Xbox in 2000, will its graphics still reign supreme.......!?

Wasn't N1 also larger than the DC too? Mass production will bring costs down. Remember we're talking a condensed board not an arcade board with all the ancillaries. A console with the N2 chipset would probably have to be a little bigger than the regular DC though.

 

"Nope. It would have been like a Gamecube "

A very underpowered Gamecube.

 

A little ? several extra buses and two extra chip and extra memory, not too mentioned the cooling. Bigger casing and probably a need for bigger power supply.

N2 is also mass produce, I don't think there are consumer electronics, that isn't mass produce these days.

 

When the XBox launched the highest end PC part was a GeForce3 Ti500 on the vid chip front and a 1.56GHZ part for the non P7 core CPUs. It luanched with a CPU a bit under half the highest end consumer PC part for CPU and a better then the best available vid chip from nV. It was still about five months until the GeForce4 hit.

If it had launched in October 2K the fastest consumer CPU was the Athlon TBird 1.2GHZ and the fastest graphics offering was the GF2 Ultra. Using the same general guidelines the XBox launching in 2K would have likely been an Athlon 550 running a NV2x based graphics core, likely with a single vertex shader and quite a bit lower clock speed. If not NV2x it would have likely been an even faster version of the NV1x core then the GF2Ultra. Memory bandwith wouldn't be as high obviously, although DDR would almost certainly have been used as the XBox uses RAM still topping the top PC offerings while DDR was available for consumer PC mobos in the October 2K time range(AMD 760).

I would expect it to have been(swap to AMD chip as that was the plan according to MS during the timeframe we are talking about)-

550MHZ TBird core Athlon
NV 19.5 Graphics Chip
32/64MB DDR ~4.8GB/sec
4GB HD
10/100

Instead of whipping the PS2 on all fronts(in terms of end visuals) it would have been much like what we are actually seeing today, the XBox with vastly superior texturing and comparable poly complexity.

 

N2 isn't mass produced to the extent of millions so it doesn't benefit in cost savings like a console would. PS2 sold for $300 and SONY was losing $150 per unit at launch which means about $450 to manufacture. By that time DC was already down to like $200 manufacturing cost. I'm pretty confident they could add in the two processors and memory with the $250 left over

SEGA wouldn't be able to swallow the $150 loss per unit like SONY though, they just didn't have the money however their technology could compete with SONY's dollar for dollar 8)

 

Ben, that is a nice speculation, but apparently they had the hardware already planned for that launch date and it was P2-400 and GF2. Even in your case, the difference between PS2 and Xbox would be so small that most people probably wouldn't bother considering that platform and went where the hype was.

If only that was so easy :\

 

But the components are, that's the where the majority of cost saving comes from.

And it also remained me most/all N2 based games is released around mid 2001. And N2 technology was showcase with some early demo, in mid/late 2000, when everyone was complaining about the jaggieness of PS2. PS2 hardware was showcase in 1999.

N2 probably can't be mass produce or release in early 2000. PS2 was already late, they were planning for 1999 released.

Furthermore, PVR is contracted with Sega, they already have their hand full (as you can see by the lateness of their Kyro card).

Try March 2K

 

Easy or not isn't really the issue. I was talking about economic feasibility and according to simple math it was doable. You also have to remember that DC and NAOMI was designed to be scaled easily unlike the PS2 which was a nightmare along the lines of Saturn. Even the early PowerVR chips were design to work in parallel is the designer wanted it that way. It's VERY easy to add more chips in a TBR so instead of rendering the whole screen, it would only render 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc of the screen depending on the number of chips. PowerVR was designed to be scaled, that was one of it's main advantages because it doesn't need ultrafast external memory or wide buses like say PS2.

The thing is they didn't even have to utilise the power of N2. They could've just made DC quality games running on it at launch like the 1st gen PS2 games to stall for time. Then come 2001 they unload the big guns 8)

PS2 was released 18 months after DC btw. IMO the only reason why N2 came out in 2000 was because they wanted to show off the scalability of DC technology to save face, not because they couldn't design it sooner.

