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Games Entertainment

X-Box Limitations (Hemos Is Dumb) (Yes, I am) 143

Posted by Hemos from the talking-with-the-man-in-the-know dept.
Fervent writes: "Daily Radar has an interesting article with Michael Abrash, one of the lead XBox technological designers. What's fascinating about this article is not what the XBox can do, but what it can't do. Abrash talks about programming limitations, HDTV, and goes against the NVidia ratio quote (the one where Gates said the GPU would be 3 times as fast as current NVidia hardware). Get your fill of the talk here." Update: 10/03 03:54 PM by CT : hemos was out of town all weekend. He missed this story when we posted it the first time HAHA! Update: 10/03 07:33 PM by H : /me hangs head in shame.
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X-Box Limitations More

X-Box Limitations

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  • Huzzah, folks. Flame threads over a game console. www.ridiculopathy.com [ridiculopathy.com]
  • Actually... if you have a NVidia-card, you might as well run it under Linux now.
    Look at this [tomshardware.com].
    The miniscule performance difference is not really worth the reboot, if you have ok hardware that is.
  • The coolest thing about my job is that Xbox is a fixed platform. Performance is my favorite thing, and for the first time since the original 4.77 MHz PC, I can actually justify taking the time to understand things down to the metal and figure out how to really optimize, because the machine is never going to change.

    First time since the IBM PC this going to be a fixed platform?!? I guess he must have gone into a coma or something and completely missed the NES, Genesis, TG-16, SNES, Neo*Geo, Saturn, Play Station, etc. :-)

  • It will get hacked as soon as it gets released. It'll be a piece of cake. Of course everybody with their hands on one now has been bought by MS and signed NDAs, so don't expect them to help.

    I wouldn't mind using one as an mp3 player.
  • Ooops, I re-read your post. Herm. You didn't forgot about multipass.

    > What, the Xbox can only do four?

    No. The XBox will do 4 at each pass. So with two passes, you've got 8.

    Strangely, carmack says 8 passes for Doom (he said that 30 would give renderman-like quality, and that it'll be possible in a near future.), while Abrash says "4 textures" * "shadows done on a second pass".

    Fun is that both make 8. Sounds like Carmack and Abrash may have worked together :-)

    Cheers,

    --fred
  • ...to spread FUD around like cream cheese on a bagel. He certainly has a grudge against Microsoft.

    Who wants to bet that someone will try to squeeze Linux on this thing?

  • I guess he must have gone into a coma or something and completely missed the NES, Genesis, TG-16, SNES, Neo*Geo, Saturn, Play Station, etc. :-)

    i dont think he missed them. he probably couldnt justify taking the time to understand those systems down to the metal because he never worked on those platforms.

    he didnt say that it's the first fixed platform system since the original 4.77 MHz pc, he said it's the first time since working on the original 4.77 MHz pc that he's worked on a fixed platform.


    Darth -- Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre

  • Read my text again. I *PRAISE* the Mozilla project

    You do? Let me see...
    Their only saving grace was Mozilla, which amounts to them taking the generous work of a lot of other people and sticking their "Netscape" badge of dishonor on it

    That really looks like you are claiming Netscape are just taking other peoples' code and sticking their name on it, which is rather far from the truth.

    Next time, please re-read what was written before bashing... Especially over something that was never said to begin with.

    Take a look at the quote, it was said.

  • Mojo is time-weighted. I'm suggesting voting-infrequency-weighted, because if a person hardly ever marks a story down as OT, the times that they do mark it down, they're more likely to be right than a person who marks half of the stories down as OT.

    Though you'd start to have a problem if half the stories actually were OT. It's just a simple solution for a hopefully simple problem.
    --

  • It will take Playstation II hackers many headaches to do what will come naturally to the programmers of this simpler-yet-more-complex approach.

    The New Way(tm) to get the most out of your Nvidia hardware is to program the pipeline yourself. I know, because I've seen it. This is simpler? This is natural?

    Now, there are definitely programmers for whom this will be a natural process. I'm not going to tell you there aren't, because one of them is sitting behind me. However, I don't think these people are the norm. I think that most graphics programmers are going to slave away to find a few processes they can re-use, but they won't optimize their pipeline beyond a certain point, and they won't get the most out of the hardware either.

  • oh wait, Netscape's CSS support has flat-out sucked. Their only saving grace was Mozilla, which amounts to them taking the generous work of a lot of other people and sticking their "Netscape" badge of dishonor on it.

    How many people do you think look at IE's about box? Let's do that now:

    Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

    Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.
    Contains security software licensed from RSA Data Security Inc.
    Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.
    Contains SOCKS client software licensed from Hummingbird Communications Ltd.
    Contains ASN.1 software licensed from Open Systems Solutions, Inc.
    Multimedia software components, including Indeo(R); video, Indeo(R) audio, and Web Design Effects are provided by Intel Corp.
    Unix version contains software licensed from Mainsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1998-1999 Mainsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
    Mainsoft is a trademark of Mainsoft Corporation. Warning: This computer program is protected by copyright law and international treaties.
    Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this program, or any portion of it, may result in severe civil and criminal penalties, and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible under the law.

    So just how much of IE did Microsoft write, anyway? Personally, I'm kind of worried if IE still contains any actual code from Mosaic. Maybe that explains why it chokes periodically trying to manage its sockets.

    Hell, they couldn't even write their own SOCKS library. How pathetic.

  • Re:Wrong market?... (Score:3)

    by 64.28.67.48 ( 217783 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2000 @03:24AM (#736096)
    but that moderate percentage of pro-Linux anti-M$ people just ready to jump on the X-box and hack it _must_ have M$'s attention, at the very least.

    You're right. Microsoft is smart enough to know how to court developers -- they will encourage the cottage-industry guys, not stop them. If you hack PSX, you get a cease-and-desist letter. If you want to hack X-Box, here's some free tools! For a few bucks, here's a whole development kit. Philosophical differences aside, you give a toy like X-Box with the tools to do whatever you want with it, and hackers/developers will go wild with it.

    Does anyone know whether Lego uses child labor? Or maybe they ruthlessly ran the Bric Blocs people out of business. Who cares? They make cool inexpensive toys and let me do what I want with them. And if it's the same with X-Box, you'll see a lot of people say, "well, they're not all bad"...

    -------------

  • From the original post:

    Abrash... goes against the NVidia ratio quote (the one where Gates said the GPU would be 3 times as fast as current NVidia hardware).

