the xbox hardware.....how does it stay visually stunning??

tbh 360 will hit a wall in 2 or 3 years... ps2 didnt hit a wall until what 2008. Halo Reach will be one hell of a good looking game i think and Alan Wake not so much.
And ps3 will hit a wall in 5 years if then but well ps4 will be out in 5.

 

^^^^

I kind of disagree with this... I think you are correct but your scale is way off. I think we are seeing 360 hit the wall now.. and with optimizations in another year we will be able to see all 360 can do.. i mean these systems have been out for a while now. ps3 will deff hit a wall in 2 years for sure if not sooner . there is no doubt.
1 year wall 360
2 years ps3..

 

you can Vlite/RTlite the heck out of windows, strip out everything, cut out all but the most essential services, install it and games will run exactly the same unless you have a really low end system but mid/high end systems have more than enough resources available for windows and games

 

quoted for truth

 

what we see as walls, are gaps in new development.. The 360 hardly has reached its potential... Nor has the PS3. but a few major points that stick out now to me. I run the 360 wireless, i have no choice and im using a "N" network. All my streaming now of movies are full HD in 1080P. Game lag is a thing of the past. Sure we all hate addons, yet this one allowed something the PS3 more than likely wont see.

The 360 live. FAR superior to PS3's free alternative. I don't see how people can debate that unless they are true PS3 fanboys.

And im looking forward to natal also. Full body motion, VS a setup of strap ons.

The PS3 does indeed have there exclusives and i enjoy each and everyone of them.

Now am I knocking down the PS3, NO.... as Ive said, I own all 3 systems today and all are a huge part of my families entertainment. I wouldn't give up either one for the other as all have there plus and minuses.

 

I love my PS3, and recently bought an XBox360 for Alan Wake when it comes out. Unfortunately, Xlive is not supported in my country, so i don't play online at all. The PS3, in my opinion, has better graphics, as well as games. It also feels more like a hardcore console than my XBox does. All in all though, i love them both, as well as my PC. It's a pity most of the really great games on XBox, like L4D2, Mass Effect 2 and Braid are on PC as well, as i feel whenever they are released on both platforms, the PC version is usually superior.

On that note though, games that are on PS3, as well as XBox, i find are a tad better on the XBox (Assassins Creed II and Bayonetta). Although i do much prefer the Xbox control as well.

 

Wrong. The very fact windows uses DLL files makes it inefficent for any application that needs more then basic low level threading. (Hence why every program I write for Windows is statically linked.) Its basic architecture is not optimal, so no matter how much of Windows you strip out, its still won't be optimal.

Remember, the game.exe process, at best, is only running 1/40th of the time to begin with (due to multitasking). [I'm assuming every single process uses one thread, its probably worse then that if I counted every individual thread windows spawns...] Then you get to dealing with Virtual Memory, loading page files, page faults, etc. Windows is great at running lots of processes at a single time, but not nearly as great when trying to focus on doing exactly one thing, due to all the bulk you need to carry with you [sharing CPU time with other processes, Virtual Memory, etc].

With embedded systems like the 360/PS3, none of this overhead exists. All the power of the machine can always be used for the process being run [in this case, games]. Besides the low level OS interface [which is stripped down and reduced functionality while in game], every bit of the hardware is constantly avaliable for use.

Really, all modern desktop OS's are general use OS's, which is fine. But for individual tasks, they are simply far slower then any reasonable embedded system, due to overhead inherent in multi-process OS's.

 

Hmm... xbox360 hardware is not visually stunning by default. (ugly plastic case that is loud!)

Jaw dropping silence is stunning , when my xbox360 hardware is turned on....
I use a Lian-Li XB01 case with two noctua opteron coolers. (hdd install when possible for silence) (more recently usb install Corsair Voyager GT 16GB + install is smooth silent playin')

 

I own both an Xbox 360 and PS3 but think that both are showing their age in comparison to a high-end PC system.

The Xbox 360 might have better looking multiformat games than the PS3 but the PS3 has, IMHO, the better looking exclusive games that really seem to push the system and make the most of its limited graphics. Games like Uncharted 2 and God of War III are incredible achievements and I suspect part of the reason for that is the decision to use Blu-ray for games storage which means developers don't have to worry about splitting the game over several discs or compromising on textures, FMV quality or sound quality. Final Fantasy XIII on the PS3 looks better for this reason too.

