Freedom of Choice?

[Pretendo]

Well as you know(or at least should)X-Box wil come with a built in HDD, and a Ethernet 10/100 modem. With that the manufacturing cost rises to $375 per unit. Thats not including the cost of making a profit, shipping, and packaging(but it's expected to sell competitivley with PS2 at a loss).

Now many X-Box fanboys from other forums make this argument, and then bash GCN. But I do have some big points to make.

1st: This is the biggest downer for XB. The built in ethernet card is standard. Since it only expcepts broadband, MSFT's pretty much screwed the majority here. Not to mention MSFT's online network won't be up by launch. So instead of spening $60 on a modem you could get a game, maybe even 2 with the money you saved.

2: To many things standard. That upfront cost will scare away most of the Joe Shmoe Console-gamer's out there.

GCN will be marketed @200 or lower. With the extra money you saved you could buy a few games, and another controller. Or you could watch your X-Box boot up. Wow thats a pretty hard choice.

I'm just scratching the surface here, but I simply won't accept Micro$oft's staunchy dictatoship metality enforced on the console industry. It's just simply absurd, and I believe gamers should take a stand against them.

[simps]

good point! well made. and i can relate. my friend bought a PS2 for 300 bucks, it was all his money. when i asked him why. he said he was tired of waiting for a new system. well. he has no money and no games, and he already had a DVD player. guess what? hes still waiting!

[Pretendo]

Originally posted by pd00
I totally agree. I think that, even despite prices, GCN will waste MSFT because of it's games. I far as I've seen, MSFT has only 1 good game coming out, Halo. But Nintendo has things like Too Human and Zelda, not to mention the sequel to my all time favorite game, Perfect Dark. MSFT won't stand a chance if anyone on this planet has a good taste in video games.

Halo is a game yet to be proven. If you've seen it running at SpaceWorld you'll notice the extremely choppy frame rate. Not to mention this game is almost ready for shipping. Thats just a ode to the kinda of quality to expect in their games-very little.

[Pretendo]

Well I'm skeptical. I've played all the incarnations of Metroid on all systems released and I've always been impressed and enjoyed the experience. Bungie's not exactly renound for their games on the console, not to mention the PC. I'm gonna take Halo peviews with a large grain of salt. Microsoft's lied to gamers a multitude of times.

Amped
300Millions Polygons Per sec
Xbox demos ran off PC's
Processor speed higher than reality
Texture Decompression ratio 8:1

Those are just the tip of the ice berg when it comes to lies from the one and only Microsoft.

[BenIII]

375? thats a lot.

[NINTENDOFREAK]

yup!!!

[MATRIX-X]

its 299

and the are losing $100 per box.

[imported_Unreal]

Because of only BB internetgames won't go choppy anymore.
If 65kers could go online, you'd have servers from here till tokyo. If only the people who have BB could go online, you'd have less servers but a lot more gameplay

[imported_Unreal]

Ow... and pd00

Only one good game?

Why don't you do some research on that on.
Have you seen Transworld or Amed. project Ego? Project Gotham? Malice? Warzone Online? Munch? DOA3? JGRF? no? check 'em out!!!!!

[dragulongx]

I can agree with that.

[Pretendo]

Well to many polygon topics to respond to individually, but 300MPPS is a BS figure. You all know that and you all know it means absolutely nothing, not even to the developer. GCN can push 20MPPS with in a gameplay enviorment (as EA Canada has stated) we've yet to see any concrete figures from the XDK community. As for Halo it's got a lot of polys, but look at the framerate .....sorry had to lauch for a second, but the framerate as seen at E3 was horrible, not much points for the gameplay when you've got framerates that low. As opposed to Nintendo's games almost all of them where at a locked 60FPS, or 30+^. Nintendo's not about making the pretiest games they're around to make the funnest games.

Besides thats what Nintendo's 2nd and 3rd parties are doing. Eternal Darkness is on par if not better than Halo, not to mention at a smooth framerate.

Also Xbox can only add 4 effects per texture pallet in a single pass. Half of GCN's 8 per pass. This effectively cuts the framerate in half when 5 or more effects are used on Xbox. Once more the numbers on Xbox are just full of that lovely smelling BS.

[MATRIX-X]

Well to many polygon topics to respond to individually, but 300MPPS is a BS figure. You all know that and you all know it means absolutely nothing, not even to the developer. GCN can push 20MPPS with in a gameplay enviorment (as EA Canada has stated) we've yet to see any concrete figures from the XDK community. As for Halo it's got a lot of polys, but look at the framerate .....sorry had to lauch for a second, but the framerate as seen at E3 was horrible, not much points for the gameplay when you've got framerates that low. As opposed to Nintendo's games almost all of them where at a locked 60FPS, or 30+^. Nintendo's not about making the pretiest games they're around to make the funnest games.


funny since the actual game MPPS means NOTHING it is something completly random which in one game will be higher and in the other it will be lower.the 300 is a benchmark you can actually compare that number since it wount chance.
and is wrong actually since its 250MPPS and 125 with one light and 1 texture +some effects.


and the power at e3 was 50% of the final power.