    And then, from the actual interview:

    MA:I hadn't seen that quote. No, I personally wouldn't say three generations; more like either 1.5 or 2, depending on how you count. Not that it matters; the bottom line is that this is the most powerful chip I could imagine anyone getting into a console in 2001.

    <sarcasm>
    Ooh. Now there's a juicy scoop for you. The Big Cheese at the company says their technology is three generations ahead, and the lead tech guy on the project says it's more like two. What next?
    </sarcasm>

  • The thing that worries me, I remember when M$ release the first version of IE, and thinking "there is NO WAY this thing can be a threat to Netscape". I certainly don't want M$ to become the dominant set-top box company...

    Yeah, a browser with decent CSS support... like Netsc ... oh wait, Netscape's CSS support has flat-out sucked. Their only saving grace was Mozilla, which amounts to them taking the generous work of a lot of other people and sticking their "Netscape" badge of dishonor on it. No, it's not always a bad thing that IE took over.

    but that moderate percentage of pro-Linux anti-M$ people just ready to jump on the X-box and hack it _must_ have M$'s attention...

    Yes, but only because they'll be the first ones to eat their hats. Sometimes I wish that Linux extremists actually read their facts before mindlessly bashing a product. I find it humorous that the same crowd is willing to give Indrema [indrema.com] a chance without even seeing *any* proof of concept... and I thought Slashdotters were wary of "Set-top Entertainment Devices" ...

    _Adam Poulos;

  • First time since the IBM PC this going to be a fixed platform?!? I guess he must have gone into a coma or something and completely missed the NES, Genesis, TG-16, SNES, Neo*Geo, Saturn, Play Station, etc. :-)

    Easy on the guy, he works for MicroSoft.

  • And maybe Sony *won't* launch the PlayStation 2 in the U.S.

    And maybe Nintendo *won't* launch the Game Cube.

    And, considering that you've been moderated up, perhaps you could give a reason *why* Microsoft "wanted to cause problems for the PS2," a product currently not competing with any MS products.

    _Adam Poulos;

  • Re:Wrong market?... (Score:3)

    by Darren Winsper ( 136155 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2000 @03:35AM (#736101)
    Oh dear, another clueless idiot bashing the Mozilla project for no good reason. Oh well, someone has to dispell the myths...

    Did you know that the vast majority of the code in Mozilla was written by somebody with an @netscape.com address? If you did, then you're just slagging off Netscape for no good reason. If you didn't, you are a clueless moron who should not be making such comments as you did.

    Now, let's also not forget that Netscape have generously given us so much free code. Thanks to Mozilla now also being under the GPL (Or soon will be), a lot of open source projects will be able to benefit (Nautilus or Galeon anyone?).

    Next time, please operate the strange device known as your brain before posting.
  • The coolest thing about my job is that Xbox is a fixed platform. Performance is my favorite thing, and for the first time since the original 4.77 MHz PC, I can actually justify taking the time to understand things down to the metal and figure out how to really optimize, because the machine is never going to change.

    First time since the IBM PC this going to be a fixed platform?!? I guess he must have gone into a coma or something and completely missed the NES, Genesis, TG-16, SNES, Neo*Geo, Saturn, Play Station, etc. :-)

    I think what he meant that it's the first time he could justify getting down to the metal, blah blah blah. In between he worked on PCs (WinNT and Quake IIRC).
  • I have a TNT2 : every few months I try to get it to work but end up with a little box moving around my monitor saying "Horizontal Sync Out of Range."

    The refresh rates are all fine, I really don't understand what's going on. :(
  • yeah, Jesus Christ, for the amount of money the programmers got paid, and the amount of money the CONSUMERS paid for Office, you'd think they'd put a little more effort into fixing bugs. Or at least providing accurate and timely documentation on the file-format to ensure interoperability.
  • I'm glad this degenerated into name calling.

    I could tell how ready you were to throw down when I read from your comment a couple up:

    Look, Microsoft is not aiming this at any market except the Generation X'ers that fondly remember when console games were cool. Yeah, the current Playstation owners.

    You're just as predjudiced as the poster you replied to. See, console games are still cool, just like Amigas are still cool, and [legacy] mainframes are still cool even when PCs have more power. What you're missing in all this is that a video game doesn't become less fun because something more technologically advanced comes along. Gran Turismo 2 is still immensely fun to me, in spite of the existence of Quake Umpteen Arena of Doom(tm).

    The question is, what do you mean by Set-Top Box? In this modern day and age, a STB is generally considered to be something which combines internet access and cable or satellite push video. Video games have nothing to do with it except that they can be an additional feature.

  • that's what it all is. Every X-box has a special chip embedded and the moment you install Linux on it, subliminal messages wil start to slowly brainwash you. It might take a little while, but slowly and steadily each of you geeks will start wearing suits and sunglasses while whispering from the corner of your mouth about how the last salary-change from Mr. Gates is really in the best interest of the company.
  • In that case shouldn't we at least give M$ some credit for trying to market a product everybody else has given up on? If it's cheap and reliable, why the hell not? Just one thing, I will not do the helpdesk for them...

  • Do you guys think stuff like this is biased? (Score:4)

    by Operandi ( 231803 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2000 @02:49AM (#736108)
    For example, would such effort have been put into finding holes in DreamCast's ability if it were not spearheaded by Microsoft? While I dislike M$ as much as anyone else, I do like being my own devil's advocate... good for keeping from becoming narrow minded I believe.

    Regards

  • Learn to read (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It says 1.5 to 2 generations as opposed to 3 generations. That does not imply any particular speed ratio.

  • Deja vú (Score:5)

    by Troed ( 102527 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2000 @02:51AM (#736110) Homepage Journal
    or what do you think? [slashdot.org]
  • Since when has any Microsoft product ever lived upto it's hype?

    Since when has any product even remotely associated to something computer-like lived up to it's hype?


  • I'm getting that deja vu feeling again. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Posting a duplicate story [slashdot.org] a few weeks later I can understand, but posting one 3 days later is getting silly.
  • Who wants to bet that someone will try to squeeze Linux on this thing?

    Squeeze? It's positively roomy.

    Personally, I plan to put linux on all the current-generation consoles, except the one that's coming with it. Dreamcast is a little cramped, but once they have ethernet, why not? X-Box is a no-brainer. Playstation 2? Well, we can hope. That's a pretty powerful box, and it's going to have a hard disk and ethernet. It also has PCMCIA. And finally, Nintendo's new machine, which is a 400mhz PPC. What a bad-ass renderfarm member that would be...

