xbox 360 specs (unofficial, but believable)

[Iron Tiger]

Well I see where you're coming from - but I've got a 160GB hard drive so I guess it's just a different angle. To me, the cost differential between a 20GB and a 40GB hard drive is small enough, even in the 2.5" space, that they could have gone with the 40. My honest guess is for anti-piracy reasons, as it will be large enough for it's intended caching and MP3 stuff, but too small for dedicated pirates to use.

I guess I was just looking to see if there was something else I was missing though that might explain 20GB vs any other gig amount.

The X360's hard drive isn't a laptop sized 2.5" drive, but one of the smaller ones (forgot the size) that goes into ultraportable products like the iPod. They have a higher cost premium than 2.5" laptop drives.

I wouldn't have thought 40 Gb would cut it for TV use. I'd have thought a media function like that would see a big HD, especially if the pictures are HD. As room for downloadable content a big HD would be essential thought, especially if you can't transfer that content onto other platforms (like some DRM'd content at the mo')

My DirecTivo has a 40GB drive and manages ~35 hours of MPEG2. WMV would need less space for the same amount of video. I don't believe the 2 entry level Xboxes will have any DVR functionality, but if they did, I wouldn't bet on it being HD. HD DVRs cost many times more than SD ones.

As a question, how many here who play online games play on the weekend, and how many play weekday evenings? Just to see how much people would be affected by weekend-only gaming and if the silver option would be enough for most people.

It would be perfect for me. I don't do much gaming during the week, anyway, and I cancelled my Live subscription because I didn't want to continue paying for a service I hardly got any use out of.

 

[V3]

Like everyone else in the world I was hoping for more speed on the GPU and a PPU to help match the PS3 we all want more. In the end it won't matter for me I'll pick up my Xbox360 launch day. Lets be honest only a complete xbox fan would expect the xbox 360 to match specs with the PS3. Sony is willing to spend and loose so much per console that even microsoft is unwilling to match. The most powerfull console has not won a generation that I can remember. I don't even think that even people at MS were hoping to win this generation any way. I am sure they are just looking to make some money and chip away at the giant sony.

I agree.. i'm actually disappointed if these`specs are real...

I would say I am disapointed just like I am disapointed with every system spec. I always want more I guess I am greedy. Now I just have to invest in a decent HD tv to get the most out of my Xbox 360. Lets be honest the 360 specs could be double what they are and sony would still beat them because they don't flinch at loosing money. Sony spends billions on R&D and Fabs and is willing to loose hundreds per console for the first years. There is not another company willing to risk so much money. If the 360 can be 75% of the PS3 I think MS did a did a hell of a job.

Well if this spec turn out to be true, at least Xbox 360 will have 512 MB of memory. While PS3 is still expected to be 256 MB currently due to Cell and XDR memory chip capacity.

 

[Carl B]

The X360's hard drive isn't a laptop sized 2.5" drive, but one of the smaller ones (forgot the size) that goes into ultraportable products like the iPod. They have a higher cost premium than 2.5" laptop drives.

Do you have a link to where you saw/read that? I was under the impression 2.5" was how they were going, but there's been such a flood of rumor and speculation lately, I could easily have missed that. It would definitely explain the 40 gig to 20 gig transition, but even then though, it seems like it would be more than Microsoft would want to spend. With the fact that it won't be the 360 itself performing any Tivo functions, I just think it's in MS' best interests to scale the size down if possible.

 

[corysama]

Like everyone else in the world I was hoping for more speed on the GPU and a PPU to help match the PS3 we all want more. In the end it won't matter for me I'll pick up my Xbox360 launch day. Lets be honest only a complete xbox fan would expect the xbox 360 to match specs with the PS3. Sony is willing to spend and loose so much per console that even microsoft is unwilling to match. The most powerfull console has not won a generation that I can remember. I don't even think that even people at MS were hoping to win this generation any way. I am sure they are just looking to make some money and chip away at the giant sony.

I agree.. i'm actually disappointed if these`specs are real...

