| bonzobanana said: Xbox had some amazing graphics like Conker for example. I certainly see the original xbox as more powerful and capable.
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As an owner of an original Xbox... I *WISH* games looked that crisp and clear. Sadly they don't as it uses Composite/Component cables rather than anything digital like HDMI or DVI.
The Xbox 360's backwards compatability does help make up for that though.
| bonzobanana said: wii had 24MB of main system memory, 2MB frame buffer, 1MB texture cache and 64MB of slower memory designed for audio and caching from the dvd drive, where as xbox had 64MB of main shared memoy and each game was given a 700mb hard drive partition for fast caching of important data. The few games that were available on both wii and xbox often the xbox had more content, 5.1 channel sound, 32bit colour and other benefits. |
The 24MB bank of 1T SRAM is used for all code and data.
The 64MB of GDDR3 is used for the same less-intensive tasks as the 1T SRAM, however the system does reserve up to 16MB for the OS and other tasks on the GDDR3 pool, which decreases the real usable capacity from 64Mb to 48MB, it is not all DVD drive cache, you only need a few megabytes for that.
The Xbox had the sound advantage because of one simple reason. nVidia SoundStorm. And that is thanks to the Xbox using an nVidia nForce chipset.
That meant the Xbox was the first console to offer full real time Dolby Digital 5.1 channel encoding and it also handled all that processing (About 4 billion operations per second) on it's own independent audio chip, freeing up the CPU for other tasks. That was a massive advantage back then.
And that wasn't even half of what the sound hardware was capable of... It could do full 3D positional audio with effects on top of it.
It was a proper "APU" or Audio Processing Unit. (Not to be confused with AMD.)
The only other decent competitor at the time was Aureal A3D which was equally as amazing... And Audigy in some aspects, Microsoft really did pick an amazing Audio solution for the original Xbox and that should be applauded.
The real advantage the Xbox had though was those damn progammable pixel shaders, which is what the Direct X 8 era was all about, the TEV could technically perform every trick/function the Xbox GPU can, but it required far more work/passes to pull it off... So often developers didn't bother and games often looked flat and drab because of it, whilst the Xbox had reflective, bump mapped, shiny, defined materialistic surfaces which Halo 2 pushed pretty hard.
That isn't to say the Wii didn't have it's advantages though, it should have won in terms of sheer bandwidth and fillrate, but the Xbox was just a more flexible machine that should have lasted a couple more years longer on the market than it did to truly shine in the games department.
I would have liked to have seen how Kameo presented on the original Xbox in real time, which looked pretty crisp on the Xbox 360 when it released.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