  • Given that this has been hapenning a lot, lately, and causes egg-on-face syndrome to the /. crew because there are a lot of people who have nothing better to do than complain about this, how about a simple technological solution, namely:

    Almost every story submission contains at least one URI, correct? Why not modify the story processing queue to let Cmdr. Taco, Hemos, etc, see a by-title list of every story which has been posted in the past month that contained that URI? Or, as a story is being submitted to the page, have an automated system look for URIs in past stories and request verification? This could be done in a way that would not take a lot of time from the processing crew, but still cactch like 90% of the duplicates.

  • I meant if DreamCast WERE spearheaded by Microsoft, as in the motive behind this article was to band-wagon attack M$.
  • I pretty sure you should know this, but

    slashdot!=linux community

  • Re:Do you guys think stuff like this is biased? (Score:3)

    by iceT ( 68610 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2000 @03:37AM (#736117)
    I'm sorry, but 1/2 a dozen EasterEggs in Microsoft's code can NOT account for over 180MB of program being installed, nor the seconds it takes to load a program and all it's DLL's.

    The things that slow MS products down ARE design decisions. You'd be hard pressed to convince me that the #1 design consideration for Microsoft is to always choosing the user experience over execution speed. Example:

    - Displaying a HTML file called 'blank.htm' (that requires rendering, with graphics, no less) when a user stops a page from loading in IE, instead of not displaying anything.

    - Dynamic, self-modifying menus in Office2k that 'redraw' less popular items after a fixed amount of time.

    - Menu pop-ups that fade in and out by default, or 'roll-up'/'roll-down', instead of just appearing (Win2k).

    - Transparent drop shadows for cursors (Win2k)

    - a Web Server that needs to have a specific web browswer installed before you can install the server (IIS 4 under NT4)

    These are not 'programmer addons'. They are product features, designed in from the beginning...

  • Well.. how many bytes do you think a couple of names take? 20 bytes per name times let's say 150 names.. Voila: 3 KB. This isn't about cars, it's about software.
    Also, a lot of Free Software contains the authors names (yes - I'm talking about the binaries).


  • Belive me, I know that. I'm dreading the "Company Wide Rollout of Office 2000" this month. The previous poster would like you to think that the Easter Eggs are to blame (or even partially to blame) for the bloat in MS software.

    Easter Eggs are a time hounoured tradition of putting your name on something which otherwise wouldn't have your name anywhere near it. To blame them for the crappiness of MS software is just mindless, herd-like MS bashing.


    --

  • ...to the Metal (Score:3)

    by Boone^ ( 151057 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2000 @03:50AM (#736120)
    As a hardware guy, I kind of enjoyed Michael's comments [dailyradar.com] about taking the time to understand things down to the metal.

    It seems that in the PC gaming world, there are many "disjointed" efforts that haphazardly come together to make a game; programmers optimizing their code (or not) for the latest in OpenGL or Direct3D, then you've got the API handlers written by NVIDIA, ATI, 3dfx, et al translating them as best as possible to the graphic chipsets' native language.

    And, of course, all of this works on top of Microsoft's OS. That's 3 pretty big things that are unable to be tuned properly. They must have generic interfaces due to the plug-n-play nature of the PC business. The solution has always been to say stuff like "Pentium II 300MHz, 64MB RAM, 3D Card w/16MB required". With the Xbox, it seems like the designers will have control of 2 of the 3 items listed above, and with a standard set of hardware, optimizing 3d engine/game code has got to become a lot easier. Suddenly the requirements can easily transform from a PII 300 to a Pentium 166, the 64MB RAM turns into 16 MB RAM, and the Video Memory gets to drop considerably as well considering the target is NTSC/PAL output.

    Of course, like the Dreamcast, we'll be seeing VGA output boxes so we can play the newest games on our 21" monitors. And since NTSC resolution is hard on the eyes on a 21" monitor, the Xbox will need variable resolutions, forcing faster processors, bigger 3D cards, and more RAM, bringing us full circle to where we started. :P I think the Xbox will be wildly successful if users treat it as what it is: a closed-box console used for gaming, not general applications + games.

  • As long as I can get HALO [bungie.com] :-)

  • Sounds like your monitor can't cope. Does it work under windoze?
  • No-one can buy one. Stop fussing about something that won't arrive until at least Christmas next year (and that's just in the US), if it arrives at all.
  • I fucking hate when some fucking moron complains about a video game crashing and then harkening back to the good old days of the NES. When you run a game on a Windows PC you've running a software application on top of a bunch of other software applications. When you run a game on a Nintendo you're running software that is basically running directly on the hardware with little or no abstraction. There is an anormous difference in the way you program for a console and a PC. Your "pretty plain PC" is just as indescrepent as any other PC, your hardware and drivers for said hardware conform to generalities and guidelines, not specific criteria.
  • DirectX limits the programmers? Limits them compared to what? OpenGL? Yeah, OpenGL sure does open doors in the programming world. Where the fuck do you get this shit? DirectX is not only a set of graphic libraries like OpenGL is. DirectX does 3D, 2D, sound, and periphrial interface. By programming directly to DirectX X-Box programmers will be able to pump out games without memorizing the console's internal circuitry. You have to realize that programmers aren't limited to using functions contained in the kernel and media libraries, they'll be able to program directly to the hardware bypassing any abstraction which in the case of the PlayStation has really extended the system's lifespan.
  • You're pretty ignorant of several points which is something you ought to be ashamed of. First of all Apple has little if anything to do with the ownership of the PPC chipset, it is owned, produced, and developed by Motorola and IBM. Apple had an exclusive rights deal with Motorola on certain product lines (the PPC 7400 specifically). Being 12 you might not remember that there used to be PPC workstations floating around years ago, you could even get Windows NT for them. M$ and PCs suceeded over Macs in general because Apple's management was a bunch of dickwads who decided to throw the company into niche markets that didn't pan out besides the fact that they exclusively produce their hardware and software whereas M$ merely produces software and lets everyone else fight over hardware to run it on (this is collectively known as market economy).
  • I don't know about you, but I could write a flight simulator with the functionality of the one in excel in less that 200k. (assuming, of course, that I could use OpenGL for the graphics)

    ------


  • Of course he won't fix it, that would be admitting he was wrong in the first place. If you haven't noticed yet, people don't like admitting that they were wrong. Christ, Rob, et.al., can't even be bothered to check for spelling errors and redundant postings, let alone be bothered with actually correcting the inherent flaws in the system *that they placed here*!

