Re: EXPECT Blu-ray INSIDE the XBOX 360... just in time for the HOLIDAYS.

I have no idea what he was trying to get there. The XBOX 360 is adaptable to any format from what I know. MS is putting the purse strings out. I'm just excited at the idea of the XBOX 720 or 1080 hitting shelves in the next couple of years!!! I don't think the have come up with the final product name as of yet, but it should be impressive.

The business of business is to make money. I think consumers take things much more personally than businesses themselves do. If there's money in it, competitors will unite.

John

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The xbox 360 is not more powerfull than the PS3. Wait another year and you will see.

I am not a gamer. I am a programmer. People like me are frustrated by public misconception generated by SCEI's misleading marketing. SCEI marketing people are so good at hyping up worthless product that even a world famouse developer like Kojima Hideo admitted that he was conned by SCEI when he began the development of MGS4.

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If this is the best console EVER put together...what in the hell is the "red ring of death?"

Xbox 360 is the best console ever put together in the eyes of game programmers.
PS3 is the worst console ever put together in the eyes of game programmers.

Programmers doesn't care about the reliability of a console because it is not their concern.

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The 360 can handle Blu-ray with no problems.

Not according to Amir Majidimehr, retired Microsoft Vice President and former head of HD-DVD group.

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Our daughter's relatively slow computer can decode AVC @ 40Mbps

Care to spell out the exact spec of your daughter's PC?

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I'm sure the XBox can also and have MIPS left over to calculate prime numbers and overlay them on the screen.

It can't. Sorry.

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It may not have the power to SUC though...

No. You will have to wait until Xbox 3.

That being said, I doubt Microsoft will build a Blu-ray inside one anytime soon. I just don't see the motivation to do so. It's not like they have to sneak Blu-ray into homes in order to win a format war.

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Microsoft should have adapted H.264 decoding on the XBox. Then it could have played the following HD DVD movies:

Xbox 360 can decode upto 30 Mbits/s of H.264 stream. Any higher and it starts dropping frames.

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The XBOX 360 can't play any of those HD DVD's? Since when?

Xbox 360 can barely meet HD-DVD spec, but not Blu-Ray spec.

Deadmeat I find your posts VERY informative and I'm going on the assumption that you know what you're talking about but I have 1 question.

If the XBOX 360 can barely meet the HD DVD specs like you mentioned and it cannot play bluray...well if the PS3 can meet the bluray specs doesn't that make the PS3 more powerful?

I'll be the first to admit I don't know much about either console except that they're both supposed to be very powerful.

Programmers always get frustrated with new tech. Hey guys, you have a 50 g disc to work with here...get inspired.

Well I have read on a couple of sites that the PS3 is a complete nightmare to develop games for. I don't remember if it has to do with the chip architecture or what but if you search online there are articles that explain this much better than me. Actually here I'll do a quick search for you...

Being a video game developer (I develop for both, Playstation 3 and XBOX 360) people ask me almost daily which platform I think is better. These are my personal feelings, in no way does this reflect my employer.

Short answer: XBOX 360.

Long answer: Price, performance, visual quality, game selection and online support. I think the XBOX 360 wins in every category.

Price: This is obvious the XBOX 360 core is only $299. The PS3 is around $499 for the 20GB version. It comes with a hard drive, but you don’t need a hard drive to enjoy a lot of great games on the 360 so I think it’s fair to compare both core systems.

Performance: On paper, the PS3 is more powerful. In reality, it’s quite inferior to the 360. Without getting into too many details, the three general-purpose CPU’s the xbox360 has are currently FAR easier to take advantage of than the SPU’s on the PS3. I suspect a few years down the road some high budget, first party PS3 exclusive titles will come out that really take advantage of the SPU’s and do things the XBOX 360 can’t, but I don’t think the console is worth buying based on this speculation (for some it will be though, we'll have to wait and see how these games turn out).

Graphics: The XBOX 360 is a clear winner. The GPU is more powerful. It has more powerful fillrate, and far more pixel and vertex processing horsepower. Part of the reason is their choice of memory, and architecture of pixel and vertex procesing. I can’t get into details but the same vertex shader will run much slower on the PS3 than the XBOX 360. The 360 also has a clever new way rendering high definition anti aliased back buffers. To accomplish the same effect on PS3 is prohibitively expensive. For this reason I think many games will have no choice but to run in non-HD resolutions on the PS3 version, use a lower quality anti aliasing technique, or do back buffer upscaling. The end result in all cases is going to be noticeably worse image quality.