I think the Xbox 360 has had some very disappointing exclusives myself. Halo 3 and Halo 3 ODST suffer from rough looking visuals, thanks to being sub-720p and lacking any AA, and even games like Forza 3 don't look as spectacular as Gran Turismo 5 on the PS3. Sure Forza 3 has great damage modelling, a good framerate and excellent handling but it still has the same 8 car races that the first game had on the Xbox plus it has no weather or night races. The Xbox 360 is a nice machine with good games but it rarely impresses me on the technical front these days, not like the PS3 continues to do.

 

^^^^ +1. They don't want to split into multiple discs with the textures. The 360, if it had blu-ray, could run it near the same.

 

what fantasy world you live in where you can rewrite windows to be an xbox 360 OS? lmao....just buy a 360. In reality, you have ONE choice to customize windows, custom preinstall environment. Your fantasy of having a special windows do only one thing very well will never exist and probably wouldnt run current PC games anyway without dlls, so whatever point you were trying to make is not only useless, its moot.

as far as virtual memory and loading pagefiles using CPU time? turn page file off then, get plenty of ram. Your CPU should be idle 0% if no services and tasks are using it. Games are just flat out not written for specific hardware like they are on consoles....that is difference, not resources..you can always buy more hardware resources on PC's than what a game and windows can use.
btw, the 7th SPU on the PS3, runs the OS and some of its memory is reserved for it as well. All OS's have to have some allocation of hardware to function.

so like i said, you can strip everything allowable out and it still runs games the same...i was not wrong, its just reality. test for yourself. Your theories of your "gaming OS" is just that, a theory that sounds good, but doesnt prove that Crysis is going to run signifcantly faster than it does on XP or W7 assuming the game would launch at all.

Why mess with such a limited functioning OS when its far easier to just add another GPU or upgrade other hardware components?

 

these gaps have already been hit. we have seen gen 2 and 3 games and they do not look much different. I don't think the 360 has very much head room left.. I mean what is the 360's best looking game?

I own a ton of 360 games and not one really stands out as ground breaking. the ps3 has killzone 2 uncharted 1 and 2 Resistance fall of man 2 , God of war metal gear. these are unrivaled in the graphics department. Now granted all these games look great now but i doubt you will see so much growth graphically out of the ps3 in the next 1-2 years and even less out of the 360. The hardware is just not capable.

you can only make a game look so good in 720p and in some cases sub 720p.Take a look at the wii for example.. go load up dolphin and play some wii games in 1080p.. Metroid , Mario galaxy, Conduit, Zelda tp with AA &16AF easily could pass or look better then some early 360 titles.

 

How to improve the graphical quality of a X360.
1. REmove the motherboard.
2. Remove the graphics chip.
3. Remove the HDD.
4. Replace them all with your gaming stuff.
5. Play your PC now in a 360 case.

The end.

 

Im guessing that when they get around to using the tessalation engine in the 360 it might start to look better. And most of the time DirectX looks better than OpenGL (ps3).

Everyone keeps saying killzone but i wasnt that impressed with the graphics, not that i can name any xbox games that look good.

im still half asleep so ignore what i just wrote, its probably all rubbish.

Dave

 

You're misquoting now. I was simply pointing out Windows is not optimized for running single focused tasks at one time. I also pointed out that is M$ would ever release a stripped down version for gamers, a lot of us would get it.

Still doesn't solve the Virtual Memory problem. Sure, a single app is bound by its 2GB Address Space (and on a game, that entire space is usually used; how many games hover at ~1.8GB in task manager?), then you throw in other applications, you get a giant mess. Remember: The amount of memory isn't imporatant, its the amount of CONSECUTIVE avaliable memory that matters.

Typical scenereo: You have 1.5 GB of RAM in use. You start a game that needs 2GB total (the entire address space, in this case). You have 4GB of total RAM (2.5GB free). Do you have enough free space to play the game? If you answer "Yes", you don't understand how memory management works within most modern OS'.

Odds are, that 2GB of data already located in RAM is spread across the entire memory spectrum [due to programs being loaded/unloaded], and even with aggressive best fit algorithms, its unlikly the 2GB you need of a 2.5GB space will be able to be fit in at one time [mainly because some datatypes, mainly large structures/classes can be significantly large]. Farthermore, as you near the limit of avaliable RAM, you will encounter slowdowns as Windows attempts to find consecutive blocks of RAM large enough to hold the data that is needed. And forget it if your AV scanner decides to scan at this point in time...