    The whole system is fucked. Karma?? WTF? People trying to get karma?? What's up with that? Who cares? People selling accounts with high karma on ebay? Fuck man, my kid sister's Garbage Pail Kids cards from the 80's are more valuable. Meta-Moderation?? Fuck me gently with a chainsaw Veronica. Secret sid forums?? Please, how *look at my l33t secret club*'ish can you get? You know, maybe Slashdot wouldn't be inaccessable for large portions of time if the code wasn't this overgrown, bloated fat spagetti mess of half-assed hacks and pure bullshit. Can you say "overkill"?

    I used to enjoy coming to this site, I really did. But ever since the Andover takeover, this place has really taken a nose dive in the proverbial dumper. Absolutely no journalistic integrity, not even the slightest bit of factual checking on stories, blatant pandering to the mob's worst emotional buttons. It's not "Slashdot, News for Nerds". It's "Slashdot, because National Enquirer was taken. (Not that we respect trademarks though)". Face it kids, this isn't Rob's personal site anymore, that went out the door when he took the money. Now, not that I give a flying fuck about Malda and crew, but this site is ultimately owned/controlled by VALinux, which purports to be a respectable company. How long is VALinux going to keep this cesspool on the books? Don't they care that through continual backing of this site they align themselves with the same bunch of degenerates that back shows like Jerry Springer? Is that the image that VALinux wants to project?

    And the biggest joke of them all? Losers complaining about a) their own karma (yes you Signal 11) and b) even worse, losers complaining about *other* people's karma. These are the biggest losers of them all. Do you mean to tell me that some arbitrary fucking score on this troll ridden, universally laughed at and mocked website that we call Slashdot really matters? Jesus H. Christ, move out of your parents basement and get a life.

    All of you.

    So what is one to do? Quit? Leave? Fuck no! I for one am going to watch this bloated pig die and rot away from the inside. I'm going to enjoy wallowing in the putrid stench that is Slashdot, gorging myself on its bloated teat. My screeds will be long, they will be nasty. You will know I'm here.

    Fuck you very much.

  • I think your brain got waterlogged in the shower. Do you know how companies like Sony and Sega make money off their consoles? It sure as hell isn't the sale of the hardware (you'll notice prices drop all the time). So that leaves one avenue for revenue. Yes, thats right: LICENSING! Gold star for you. Part of the price of all those games you buy for your PlayStation or Dreamcast goes back to Sony and Sega. This fee is merely for the privilege to produce video games for said console. This practice makes these console companies, yes another star for you: millions of dollars! Wow this isn't too hard now is it. A video game console is not about the hardware it is all about the games that are exclusively available for it. Legend of Zelda has sold oodles of copies, yet it is only available for N64. Its games like that that make console makers cream their jeans. Consoles have a distinct advantage over PCs technologically that you're not recognizing. They have documented and stardard hardware, there's no fucked up drivers running some odd network card. This allows programmers to easily program right onto the hardware with no abstraction of media libraries or kernels. You're also forgetting that TV screens are quite large and their lack of crispness lends to a natrual anti-aliased blur look to things displayed on them. My TV is 25" and I have a several hundred watts of surround sound speakers hooked up to it. Until computer monitors regularly exceed 21" and speakers for them top 100 watts gaming consoles will still hold a place in people's living rooms.

  • Why I love redundant /. stories (Score:3)

    by Mtgman ( 195502 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2000 @09:37AM (#736130)
    I can just go back to the older story, cut and paste all the high-scoring comments, sit back and watch the karma just roll in. Thanks Hemos!

    Steven
  • There is a huge difference between extremely optimized hardware and fast hardware. You can have the latest googleflop hardware that only performs 5% better than the model thats two years old but people can code to it down to a single clock. Look at the PlayStation, games released when the system was released don't look as good as games just released for it. Shit if you're really in doubt take a look at how well the GeForce performs with its original drivers against the latest ones released. Taking time in development often means you won't need a hardware upgrade every 6 months to perform adequately.
  • Might I sugest that some kind of story warning system be implemented wherein the story would be showen to say 100 randomly selected readers, who loaded the main slashdot page at the right time, before it is actually posted.

    Unfortunately that would delay the stories significantly. (This IS a NEWS medium, after all.)

    A simpler, faster, and more automated method would be to have the posting software check any hyperlinks in the story against those in the other stories posted in the last week or so, and bring them to the editor's attention.
  • Well.. how many bytes do you think a couple of names take? 20 bytes per name times let's say 150 names.. Voila: 3 KB. This isn't about cars, it's about software.
    Thank you for playing, but I'm sorry that answer is incorrect.
    We're not just talking about a couple of names stuck in the code somewhere. We are talking about a moderately functional flight simulater contained in the .exe to display the names. You may have only 150KB of "names" but you've got another 4MB of CRAP to display those names. Take a look at an older version of Office, compare the size of the Excel .exe to the word .exe. For the longest time I used to wonder why Excel had such a huge filesize for the .exe.
    Free software is a slightly different argument, the user is not really _paying_ for the software, so s/he has less to complain about "extras" being included in the code.
    It's not that I don't think the authors should get recognition for their work, but they could just as easily include their names in the Help->About menu.
  • And that's why Bill Gates will personally install booby traps in EVERY X-Box that will go off if anybody tries to open it. That'll be his revenge against those Linux haxors.
  • It was hardly a slight simulator. It was more like "asteroids" in the first person. There was no physics modeling or anything like tht - VERY code light. Calling it a flight simulator is like calling Wolfenstein-3D Quake3.
  • The previous poster would like you to think that the Easter Eggs are to blame (or even partially to blame) for the bloat in MS software.
    No, I would like you to beleive that the Easter Eggs are a painfully obvious sign that M$ and/or it's employees give practically no consideration to the overall size or efficiency of the finished product. If the Easter Eggs are things we can SEE, how many more things that we cannot see do you think there are? I'd be willing to bet that the code in just about any M$ product could be tightened up TREMENDOUSLY. M$ has the manpower and the budget and the experience to create some highly efficient stuff. For as long as they've been around, we should have an office suite that can install in 20MB worth of space, not 200MB.