Game Selection: The XBOX 360 has a huge head start here. 1 year is an eternity in gaming. Almost all multi-platform developers have made the XBOX 360 their primary platform due to timing of release-to-market, this means the games will look and perform better on the 360. The PS3 versions will be ports of the 360 versions. (The opposite was true for XBOX 1 vs. PS2). The XBOX 360 is also far faster to develop for due to better development tools (massively popular Visual Studio .NET vs. proprietary, buggy PS3 compiler and debugger), better documentation, and easier architecture (3 general purpose CPU’s vs. 8 specialized processors that require DMA). Timing has also caused all next-gen middleware developers to make XBOX 360 their primary platform, and they will ‘add ps3 support’ as needed. This support will probably be inferior to the XBOX 360’s due to manpower and more importantly, demand. It’s this catch-22 now that will continue to drive the 360 forward and hold PS3 back.

http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-348-1.htm

That article was done when the consoles first released. He has since done a follow up titled "Playstation 3 vs. XBOX 360: One Year Later" which you can read here...

http://www.hardcoreware.net/playstation-3-vs-xbox-360-one-year-later/

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The XBOX 360 can't play any of those HD DVD's? Since when?

Falcon, you really have to fine tune your sarcasm detector.

All the movies I mentioned (and there are many more!) are all encoded in H.264 (not Microsoft's VC-1) and play just fine on the XBox 360. That was my point.

Just like Blu-ray has many titles encoded with VC-1, so does HD DVD have titles encoded with AVC.

And don't be fooled by people who make up things as if they were facts without them providing any references. I'm sure XBox 360 is powerful enough to process a Blu-ray stream just fine. Heck, the PS3 is likely powerful enough to decode 6 streams (across 6 cells) and still decode HD MA. I'm sure the XBox has at least 1/6th the power of the PS3.

It's not the lack of power that's preventing Microsoft from providing a Blu-ray add-on, but rather there is probably not much of a point in doing so (from a marketing perspective).

BTW, here's a simple spec page for the 360: http://www.xbox.com/en-AU/support/xbox360/manuals/xbox360specs.htm

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Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth

I'm going to guess the above might be even faster than our daughter's duel core AMD that decodes AVC fine even under Vista and dozens of other processes running at the same time!

[Post edited by Skyhawk on May 3, 2008]

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If the XBOX 360 can barely meet the HD DVD specs like you mentioned and it cannot play bluray...well if the PS3 can meet the bluray specs doesn't that make the PS3 more powerful?

To understand this "contradiction", you would have to understand different types of processors and how they handle data.

PS3 CELL is a streaming processor it excels at processing linear access streaming data such as video but sucks at handling random access data.
Xbox CPU is a traditional general purpose multicore processor it is good at handling a large volume of random access data but is not as fast as CELL in processing linear access streaming data and therefore cannot process video and audio as fast as CELL does.

Video falls into linear access data category and CELL is considered an excellent streaming processor. However, CELL sucks at handling a large volume of random access data as I mentioned before and programming CELL to handle a data volume larger than 256 KB properly is a total nightmare, if not impossible.

So what constitutes this "random access data"? Games. This is why Xbox 360 is much more powerful than PS3 for running games, but PS3 makes a much better movie player than Xbox 360.

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All the movies I mentioned (and there are many more!) are all encoded in H.264 (not Microsoft's VC-1) and play just fine on the XBox 360.

All those H.264 movies you listed were encoded below 30 Mbits/s as per HD-DVD specification and Xbox 360 plays them.

Playing 40 Mbits/s H.264 stream as required by Blu-Ray specification is another matter.

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I'm sure XBox 360 is powerful enough to process a Blu-ray stream just fine.

I don't know what you do for a living but I am a programmer holding a master's degree in CS.

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Heck, the PS3 is likely powerful enough to decode 6 streams (across 6 cells)

What CELL could do.

- Six 18 mbit/s 1080i MPEG2 streams
- One or two H.264 streams of upto 50 Mbits/s in total..

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It's not the lack of power that's preventing Microsoft from providing a Blu-ray add-on, but rather there is probably not much of a point in doing so (from a marketing perspective).

It is against Microsoft's corporate policy to support Java, as required in Blu-Ray specification. Supporing Java is like dealing with a terrorist at Redmond.

Hence don't expect to ever see a direct Blu-Ray playback support in any of Microsoft product, be it Vista SP2, Xbox 3, etc.

wouldnt think a guy that calls himself "deadmeat" would be so damn smart.

microsoft pays you well...don't they.

[Post edited by bladerunner1 on May 3, 2008]

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I don't know what you do for a living but I am a programmer holding a master's degree in CS.

Surprisingly, I don't even have an undergrad degree in CS. I don't do Oracle databases, nor certified as an MSE. I don't do HTML (as a living), nor any other high-level stuff. I don't do phone support, nor do I program VB or MS Access.

But when high-level CS IT guys start pretending to know about hardware engineering low-level stuff, I get sceptical.

Get a ring on your pinky finger... then we'll talk.

Edit: Another thing BTW Deatmeat got wrong. The PS3 does not use all the cell processors in parellel in order to process the AVC codec. This kind of processing is serial, and doesn't lend itself well to parallel asynchronous processing (to put it mildly).

[Post edited by Skyhawk on May 3, 2008]