The Microsoft Xbox
General Info
Microsoft confirmed months of suspicion when Bill Gates officially announced the Xbox console via a Web-wide news feed in March 2000. The Xbox was then unveiled in full at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this past January where the WWF's The Rock joined Bill Gates on stage. At E3 2001 this past May, Microsoft announced that the console would be launched November 8, 2001, for $299. Since the success of the Atari 2600 of the 1980s, American companies have tried to jump into the video game console market with limited returns. But Microsoft has something 3DO and Phillips never had--a seemingly bottomless pit of money to develop, market, and support such a device. Microsoft is prepared to come out swinging with what it contends is the most powerful console to ever be released and $500 million in marketing cash.
Equal in size to a VCR, the Xbox could go down in history as the largest video game console ever. Its basic rectangular shape is augmented by a large X formed into the top of the console. In the top of the console rests a circular green jewel bestowed with the Xbox logo. The console includes four USB controller ports, a front-loading 5x DVD drive, as well as eject and back buttons on the front. The back of the console houses a standard audio/video-out port, a digital-out port for HDTV, and a power supply outlet. The Xbox will also include an extensive front end that's being called the Dashboard. The Xbox Dashboard will let you adjust the console's settings and control its operation.
Instead of splitting its user base by offering add-on components at a later date, Microsoft is placing all the hardware it needs for the next five years into the Xbox now. The Xbox will come with an Ethernet port to connect to both DSL and cable broadband connections and an 8GB hard drive that will be supplied by Western Digital and Seagate. Neither the GameCube nor the PlayStation 2 can boast of such inclusions. Microsoft has stated that the hard drive will be used to rip your own soundtracks for games, to decrease loading times by caching data, and to save game data. In conjunction with the Ethernet port, it will also be used to download new characters, levels, and more. Although a small minority of those online use broadband connections, the Xbox will not have dial-up capability. It's a bold step on Microsoft's part: It's banking on its theory that many will be securing a broadband connection within the next five years.
The Xbox will not come with the ability to play DVD movies. However, for $29 you can purchase the DVD Movie Playback Kit, which will unlock the feature in the Xbox hardware. Xbox software will be stored on 4.5GB DVD discs and will be sold in standard DVD cases just like PlayStation 2 and GameCube software.
The Intel-developed Xbox CPU is based upon the company's Pentium III line of processors and clocks at 733MHz. While chip architectures vary, making them virtually impossible to compare, the PlayStation 2's CPU runs at 294MHz, and the GameCube CPU clocks at 486MHz. Needless to say, Microsoft's upcoming console can more than compete with the competition where computational operations are concerned. The Xbox will come with 64MB of unified DRAM, compared to just 32MB of the same memory in the PlayStation 2 and 43MB of total RAM for the GameCube. The Xbox's memory can be allocated however the developer sees fit, eliminating the bottlenecks associated with the PlayStation 2's limited amount of VRAM.
The 250MHz Xbox GPU was initially announced as 300MHz and is developed by Nvidia, the company behind the popular GeForce video cards for the PC. Specifically, the Xbox GPU is based upon Nvidia's recently released GeForce 3 technology and is classified as the NV2a. Dubbed the X-Chip, the Xbox's graphics processor is capable of a multitude of onboard special effects including full-scene antialiasing, four simultaneous textures per object, fog, environment mapping, pixel and texel shaders, bump mapping, and real-time lighting. Despite the X-Chip's ability to display just four textures per object compared to eight for the GameCube, the Xbox's textures should be a marked improvement over those on the PlayStation 2, thanks to onboard texture compression at a 6:1 ratio. The Xbox's unified DRAM should also aid in texture clarity since developers have the freedom to allocate it however they wish. The X-Chip can display graphics at a maximum resolution of 1920x1080.
Microsoft's specifications for the Xbox state that it is capable of displaying 125 million raw polygons per second, but this figure is misleading. The most visually impressive Xbox games shown at E3 looked to be running at around 10 million polygons per second, and some with drastic frame rate problems. In Microsoft's defense, the games were running on unfinished development kits, but it may have been a better idea to hold back games that weren't running smoothly to maximize a positive response. While most weren't overly displeased with the Xbox's performance at E3, what was shown failed to demonstrate that the Xbox is three times more powerful than its competition, as Microsoft has stated.
One definitive advantage the Xbox has over its competition is producing sound. Despite the fact that Xbox development kits still lack sound hardware, the Xbox will ultimately be capable of in-game Dolby Digital surround sound--a first for video game consoles. The Xbox will also be capable of broadcasting 256 simultaneous stereo voices through 64 different channels. Dolby Surround will be a snap for the Xbox, and overall, the auditory experience found in Xbox games should be superior to that of both the PlayStation 2 and GameCube.
The Xbox architecture is said to make it easy to develop games for the console, and PC developers have found it to be the same environment they've become accustomed to working with. Microsoft has had somewhat of a spotty history where the Xbox hardware is concerned. Even now, major third-party developers are still waiting for final Xbox development kits. Microsoft had previously stated that completed kits were shipped to developers prior to E3, but the ship date was missed. The latest kits developers received are fairly complete, and Microsoft will upgrade them with software instead of supplying developers with entirely new units. As mentioned previously, developers have stated that the Xbox beta kits still lack sound hardware. Apparently, developers are still constructing the sound for Xbox games from specifications given to them by Microsoft.
Article written by Brad Shoemaker and Shane Satterfield
and taken from : this site