    For the most part, Easter Egss didn't exist until companies, like Microsoft, realized that they had the users by the balls. Look through some programs from the early 80's or late 70's and see how many Easter Eggs you find. I'm not saying that these programs are feature-for-feature indentical in any way to what we have today, but programs from that era were MUCH more tight and efficient than anything we have today.

    Ignoring the bloatware and crap that we call software today is simply sticking your head in the sand.
  • Carmack stated that he's designing for hardware that doesn't exist yet. The XBox hardware *does* exist.
  • I would like to point out that NTSC has a total of 640*480*30fps=9,216,000 pixels per second,.... [snip] ... With that in mind, and neglecting overdraw, you don't need more than 12,000,000 polygons/sec anyway. If your rate is steady, that is.

    I don't think Microsoft is stupid enough to limit the Xbox only to TV resolutions. If I get one (which is doubtful, but let's assume so for the sake of argument) there is no way I am going to plug it into a TV. A consumer TV is an outdated, horrible, blurry, flickering display platform. It sucks bowling balls through a garden hose. The only reason it is used as a computer display is because it allows people NOT to buy an expensive computer monitor with a smaller screen.

    In any case, if I get an Xbox, it's going to get plugged into a decent computer monitor. And, of course, if the highest resolution it'll support will be 640x480 with 60Hz refresh rate...


    Kaa
  • Update: 10/03 07:33 PM by H: /me hangs head in shame.
    my clock only says 4:11pm right now and i think i am in the same timezone as him?(eastern)
  • Xenex, check to make sure those HREF tags are closed before you hit the sumbit button, man!
    Putz.
  • Begins! Ha, more like "comes to its end."

    Really though, with that attitude, software will continue to be more bloated and buggy. Just because I have a 60Gig HD, it doesn't mean that the software I run can be bloated because "I've got plenty of space." Very flawed logic.

    Dom
  • You are so naive... I am fully aware that there have been (and still are) a good deal of PPC variations out there, including my personal RS/6000 250s. Don't start a flame war (or a contest of intelligence) with me because you'll end up looking like a moron. Apple's execs didn't throw their product into a niche market any more than Microsoft did. Apple may exclusively produce thier own hardware since they disallowed clones from companies like PowerCurve and (my very own) Umax. Software on the other hand... Have you ever heard of Linux? or NetBsd? and you yourself said M$ NT runs on PPC chips... Besides, I never said that Apple owns any part of the PPC chipset, I was using the parallel of PC CISC clones vs. PowerPC RISC processors, so perhaps you should learn to pay attention and not be so anxious to insult your elders, kid. Get a real job and stop trying to sound educated.
  • So again, why? A number of people here have previously said they'll be lining up to buy this thing when it comes out, so maybe one of them can explain where I've gone wrong? It just makes no sense to me whatsoever.
    So basically, your question is: why are consoles and console games big business? Well, here's why I will probably be lining up for one of these puppies. The whole thing will probably cost a little more than the latest PC graphics card, and give better performance than you will get unless you happen to have a brand new PC. My home PC is set up at a desk for work. That's where I spend a lot of my time already; it's not where I care to spend my leisure time. It's also a few years old. Fine for the work I do at home, but limited for games. But while I enjoy playing games, I don't love them so much that I care to spend the price of a brand new PC and large screen high resolution monitor for my rec room. A few hundred bucks is about it. The TV in my rec room isn't high res, and probably won't be for a few years, until prices drop quite a bit--I'm just not that much of a videophile. Given that I will save hundreds of dollars on the console, as compared to a new PC and monitor, I don't really object to paying a few extra bucks in license fees for the games themselves--so Microsoft will ultimately be able to make a profit (although knowing Microsoft, they probably will let most of the profits go to developers for the first year or two, to hook them into developing for their system).
  • Amen Bro,
    I use Abiword and its 10x better the MSword, and it fits on a 1.44meg floppy!
  • Just because I have a 60Gig HD, it doesn't mean that the software I run can be bloated because "I've got plenty of space." Very flawed logic.

    That attitude makes a lot of sense to me. Software design is a matter of tradeoffs. If software was more efficient, that would mean it would either be less flexible, and/or more buggy, have less features, be released later, etc. The bottom line is that optimization takes time and that's time that could be spent on other things.

    Frankly I would hate it if Office didn't have some of the features I use just so it could run on someone's 486. I need those features more than I need speed, with the computer I have.

  • It was hardly a slight simulator. It was more like "asteroids" in the first person. There was no physics modeling or anything like tht - VERY code light. Calling it a flight simulator is like calling Wolfenstein-3D Quake3.
    Okay, fine, it's not a real flight sim. _But_ that doesn't change the fact that it was a useless inclusion.
  • Does anyone know whether Lego uses child labor? Or maybe they ruthlessly ran the Bric Blocs people out of business. Who cares?

    Well you should care. It certainly turns my stomach to know that kids not much older than my little nephew are making clothes and shoes in the name of the almighty corporate share price.
  • http://slashdot.org /commen ts.pl?sid=00/10/03/1240228&cid=5 [slashdot.org]

    http://slashdot.or g/comme nts.pl?sid=00/10/03/1240228&cid=17 [slashdot.org]

    And I saw this comment twice already, there are probably many more. In fact, this comment has been posted in just about everything I can think of. A problem with /.? No, a problem with people like you.


    _______________
    you may quote me
  • Two reasons:
    • The memory devices and other componenets used on consoles are patented; only the console maker can authorize production of console software. For example, there wasn't an NES demoscene [parodius.com] until the NES patents expired.
    • Console makers are suing manufacturers of cartridge and disc dumping hardware (such as Bung) out of existence.
    The Xbox seems more open-spec than traditional consoles (it's quite like a PC) but it can only be truly open if it becomes the X11 [xfree86.org]box (as has happened to some i-opener models).
    <O
    ( \
    XPlay Tetris On Drugs [8m.com]!
  • This really is getting kind of pitiful, Hemos. Many posts on Slashdot get moderated down because they are inflammatory comments often from trolls. After reading the article you posted here, I have a hard time believing that what you posted was anything other than a troll.
    Before this gets moderated down, let me clarfy that. As one of the senior posters on Slashdot, you owe it to your fellow posters to post quality material. I don't think you've done that. While the link you posted is a good article, all you did was bitch and moan for your couple sentences about Microsoft. Is the idea that MS is a bad or evil or monopolistic company a new idea? Nope.
    The reality is that this typifies much of the Linux community at this point. Rather than create a gaming console that runs linux or bsd or whatnot, it is far easier to sit on the sidelines and complain about this-or-that. It seems like the Linux community has really suffered in the last year... Rather than develop new technologies, the community has reverse-engineered other technologies. Rather than reverse-engineer new technologies, the community has been inclined to bitch.
    It comes down to the simple fact of put-up or shut-up. Rather than continue to post 'oh Microsoft Sucks' articles, come up with some constructive ideas, help move things forward.
  • they will take a loss with the hardware and make their $$$ with the software.

