Bill Gates Impressed By Xbox Modders >

	2006/06/22 14:30:08: Posted by DM
	Apparently, Bill Gates is impressed by some of the things the modding community has done with the XBox. Apparently when Bill was shown what Avalaunch and the like coudl do, he wanted to know how he could engage this modding community. *Link Fixed >Link
	Labeled With  xbox microsoft Comments [20]  | Rate this article: -- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10  | Avg. rating of 8.5

"NAO32 on Xenos would cost developers shading power relative to FP10, however, and they would lose the ability to use the eDRAM for blending as well. So at this time, I believe something like NAO32 makes more sense on RSX than on Xenos."

Thats because they are using a hacked version of HDR similar to what valve does to allow HDR+AA so it takes far more resources to make it happen than it would be to incorporate true HDR on the 360's GPU or any other gpu for that matter. It hurts the RSX as far as power for other things goes with such a method (not sure he'll admit that though)



"My final answer is totally positive: NAO32 can be considered a real HDR format."

No it can't since it doesn't have all the proper advantages of a true HDR format he mentions one of the drawbacks here.

"PSINext: We've spoken here about a number of NAO32's advantages. Are there any notable drawbacks?

Marco: Yes, there are drawbacks too; it's not an all-win situation. GPUs usually support hardware blending in RGB color spaces, hence hardware assisted blending is not going to work on a NAO32 frame buffer - it would produce incorrect results."

The bad side to a method like this is the rsx loses power it would have to do certain other things, but the good news is most people will never know or case for that matter because the games will still look good, but by no means is this method substitute for true HDR.



I meant know or CARE. typo.

"PSINext: As previously discussed, beyond it's high quality one of the primary reasons for the use of NAO32 is that it saves bandwidth in a bandwidth-hungry environment. In the future do you feel RSX will be at a disadvantage to Xenos when it comes to framebuffer effects due to the 128-bit bus and lack of eDRAM?

Marco: Not at all; in fact for many framebuffer effects I believe RSX will have an edge over Xenos. Don't want to go into details, but let me just point out that RSX is connected to two seperate buses, not just one."

LOL bold face lie here folks. Not surprised though as naturally he will only want to say good things about the platform he's working with, but having 48GB/s compared to 256GB/s on the xenos will sure as hell make a difference and its pretty funny he lied about it :)



They are giving up some shading power to gain back some memory they would've lost or memory bandwidth that would've been needed. There are major downsides to this in the future, but as long as it works for their game they can get away with it.

What he said about rsx being better for framebuffer effects is clearly false as the 360 runs them all effortlessly without having to use a hacked form of HDR which they have to give up shader power in order to use.

"OMG! The Xbox is doing more than we wanted it to, call the lawyers."

I saw nothing about bill gates it was some heavenly sword interview and he was talking up the new HDR method created in an attempt to get 4XAA to work properly on the ps3 for heavenly sword, but he admits the quality of aa isn't as good as it should be.

He says 4xaa was on, but if what we saw at E3 is what he considers 4XAA then... their hacked HDR method isn't doing too good of a job yet.

Well of course all the demos at E3 for ps3 isnt final. All developers are talented and they can find ways to make a lot of things work. You guys are talking like Ninja Theory doesn't have time to work on all these things. They have loads of time. His thing about the RSX could be true, I mean he could probably be under NDA restriction. Its possible that Sony could've tweaked the RSX a bit. ;]

Where's the "Bill Gates IMpressed By Xbox Modders" link?

Um...WTF?

I have a question for opta, where in the RSX spec does it say 48GB/s? And isn't the 256GB/s just for the eDRAM?

nevermind im dumb lol.

Here's the real link to the article:

arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2006/6/22/4415

First of all the title have no relation with the link..so please someone change it. and second optaviusx you say that this Marco developer he's telling lies because he is working with the ps3 platform.and you? Mr optaviusx you are saying the truth? and what exactly truth is this?..Your truth?..your perpective of things?,so far all the information you have give to us about the RSX is ALL wrong...first you start saying that the rsx is simple a 7800gtx..which now is proven that is not ..and now you continue with this myth that the rsx as with every Nvidia card have this inability to have both HDR+AA.and they simple use a hacked method to do it...which is ofcourse BS.and something else you always do is to isolate a few numbers..like this 48Gb/s of the rsx and the 256GB/s of xenos,without even consider thousand other parameters in both machines.so i continue to believe that you have no idea what you are talking about.Period

He was being very honest in his article admitting that they were having trouble making 4Xaa work as its suppose to with their hacked HDR method, but when he said

"Not at all; in fact for many framebuffer effects I believe RSX will have an edge over Xenos. Don't want to go into details, but let me just point out that RSX is connected to two seperate buses, not just one."