Eternal Darkness is a completly different game and if you say xbox has pc games well ED looks like a 100% pure pc game

the fillrate for 8 textures on gc drop dramatacly.

[Temjin]

Originally posted by Pretendo
Well to many polygon topics to respond to individually, but 300MPPS is a BS figure. You all know that and you all know it means absolutely nothing, not even to the developer. GCN can push 20MPPS with in a gameplay enviorment (as EA Canada has stated) we've yet to see any concrete figures from the XDK community. As for Halo it's got a lot of polys, but look at the framerate .....sorry had to lauch for a second, but the framerate as seen at E3 was horrible, not much points for the gameplay when you've got framerates that low. As opposed to Nintendo's games almost all of them where at a locked 60FPS, or 30+^. Nintendo's not about making the pretiest games they're around to make the funnest games.

Besides thats what Nintendo's 2nd and 3rd parties are doing. Eternal Darkness is on par if not better than Halo, not to mention at a smooth framerate.
I want everybody to remember this so we wont have any arguments about it in the future, okay? HALO, and a some other Xbox games at E3 were having framerate problems because the CPU was handling all the sound processing, putting too much stress on the thing. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Xbox's architecture, the CPU is only supposed to do handle the Artificial Intellegence, and Physics. Nothing more. Now that the Sound Processor has been included in the final kits, the CPU shouldn't be lagging, and most of the games you saw at E3 with bad framerates should be running silky smooth this fall. :)


Also Xbox can only add 4 effects per texture pallet in a single pass. Half of GCN's 8 per pass. This effectively cuts the framerate in half when 5 or more effects are used on Xbox. Once more the numbers on Xbox are just full of that lovely smelling BS.
Actually, Pretendo... The Xbox can do 8 textures as well.

4 passes, 2 texture layers through each pass. Go to tomshardware.com and read up on the Geforce3/NV2A to learn more. :) Also, I hear(Not sure, so dont get all worked up if I'm wrong) that the Xbox takes less of a performance hit than GC when it uses the texture layers.

And now I'm expecting to hear a couple of "ITS NOT ABOUT GRAPHICS GAMEPLAY IZ WHAT COUNTS!!!!11". :D

[Edited by Temjin on 06-20-2001 at 08:52 AM]

[Temjin]

Oh, and about the Broadband...

There is a 56k adapter in the works. So if people who dont have broadband want to go online with the Xbox, they can buy the 56k adapter, just like with the GC. :)

* Temjin pets his cable modem.

:D

[MATRIX-X]

There is a 56k adapter in the works. So if people who dont have broadband want to go online with the Xbox, they can buy the 56k adapter, just like with the GC.

not exactly....
the thing is a compagny can make a narrowband addon to the xbox BUT and this is a very big BUT since the games are going to be programmed for broadband it will be like trying to get an elephant trough a coke bottle.and your experience will suck big time.

[Temjin]

Originally posted by MATRIX-X

There is a 56k adapter in the works. So if people who dont have broadband want to go online with the Xbox, they can buy the 56k adapter, just like with the GC.

not exactly....
the thing is a compagny can make a narrowband addon to the xbox BUT and this is a very big BUT since the games are going to be programmed for broadband it will be like trying to get an elephant trough a coke bottle.and your experience will suck big time.
... Yeah. But at least its there. :D

* Temjin pets his cable modem again.

... Ho ho ho!...

[Pretendo]

Temjin,
I'm quite familiar with the Xbox hardware, but the GF3 card (emphasis on the 'card') and the GF3 GPU 'chip' in Xbox have key differences. 1st unlike Xbox's CPU the GF3 based GPU is a custom processor. It's impossible for it to be an exact copy of the card or the chipset on the card. As the the cards contain at least 64MB's of RAM to draw upon. You're making a horrible analogy here. Xbox can have it's 8 layers of textures, but not without cutting the PPS rate in half. Lets not forget about memory bus bandwidth here, that two can severly cut down the communications pipleine between the processors and RAM as it's shared due to the partionable memory. Also unlike you I'm taking specs from the sources. Microsoft says XB can only do 4 layers per pass, thats final. End of rant.

Now what was this about Gameplay over Graphics?

Not only can GCN get on par with XB in this area it can easily superceed it. But at the route of all succesfull consoles the gameplay is where it's at.

Also if your a dial-up user you're still gonna end up paying for the ethernet adpater you don't need. So in the end it costs well over twice as much as your options with GCN.