    Hence, the inevitable linux hacks are a very serious threat. Imagine a kickass web server/firewall for $300 running only open source software subsidized by Mr. Gates and company.

    They are in the identical situation to CueCat. We can expect them to behave just like CueCat, if not worse. There will definitely be great entertainment when they attempt to clamp down on us hax0rs.

  • I hate to submit a "me too" post, and have resisted thus far, but this issue of repeating stories really is getting out of hand. I don't know which is worse, repeating a story from a month ago (a la the Gamecube story) or from a few days ago (a la the Xbox story). Either way it appears sloppy to the reader.

    I don't like to complain about a website that provides this much content for nothing, but there really should be a system in place to prevent this from happening.

    ----
    rip20c
  • Maybe there IS no X Box, maybe M$ just wanted to cause problems for the PS2.

    Ahh, the delicious irony. Microsoft's vapourware campaign is doing unto the PS2 what Sony has done unto the Dreamcast.

  • That is a point. But you are reading /., so you are probably a PC gamer anyway. Average console buyers --the kind that dont have PCs, or use their PCs just for (home)work-- use TVs for their gaming, and they even like that blurry merge-in of the pixels. So you are in a minority there.

    I remember another interview with Carmack (won't bother to look up the URL, you will have to trust me on this) where he said that rather than increase resolution, he would up the frame rate and keep the eye candy. But hey, he's only the programmer. I am gilty of going for the 1240x1024 too, sometimes.
  • <i>An outdoor scene can have a scene complexity of 3.5 - 5 (or average). So at complexity 5, each pixel is overwritten, on average, 5 times</i>

    Not to be snotty, but... Where do you get these figures from? I thought VIS (the visibility table compiler for Quake games) took care of those invisble poligons and reduced overdraw.
  • Yes, you are right. I got passes mixed up. Yet I am sure that by the time Xbox hits the streets there will be a NVidia chipset for PCs that does eight textures per pass. Or sixteen, whatever. It seems hardcore gamers will pay anything, so the race isn't gonna slow down any soon.

    30 texture passes would give renderman-like quality? hmm... Time to go hit Google [google.com].

    Mark Peercy of SGI has shown [bluesnews.com], quite surprisingly, that all Renderman surface
    shaders can be decomposed into multi-pass graphics operations if two
    extensions are provided over basic OpenGL [...] It may take hundreds or thousands of passes, but it clearly defines an approach with no fundamental limits.

    I would appreciate it if you could provide the URL where Carmack says 30 will do. That is only 1.5 generatios away from 4! (well, 3 really ;).

  • In my opinion, stuff like that is the last remnant of the hacker ethos still alive at Microsoft... it proves that they're not all "borg" as many slashdotters think; they're in for good fun coding as much as the next guy... I personally thought that the raycaster/ "Doom" clone in Excel was cool as hell...

    You guys all want Micro$oft to "get hip" to new technology/business models/whatever but don't want them to pull a prank once in a while?

    (God, didn't any of you ever screw around in compsci class?)

  • In my experience with buying game systems the really good games don't come out until the second or third generation. (about a year to two after the system is released) It seems that is when designers have a good handle on the ins and outs of programming. None the less I am gonna wait for the Nintendo cube, but then I am a Zelda addict!
  • What I'm talking about here doesn't really have anything to do with features, flexibility, or ability to run on older hardware. It has more to do with laziness and apathy on the part of programmers.

    That attitude makes a lot of sense to me. Software design is a matter of tradeoffs. If software was more efficient, that would mean it would either be less flexible, and/or more buggy, have less features, be released later, etc. The bottom line is that optimization takes time and that's time that could be spent on other things.

    Ok here's another tradeoff: I'll code my software in a sloppy, inefficient way so I can get it to market faster and provide the user with lots of new features (selling-points). Now, I, as a user of that software am pleased with the the new features, and speed in which it is delivered to me, but that feeling of pleasure soon goes away when my efficiency takes a hit because the software does not work properly, or is unstable, or is slow.

    Bloatedness, instability, design-flaws, etc, are all symptoms of the same disease.

    Who says that you can't have all the features of Office running on a 486. If Office were programmed with efficiency in mind you could. It would also mean that it would run faster and take up less space on your computer as well (even if you might not notice the difference; it's still true). It also means that you could run more software on your computer at the same time. Then maybe you wouldn't have to buy a new computer every three years so that you can run the latest software packages.

    A few questions for you:

    1. Why would an efficient software design be less flexible?
    2. Why would an efficient software design be more buggy?
    3. Would an efficient software design necessarily have less features?
    4. Wouldn't you rather have software that took longer to develop, but was more efficient and stable?
    5. Have you ever been hynotized by Bill Gates?

    Dom

    osm is an artist; I do not question his ways --troll

  • Gosh. I hate google. Now you want me to back up my claims !

    Seeking. Mmm. You are right. I screwed it badly. Don't know where this '30' figure came from.

    Added a bit of extra misinformation into slashdot. Sorry for that.

    Cheers,

    --fed
  • Taco could do with hacking a script together that scans each story post for 'furby autopsy' and 'textmode quake'. That would probably cut redundant stories at a stroke.


    ---
  • Well you should care. It certainly turns my stomach to know that kids not much older than my little nephew are making clothes and shoes in the name of the almighty corporate share price.

    Hmmmmmm.

    So you would feel much better if kids not much older than your little nephew were starving to death, working as prostitutes, or stealing to survive instead of having a comparatively safe, comfortable, and highly paid job in the garment industry?

    Fuck, some people like this guy are such idiots it makes me want to puke. Wake up and smell the coffee (or cliché of your choice). The real world is a harsh place, you know. Who do you think would feed these children if they DIDN'T have a job? People who actually care about the welfare of children should be BLESSING the garment industry for taking them off the streets, not trying to put them back on.