You are disappointed by the prospect of 9GHz machine with a better-than-top-of-the-line video card for $300? Are you really going to give MS are hard time because they didn't invest enough in time travel to pull technology out of the labs of next year (when the PS3 ships) and hand it to you on a silver platter?

Anyone with a passing familiarity with technology would expect a console that comes out at a much later date for approximately the same price will certainly be more advanced than the one that launches earlier. If the PS3 was launching at the same time for the same price as the 360 then MS would deserve some criticism, but that is not the case.

When the 360 comes out for Christmas, it will be as good as the technology of Earth circa late 2005 can deliver for $300. MS has paid a lot of people who are a lot smarter than any of us a lot more money than any of us will ever see to figure out what is the optimum balance of hardware and cost. If they left anything out that you want to complain about it was for a better reason than your complaints. A billion dollars is a lot of motivation to get things right.

BTW:Every time someone says they expect a Physics Processing Unit in the next consoles I get a headache. One company announces that they are planning to try to eventually build a new hardware market from scratch and suddenly so many people expect MS, Sony and Nintendo to drop what they are doing and line up with a tanker truck full of money to invest in them? Gahhh... No one has ever made a PPU before. No one knows if it will actually deliver results worth paying for. For all we know Novodex could end up being another Stacker (I loved Stacker until I upgraded my 40MB drive for 512. Virtual 80ish megs was teh sheet). Any of you kids old enough to remember Stacker's hard drive compression accellerator boards? That was a brillant but ultimately useless way to enhance the user experience.

Sorry. I hate to drop napalm out of the blue. This post isn't really aimed at blakjedi or quest55720. I've built up a lot of frustration with so many people expressing laughably unrealistic expectations (teraflops and gigabytes for $199.95!!!). But even more irritating is when people belittle amazing work because it doesn't live up to their outrageous fantasies.

 

[mech]

Oh yeah, and Xbox360 resolutions will equal or exceed PC game resolutions

Xbox 360 games will run at 720p, i.e. 1280x720. I run all my PC games higher than that now...

That's great, but most users run at 1024x768 or 1280x960, and Xbox 360 will support 1920x1080 - which I supremely doubt many PC users run their boxes at Most don't have monitors that support resolutions that high (in fact my TV supports a higher resolution than my monitor). Yes it's interlaced, but that's not the point in this case.

512mb heaps? I really don't think so. Here's what unrealtechnology.com mentions for UE3 games:

Mmmmm that's nice, but I still think 512mb is a nice amount for Xbox360 - follows the trend of an ~8x increase in RAM per generation.

Anyway, apparently Apple was ticked off at IBM's seemingly inability to produce higher clocked PPC and yet MS is sporting a tri-core CPU with almost 1ghz above the high-end G5?

There have been changes to these cores to make them easier to clock higher.

Does these specs tell us an estimate on how much Gflops the system can handle?

The estimates in this thread seem pretty accurate...

 

[Iron Tiger]

The X360's hard drive isn't a laptop sized 2.5" drive, but one of the smaller ones (forgot the size) that goes into ultraportable products like the iPod. They have a higher cost premium than 2.5" laptop drives.

Do you have a link to where you saw/read that? I was under the impression 2.5" was how they were going, but there's been such a flood of rumor and speculation lately, I could easily have missed that.

This pic shows the X360 to be about 2.5" wide and the hard drive isn't as wide as the rest of the unit, so it'd have to have a drive smaller than 2.5".

You are disappointed by the prospect of 9GHz machine with a better-than-top-of-the-line video card for $300?

I think considering a 3-core 3GHz chip to be a 9GHz chip is an outrageous fantasy. Even the 3.2GHz 3-chip quote in these "official" specs won't net the performance of a single core 9GHz chip.

 

[jvd]

I still don't see why some of you are under whelmed by this but think in less than a 8 month period sony is going to do something so over the top its not even funny ?

WHat happens if the ps3 is only a

3.5 ghz cell 1x8
512 megs of ram
600mhz nvidia gpu
blu-ray
no hardrive ?

