E3 2005: Updates on Xbox 360's E3 showing

News - Compatibility, hardware, et al

If Sony's presentations have been controversial then Microsoftfs attempts to enthral attendees have suffered in comparison. Many have commented on the less than overwhelming visuals of many of the game demos that are on the show floor. Well we have an explanation for that now. While each demo pod may have given the impression that the games were running on actual XB360, in no small part thanks to the console visible through a window in the base of each station, all the game demos were in fact running on something completely different.

Many developers have made the point that they only have Alpha hardware to play with at the moment, hence the relatively underwhelming visuals. Well we can now reveal that Alpha hardware is in fact two Apple G5s, as these have been spotted nestled next to the empty XB360 case in each demo pod. As the G5s can only use an X800 XT or equivalent the available graphics grunt was a lot less what the XB360 will carry into battle. So the reason the demos were plagued with jaggies is because they werenft running on a 520 chip, which has been revealed as FSAA capable and a few other tricks for freef inside the 10MB of RAM embedded in each GPU. So while Sony was seemingly content to hoodwink people into believing pre-rendered videos were running on PS3 hardware, when in fact no such hardware actually exits yet, Microsoft took another route. And a bewildering one at that. Now we are all for honeys here, but surely it would have been in everyonefs interests to somehow try and replicate the final image quality of the XB360 rather than use weak hardware to eshow offf the games which are meant to encourage us to buy X360s come this Christmas. Oh well, at least we know that the lacklustre images aren't indicative of the final XB360 hardware.

Some other interesting XB360 hardware news came at us late last night. The ability of the XB360 to play Xbox games has been an unknown quantity for some time now, with Microsoft being exceedingly coy in their attitude towards revealing whether or not the XB360 will be able to play older games. The complete change in hardware manufacturers, (the 360 changes from an Intel to an IBM CPU and from Nvidia to ATi for the graphics) was always going to spell trouble for any notion of backwards compatibility, with many believing it would be too much of an obstacle to overcome. And this has turned out to be pretty much the case, with Microsoft confirming that Xbox games will be incompatible with the newer console. To try and keep things under control Microsoft are claiming that a number of very popular titles will be made to work on the 360.

Quite how this will be done is still an unknown, but words like 'emulation' and 'recompile' are know flying around like underwear at the start of an orgy. It is beginning to sound like games will have to be repurchased as they will need the kind of extensive work that cannot be done by the XB360 all on its own. Microsoft may introduce some kind of exchange facility so original versions can be traded in for an XB360 capable version. Of course, many gamers may want to hold onto those original games, so quite what Microsoft are going to do about the issue remains a bit of a mystery. Personally, I cannot see what all the fuss is about with backwards compatibility. If you want to keep on playing all your old games so much maybe the time isn't right for you to upgrade to the next generation. Either way, Sony and Nintendo must be having themselves a quiet chuckle at the bind that Microsoft is in over this issue.