Xbox and PC

Hi seven... i understand your doubt about copression and decompression space&time... but i think that they have textures already compressed on the support (DVD-HardDisk).
Then they load something like 30Mb of this compressed textures in ram. When they need to put a compress texture on a surface they send the compressed textr. to the chip that will process it and put on that surface.

If the chip doen\'t put DIRECTLY the compressed texture on the poly surface (that means write on video memory) they need a intermediate buffer to put the uncompressed textr. before next stage.

But see how a GeForce work on a PC.
They put compressed texture directly in the videocard memory. So i think they don\'t need an intermediate buffer... the chip process directly with compressed texture and write on video memory.

For the problem of COMPRESS the texture, well... they can store them already compressed in the support OR they can compress them when install on HD OR they can compress them 1 time at startup. But i don\'t think they compress it when the game is in a middle of a running action.

Well, i think that THIS is very interesting \'cause there is no sense in scream mantras like "XBox is Better" or "PS2 will WIN" without know WHY something should be better or not.

My initial question was to understand why people say XBox is not a PC... when i saw very little differences (UMA). My first warnings are that Microsoft and games software house will use the XBox not only as a console but as a PC (patches, SO, unfinished product, different levels of software version on field...).
But before say something it\'s better than other i think we need to understand \'other\'.
We know at main steps how xbox can run, we don\'t know well how PS2 can do things like some game do?

If we understand that there\'re HW limitation that means that thinks CANNOT be done or we see that there are no problem \'cause different approach then there\'s a sense when someone can say "PS2 have a future" or "PS2 can do better".

This forum is full of debating without know-how.
Maybe it\'s better ASK then scream pseudo-religion concepts.
IMO.

TheSammer, hope you don\'t mind a late reply from a no tech know how person to your earlier concern shown for xbox being a PC. The reason for seeing little danger in there being patches for xbox would be that programing for a fixed set of hardware and a single OS is supposed to eliminate many of the bugs that show up when trying to program a game to work on many different PC setups. You must of known that already though, right? While free added levels could be seen as a bonus, a patch/fix would kill any chance xbox has left of not being thought of as a PC that only plays games.

Wouldn\'t ANY added time for compressed textures go a long way towards explaining why those texture specs listed don\'t add up to much net difference in texture looks between consoles? Anyway, its become increasingly clear to me the xbox specs have proven to be little more than a marketing ploy.

This may be wrong but I remember the unified memory wasn\'t even listed when the first set of xbox specs were originally made public, which makes me think it wasn\'t considered until after they discovered the performance of the paper specs weren\'t even coming close to being realized in the real world. Same thing goes for the fatter pipes. My guess as tech ignoramus would be the CPU and GPU are bumping heads trying to access data from the UMA at the same time thereby filling those fat pipes with a hefty % of noise.                        

About the tech forum. I don\'t think it\'s so much a lack of interest on the part of the members here as it is a lack of expertise among the members. Also, the few times I have witnessed ‘experts\' elsewhere go back and forth it isn\'t long before most of us onlookers get left in the dust with only a foggy sense of the points being argued and no real clue which speaker really knows their stuff. That\'s how it is for me anyway. Unless one expert gets busted by the other and exposed as a poser on a point of fact that everyone else can go back and check, it\'s pretty easy to fool us plain old gamers. That\'s why most of us have come to rely on the games we can see being played as the only reliable gauge for performance. The screaming about system ‘X\' being so much better than system ‘P\' hardley gets wispered now compared to how it used to be.

good point there... although, I am pretty sure that the images have to go through some sort of calculation before it can be displayed on screen. Anyway, tech notes by side, I think that present games coming to PS2 clearly prove that it\'s not weak in textures. I\'ll get back to the streaming issue, if I find an article by some developer. I will also see if I can contact some of the developers at SCEE (Camdan, guys behind Dropship) and maybe they have some impressions to share.

As for X-Box being like a PC. I must agree, while it might not be used as a PC, I think the hardware and components are too PC similar to be ignored. I mean, it uses DirectX, it\'s got a slightly modified (and weak for graphics) Pentium III CPU, a very powerful GPU (as in a PC too) with the only difference that all this is shared over a UMA. Look, it\'s even got a built in harddrive, which a lot of fanboys outthere will jump in joy about. Hell, I even heard DoA3 copies a lot of data onto the harddrive when inserted the first time. It will be very interesting to see, for what the hdd will come more in handy: for lazy programming (a fact on PC\'s), or really good use of the hardware. Time will show.

As for the launch games of X-Box? Do they look good? Yes, I think so, but am I impressed? Definately no. Many X-Box fanboys will try the arguement that it is first generation and that second generation will look much better, but this doesn\'t quite count with X-Box. Here\'s why:

1. It\'s very similar to a PC architecture.
2. Use of DirectX.
3. There is only one architecture. Not like in PCs.

Of course, X-box\'s graphics will get better with time, but it won\'t see such a big leap as we will with the PS2. I think the above technical posts about the PS2 proves how complex and different it is. As a result, first gen games looked okay, with second and third coming in fast and looking much much better. Since X-Box is very easy to develop for, I think it\'s safe to say that games like DoA3 are already pushing a lot out of its hardware. PS2 on the other hand is only at its beginning and developers are slowly getting a hold of it. It\'s getting better and I think at this rate, it won\'t take a long until PS2 will be fully up to par with X-Box games. And maybe, PS2 will even surpass X-Box once... it\'s all up to the developers.

[BizioEE]

I was a lot busy these days so I couldn\'t express my thoughts about these arguments...

texture compression on X-Box and GameCube might be done hardware, but any compression of data takes up time. If you check the link by SegaTech above about the texture amount of either consoles, you will something like:

GameCube 12 MB (not compressed) == (compressed) 72 MB per Frame (!)
X-Box 45 MB (not compressed) == (compressed = 270 MB per Frame (!)

Since the images have to be processed (a monitor can\'t display 3D, has to calculate into a 2d image), I figuere that the images are being compressed on the fly (thanks to hardware compression). Now, who where believes that X-Box can compress 270 Mega-Bytes (!) of data into 45 MB in 1/60 of a second (assuming the game runs at 60 fps)?

If we assume that a typical level in a GC or Xbox game has these requirements: 4 MB for code, 4 MB for sound, 3 MB for frame buffer and Z-buffer, and 8 MB for polygons + lighting information...then "you have" 72 MB for the GC(at 183 FPS) and 270 for the X-Box(at 124 FPS)...but...
...there\'s something I can\'t understand ...are they assuming a rendering rate of 10 million polygons per second?...if the answer is "yes"...what happens if you process,for example,15 or..20 mpps with more effects ? or with a lot more instructions for poly ?
...you should need more than 8 MB for polys...and you could need more than 4 MB for sound...

...and...when they say you need 3 MB for frame buffer and z-buffer,are they considering the X-Box z-compression ? ..if the answer is "no"...then X-Box should have more RAM available for textures in the same conditions...

Where\'s Dr Yassam when you need him ?