    Or maybe people like cyber-vandal aren't REALLY the complete fucking idiots they appear to be. Maybe they just don't like it that the under-6 prostitute supply is drying up in Bangkok as the former prostitutes move into the garment industry and other "expolitative" industries, and they're trying to get the kids out of a job so that there's a bigger labor pool for their sick pedophiliac urges. But maybe not.
  • And, considering that you've been moderated up, perhaps you could give a reason *why* Microsoft "wanted to cause problems for the PS2," a product currently not competing with any MS products.
    First, I wasn't moderated up, I simply posted at "3".
    I highly doubt that M$ is just causing problems for the PS/2, that was offered as a paranoid sort of statement. My point was that people are _already_ proclaimin the X-Box as the saviour of the ocnsole-world. However, the X-box is little more than a comples "thought" right now. It doesn't really exist to the public,and we have NO realistic idea when it will exist. However, thousands (hundres of thousands) or sheeple will wait and wait and wait until M$ get's the X Box done. In the mean time, these people aren't buying competitive products because they are buying into the hype of M$. _If_ the X Box is like any other major M$ product lately it will ship Wayyy behind schedule (probably 3 weeks after X Mas), and will only support 3/4 of it's stated features in the first version.

  • wash away all the hype and what do we have? we have logic.

    it is however many 'generations' away that nvidia wants it to be. if they want to release 3 new 'generations' of cards between now and then, they can.

    but in reality, it exists now, it has been thought of now, it is of the current generation. they are just choosing to hold it back, or maybe it's still super buggy. my guess is the hardware is pretty much ready and they're giving software developers more time.

    in any case, we've gone over before how stupid the x-box is. anyone who buys it is a moron. use your money for a PC which you can upgrade, not a small crappy PC which you cannot (which is what the x-box is.)
    ...dave
  • Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] has had story moderation for quite some time.

    But yeah... I think readers should be able to vote a story as "old". To avoid trolls from taking over, perhaps preference could be given to people whose ratio of offtopic-votes to comment-posts is lower.
    --

  • Wrong market?... (Score:3)

    by BrK ( 39585 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2000 @02:52AM (#736176) Homepage
    I'm not much of a gamer, so my comment may be totally off-base...
    Doesn't it seem like the X-box is going to be marketed directly toward a crowd with a large population of anti-MICROS~1 people? Sure, there's lots of people that have never heard of Linux, and think that Bill Gates is a visionary, but that moderate percentage of pro-Linux anti-M$ people just ready to jump on the X-box and hack it _must_ have M$'s attention, at the very least.

    The thing that worries me, I remember when M$ release the first version of IE, and thinking "there is NO WAY this thing can be a threat to Netscape". I certainly don't want M$ to become the dominant set-top box company...
  • read the slashdot [slashdot.org] discussion on this here [slashdot.org]
    can entire news posts be set to -1, redundant?

  • You're final argument made me so angry that I wanted to kick your spotty, greasy-haired head in. How dare you, you little prick.

    That was a damn fine troll, wasn't it? :) And I only got one Offtopic on it, even though I posted at +2 and everything. Hmph. Are the moderators ASLEEP?

  • Repeat (Score:2)

    by jjr ( 6873 )
    I saw the same article two days ago on slashdot please this stuff needs to stop.
  • And the downward spiral begins...
  • It's a glitch in the matrix, it usualy happen when they change something...

    Be afraid, be very afraid....
  • BG said that the new nVidia chip would be three *generations* ahead of current chips, not that it would be 3x as fast. There's a VERY big difference.

    Abrash said it would be 1.5-2 *generations* ahead of current chips.

    -JF

  • Misinformation (Score:5)

    by CaseyB ( 1105 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2000 @02:59AM (#736205)
    It's an interesting story, but the lead-in above is entirely misleading.

    Abrash has nothing but good things to say about the new hardware. Granted, he works for the company, but he has more than enough credibility outside of the Microsoft arena for me to listen when he speaks.

    He talks about the constraints that ALL hardware-level developers have to deal with, but he says nothing that indicates the X-Box hardware is especially limited.

    To wit: "the bottom line is that this is the most powerful chip I could imagine anyone getting into a console in 2001"

    "Ratios" in processing power are not mentioned anywhere in the article. Apparently some overenthusaistic PR guy (probably not Gates) said it was 3 generations ahead of current parts, and Abrash says that's a bit of an overstatement. It's merely 1.5 or 2 generations ahead. Wow, that really sucks. :)

  • So far, the PSX 2 has yet to prove itself. The X Box is already there. I can't wait. :)

    It would seem that you are caught in MICROS~1's hypnotic rays. If you'll take a journey down to the local toy store, you will find that the X Box is not "already there". It's no where, it's nt sold yet, and it very well could be a HUGE, elaborate hoax by M$. Maybe there IS no X Box, maybe M$ just wanted to cause problems for the PS2.

  • Re:Do you guys think stuff like this is biased? (Score:5)

    by Evangelion ( 2145 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2000 @03:01AM (#736207) Homepage

    Goddammit people - the flight sim in Excel was put there as an easter egg by the programmers, so thier names would show up *somewhere* in the goddamn product. This was not a Microsoft thing, this was not in the design document. It was a nifty little extra put in by the programmers so they could actually leave thier names in the prodcut. For fuck's sake, if you're going to attack MS, at least attack them for something they did.

    --
  • Goddammit people - the flight sim in Excel was put there as an easter egg by the programmers, so thier names would show up *somewhere* in the goddamn product. This was not a Microsoft thing, this was not in the design document. It was a nifty little extra put in by the programmers so they could actually leave thier names in the prodcut. For fuck's sake, if you're going to attack MS, at least attack them for something they did.

    Sorry, bloatware is not "nifty little extra".
    Excel was shipped by MS, MS paid the programmers to write a spreadsheet. They _didn't_ pay them to spend who knows how long (even if it was only a couple of hours) to add a flight sim to a _spreadsheet_ that offered NO benefits. Of course "MS" didn't do it, "MS" is a corporation, but it's employees _did_ do it, and they're assinine for doing so.
    Who decided in the first place that they even _needed_ to have their names on the product? Do you want every guy on the line who builds your car to sign his name somewhere? How about if every guy on the car assembly line drops in a 5lb hunk of steel with his name engraved on it? Then you can carry around an extra 1/2 ton of shit with you WHEREEVER you drive.
  • For example, would such effort have been put into finding holes in DreamCast's ability if it were not spearheaded by Microsoft?