How will this be a huge leap up from the xenon ? Surely a diffrence but no more than the ps2-xbox leap mabye even less so

 

[Legend]

so we can say ~ 76.8 GFlops give or take? that seems very low compared to Cell's Gflops. how might that translate to graphics? or aren't Gflops that important if both GPUs are fairly similar?

 

[mech]

Yeah, around that, maybe a little more, but wouldn't it be more important that the graphics card can absolute chew through polygons? ~ 80 gigaflops should be enormous for just physics, sound and AI

 

[pakotlar]

so we can say ~ 76.8 GFlops give or take? that seems very low compared to Cell's Gflops. how might that translate to graphics? or aren't Gflops that important if both GPUs are fairly similar?

The 360Gflop figure that the Cell is touting is for single precion, best scenario case. I wouldn't bet on it actually achieving that figure outside of very rare circumstances. Will the CPU be more powerful that the X360's. Yes. Will it be a lot more robust? Probably not. Also keep in mind that the PS3 gpu may rely on the Cell's SPU's to process vertex data, in which case the Xbox360 may come much closer performance wise to the PS3. I do not believe that the PS3 will be much more powerful than the Xbox360. It will have a somewhat more robust CPU setup, and a more powerful (?) pixel rendering setup. However it may add up to be a very similar gaming experience compared to the xbox360. Remember what kind of technical advantage the PS2 touted compared to the dreamcast? I personally bought into the hype and didnt buy a dreamcast at launch. When the PS2 came out, I remember comparing the games and remarking how similar the graphics between the two were.

On a side note, you can bet that sony will tout figures akin to "Dreamcast puts out 6million poly/s while we put out 75 million!" on launch. Don't expect reality to line up with their claims.

On more thing to consider: The majority of games on both systems will be multiplatform. In which case the lowest common denominator will be catered to. The PS3 may have some extra "oomph" but considering that the hardware will be much closer in spec than the Xbox vs PS2, and that the Xbox put out graphics only marginally better than the PS2 on multipflatform games, I'm willing to bet that there will be nearly 0 difference between the 2 consoles until some AAA exclusives that push the hardware land on PS3. Considering how long it took games like MGS2 and Grand Turismo 4 to come out, I wouldn't wait. Get the Xbox360 now, and if the PS3 turns out to be something special, well save your tax return and buy that as well.

 

[Embedded Sea]

It appears we've stepped beyond the "where there's smoke there's fire" situation, this is more like, oh, I dropped this piece of paper by accident, I'm sorry, it happened to have all sorts of NDA stuff written on it

 

[Megadrive1988]

Anti-Aliasing

I was going to start a seperate thread for this - but that doesnt seem right at this time - I was going to start a topic on Anti-Aliasing on the 360. so I'll just throw it out here in this perfectly capable thread

what can we expect for AA on the '360? are developers limited to 4x in HDTV resolutions ?

is 4x AA for 720p, 1080i or just 480p/480i?


if defaulting down to 480i/480p can we get more AA to help make up for the lower res?

can we expect AA in all '360 games?


current consoles with decent AA *capability* (GCN, Xbox) don't seem to have many games that use it -- developers seem to want the extra cost of AA to go into prettier graphics and smoother framerates. its fair to say that AA on this generation consoles (DC, PS2, GCN, Xbox) has been almost a disaster.

not just on PS2. but all consoles. ok perhaps 'disaster' is the wrong word. failure? disappointment? definitally a disappointment for me. without a doubt.

 

[mech]

Given the currently accepted "rumour" that it has 10 meg of embedded RAM, I think we can expect 2x AA for 720p.

MSAA should come for free with embedded DRAM, it'd more be fitting it all into the RAM.

Personally, it won't surprise me if we have limited AA AGAIN this generation, especially with going to much, much higher resolutions and all.

