Are X360 third parties feeling intimitated ???

[Fonzerelli]

Kyle_Michaels said:

During the original xbox, you may remember that Microsoft went with nVidia for the graphics chip in the system. Long story short, disagreements arose regarding the monetary agreements between the two companies, and MS ultimately took nVidia to court (though it was later settled).

During that time, MS was also working on their DX9 API for Windows, and speculation suggests that MS sort of left nVidia out in the dark regarding the specifications and such (out of spite, perhaps), which resulted in the infamous "FX Fiasco" lineup of graphics chips, that were quite inferior to that of their competitor's series (ATI, the designer of the current X360 graphics chip, Xenos).

Mind you, much of nVidia's downfall with the FX series was a result from poor yields / bad process tech, but many analysts suspect that the sour dispute between MS and nVidia had a role to play in it all.

Today however, I don't believe that's the situation (atleast in the graphics division of things). nVidia is really the only supplier right now of viable DX10 solution GPUs, and MS is trying to push Vista like no other.

That might not answer your question, but I thought I would atleast mention it, nonetheless.

 

Nvidia's FX plans were partly delayed because thye spent a lot of their RnD resources on the Xbox MotherBoard Chipset and GPU. Nvidia were of the impression that DX 9 would support thier CG shader architecture. MS was basically pissed off that Nvidia would not reduce the price the chipsets used in the Xbox and actually went to the courts to force nvidia to reduce their rates.

It is suspected that MS went behind nvidia's back and gave ATi a few tips which greatly improved the performance of the radeon 9xxx series of cards. Such as using shader model 2's required minimum of 96-bit FP24 for full precision. For a game title to use FP16, the programmer had to specify which effects used the lower precision using "hints" within the code. Because ATI didn't benefit from the lower precision and the R300 performed far better on shaders overall, and because it took more effort to optimize shader code for the lower precision, the NV3x hardware was usually crippled to running full precision full-time.

 I suspect a few third parties do not want to see history repeat itself and realize that a stronger PS3 and Wii is very much in thier interests.