[E3] XBox 360 demos were running on Powermac G5s?!

kleinluka

just saw this and found it pretty interesting:

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2420&p=5

Joshua Stubbles

Very interesting.
When I was playing Need for Speed: Most Wanted, the 360 kit WAS lit up - maybe to throw me off? hehe.

In either case, it's not the true power of the real 360, which is defineatly a good thing. Why they chose APPLE systems is beyond me though

Vark

Those aren't regular G5's, those are Alpha Xenon Devkits. The original 360 Dev kits were all powermac's because they use the G5 PPC processors that the 360 will use.

KDR_11k

Naah, the PPC970 (aka G5) is different from the X360's (which I believe are called PPEs), most importantly the X360 CPU is in-order, meaning it doesn't reorder code to keep all of its parts busy and therefore stalls more easily.

Vark

Well I should say they run a variant of the processor that the 360 will use (as the 360 PPC's are based on the G5 core, the same way the Gekko is in the Gamecube).

They are heavily modified, but similar enough to gauge performance. (minus of course the presence of the 3rd core as the G5's only have 2 processors).

gauss

yes, i saw them in person. i don't see how this is a huge surprise--they probably finalized the hardware (much less the case) not too long ago, you think they've got a bunch of the units popped fresh off the assembly line already? the house fan inside those little cabinets was funny though.

KDR_11k

Well, Ati had one running...

Vark

Yea, ATI had *just* gotten the kit a few days before and scrambled to have that one demo up and running on it. The nice thing about MS hardware drops is since everything is their Xbox Visual Studio / Direct X the libraries are fairly mature and they can swap out the hardware easily when they put out a new revision. It usually only takes a few days to get old code running (of course you won't be using any of the new features for a while, but at least shit runs).

Justin Meisse

It's surprising considering how much Microsoft hates Apple and vice versa.

KDR_11k

Vark: But it begs the question why nobody else ported their games to the final hardware.

Vark

Not really... Getting a couple hundred meg graphical demo up and running is a LOT easier than a multigig game with hundreds of individual game systems to break / go incompitable / plain on look shitty. Having something up and running on a new rev of hardware is different than having it run *well*.

All the demo's and what not that were shown at E3 were polished and tailored for E3 specifically. Our demo itself which wasn't even shown to the general public was tested for weeks because the last thing you want is your game to blow up or look retarded for a room full of press.

If MS had dropped the beta hardware maybe a month, month and a half before E3, that would have been enough time for everyone to try and get their stuff up and running and looking suitably sexy for the E3 press.