Microsoft corporate VP sets out targets for forthcoming next-gen platform.
Speaking at the ELSPA International Games Summit in London, Microsoft corporate VP Peter Moore has predicted that the company's first-mover advantage with Xbox 360 will allow the console to reach 10 million installed base "very quickly."
In a recent interview with German magazine Gamestar, ATi has made some of the boldest claims to date regarding the base-level power of the Xbox 360 console, for which ATi is the GPU supplier.
Perhaps offering the most in-depth look at how the 360 chip operates, ATi head of developer relations Richard Huddy said, “First and foremost we have a 'unified shader architecture'. No other console or PC chip can boast this. And what, in short, it means is that the hardware is always able to run at 100% efficiency. All previous hardware has separate vertex and pixel shaders. That means that that previous hardware just had to hope that the vertices and pixels came in just about the right ratios. If you got too many pixels then the vertex engines would be idle, and if you got too many vertices then the pixel engines would starve instead. It’s not uncommon for one part of the chip to be starved of work for a large majority of the time – and that’s obviously inefficient. With a unified architecture we have hardware that automatically moulds its-self to the task required and simply does whatever needs to be done. That all means that the Xbox 360 runs at 100% efficiency all the time, whereas previous hardware usually runs at somewhere between 50% and 70% efficiency. And that should means that clock for clock, the Xbox graphics chip is close to twice as efficient as previous graphics hardware.”
' DFC Intelligence will be releasing detailed forecasts on gaming consoles market some time soon '
Currently the company describes the best case market share scenario for each of the future gaming system. Xbox 360 can hope for 40% of the market at best, the PlayStation 3 can aim at 50% and the Revolution at 35% of the market will be a big success.
NVIDIA Technology has been licensed by Microsoft to be used in its next gen Console, but its said that tinkering with the softwear will still be required. Following the announcement, sources close to the company indicated that a form of recompilation (known as "transcompilation") would be required to make Xbox games work on the 360, with the resulting patched executables being shipped on the system's hard drive for certain popular games, and patched versions of other games gradually being added over the Xbox Live network, which we will soon come to know as emulation profiles. Microsoft says its goal is to make every game backward compatible with its new console that was never intended to have this feature.
' Beyond3d.com posted a new interesting and detailed article about the ATI Xenos, Xbox360's gfxchip '
Throughout this article we'll attempt to piece together the operation of the graphics processor based on our conversations with ATI and some developers who have already had some knowledge of XBOX 360's capabilities, however we'll also offer some opinions on certain elements. Sections typed in blue indicate Beyond3D's suppositions and have not been directly indicated to us by ATI.
HQ Network: 8,191 | 
Guests: 4243 |
Members: 1