    Well, it's to be expected, isn't it. Microsoft is currently the biggest maker of micro-computer software and with that comes pros (they get to play the FUD game) and cons (they get to be scrutinized more than others).

    Feeling sorry for them is like feeling sorry for movie stars that whine that they can't ever go out in public without being hounded to death by fans.

    Too damn bad. It goes with the territory...

    And if you think it's just anti-microsoft, I've seen a horrible amount of flames and criticisms leveraged toward the #1 Linux distro too...

  • My original post was meant to convey that Microsoft has brought a lot of this bashing upon themselves by doing things that are not in the end users best interest. As an example I mentioned an Easter Egg in Excel that ate up about 3-4MB of space (from an era when a 200MB HDD was big, this is about 2% of your drive capacity). I could've provided other examples, but this one sprung to mind first.

    I said the same rules don't always apply to Freeware, because it is FREE. Sort of like the "beggars can't be choosers" line. If I _pay_ a company for a spreadsheet, I expect to get a _spreadsheet_. No more, and no less. I expect that product to be resonably efficient and to work as advertised. I do _not_ expect that product to be full of bugs, or other USELESS things that consume resources on my PC that I also _paid_ for.
    If I D/L a FREE piece of software, then I should realize that because the author is not getting any income from this software it may not be as stable or efficient as a commercial piece of code (although a lot of freeware is MORE stable than commercial stuff...). I also should recognize that the Freeware code was most likely a project that the author takes personal interest in, and he may have added Easter Eggs to amuse himself. If I don't like the Freeware I can delete it, and I haven't lost anything but time. If I don't like the Payware, I'm stuck. The stupid-ass license prevents me from returning it, and the manufacturer will tell me to piss-off (more or less) if I ask for a more efficient piece of code.

    My argument remains the same. Microsoft has made a history of following the dollar, rather than the users requests. By doing so, they have become quite financially successful, but have also brought the wrath of many users upon themselves. I do not belive that MS is the only commercial software company with Easter Eggs, but they are the only commercial software company that is making a console box that is the topic of this story.

  • Duplicate/really old stories WAS: Re:Deja vú (Score:5)

    by milkman1 ( 139222 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2000 @03:12AM (#736223)
    It seem like there is a redudant story post every day or two these days.
    Might I sugest that some kind of story warning system be implemented wherein the story would be showen to say 100 randomly selected readers, who loaded the main slashdot page at the right time, before it is actually posted. I would suggest a system where the main page is randomly replaced with just the prospective new story. Comment posting would be disabled. There would also be several options for moderating the story. I would suggest:
    Redudant
    Ancient
    OT (Not relevent to slashdot)
    Great story

    It would also have a box for explantion (forinstance to link to the older story)
    The results of the moderation would be fed to a real time display shown to the poster of the story. This would allow them to cancel or delay unneeded redudant/otherwise bad postings.
  • I would like to point out that NTSC has a total of 640*480*30fps=9,216,000 pixels per second, and Pal has 720*576*25fps=10,368,000 pixels per second. (Please don't knock me over the specifics, I might be slightly wrong about NTSC -being European, I've never actually worked with it- and I know that Pal has a "square pixel" mode where horizontal resolution is 768, right? Just trying to give you nice thousands here.) With that in mind, and neglecting overdraw, you don't need more than 12,000,000 polygons/sec anyway. If your rate is steady, that is.

    This is why I think Abrash's words are very revealing:

    MA: It's impossible to tell what performance developers will get until people are actually programming the hardware. It's also hard to evaluate because the chip is so programmable; how do you compare 125 mtris/s with 1 texture to, say, 12.5 mtris/s with a custom lighting model, along with 4 textures doing reflective bump mapping and a combiner program doing custom shading, plus shadows done on a second pass? It's not a matter of raw polygons anymore, but rather of the impact on image quality of the intersection of many factors: polygons, vertex shading, multitexture, texture lookups, pixel combiners, antialiasing, and multipass.
    I am not a graphics überhacker, and don't have the answer on that comparison, but the second option (the way the Xbox design team have taken) sure sounds nicer to programmers. And you don't really need any more triangles anyway. Hmm. It will take Playstation II hackers many headaches to do what will come naturally to the programmers of this simpler-yet-more-complex approach.

    On a related note: In a recent interview [slashdot.org], John Carmack revealed that the Doom 2000 engine will have eight texture passes per polygon. (I am adding the emphasis). What, the Xbox can only do four? It is clear that id wants us PC gamers to keep our leer on when talking to those lowly conlosers. Hah!

  • Re:Wrong market?... (Score:3)

    by nihilogos ( 87025 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2000 @03:13AM (#736225)
    I'm not much of a gamer either (although I like to play lots of Quake 3) but I think the market they're aiming at is the Playstation and like game consoles. These people aren't really noted for anti MS sentiments and would probably go for anything as long as the rendering looks nice. I like nice 3D stuff, MS platforms currently kick Linux's butt in this department, and I have a Win98 partition solely for 3D studio and Quake 3.

  • Re:Misinformation (Score:3)

    by tjwhaynes ( 114792 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2000 @03:17AM (#736226)

    "Ratios" in processing power are not mentioned anywhere in the article. Apparently some overenthusaistic PR guy (probably not Gates) said it was 3 generations ahead of current parts, and Abrash says that's a bit of an overstatement. It's merely 1.5 or 2 generations ahead. Wow, that really sucks. :)

    This 1.5/2 generations makes perfect sense given what we know of NVIDIAs processor roadmap. Given that they have new processor releases, we will see at least the successor to the GeForce 2 before the XBox hits the shelves, and possibly another incremental improvement on that as well (like GeForce2 -> GeForce2 Ultra). So 1.5 -> 2 generations is entirely in line with what we are likely to see on the NVIDIA cards in our PCs in the same time frame.

    Cheers,

    Toby Haynes

  • Um, hello? Abrash works for Microsoft, OK? In fact, as he states in response to the first question, he's a "Software Development Engineer (the generic Microsoft developer title), Xbox Advanced Technology Group". I don't think the motive behind the article is a direct attack against MS, although the Slashdot editorial team seem to enjoy such attacks as much as the next geek. Rather, I think the interview (which was posted by Daily Radar [dailyradar.com] a few days ago) is cool, since it really asks someone who knows his stuff when it comes to graphics hacking.

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