22nd May 2003, 10:05 AM
LL/ I wont even try to argue with you, but we were told that the XBox doesn't try to conserve resources at all. It has no built in "restraints" for the hardware so things can get very ugly when designing a high-end game, it can become a programers nightmare when they find out that tens, even hundreds of thousands of polys aren't seen but still take up space. DJ is right about the models but that takes up ver little space on a disk depending on how the system reads that data. From what we were told (taking our own discoveries aside), the XBox and GC compete on the sme level with a slight margin that varies for each system; Nothing comes close to the GC's hardware design and how it's able to draw... but no one is taking advantage of it.
DJ/ Both the XBox and GC are built for Stereo.
Surround Sound, or Digital Sound (ex: DTS coding) needs to be slapped in through software. There's no reason a GC game cant be made in Dolby Digital EX (6.1) SDDS (krappy 7.1) Spherical sound (4.1 and higher) and so on, you could even program the game to run at experimental standards like 10.10. (beautiful 3-D sound). The hardware of a system, for sound, comes down to a few cheap chips inside: Left and Right channels, ADPCM (compressed), PCM (uncompressed), and MIDI. On the GC, ALL of those formats can be sent to 3-D audio and through the seperate DSP for effects as long as the game supports it. The XBox cant do that. It simply has 64 channels that can be coded left and right or sent through the software to produce 3-D sound, the XBox DSP is a global processor which takes up HUGE amounts of system resources and is hardly used. There's no such thing as a system that can run surround sound or not, it's all in the software.
As for the visual standards, i'm looking through the hardware sheets now and I dont see any notable differences. Both systems can display the same lines of resolution and both are capable of HD Progressive Scan. Though through software, you can achieve other visual formats for both systems.
DJ/ Both the XBox and GC are built for Stereo.
Surround Sound, or Digital Sound (ex: DTS coding) needs to be slapped in through software. There's no reason a GC game cant be made in Dolby Digital EX (6.1) SDDS (krappy 7.1) Spherical sound (4.1 and higher) and so on, you could even program the game to run at experimental standards like 10.10. (beautiful 3-D sound). The hardware of a system, for sound, comes down to a few cheap chips inside: Left and Right channels, ADPCM (compressed), PCM (uncompressed), and MIDI. On the GC, ALL of those formats can be sent to 3-D audio and through the seperate DSP for effects as long as the game supports it. The XBox cant do that. It simply has 64 channels that can be coded left and right or sent through the software to produce 3-D sound, the XBox DSP is a global processor which takes up HUGE amounts of system resources and is hardly used. There's no such thing as a system that can run surround sound or not, it's all in the software.
As for the visual standards, i'm looking through the hardware sheets now and I dont see any notable differences. Both systems can display the same lines of resolution and both are capable of HD Progressive Scan. Though through software, you can achieve other visual formats for both systems.