AT Xbox 360 review

[KristopherKubicki]

Plagerized for your Protection (TM)

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2610

Kristopher

 

[Megatomic]

LoL, that's still bothering you eh?

 

[Polish3d]

Any idea why this "Free AA" thing isnt implemented on PC GPUs?

 

[mwmorph]

nice article.

 

[fbrdphreak]

sooo........sllooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

 

[klah]

Originally posted by: fbrdphreak
sooo........sllooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

Mirror: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=33&threadid=1736410

 

[PrayForDeath]

Interesting read. However, it's dissapointing to know that the standard AA requirement is now 2x instead of 4x, and that some game developers are rendering their games at a low resolution then scaling it up to 720p.
Now we need the GAMES!!

 

[w00t]

Nice, my little bro is probably going to get one of those for x-mas. I am going to keep the gaming on my pc forget xbox.

 

[imported_JeReMY]

Nice article, hopefully soon people can figure out how to mod them

 

[MrEPinky]

I like that Microsoft is making a VGA cable for those of us who don't want to shell out for an HDTV, but do want higher resolutions. This is a big selling point for me, the poor college student.

 

[microAmp]

Originally posted by: klah

Originally posted by: fbrdphreak
sooo........sllooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

Mirror: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=33&threadid=1736410

Plagiarism at it's best

 

[BFG10K]

Any idea why this "Free AA" thing isnt implemented on PC GPUs?

If you're CPU limited then it is. If you're referring to the eDRAM then I don't think it'll be long before we see something like that on the PC. In the meantime you can go with an SLI GTX 512 and it'll crush any console available.

 

[Fox5]

The reason that free AA isn't on PC gpus...
The edram is expensive to add...
The edram isn't as flexible. It only allows free AA up to a framebuffer size that fits in the edram, pc's go up to 2048x1568 or some ridiculous res by that, so the free AA would cease to work.
Also, new video cards come out so frequently that the AA basically becomes free anyhow. (besides, how would they sell new video cards if every card could run games with maxed out AA?)

 

[PrayForDeath]

Originally posted by: Fox5
The reason that free AA isn't on PC gpus...
The edram is expensive to add...
The edram isn't as flexible. It only allows free AA up to a framebuffer size that fits in the edram, pc's go up to 2048x1568 or some ridiculous res by that, so the free AA would cease to work.
Also, new video cards come out so frequently that the AA basically becomes free anyhow. (besides, how would they sell new video cards if every card could run games with maxed out AA?)

Also, this eDRAM only provides free 2x AA (sometimes 4x); on the PC people use up to 16xAA (some crazy combinations), so it would need a gigantic eDRAM to become free.

 

[Powermoloch]

relax guys....even xbox.com had given their take on the inner workings of the Xbox360 (but not as great in detail as anandtech.com I thank you )

 

[gtx4u]

once again Microsoft has lied they said 4x free AA now it's only 2x free AA?? wtf, 1280x720 on 2x AA = JAGGIEEEES. Too bad it can't even display 1080p.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Excellent article Kristopher! I'm digging the pics too! Quite a neat and clean design of the internals on this generation Xbox, if I do say so myself!

 

[BenSkywalker]

The edram is expensive to add...

That is true.

The edram isn't as flexible. It only allows free AA up to a framebuffer size that fits in the edram, pc's go up to 2048x1568 or some ridiculous res by that, so the free AA would cease to work.

That would be a great point but it is of course completely wrong. As it stands now the 360 doesn't have enough eDRAM to handle AA @720p- they tile the scene data(which can also easily be done on PCs).

Also, this eDRAM only provides free 2x AA (sometimes 4x); on the PC people use up to 16xAA (some crazy combinations), so it would need a gigantic eDRAM to become free.

4x tends to give about a 5% performance hit with the 360 as far as the GPU is concerned. That said, it needs to hit system memory more often to tile out the data for each frame(which could be an issue). If the 360 had dedicated video memory outside of the eDRAM this wouldn't be an issue.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Originally posted by: PrayForDeath
Interesting read. However, it's dissapointing to know that the standard AA requirement is now 2x instead of 4x, and that some game developers are rendering their games at a low resolution then scaling it up to 720p.
Now we need the GAMES!!

Still, 2xAA is better than nothing...

 

[gtx4u]

Originally posted by: StrangerGuy

Originally posted by: PrayForDeath
Interesting read. However, it's dissapointing to know that the standard AA requirement is now 2x instead of 4x, and that some game developers are rendering their games at a low resolution then scaling it up to 720p.
Now we need the GAMES!!

Still, 2xAA is better than nothing...

2x AA is good combined with high resolutions, but with low resolution it looks like no AA at all.