Marxist ßastard Posted October 26, 2004 Share Posted October 26, 2004 The XBox, IIRC, has a relatively fast GPU running alongside a slower CPU. This fact influenced the design of Morrowind in that an average frame consists of a great number of polygons, and the detail level for objects viewed at a distance is just as great as that for an object viewed close-up: Ulrich Grassberger - Original Page: Again: This is important stuff, for example the Quake III engine is badly suited for outdoor levels with far visibility range, its scene management cannot cope with that. Play Dune on a K6/2-500 and you will see! For another example I could compare Morrowind on PC and Morrowind on XBox: That´s a game optimized for Pixel and Vertex Shaders, it runs really ugly on a Gemelt MX or comparable "outdated" hardware. It is optimized for the XBox which has only a Celeron 700 CPU but a powerful GPU: The makers of Morrowind stripped scene management to the bone and used the CPU for barely more than I/O control. Hence polygon counts rise fast with visibility range. (According to the theory it should rise with the third power due to the three dimensions, but even Morrowind is not that a hog.) Hence when run on machines which lack DX8 graphics hardware (and Morrowind doesn´t make good use of SSE or 3Dnow! either), visibility range must be reduced (in order to get a decent framerate, even with an Athlon 2000+), and the colors are dragged into a grey soup of fog. It would only follow logically that we should see the same sort of influence over Oblivion's design being held by the XBox 2 as we saw the influence of the original XBox over Morrowind (if anything, there should be greater influence, seeing as how Bethesda has obviously tasted blood with the console market and they have a thirst for more, as indicated by the GameInformer exclusive and predicted simultaneous triple-release). The following is a collection of excerpts from a post on an XBox forum discussing the hardware that will most likely be put into the progeny of the house of XBox; the exact source is unknown, as stated in the post: Xenon Hardware Overview By Pete Isensee, Development Lead, Xbox Advanced Technology Group [...] Hardware Goals Xenon was designed with the following goals in mind: Focus on innovation in silicon, particularly features that game developers need. Although all Xenon hardware components are technologically advanced, the hardware engineering effort has concentrated on digital performance in the CPU and GPU. Maximize general purpose processing performance rather than fixed-function hardware. This focus on general purpose processing puts the power into the Xenon software libraries and tools. Rather than being hamstrung by particular hardware designs, software libraries can support the latest and most efficient techniques. Eliminate the performance issues of the past. On Xbox, the primary bottlenecks were memory and CPU bandwidth. Xenon does not have these limitations. Basic Hardware Specifications Xenon is powered by a 3.5+ GHz IBM PowerPC processor and a 500+ MHz ATI graphics processor. Xenon has 256+ MB of unified memory. [...] CPU The Xenon CPU is a custom processor based on PowerPC technology. The CPU includes three independent processors (cores) on a single die. Each core runs at 3.5+ GHz. The Xenon CPU can issue two instructions per clock cycle per core. At peak performance, Xenon can issue 21 billion instructions per second. [...] GPU The Xenon GPU is a custom 500+ MHz graphics processor from ATi. The shader core has 48 Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs) that can execute 64 simultaneous threads on groups of 64 vertices or pixels. ALUs are automatically and dynamically assigned to either pixel or vertex processing depending on load. The ALUs can each perform one vector and one scalar operation per clock cycle, for a total of 96 shader operations per clock cycle. Texture loads can be done in parallel to ALU operations. At peak performance, the GPU can issue 48 billion shader operations per second. The GPU has a peak pixel fill rate of 4+ gigapixels/sec (16 gigasamples/sec with 4× antialiasing). The peak vertex rate is 500+ million vertices/sec. The peak triangle rate is 500+ million triangles/sec. The interesting point about all of these values is that they’re not just theoretical—they are attainable with nontrivial shaders. [...] Memory and Bandwidth Xenon has 256+ MB of unified memory, equally accessible to both the GPU and CPU. The main memory controller resides on the GPU (the same as in the Xbox architecture). It has 22.4+ GB/sec aggregate bandwidth to RAM, distributed between reads and writes. Aggregate means that the bandwidth may be used for all reading or all writing or any combination of the two. Translated into game performance, the GPU can consume a 512×512×32-bpp texture in only 47 microseconds. The front side bus (FSB) bandwidth peak is 10.8 GB/sec for reads and 10.8 GB/sec for writes, over 20 times faster than for Xbox. Note that the 22.4+ GB/sec main memory bandwidth is shared between the CPU and GPU. Based on the information presented there, we should probably see better scene management and more CPU-based operations in Oblivion, along with more equal CPU and GPU requirements for the upcoming game, if not a processor requirement that surpasses the video requirement. By my interpretation of the hardware, we should probably also see the memory requirements of Oblivion shift more towards bandwidth than sheer size. It would be intresting to hear the predictions of other members with regards to how the XBox 2's hardware will influence the design of Oblivion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kaningutten Posted October 29, 2004 Share Posted October 29, 2004 I haven't bothered to read all that much about the technicallities of Xbox 2, since I doubt I will ever buy it... But the way I see it Xbox puts all the money on grapichs, and IMO that is not a good thing for RPG'ers or people who want deeper games! The only good RPG released for Xbox (or any console for that matter! And remember this is only my opinion) is KotOR! I generally feel that they have yet to develop an RPG that works with the xbox-controller. And whether Bethesda manages that for Xbox 2 or not remains to be seen... I, for one, am not to happy about Bethesda claiming to design Oblivion particularily for next generation consoles! I've never played MW on xbox, but I have a hard time believing that it can even compare to the experience you get on PC! As for Oblivion they have already stated that the combat system will be built from scratch, and that comes as no surprise seeing as xbox is an action-oriented platform. I'm also hoping to see a good 'dialogue-tree' type of feature for conversations in Oblivion, but, alas, this is also something very rare on consoles... Again the only one I can think of is KotOR. That's really all I got to say about this at this point, but it's an interesting topic and I sure would like to see what all you people think... