Xbox 360
From Xboxic
The Xbox 360 is Microsoft's next-generation console. With its hardware specifications it is a highly powerful gaming machine capable of rendering immense realistic environments in HDTV resolutions with high-quality surround sound. It is available in 2 SKU's:
- Xbox 360 System (also known as the Premium Edition)
- Xbox 360 Core System
Launch
The Xbox 360 was launched nearly simultaneously in the 3 major regions: North America, European Union and Japan. The Americans were first on November 22nd 2005, the Europeans followed on December 2nd 2005 and the Japanese came in last on December 10th 2005. A worldwide launch of a product like this was never attempted before, and it proved to be a mixed success: shortages especially in the United States were so huge that many people considered the launch a complete failure.
Hardware problems
Another problem plaguing the Xbox 360 was the immediate reports of high failure rates on the shipped hardware. Although Microsoft denied anything strange was at work and claimed to have DOA rates below the industry average of 3 to 5% for bleeding edge hardware, there certainly were some problems with scratched DVD's and general hardware failures also known as the Three Red Lights problem.
Microsoft is losing billions of dollars on the RROD problem, several repairing facilities have stopped accepting xbox360, failure rates are exceeding 40%, many gamers are on their 2nd, 3rd or even 4th 360 (including some of the members from the xboxic website).
Launch Xbox 360s also had a massive problem with overheating (2 red lights). Some companies took advantage of this and produced extra fans that clipped onto the back of the Xbox 360 console. These problems have since decreased and it is generally thought that Microsoft hurrying the launch which caused so many faults.
Specifications
Central Processing Unit
The central processing unit (CPU), codenamed Xenon, is a custom IBM triple-core PowerPC-based design.
- 90 nanometer, 165 million transistors
- Three symmetrical cores, each one Simultaneous multithreading-capable and clocked at 3.2GHz
Graphics Processing Unit
The graphics processing unit (GPU) is a custom ATI R500-based Xenos.
- 337 million transistors total
- 500 MHz parent GPU
- 500 MHz 10 MB daughter embedded DRAM framebuffer
- 48-way parallel floating-point dynamically-scheduled shader pipelines
- 4 arithmetic logic units per pipe for vertex or pixel shader processing
- Unified shader architecture (This means that each pipeline is capable of running either pixel or vertex shaders.)
- Support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0, limited support for future DirectX 10 shader models
- 2 Shader operations per pipe per cycle
- 96 Shader operations per cycle across the entire shader array
- Shader performance: 48 billion (48,000 million) shader operations per second
- 16 Filtered & 16 unfiltered texture samples per clock
- Maximum polygon performance: 500 million triangles per second
- Pixel fillrate: 16 gigasamples per second fillrate using 4X MSAA
- Dot product operations: 9.6 billion per second theoretical maximum, 33.6 billion per second theoretical maximum when summed with CPU operations.
Memory
- 512 MB 700 MHz GDDR3 RAM (Total system memory is shared with the GPU via the unified memory architecture.)
System bandwidth
The system bandwidth comprises:
- 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth (700 MHz × 2 accesses per clock cycle (one per edge) on a 128 bit bus)
- 256 GB/s eDRAM internal logic to eDRAM internal memory bandwidth
- 32 GB/s GPU to eDRAM bandwidth (2 GHz × 2 accesses per clock cycle on a 64 bit DDR bus)
- 21.6 GB/s front side bus (aggregated 10.8 GB/s upstream and downstream)
- 1 GB/s southbridge bandwidth (aggregated 500 MB/s upstream and downstream)
System Floating-Point Performance
- 115 GFLOPS theoretical peak performance for CPU
- 1 TFLOPS theoretical peak performance of CPU and GPU combined
Audio
- All games support at least six channel (5.1) Dolby Digital surround sound
- Supports 48 kHz 16-bit audio
- 320 independent decompression channels
- 32 bit processing
- 256+ audio channels
- No voice echo to game players on the same Xbox console; voice goes only to remote consoles
- Voice communication except during games or applications that do not support voice.
- uses XMA codec (advanced audio technology from Microsoft)
Video
- VC-1 at non-HD NTSC and PAL resolutions
- VC-1 or WMV will be used for streaming video
- VC-1 supports DVD quality and high definition quality video
- Bink Video is licensed for games like Project Gotham Racing 3
- additional MPEG2 decoder for DVD video playback
DVD Drive
A 12X DVD-ROM drive, capable of reading DVD+R/RW discs, is part of the console, with game titles shipping on single or dual-layer DVDs. The other supported formats are: CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-R/RW, WMACD, MP3CD, and JPEG Photo CD.
Xbox 360 games are set to the standard 8.5GB of storage available on a dual-layer DVD. This storage space limitation is a concern to developers, and some games made for the system may span multiple discs. The Nintendo Revolution will use a similar size of disc while the PlayStation 3 uses a 25GB or 50GB Blu-Ray Disc.
Microsoft will release an external HD DVD drive in 2006 but this will only support HD DVD movies, games will not be released on HD DVD, so says Joystiq.
Physical characteristics
- Weight 3.5 kg (7.7 lb)
- 309 x 83 x 258 mm (12.15 x 3.27 x 10.15 in)
Miscellaneous
- Support for WMV HD and progressive or interlaced DVD video (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,2088531,00.asp ) playback.
- Media Center Extender capability
- The console makes use of regional lockout. Most games bought for the console in a specific region can only be played in a console from the same region.
- Developers have the choice if they want to release a region free Xbox 360 title. DVD playback on the console has similar lockouts.
- All games must support a 16:9 aspect ratio, and a minimum of 720p HD resolution (except for PGR3, COD3 and THPS8) with 4x full-scene anti-aliasing enabled. The GPU can downsample 720p to lower display resolutions (including 480i SDTV and 480p) and dynamically crop or scale 16:9 to fit 4:3 screens. Some games will optionally support native 1080i and 480p video resolutions as well.
- 3 USB 2.0 ports
- Microsoft claims all games will support custom music.
- There are several ways to utilize the custom soundtrack option: by ripping music from audio CD's, stream music directly from your PC (Windows Media Center Extender), plug in a USB Flash Drive, or plug in an MP3 player that is USB-capable (including any Apple iPod models which support USB) into the system to use custom soundtracks. However, you can only store music on the system's hard drive by ripping your audio CD's.
- Xbox360 now has support for outputting every game at 1080p HD resolution, the development tools have been updated to include it for native rendering. Games like NBA street and Virtua Tennis 3 are to utilise 1080p resolution.
Related Links
Related News
External Links
- Xbox 360 homepage on Xbox.com
- The Authoritative HD DVD FAQ by Hugh Bennett
