Xbox 360

SiNXation 05-17-2005

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Even thought I have no been a big Xbox fan due to the lack of a good library of games this is still cool. Here's the specs on the last big console for the year.

2 types of Xbox Live:
Xbox Live Silver (no subscription required)
Xbox Live Gold (subscription benefits)

Features for Gold service
* Also for Silver
# Also for Offline

- Seamless transition to Xbox Live account from Xbox to Xbox 360
- Access to MMOs (additional fees may apply) *
- Free Xbox Live weekends *
- Multiplayer online gameplay
- Avatar for gamer profile * #
- Motto for gamer profile * #
- Personalized look for Xbox System Guide * #
- Offline achievments * #
- Online achievements *
- Access to other players’ Gamer cards via Live *
- Cumulative gamer score * #
- Location/language profile * #
- Reputation *
- Enahnced matchmaking using above
- Skill level matchmaking
- Gameplay style profile (casual, competitive, etc.)
- Recent players list *
- Free and premium download game content *
- Free and premium downloadable movies, music, tv *
- Downloadable demos/trailers *
- Microtransactions *
- Custom playlist in every game * #
- Play music from portable devices * #
- View images from digital camera * #
- Strem media from Windows XP * #
- Interactive screen savers * #
- Track info for CDs * #
- Communication with voice, video or text *

360 HW:
1. Support for DVD-video, DVD-Rom, DVD-R/RW, CD-DA, CD-Rom, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 cd, JPEG photo CD
2. All games supported at 16:9, 720p and 1080i, anti-aliasing
3. Customizable face plates to change appearance
4. 3 USB 2.0 ports
5. Support for 4 wireless controllers
6. Detachable 20GB drive
7. Wi-Fi ready

Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
- 3 symmetrical cores at 3.2 GHz each
- 2 hardware threads per core
- 1 VMX-128 vector unit per core
- 1 MB L2 cache

CPU Game Math Performance
- 9 billion dots per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor
- 500 MNz
- 10 MB embedded DRAM
- 48-way parallel floating-point shader pipelines
- unified shader architecture

Memory
-512 MB GDDR3 RAM
- 700 MNz DDR

Memory Bandwidth
- 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
- 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
- 21.6 GB/s frontside bus

Audio
- Mulitchannel surround sond output
- Supports 48khz 16-bit audio
- 320 independent decompression channels
- 32 bit processing
- 256+ audio channels

Dream

Microsoft's Xbox 360 press-conference took place after the Sony PS3 event yesterday, and it pretty much got swept over by the Sony PS3 hype wave.

One of the Microsoft Execs said Xbox 360 is the most powerful game platform - well that just sounds funny after having seen the specifications of the Sony PS3. Microsoft made some additional announcements like that the Xbox 360 will be backward compatible with Xbox games. Also Final Fantasy XI (Square Enix) will come to Xbox 360. Microsoft is planning a global launch. This is a world's first. In addition, more than 160 games are in development for Xbox 360, with 25 to 40 games slated for release this calendar year. Microsoft showed an extended Dead or Alive 4 live game play video that really looks amazing and fun.

Hsoolien

I've always been a fan of the xbox cause the games i Want are on it, and on it best, so far the PS2 just has not offered any of it's own good reaosns to me (even having the proprietary sequel to my favorie fighter series, I cannot jsutify buiying a PS2 and payin 10$ more (the average amount more PS2 gamers are here over their xbox quiv's) for what will be a inferior game contorl and graphics wise)

As for the Sony launch sweeping the xbox360 launch... duh PS fanboyism is so excessive (and completely obliterate all intelligent discussion) that even of the Xbox360 was 100 times more powerful and had eveyr game coming out this year on it, (except for the two shittest, only avaialable exlusively for the PS3), the PS3 would outsel the xbox 360


Much like of the worst porn (say it only feature fat hairy gay man sex) ever was liscenced the Starwars brand, Starwars geeks would buy it, and love it.

SiNXation

***UPDATE***

The Xbox 360 will be able to run some games from the current Xbox library. Microsoft Senior Vice President of the Home and Entertainment Division Robbie Bach says the Xbox 360 will run the “top-selling” games from the current console. Sounds like more of a licensing problem than a true hardware problem to me. With Sony and Nintendo announcing full backwards compatibility, Microsoft better get this right.

