As I made clear in my review of last year’s E3, the Electronic Ent. Expo, I’m not a gamer. But I’m sure if I go to enough E3s, I will be converted. This year’s event was not as loud or as flashy as last year, but bigger things were afoot. The launches of PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were the talk of the expo and many people have taken sides.
The game demos for both of the next-generation consoles were impressive. It’s not that the graphics have gotten all that much better, but everything else has. Lighting and movement have taken leaps forward providing a more natural and realistic gaming experience. As well, the graphic volume is amazing. Crowd scenes where various characters move differently in a natural motion. Hordes of zombies attacking instead of just a handful. It’s getting to the point where the look of the cinematics and gameplay are too close to differentiate. This is all due to the improved processing power of the new systems.
Xbox 360 Specs
Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2GHz each
Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total
VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
1MB L2 cache
CPU Game Math Performance
9 billion dot product operations per second
Custom ATI Graphics Processor
10MB of embedded DRAM
48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
Unified shader architecture
Polygon Performance
500 million triangles per second
Pixel Fill Rate
16 gigasamples per second fill rate using 4x MSAA
Shader Performance
48 billion shader operations per second
Memory
512MB of 700MHz GDDR3 RAM
Unified memory architecture
Memory Bandwidth
22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
21.6 GB/s front-side bus
Overall System Floating-Point Performance
1 teraflop
Storage
Detachable and upgradeable 20GB hard drive
12x dual-layer DVD-ROM
Memory Unit support starting at 64MB
I/O
Support for up to four wireless game controllers
Three USB 2.0 ports
Two memory unit slots
Optimized for Online
Instant, out-of-the-box access to Xbox Live features with broadband service, including Xbox Live Marketplace for downloadable content, gamer profile for digital identity and voice chat to talk to friends while playing games, watching movies or listening to music
Built-in Ethernet port
Wi-Fi ready: 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g
Video camera ready
Digital Media Support
Support for DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 CD, JPEG Photo CD
Ability to stream media from portable music devices, digital cameras and Windows XP-based PCs
Ability to rip music to the Xbox 360 hard drive
Custom playlists in every game
Built-in Media Center Extender for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
Interactive, full-screen 3-D visualizers
High-Definition Game Support
All games supported at 16:9, 720p and 1080i, anti-aliasing
Standard-definition and high-definition video output supported
Audio
Multi-channel surround sound output
Supports 48KHz 16-bit audio
320 independent decompression channels
32-bit audio processing
More than 256 audio channels
System Orientation
Stands vertically or horizontally
Customizable Face Plates
Interchangeable to personalize the console
Printer-friendly version
Post new comment