I personally wouldn't want to play late game on a large map with a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo or Athlon X2. I personally play with a Phenom X4 @ 3.0Ghz and I would appreciate some more processing performance. The AI in that game is a killer.

Anyway the interesting thing is that Kinect uses a decent whack of GPU performance as well. It is a legitimate GPGPU application and deserves credit for that alone, especially on a DX9 GPU. Its probably the equivalent effort to 'maximising teh Cell' if you go by estimates that GPGPU is about 5* harder than Cell programming.

huh? The image processing required basically yelled "use the shaders in the GPU" right from the start, and I think people know how to write shader programs on Nvidia GPUs. getting the Cell to talk with the SPUs and the GPU is a lot harder in all likelihood.

Unlikely. Shader programming is significantly tougher than SPU programming and requires a lot of finese, especially when other programs are running sequentially or at the same time. Epic attests to the same thing as well I believe that it went something like this:

1: X86

2. PPC.

5. SPU

10. DX10 GPU

In terms of quantity of money needed to be thrown at each problem.

However this is a DX9 GPU which doesn't benefit from any of the

I like Kipman. He made me able to post something other than just ellipsis on that "contributions of your country to gaming" thread, and what a great contribution that is. Even as a Sony fan there's a side of me who wishes to see Kinect succeding,

Neither me, but people were speaking of the graphical effects. A game the scope of Civ 5 is pretty damn rare when you get down to it. I use a very similar processor so I definitely can see what you mean. AI and units on screen will take a hit, but there are ways to make it work.

lol if it used alot of power it wouldnt be able to run a game

It's because he is only referring to what games are actually able to use.  The ps3 has a total of 8 spus, but one is reserved as a backup in case one of the other 7 fails, and one is dedicated solely to the operating system, leaving a total of 6 that can be used for games.  As you see in the article, he never says 6 spus that the ps3 has, he says that games can use.

10 % is alot considering alot of xbox games dont look that great anyways.  and for all of you guys suggesting it would be awesome because now halo can run using kinect.  thats never going to happen.  the one thing that everyone is ignoring for some reason is that you cant move your character with kinect..  almost every game your going to play is going to be on rails or casual games unless they come out with some sort of nav controlller and then that just takes away from there whole slogan "you are the controller"  I dont get how some people are taking this device seriously..

Wasn't it not supposed to use cpu at all? I remember that being posted here before when it was leaked that they were taking out the onboard kinect processing.

Anyway, I was under the assumption that multitasking actually increased the amount of cpu being used by both programs and created memory bottlenecks, is that not true?

Not sure about the multitasking thing, but it was originally stated that the Kinect would have a processor of its own.  Microsoft, however, later announced this would not be the case.  I would say the major reason for this is because if they would have had to put a processor in every single Kinect, it would be a minimum of $200 on store shelves, and while I cannot for the life of me believe that $149 is selling as much as it is in preorders already, I really don't think people would pay $199 for it.