"What where you guys smoking when you said that? You probably hadn't followed HALO at all then. HALO was rushed to meet the xbox release date deadline. Bigtime."

I'm a bit late on this. But WTF are you talking about?

The BS must be neck-high wherever the hell you're from #48 because you're shoveling it something fierce.

Halo and Splinter Cell look and play fantastic on the Xbox.

Many adults in North America have something called a home entertainment center (big ass TV, surround sound speakers, comfy recliner), the Xbox integrates beautifully with such a setup.

"Personaly I cant enjoy console games and cant see myself buying a console and playing like a friggin kid in the living room, maybe if I was still 13 or 14 years old, but not now lol"

This is the saddest thing I have heard in awhile. For years people who have played video games(yes consoles and pc games)have tried to end the bs sterotype of all games are for kids...and here we have a guy that for some odd reason thinks console but not pc games are for kids. If you put a ps2 where your comp is and a tv where your monitor is what exactly is the difference?

Aight, to all of you computer illiterate

Xbox Uses Nv3A graphics core, wich is identical to Geforce 3 100% except one thing, it has two Vertex and Pixel shader units as opposed to GF3 has only one, so technicaly Xbox can operate those effects faster, BUT, it's very bandwith limited, I think it even has slower memory then Geforce 3 to cut the cost. Look at the textures in Halo or rather lack of that, it looked ok back in the day, it looks like ass now.

Xbox CPU is a Celeron, Coppermine based core(with less cache), but still sucks donkey balls and yes Splinter Cells lags, maybe to some ppl that arent as sensetive to low fps it doesnt look like lag, but it sure does lag and alot in some places.

Motherboard is that of an Nforce chip, there are rumours that Xbox is what made Nvidia go to motherboard market.

Personaly I cant enjoy console games and cant see myself buying a console and playing like a friggin kid in the living room, maybe if I was still 13 or 14 years old, but not now lol

PC games(I'm not saying all of them) have that higher quality that will never be on consoles due to what audience they are targeted. And personaly I have life and play games after work mostly when there's nothing else to do.

I see in US it's ok that an adult man has 4 consoles though lol.

Lucas Arts and Bioware have been saying for a while now that KOTOR-PC will be out in the Fall. Now suddenly it's big news.

Gaming news sites missed the boat on this one - or rather got on the boat too late?

My point kinda hinges on it not being that profound.

The difference is in a few things like that, but those things pretty much mean a Geforce 4 can do more. So a Geforce 3 is *not* as graphically capable as a Geforce 4.

The NV2A had a few bits and pieces to make it something more than a Geforce 3, and some of those bits and pieces were similar to Geforce 4 qualities.

Its similar to the reason that a Geforce 4 MX sucks compared to a Geforce 4 Ti. Nearly all the same graphical features are there but it's slow and crippled and actually most similar in architecture to the Geforce 2 so it performs badly. The NV2A has some of the same features as the Geforce 4 Ti (in some kind of cobbled form) but it's still just a Geforce 3 at heart so it doesn't perform so well.

Besides, my main point was that its not a pure Geforce 3 core which you earlier said it was.
This comment was edited on May 6, 04:27.

"Two years ago I had a GeForce 2 GTS, which was EASILY capable of Halo type graphics."

Cool baseless assertion. What you needed to do was give us a "forinstance." What was that game that you were playing two years ago with the DOA3 quality graphics? ;p

You do realise that the difference between a GeForce 3 and a GeForce 4 isn't all that profound, right Von Helmet? I mean, it's got a faster clockrate, an extra vertex shader (IIRC), and some odd knick knacks here and there, but they're basically the same card in terms of what they are graphically capable off. It's just that the GeForce 4 does it a little faster (at least the 4400+ models do) and a little smoother. I haven't seen the Xbox do anything graphically that my current PC, which is already well over a year old, doesn't yawn at.

Raff, I totally agree that the whole chipset package in the Xbox is awesome, and that the nForce chipset is awesome as well (or at least, the nForce 2 chipset is). But once again, it's nothing that I can't get for my PC, which was my whole point to begin with, so long ago

I'm not sure if it's the fact that it's a single platform that makes the optimization so easy, though... I'm a bit of a pessimist, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the reason that Xbox games are so optimised is because developers don't have any excuses to make if their game runs like crap on the Xbox.

I mean, on the PC scene it's been all so prevailent (sic?) the past decade or so.

"Dammit, our game runs like crap!" Programmer
"What can we do about it?" Manager
"Well, we can optimise, that should improve speed by about 60 percent or so."
"And how long will that take?"
"About three months or so..."
"Forget it, we'll just up the recommended specs."

Why wouldn't they? Game runs like shit on a 1Ghz processor? Just say that you recommend a 2Ghz processor. PC programmers have gotten lazy as hell, because they can ALWAYS simply throw more raw power at their speed problems. "The game runs fine on our test machines! Those machines are very much like what the average gamer has at home, so it should run fine on your P3-800!"
(Which should actually read, yeah, we only test on 3GHZ+ machines here, and we get 25fps, so we really don't understand why you're complaining about 0.2fps. In case you want an example of this behavior : SimCity 4.)

And not just the game programmers btw, the idiots from publishers such as EA etc will simply not allow for an additional three months or so for optimizations. Hey, it runs at 5fps! Ship it!

