doesn't matter if psx could push more polys(which I'm not quite sure is true) you couldn't see most of them anyhow because the screen was extremely pixelated and low res.(I can't stand to play most low res n64 games too, mario 64 being one of the few exceptions) I hated playing psx on svideo, pixel popping and disappearing polygons all over the place.
As for framerates, I'll agree that psx tended to have more consistent framerates, but it was doing less, and I rarely recall any framerate problems when using software rendering back in the day(only in rare occasions, like in halflife's intro when everything goes to hell, and in quake when grenades explode, and that was on a 486 that I was using while my main pc was down anyhow), only with 3d acceleration have framerate fluctuations really seemed to pop up. Both systems had few 60 fps games, though psx did have more.
Conker's Bad Fur Day, imo, is one game that basically shows the full potential of the n64, high quality textures, sound, polygon counts, decent framerate, special effects, and all without the use of the expansion pack. Hi res n64 games were great....too bad there weren't very many of them, but super mario 64(not high res, but it had a simple clean look and a good framerate), perfect dark, conker's bad fur day, and maybe a few others are about the only games from last gen I can still stand playing on their home systems.(amazing how conker managed to do basically everything better than any other n64 game, and it had hi res, yet didn't use the 4 meg expansion)

If you tried to argue ds is more powerful than n64, maybe I'd give you that, its polygon rate totally eclipses the n64's, and it seems pretty good at texturing too. However, the psx's lead in polys, which at most may have been twice the amount, is too small to give the psx the lead in graphical quality.(though in many games, cds did make the difference, as did a smarter memory allocation) I just couldn't stand the psx's sliding textures and blurry pixelated graphics though. I remember in metal gear solid: vr missions, they had a high poly virtual mei ling to gawk at, but her hips and various other body parts would wave around and flicker in and out of existence! It was more nauseating than cute.

Gamecube would have been the most powerful without xbox...and it did launch in Japan before xbox launched anywhere, so it was the most powerful for a little while. Though in my opinion, nintendo crippled the gamecube by not giving it more video ram. If gamecube had say 16MB video ram, 24MB system ram, and that was it, I'd say it'd compare a lot better to xbox.

As for the handhelds....
Gameboy was the most powerful handheld, as it was the only handheld.
If gameboy color came out before neo geo pocket color, then it was the most powerful handheld at the time.(minus consoles turned into handhelds)
Gameboy advance was the most powerful handheld, and it may still be depending on how you look at it.....I haven't seen anything on gp32 that looks better than what gba can do, and gba beats the ngage in 2d graphics...plus niether of those are really competitors to gba.
DS will be the most powerful handheld period if it comes out before psp, and it may even be more powerful than the best pdas at the time.

I bet perfect dark 0/2 will be a launch game.

Oh, if we go by the logic that psx and genesis are more powerful than n64 and snes because their games ran smoother/had higher framerates(which was usually only true for exclusives compared to exclusives, not ports to ports), than gamecube is more powerful than xbox, there are more games that seem to be a consistent 30 fps on it, or 60 fps, than there are on xbox. Even xbox's star series, halo, can't maintain 30 fps in either game.

Nintendo doesn't make any great leaps in technology, but they are at where an industry leader should be when they launch a system. Gamecube is their only system that's launched at about the same time as another system, and its weakness could be explained by it being $100 cheaper and nintendo probably wasn't taking $200 in loses on it. Nintendo systems usually win on hardwired features though, and not raw power. Well, nes was raw power at the time, but snes did not have raw power, it had good features(not sure how to explain why its 3d games looked better than those on other systems though, maybe the fx chip was better?) and a sound chip and other chips to off load work, n64 was sort of raw power(most powerful cpu, may have been the most powerful graphics if you turned off all the effects, or were they hardwired?), gameboy advance wasn't raw power(has a graphics chip), and gamecube...well cpu may have the most raw power, but its graphics chip is easily the weakest, though backed with fast memory and hardwired effects.(wasn't it like 1 free light per texture layer?)

I kind of want to see gamecube 2 be an extension of gamecube's current graphics chip(just faster, more memory, and easier to use pixel shaders) just to see what gamecube could have done if nintendo had designed it better. On the other hand, I also want a console that can compete next gen graphically, so scrap the gamecube 2 idea.

