Tuesday, July 4, 2000

Abrash on the XBox -- 10:52 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Maarten pointed out this article on Dr. Dobb's Journal where Michael Abrash (formerly of id, now of Microsoft's XBox division) gives a glimpse at the XBox' graphics. One of the most interesting comments is this:

The bottom line is that Xbox is a well-balanced graphics system that will generally be capable of approaching the specs being claimed for it. "Capable" is not the same as "easy" -- this level of performance will require exemplary programming, taking full advantage of the fact that Xbox is a fixed platform to which code can be carefully tuned. Microsoft will encourage this by providing plenty of sample code and documentation showing how to push the hardware to its limits, via a version of DirectX 8 optimized and extended to support every feature of Xbox. For those who prefer OpenGL, NVIDIA will provide a fully Xbox-enhanced version.

Good to know there will be an OpenGL option so DX8 won't be rammed down developers' throats. I also can't help thinking that games that will be developed on the XBox and then ported to Windows should run rather nicely on NVIDIA graphics cards . . .

Abrash also adds this article which goes into more depth on the subject of the XBox' memory bandwidth. In that article he verifies that the 64M of memory in the XBox will be 200Mhz DDR SDRAM. Just a warning, both articles are very technical and may cause your brain to cave in.

News for 07/04/2000

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