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X-Fan
05-18-2005, 06:40 PM
There is no doubt that the level of detail in the trailers is up to next-gen standards, but almost anything in-engine has chugged a bit at one point or another.

When asked about this issue our source replied that the current playable 360 games would all have frame rate issues due to the fact that they are running on alpha units. A rough estimate placed these machines at about one-third as powerful as the 360. We went head-to-head in Top Spin 2 and noticed that there were visible jaggies and a few frame drops. This is because the Alpha units do not run anti-aliasing and simply don't have the power to run a high-res game at full quality. The developers had tuned Top Spin 2 to run at a smooth 60 frames per second but this was simply not possible on the Alpha hardware. We have heard that the final development kits will arrive in July and they promise to look much better.

It is not surprising that many games in early stages would suffer from the types of issues we've seen so far. If the alpha units are underpowered, it is surprising that we haven't heard about this earlier. Knowing that the final products will most definitely run smoother certainly got us more excited about the 360 line-up.

Source =Xbox 360

LiquidX
05-18-2005, 07:31 PM
Better some frame drops and jaggies than having the whole thing crash during a live presentation. I wonder if "running at 1/3 the power" means that its only working with one of the processors.

skorp
05-18-2005, 10:53 PM
Moore clarified that the demos shown the night before at the Microsoft press conference were all gameplay off alpha dev kits only. "We haven't delivered beta kits," he clarified. Final hardware to developers would come in early July, Moore added. He shrugged off the impressive video Sony showed at its media event, suggesting the video was merely an approximation of what the PS3 will deliver. "The [Cell] chip doesn't even exist," Moore nearly hooted.

- Gamespot

mattgame
05-19-2005, 07:54 AM
Phew that was close. I was getting concerned.