Dream

[UPDATE]

So now that all the hard facts about the Xbox 360 are out, we’re left to contemplate some of the more subtle news items regarding the new console. Anyone who remembers Windows 3.1 knows that Microsoft isn’t exactly known for its design suave, but they decided to take an entirely different tack for the daughter-of-Xbox, and plunked down a ton of the cash into the design part of the equation. Their primary goals? Please the Japanese, and please the wives and mothers who, as “nongamers,” will have to pass approval on a new box in the living room. In the interest of brevity we’ll be glossing over the fact that lots of wives and mothers are actually gamers, and just point out that the end result of the process was a shifting away from the aggressive, brute force of the first generation Xbox and on to a more peaceful, organic design. Inspired by a bong hit.

BonitaPajarita

So your saying that Microsoft was not going to fully consider compatability for the previous games that were created as well as the other 'kinks' it was just going to glaze over by there visual design...so Microsoft to do that.

I hope the other consoles knock xbox out of the water...Nintendo and Sony! Just to show them a little lesson that they are not everything and a bag of chips and can screw over people and that YES people are paying attention to what you are doing and not as naive as you think they are mothers and all.

Its funny I just read an article on news.yahoo.com that ....

"The BSA survey, conducted by the U.S.-based market research firm IDC, covered business applications, operating systems, consumer software and local market software in 87 countries.

IDC compared software sales in each of the countries with estimates of software in use and took the difference to be the pirated amount, calculating losses based on prices for those copies.

Vietnam topped the list, with 92 percent of all software used coming from pirates. It was followed by the Ukraine (91 percent), China (90 percent), Zimbabwe (90 percent) and Indonesia (87 percent).

The piracy rate was lowest — at 22 percent — in North America. Holleyman said that the United States has the lowest rate of piracy because it has the toughest penalties for illegal software usage.

The piracy rate was 53 percent in the Asia-Pacific region and 35 percent in Europe."

Chopper C

Hsoolien

Bacwards compatability does not really matter all that much. other then the first couple of months of having the system, i know very few people that use the BW compat of PS2 (maybe because of issues with CD media for those that bought them on the first couple of runs).

The reason is purely technical, ATI shaders are just not up to par with even a couple of hardware generations back of NVidia shaders (no matter how much better FPS ATI gets with AA and all that crap enabled, Nvidias shaders are jut extremely kick ass), nor are they very compatible (except DX specific shaders), so they would literally have to write shader translation code for evey game almost every game out there, which would be why the are limiting themselves to best sellers.

Chun-Li

I'm with Hsooly on this. Its not really a big deal unless the came is really good and they don't make a new version for it. It just helps you start off with someone do to when you fish get the system. But on the other hand there is still alot of PS1 games I play on the PS2 just becuase they never made a new version of the and and the game is still kick ass.

POY POY rocks!

BonitaPajarita

Yeah thats my main concern is not just a new system w/ new games but old games as well that I want to continue playing.

Of course its just a marketing move and strategy to get more ppl to spend money on another item that not needed, but it's of course fun to have.

If I dont get this I will die!!!

rocafam1

god bless xbox 360 hi pplz

Chopper C

Well, news now is that BC will be available on the 360 but on the "popular" games, such as Halo CE and Halo 2. And there will be ports for wired controllers, just in case you didn't want to go wireless. That would have been a big problem for my bro-in-law, b/c he's got a video game store where you go and play video games on 9 big screen tv's. 1 360 to 9 tvs and all those frequencies does not make a pretty picture. I dunno, if you wanna know more about that check it out at www.goballisticgames.com

Hsoolien

Like i said, they are only spending time rewriting shaders for bestsellers, basicly MS fucked up, though they can't admit it.

One aspect I don't like is that the 360 comes in a harddriveless (and liveless) flavor that's something like 100$ less, which is going to be a big seller with caual games that know no better making companines much less likely to make games that would use (or even need) those featurses, there are games for the Xbox with save files that require more then the space ona standard memory card, so what developers going to restrict themselves again??? Besided not having a harddrive means byuing multiple memory cars by necessity thus completely nulling the price difference...

CivilGuy

I will be there release day to get mines