 

In US the DC was released on 9.9.99 & PS2 was 10.26.00. Are you referring to the Japanese or European launch?

 

DC was released fall of 98 in Japan and PS2 was released spring 00 in Japan. That's about 18 months. Both consoles initially debuted in Japan.

 

I always heard that the PS2 launched early to thwart the growing popularity of the DC.

I wonder what PS2 games would look like if it had a 300mhz bus from EE<->GS rather than 150mhz, for 2.4gigs/sec bandwidth.

zurich

 

Doubleing the EE to GS bus bandwidth probably wouldn't make games look that much better -- since PS2 games already have enough polygons to do whatever they want. Your theoretical PS2 would still have way too little RAM, especially frame buffer and texture RAM. And it would still have the extremely limited pixel shaders it currently has.

If they were able to improve the quality of their pixel pipelines, or double the ammount of embedded DRAM, or even double the amount of main RAM, that would have a more noticable effect on PS2 game quality.

 

Well, that's what I was thinking. Simple math is not really the way in things like this. I have a feeling N2 based console wold be too expensive not only for a budget limited company like Sega, but also for Sony for example. The actual board was really expensive. Much more, if I remember, than the PS2 based arcade board. What was the reason for that, I don't know.

 

Everything we saw back then clearly indicated that MS was going with an Athlon, including all of the information from those working on the project. In late 2K early '01 there was a considerable amount of discussion when MS decided to go with Intel over AMD as a supplier(AMD made public comments about it, paraphrasing, Intel was 'giving the chips away, we can't match their price point').

I have a hard time believing the claims of what the XBox would have been as concrete based on any single claim particularly when we had dozens of comments, including from the companies directly, that refute the claim you are referring to.

No, it would likely have had a compounded effect making the PS2 look quite a bit worse at the time then it ended up looking when the XBox first hit. Using DX and PC native hardware developers were utilizing GF1 level techniques for XBox launch titles and they still managed to easily outdo what the PS2's second/third generation titles looked like. Compare the XBox launch titles that don't use pixel shader effects to the PS2 launch titles on a visual basis. You think they can port Mafia from the PC to the PS2 without reducing the texture quality an enormous amount? GeForce1 hardware can run the game with full texture detail.

Given that ports, which most titles are today, use the PS2 as the baseline dev platform the XBox is lacking in its more advanced capabilities being taken advantage of with the exception of superior texturing. This would be no different if the XB had NV1X level hardware the only difference would be the PS2 wouldn't have the built in lead from launching earlier so the XBox would have had a legit chance at being lead dev platform.

As far as using the Naomi2 hardware, check what the non lit or single light poly throughput is for the hardware. Considering the typical amount of HW lights used, I don't think picking a platform that couldn't keep up with a GeForce1 would be a good idea. Not to mention, dealing with SH4 over x86 and the WindowsCE build over the more robust OS cores, it would have been a very bad choice. The effective fillrate is useless to discuss, this is a console not a PC. When you remove the need for bandwith to fill fillrate PVR's technology loses a lot. It is cheap, doesn't use many transistors and uses a lesser amount of bandwith for rasterization then an IMR. None of those are major factors to a console. Poly throughput most certainly is, and there the all important PR peak theoretical rate is a card that is used extensively in marketing numbers. Naomi2 comes up extremely short on that end, as does its weak texture filtering and the extremely poor texture filtering hack needed to avoid massive performance hits when utilizing trilinear filtering(particularly evident if you utilize Dot3 or other DX7 level effects).

 

duffer,

doubling the GS bus bandwidth would certainly allow more textures/higher res textures. And the PS2 doesnt have any per pixel effects (if you discount uber-multi-pass as perpixel)

zurich

 

A GF1 outdoes a PS2 on the image quality, effects, and features front, but loses in a rather major way in fill rate and T&L (programmable at that).

And as we've seen, shadow volumes and multipass rendering really sucks up fill rate.

zurich

 

Goodness me there is a lot of incorrect information re Naomi 2 etc in this forum.
If I get time I'll try to reply to some of the comments but I'm somewhat busy at the moment.