 

[Megadrive1988]

sigh, just what i wanted to hear :|

(you're probably right though)

 

[MechanizedDeath]

The 360Gflop figure that the Cell is touting is for single precion, best scenario case. I wouldn't bet on it actually achieving that figure outside of very rare circumstances. Will the CPU be more powerful that the X360's. Yes. Will it be a lot more robust? Probably not. Also keep in mind that the PS3 gpu may rely on the Cell's SPU's to process vertex data, in which case the Xbox360 may come much closer performance wise to the PS3. I do not believe that the PS3 will be much more powerful than the Xbox360. It will have a somewhat more robust CPU setup, and a more powerful (?) pixel rendering setup. However it may add up to be a very similar gaming experience compared to the xbox360. Remember what kind of technical advantage the PS2 touted compared to the dreamcast? I personally bought into the hype and didnt buy a dreamcast at launch. When the PS2 came out, I remember comparing the games and remarking how similar the graphics between the two were.

Doesn't this keep the comparison relative? If the Cell FLOPS figure is ideal, and the realworld figure is lower, then why wouldn't the XeCPU figure also be an ideal figure with the same downward scaling? It's been en-vogue to accuse Sony of fluffing their numbers, but I don't see how it'll be different for MS. And if they're both fluffing, then the comparison stays the same. Roughly a 3x advantage in CPU power. It could just be that STI did their homework, that's all. They spent enough, shouldn't we expect them to reap the rewards? PEACE.

 

[wco81]

Wouldn't the higher resolution compensate somewhat if you can't get as much AA as you'd like?

 

[Iron Tiger]

sigh, just what i wanted to hear :|

(you're probably right though)

ATi hardware? Fixed hardware specs? Sounds prime for temporal AA by default. Any game that has AA and runs at 60fps whould have TAA. Now if Forza 2 ships with a 30fps limit, I think people will have all the more reason to be upset about it. Of course TAA can run at a lower framerate if the threshold is set lower, but the flickering at under 60fps would look like an artifact.

 

[jvd]

Doesn't this keep the comparison relative? If the Cell FLOPS figure is ideal, and the realworld figure is lower, then why wouldn't the XeCPU figure also be an ideal figure with the same downward scaling?

oh they are both ideal no doubt about that .

Its just what number you think will be sustainable . I'm figuring a 1x8 at 3.5ghz mabye a bit lower depending on heat out put and yield . Guessing around 200gflops for the cell chip in the psp. Thinking at most it will pump out 120ish in anything close to a real life situation due to all types of limitations .

I could see the xcpu hitting mabye 60 in a real life situation as i think it would be easier to keep it operating to its maximum as its maximum is much lower

 

[MechanizedDeath]

Doesn't this keep the comparison relative? If the Cell FLOPS figure is ideal, and the realworld figure is lower, then why wouldn't the XeCPU figure also be an ideal figure with the same downward scaling?

oh they are both ideal no doubt about that .

Its just what number you think will be sustainable . I'm figuring a 1x8 at 3.5ghz mabye a bit lower depending on heat out put and yield . Guessing around 200gflops for the cell chip in the psp. Thinking at most it will pump out 120ish in anything close to a real life situation due to all types of limitations .

I could see the xcpu hitting mabye 60 in a real life situation as i think it would be easier to keep it operating to its maximum as its maximum is much lower

Certainly you see how your scenario is biased, right? What would be the basis for two chips running at similar clock speeds and similar die sizes, having such a disparity in efficiency? I mean, besides mere speculation. You're just lowballing Cell figures out of the blue. Besides, hasn't STI already stated that Cell can scale to 4.6GHz? Why then does it need to be scaled back to 3.5GHz? The upper bound of that frequency range was a real space heater, but it looked like it ran just fine @ 4GHz and what, 1.1V? How come Cell figures get lowballed, but the XeCPU and its three, big cores don't get the same treatment?

We'll find out in a week, but I'm just curious. It would seem reasonable to me to assume that the numbers would scale relatively proportionally. PEACE.

 

[Fafalada]

I could see the xcpu hitting mabye 60 in a real life situation

Is that the same "real-life" situation in which SH4 hits 900MFlops?

Anyway it's true that in many situations utilizing 3 processors is easier done then 9.
On the flipside, streaming processing is probably the only type of workloads where you stand a chance of getting really high FPU utilization from ANY programmable chip - and I'd argue that The 9(yes, I know it's a horrible pun) will do better at those type of workloads.