My little brother is wondering if the rumours about the downgrading of the video capabilities of the upcoming XBox are true. We’ve searched around a bit, but seem to find conflicting information all over the place. Anyone know for certain what the answer is, or have a recently updated website where we could find out?
From what I’ve read, the capabilities haven’t been downgraded from the final specs. The latest I’ve heard is that the Xbox will have a GeForce 3 Ti running inside, and since the games seem to be running at a very high resolution, that would seem to bear out. I’ve never read anything contradicting the GeForce 3 and I haven’t heard anything about the downgraded video abilities. A downgraded hard drive, yes, from 10 to 8 gigs, but that was announced some time ago. Ign.com and videogames.com are two popular, mainstream sites dealing with video games.
Oh, please God! Let it be so! I have a bet to win.
Actually, I haven’t seen anything about this. While there has been much speculation that heat may be a problem with the X-Box, I have yet to see anything along the lines of downgrading the graphics.
However, if heat issues were a problem with the X-Box, one of the more effective and cheap solutions might be to simply “underclock” the graphics chip so that it produces less heat. I’m not certain that the X-Box works on the exact same clock and multiplier principles that PCs do, so it might not even be possible to do this.
Monkeying around with the clock speed on graphics chips is not an unknown solution. Recently ATI, competitor of NVidia, was busted for doing just that.
And no, I am not an impartial commentator here, so don’t take my word for it.
I have a PS2 and I saw an XBox on Sunday. Contrary to the XBox hype the machines are about the same. The GameCube is about the same too. The games looked very similar on all 3 machines. If the XBox really does have more computing power than the PS2 it is not being used well. Considering the PS2 has a year head start and many more games the other 2 have a tough road to catch up.