Going without a page file in Windows is silly unless you have a rediculous amount of RAM (at least 12GB) in your system. Less then that, and a few RAM hungry programs can (and eventually will) eat enough RAM to make it so putting anything in RAM will bring the entire system to its knees in a vain attempt to find consecutive space in RAM to hold data.

A good example of the above can be found here:
http://www.flounder.com/inside_storage_allocation.htm
http://www.flounder.com/memory_damage.htm (not directly related, but a very good read non the less)

Hence, why the PS3/360 are still able to put out decent visuals: You know exactly how much room you have in RAM, and can program variables down to their exact RAM address. No need for any overhead, or having the OS have to scan the RAM in an attempt to find space for your data to fit. That by itself is a significant improvement in performance over PC's.

Yes, the PS3 has 6 cores for programmer use; the 7th hosts the OS, and the 8th is disabled. As for RAM, as of the latest firmware updates, about 190MB of the PS3's total cache of 256MB of general use RAM is free for appliacation use. (The latest firmware cut down the size of the OS footprint by about 35MB)

Again, you misquote. Windows itself is flawed as a dedicated gaming OS. You incur a performance hit on everything simply because you run Windows. Linux is the same way, as is Mac OSX. Multi-purpose OS' have significant overhead in performance, as they need to account for every possible system setup and every possible error, so hence you need more CPU Power, RAM, and space to run any single app then is needed for a dedicated machine to do the same. And thats the whole point of this discussion: Consoles can still put out visuals because they don't need an OS capable of doing hundreds of different things at the same time, and are thus much more optimized as a result.

 

And BTW, I haven't even gone into locking, OS Pre-emption, and dynamic link libaries (and their effect on performance) yet, which are other factors that cause Windows to be less then an optimal OS.

 

well said ,,,,,,mentioned something like this when crysis was coming out!! flaming how consoles could never run the game lol......and guess what there making crysis 2 for the consoles!!!! so who ever flamed me for that sometime ago [WHAT WAS U SAYING LOL ]:stewpid:

so in my opinion this is how it goes.......
pc.......needs more ram etc etc etc IE...operating system etc etc

console.......dosent need 6 gig plus hence no operating system...just games!!!!!!!!!

over!!!!!!!!!!

 

The irony is, I forgot one major point above: Even if you turn Virtual Memory usage to 0 in Windows, you still run using Virtual Memory (see Edit below). The usage you turn off in the control panel only refers to the size of the [swap] file on the hard drive, and not the Virtual Memory system itself. Every process in a Windows environment, including the 64 bit varients, by default, have an unchangable 2GB Virtual Address Space. This space can be extended via \3GB switch, but even in a 64-bit windows environment, you will find that programs not complied with special switches will never use more then 2GB of their address space at any one time.

Hence, why you don't need 6GB of RAM when running one program (or a very limited sets of programs) at a time; more RAM is needed simply because you have more programs running that need it. And even single programs need more RAM because of fragmentation concerns. Thats part of the overhead that comes with multi-purpose OS's.

EDIT

For clarification purposes: What M$ calls Virtual Memory actually refers to memory swapping (Paging), which are two totally different concepts. The reason for this misconception was the renaming of WIN386.SWP to Pagefile.sys. Turning off "Virtual Memory" in Windows only disables the swap file, not the Virtual Memory management system.

 

way too long post to read, but i think it was you originally misquoted me apparantly as i was talking specifically about Windows ..as in Windows XP/Vista/7....not some fantasy OS you made up that doesnt exist that is "optimal".
As i said twice, you can Strip it down and it runs games the same less you dont have enough resources free. your welcome to dispute and prove that...but your fantasy OS is moot.

Even IF MS made this super omfg gaming only OS, there is no proof how it would perform other than theoretically. Consoles development is better implemented due to specific hardware, though their OS's do also perform other functions besides gaming and if hacked, can perform even more functions than allowed.

 

have you never owned a ps1 or ps2 before? a prime example of graphics improving over time is ff7 and ff9 on ps1. huge difference in in-game quality between the two games.