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Turkeymoo Posted November 3, 2004 Share Posted November 3, 2004 But the way I see it Xbox puts all the money on grapichs, and IMO that is not a good thing for RPG'ers or people who want deeper games! The only good RPG released for Xbox (or any console for that matter! And remember this is only my opinion) is KotOR!Ahh ignorance at it's finest <_< , look have you forgotten about Morrowind?! Yes it's on xbox and don't forget about Fable. Although short, it was an excellent RPG. And what about Lord of the Rings: The Third Age? IT FOR XBOX. The fact is, xbox has more good games for it than any other system, people just never give it a chance! XBOX RUUULLLZZZZZ!!!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FlightlessBird Posted November 3, 2004 Share Posted November 3, 2004 XBOX RUUULLLZZZZZ!!!!!! lol :lol: I can't wait for Peregrine to see that. I dont plan on getting Xbox2 becuase I am having trouble with my money at the moment but who knows? Maybe i'll have more in the future. Better graphics = + but too much emphasis on it could hurt the consol overall. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slaiv Posted November 3, 2004 Share Posted November 3, 2004 Well, it's obvious that XBox Next will have some effect on how Oblivion is developed - the question is how much. As stated, XBox has turned out to be much more of an action oriented system, as opposed to PS2's RPGs, or Gamecube's platformers. This should affect the combat system and the amount of fighting done in game. The specs are a whole different story. My guess is that Bethesda will design Oblivion around the XBox Next's specs; whether or not doing this will be because the game is developed around XBox Next, or because said specs can support incredible graphics with decent runtime remains in question. This probably means that those who plan to get this for pc will need to heavily upgrade rom their current setups [unless they are extremely high end] just to play the game at a decent framerate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kaningutten Posted November 4, 2004 Share Posted November 4, 2004 Ahh ignorance at it's finest <_< , look have you forgotten about Morrowind?! Yes it's on xbox and don't forget about Fable. Although short, it was an excellent RPG. And what about Lord of the Rings: The Third Age? IT FOR XBOX. The fact is, xbox has more good games for it than any other system, people just never give it a chance! XBOX RUUULLLZZZZZ!!!!!!<{POST_SNAPBACK}> Did you even bother to finish reading my post? I said I haven't tried Morrowind on xbox (I do have a feeling that there's a lot of loading involved, though)! But Fable is the biggest disappointment EVER; It's not even an RPG!!!! LotR: The third age... Haven't tried it and I never will! It's EA dammit!!! If that game is actually good... well... that means hell just froze over! XBOX SUUUCKZZZZZ!!!!! Some of you might disagree, and I did mention in my post that it was only my opinion! And for you information so is the content of this post! I still feel that consentrating on consoles is a bad move for Bethesda! I believe the majority of Morrowind fans play on PC and also that the experience of the elderscrolls is best suited for the computer! (Remember; This is only my opinion) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luxar Posted November 4, 2004 Share Posted November 4, 2004 Ahh ignorance at it's finest <_< , look have you forgotten about Morrowind?! Yes it's on xbox and don't forget about Fable. Although short, it was an excellent RPG. And what about Lord of the Rings: The Third Age? IT FOR XBOX. The fact is, xbox has more good games for it than any other system, people just never give it a chance! XBOX RUUULLLZZZZZ!!!!!!<{POST_SNAPBACK}> Did you even bother to finish reading my post? I said I haven't tried Morrowind on xbox (I do have a feeling that there's a lot of loading involved, though)! But Fable is the biggest disappointment EVER; It's not even an RPG!!!! LotR: The third age... Haven't tried it and I never will! It's EA dammit!!! If that game is actually good... well... that means hell just froze over! XBOX SUUUCKZZZZZ!!!!! Some of you might disagree, and I did mention in my post that it was only my opinion! And for you information so is the content of this post! I still feel that consentrating on consoles is a bad move for Bethesda! I believe the majority of Morrowind fans play on PC and also that the experience of the elderscrolls is best suited for the computer! (Remember; This is only my opinion)<{POST_SNAPBACK}> Although I agree with most of what you say, your statistics are severely skewed. Morrowind sold much much better on X-Box than it did on PC.(which is the reason for Bethesda's focus on consoles now) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slaiv Posted November 4, 2004 Share Posted November 4, 2004 It's not even an RPG!!!!Hate to break it to you, but, by definition, yes, it is. XBox is more mainstream. Which is why MW sold better on Xbox. [if I have my stats right.] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kaningutten Posted November 5, 2004 Share Posted November 5, 2004 Luxar; Humm, that's a surprise... I still don't get it, though! ;) Slaiv; I know... I just said that to emphasize my opinion. I personally found absolutely no room for roleplaying in Fable, which is kind of sad considering all it could have been if Molyneux had kept his promises. Maybe this discussion (too) ends up with a 'mainstream versus hardcore fans' discussion... :blink: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kaningutten Posted November 5, 2004 Share Posted November 5, 2004 Oops... double post. It wasn't my fault! Honest! :blush: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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