NEWS - Thursday, June 16, 2005
MS Gets License For NVIDIA Tech
At the recent Microsoft pre E3 conference it was announced that the Xbox 360 would have backwards compatibility with the top selling Xbox games. Despite not supporting all Xbox titles it was good news for Xbox fans. The US website 1UP has learned that Microsoft have a license agreement to use NVIDIA technologies in the Xbox 360. This will allow backwards compatibility to be made more easily. Without the NVIDIA tech Microsoft would have had to reverse engineer the NVIDIA technology, entering a legal nightmare. One of the other major stumbling blocks is the difference in the CPUs used in the Xbox consoles. The Xbox 360 has an IBM Power PC chip whereas the Xbox has an Intel CPU. According to Richard Huddy from ATI, in an interview last week, this should not be a problem thanks to the 360’s massive processing power. Despite the news that Microsoft has licensed NVIDIA technology it is still unknown exactly how backwards compatibility will work. One suggestion is that game specific patches will be made available allowing the older games to run on 360 hardware. At this point Microsoft have nothing to say on the matter.Source: http://www.pro-g.co.uk/