On the Xbox, and any other console for that matter, they don't have that luxury, and so they have to optimise. Nobody is going to play an Xbox game that runs at 2fps.

I'll admit that with only having one hardware configuration, you can tweak some speeds here and there because you know what you're working with, but I think a lot of PC games are simply unoptimised in many areas that are independant of hardware. Then again, I'm not a programmer, so I could be wrong. I doubt it, though.

Creston

"I don't know what Creston had in his comp 2 years ago, but my Matrox G400 MAX might have been able to pull off Halo-ish graphics at 320x240."

Halo runs at 640x480.

Raff, you're confusing the geForce and the nForce.

See Creston, this is what I respect about you (if you are still following this thread)- rational discourse, when most people would be busy flaming away by now. I am talking about those little chips that play traffic cop (and what I thought you were talking about also). The chipset, produced by nVidia, for the xbox is what would become the best AMD chipset on the market today.

It is what the chipset allowed in terms of bandwidth and memory usage that made it special. The GPU itself, a hybrid that was (upon first release) better than what we would see on the market, has been surpassed by all the current cards (minus the GF4MX if that is still in circulation) from nVidia. So in that, I'm take my rather dated Ti4400 (that didn't take long) over the xbox hybrid any day.

And I'm pretty sure there are a lot of PC developers out there that are very happy about coding for a single "PC" based platform. I'm not convinced that many of the games that run so smoothly on the xbox would even run on a Celeron 733 w/GF4MX card, because of all the optimization that a single platform provides.

Still doesn't change the fact that a REAL RPG is meant to be played on a computer! If it's good enough for Bard's Tale, Ultima, Fallout and Wizardry, it's good enough for KotOR!

Geforce 4 Ti cards were released in February 2002. The XBox was released in November 2001. That's a gap of three months, which is easily close enough for some Geforce 4 technology to have seeped into the XBox.

The GPU in the XBox is known as the X-Chip and the nVidia chip number is NV2A. The Geforce 3 was NV20 and the NV2A is similar but modified. The modifications are basically the addition of some Direct X 8 features and other stuff which are basically what separates the Geforce 3 from the Geforce 4.

As such, the GPU in the XBox can be thought of as a hybrid of Geforce 3 and 4 technology, as I said earlier. Note that I did not say it was a Geforce 4 chip outright, but that it was a hybrid.

Later.

Creston's right. I'm 99.9% sure the X-Box uses a Geforce3 chip. It came out too soon to have a Geforce4 chip.

--------------------------------------------------
Bunko
TI-83+ Graphing Calculator, 64k Memory, 1" Display
Not good for ninja fights.

I did that myself, and now I have a PC, PS2, Gamecube, and an X-box

And no life to boot!

--------------------------------------------------
Bunko
TI-83+ Graphing Calculator, 64k Memory, 1" Display
Not good for ninja fights.
This comment was edited on May 5, 15:23.

Nice to see we have more newbies on the board who feel their only need to post is to tell others to shut up. Et tu, Percolator Fish?

Two years ago I had a GeForce 2 GTS, which was EASILY capable of Halo type graphics. In fact, games right now are barely starting to scratch the surface of what's possible with a GeForce 3, which is already two generations old. Try to keep up with the technology a bit would you? Thank you, move on.

Creston

This comment was edited on May 5, 13:38.

"Tell me that your PC from two years ago was running graphics as detailed as Halo or DOA3 and I'll tell you that you are a liar and need to be quiet more often."

I don't know what Creston had in his comp 2 years ago, but my Matrox G400 MAX might have been able to pull off Halo-ish graphics at 320x240. Of course, the 2xAA wouldn't have been there.

Remember, consoles don't run at the same resolution most PC do. Heck, the average internet browser runs at 800x600. I run most games at 1024x768 with 16x Aniso filtering. I'd love to see the X-Box quadruple its display resolution and maintain >40fps.

thank gosh an intelligent response. well done.

I can't stand RPG's on consoles. The gamepad simply was not meant for controlling any sort of in-depth RPG.

I'm curious how people got by in Morrowind on the XBox. I played the PC version and it was like multi-tasking at times


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Currently Playing: PS beta On Deck: Breed Demo Reading: Stephen Baxters "Manifold" series
This comment was edited on May 5, 05:23.

Stop being wrong Creston.

" It's stuff that I had in my PC two years ago (or as close to it as possible). "

Tell me that your PC from two years ago was running graphics as detailed as Halo or DOA3 and I'll tell you that you are a liar and need to be quiet more often.

This comment was edited on May 5, 02:33.

Raff, you're confusing the geForce and the nForce. The geForce is strictly a graphics card, and the Geforce 3 core is the exact same core that's in the Xbox (the NV20).

The nForce is something TOTALLY different than the geForce (ie, a motherboard chipset).

Nowhere was I talking about an nForce chipset for Pentium processors? I'm simply replying to an earlier statement that said that the graphics chip in the Xbox cannot be found or bought for the PC, which isn't true.

Does that clear things up?

And at #22, Von, I realise that you cannot get the EXACT same specifications as what's currently in the Xbox, but then again, why would anyone WANT to? Geforce 3 / 4 mix? When we can get Radeon9800's and GeforceFX's?
That's what I meant to say, there isn't anything in the Xbox that's all so magnificent. It's stuff that I had in my PC two years ago (or as close to it as possible).

Creston

This comment was edited on May 5, 00:55.

they have look dirty (grainy?) to me