NES, SNES, and N64 did have several years over the consoles they were more powerful than though.(well, I think there was an atari release around the time of the nes that sucked) Dreamcast did crush the n64 and only released 2-3 years later in Japan, but it was privy to a revolution the n64 had really caught hold of(the 3d revolution, n64 had 3d acceleration, that's about all you can say about it), plus I think if n64 was prefectly designed(no limitations anywhere, 64MB of system ram, a larger texture cache, fast cd rom drive, much faster ram, and just an overall better designed system only keeping the cpu and graphics chip the same could have competed with some of the dreamcast's earlier games, according to a nintendo press release I found online once, the n64 with a good microcode was capable of about 1.2 million polys per second, but with the crappy one the system launched with it could only do about 200,000)

Edit:
Anyone know why nintendo went for edram over just video ram like on a video card for gamecube? Isn't edram really expensive? Couldn't they have gottten more video ram at around the same speed if they went with external ddr, and if not, even the 6.4GB xbox had would have been more than enough for gamecube, something with voodoo5 level raw power doesn't need geforce 4 level bandwidth.

 

[Fox5]

I have'nt bothered to read all the posts but has anyone brought up RE4 on GCN? Good gracious a mighty other (3rd party) devs need thier asses kicked if Capcom can put out final product that looks and runs as good as what was at E3. No excuses. Only Half Life 2 looks better from what my eyes have seen. As good as Halo 2's bump mapping is and even taking into account Metroid Prime 2's upgraded smooth ass graphics (which look glorious btw). RE4 is just tops imo. Like I said, other devs need an ass kicking if Capcom gets RE4 near 30fps with graphics like that. Lil ole Cube that could.

Resident Evil 4 has a good polygon amount and nice effects, lighting, etc, but I don't like the color pallete, and, like many gamecube games that try to push it, filtering has suffered. Those types of games look great from a distance, or on a normal tv, but I play my games on a pc monitor only 2-3 feet away usually, and the blurryness annoys me. I wish the gamecube didn't have a distinctive graphical look I could recognize it by, please gamecube, go back to the pc style well filtered graphics of ssbm(and make all games at 60 fps), I don't care if polygon counts suffer.(I'm guessing filtering suffers due to the gamecube's lack of ram?)

 

[Goldni]

You see Fox I've become a little more keen at telling what console a game screen ( or vid) is being played on. Most PS2 games definetly have a similar look. Washed out textures. Low color palette. Noticable aliasing with stuttering framerates. Xbox better texture clarity and better draw distances but I'll be damned if the XB 'blur' line isnt too close in many games. This has been especially appearent in multiplatform titles that I've played on GCN vs XB. It appears to be pushed out a little bit further on the same GCN title. Lastly the GCN suffers from inconsistancy. It's a mix of what bothers the PS2 and XB..as well as poor textures. It's problems are mainly brought on from what someone else said. An old port of a PS2 build that 3 or 4 progammers coded over.

I think Capcom (with RE4) has raised the bar. I mean when you've got guys from the HL2 team stating RE4 really surprised them that's what I'm talking about.

 

[Jov]

I think Capcom (with RE4) has raised the bar. I mean when you've got guys from the HL2 team stating RE4 really surprised them that's what I'm talking about.

Can you please provide a link? I'd like to have a read on their comments.

 

[Megadrive1988]

SNES was the most powerful console of its gen, not including add ons for other systems.

NeoGeo was 2-5 times more powerful than SNES. in colors, sprites, effects, CPU speed. etc. NeoGeo even came out before the Super Famicom in Japan and SNES in the U.S.

the n64 with a good microcode was capable of about 1.2 million polys per second, but with the crappy one the system launched with it could only do about 200,000)

you can't possibly mean with textures, gourad shading, AA, filtering, mip-mapping or other features switched on. that has to be flat shaded or raw vertices/sec. because with everything turned on, N64 could only manage about 160,000 polygons/sec. otherwise, you are blowing N64 capabilities upto Model 3 levels with your comment on 1.2 million polys/sec.