Thats clearly untrue. Morgan is this a weak attempt to defend the ps3 without actually knowing anything? I don't hate the ps3 I'm really looking forward to final fantasy 13 if you knew ANYTHING at all you know no nvidia gpu supports HDR+AA its not a "myth"

*Edited: If you have an issue about moderation, contact DM. Your previous post was off topic, and about illegal modding. Therefore it was removed.*

maybe i dont know anything as you say...but what you are doing is idiotic.to predend that you know ANYTHING.

The version of HDR they are doing is as I said a hacked version because they aren't using true HDR as its suppose to be used because they also want to incorporate antialiasing into the games along with HDR on an nvidia gpu. READ WHAT THE GUY SAID. They are trading shader power to gain more memory space and bandwidth.

Another thing I'm not isolating meaningless numbers either. The numbers I'm isolating are the IMPORTANT TO REAL WORLD PERFORMANCE NUMBERS my friend :) Memory Bandwidth is a crucial aspect to a gpus sustainable performance in real world games. Features like AA, HDR, Softshadows they are bandwidth eaters. So having a 256GB/s capable embedded ram on the gpu's daughter die is a major plus and its crucial to real world performance.

For example the unreal 3 engine doesn't play nice with 4XMSAA which is why they must use tricks to EMULATE it.

He was impressed becuz he knows he's not that smart, he should of did wut tha modders did before he released tha original xbox

I understand what you're trying to say morgan and I of course respect that, but beleive I'm know what I'm talking about here. Everything he said in that article he was being honest about until the guy asked him about xenos. The possibility that rsx can do a better job at framebuffer techniques is impossible. Less than 5 times the framebuffer bandwidth. Can only dedicated half the amount of shader units to pixel shader processing as the xenos can and the rsx can only dedicate 6 times less shader units to vertex shader processing. In addition to that the xenos has a custom api with supported options well beyond what is even possible on an nv47 chip. The rsx has more raw horsepower each shader unit performs more ops than say a single shader unit on the xenos. A Xenos with 24 shader units like the rsx would likely lose in performance to the rsx, but the xenos would still be more efficient aka perform to closer peak performance at all times.

bah typos galore.

Something you guys might find interesting. Dave Baumann which is very close with ati dismissing marco's claims on beyond3D.

Dave:

I think that does needs some more details, because the only element discussed there, two seprate busses, isn't actually that different between RSX and Xenos.

nAo: All details are already there since I was talking about frame buffer effects: in the vast majority of cases you'll end up being texture bw limited and last time I checked Xenos does not have 2 separate busses to fetch textures.



Dave: True enough, but unless you just aren't ouputting any pixels at all then it probably has a greater local texture bandwidth in the first place.

nAo: Sure, but as soon as you get serious with texture bw (thus you are texture bw limited) the ratio between color and texture bw is so small that it gets almost not relevant as the color bw just costs as much as another texel to sample..

Another important factor here is texture cache, complex post process effects require big texture caches cause they use wide fllter kernels and/or non coherent sampling patterns.



Dave: Because Xenos has a dedicated bus for pixel bandwidth.

The two busses on PS3 are the main Cell/XDR at 25.6GB/s (which FlexIO can access at a lower rate) and the 22.4GB/s for RSX/GDDR3 - here you can achieve a number of combinations, for example: Cell/XDR - system, RSX/GDDR3 - texture / pixel; Cell/XDR - system / texture, RSX/GDDR3 - texture / pixel; etc. With Xenon we have a 22.4GB/s UMA for system and graphics, and another 32GB/s(or 256GB/s) purely for pixel.

nAo is the same marco guy from that interview we read.

Is that good?? If they can deliver MGS4 playable with the graphics of the video, then i will consider PS3 better than XBOX360, if not, i will stick with Mass effect :P

Hey optaviusx, can you please give me the link to beyond 3d article you posted above. It seems like an interesting read.

Hey whoever modded Jagosix, this whole article is about modding...

is true that some guys now know how to complete modify xboxs......i saw one with a red case,,,a 200 giga disk and linux on it....internely the console is really like a pc.