XBOX 360: The Beta Kits

[StrifeSnake13*]

IGN (http://www.ign.com) has put up a lengthy article (http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/636/636018p1.html) detailing the Xbox 360's Beta Development Kit. Here's a taste,
We asked the teams how much more powerful the Beta Kits are then the P5s they're been working on, and what the significance of that additional power is. We learned that they're still exploring the Beta Kits' power and limitations, and that while there is nearly twice as much graphic power, the way in which coding passes from the triple core processors through the systems, it's got to be cleaner than on single processing machines. One North American developer had this outlook.

"On our side, we've been working very hard to tap into the full power of the Betas. On a technical side, while the GPU is nearly twice as powerful as the Alpha kits, the CPU architecture requires very clean logic coding in order to take advantage of its full potential." (We'll get to the clean logic bit later on in the story.)

[Justin_McElroy]

Hmmmm, ahhh yes, fascinating...hmmm, I suspected all along that the...uhh...hmmm.

Ok, I give. What?

[TrackZero]

Ummm....woo-hoo?

Personally I'm interested on how the system performs once it's fully out, I'm not worrying about a dev/beta kit.

Edit: And it's also just comforting to hear quotes like this:

"What gamers want to know, however, is will the games look better than the early versions at E3? Will they run with fast framerates and look spectacular? All of the developers' indirect answers leaned to "Yes." How will that happen? The Beta Kits are simply more powerful than the Alpha Kits. They're a better, closer representation to the final console's power."

Because Gears of War looked fantastic. And if you take that and double the performance, it's very next-gen IMHO. I just wish it was November already so I could be playing Perfect Dark Zero.

[bone4ahead]

Ummm....woo-hoo?

Personally I'm interested on how the system performs once it's fully out, I'm not worrying about a dev/beta kit.

Edit: And it's also just comforting to hear quotes like this:

Because Gears of War looked fantastic. And if you take that and double the performance, it's very next-gen IMHO. I just wish it was November already so I could be playing Perfect Dark Zero.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but Gears of War was running on SLI'ed Geforce 6800 Ultras and not an Alpha kit. The Alphas had ATI Radeon 9800's I think. So Gears Of War is probably looking almost as good as it will on final hardware.

[Morrolan]

If they can give me Gears of War, Oblivion and Resident Evil 5, looking like they do now, and running at a smooth framerate, I'm sold on the next generation. As has ALWAYS been the case, there will be enough super-high-profile games to keep me occupied. I won't really care that smaller development houses aren't able to get a handle on the hardware right away. Until they do, I'll be kept busy.

[mister_slim]

What's a P5?
What gamers want to know, however, is will the games look better than the early versions at E3? Will they run with fast framerates and look spectacular? All of the developers' indirect answers leaned to "Yes." How will that happen? The Beta Kits are simply more powerful than the Alpha Kits. They're a better, closer representation to the final console's power.
That is belaboring the obvious.

[sync]

What's a P5?that has to be a typo. I'm sure they meant G5.

[Swick]

Why does IGN even bother writing "articles"? They just rephrase the developers' words and stick them right next to the actual quote.

[F3nyx]

Why does IGN even bother writing "articles"? They just rephrase the developers' words and stick them right next to the actual quote.Because it's a nice middle ground between an editorial and an interview transcript. And it's not just rephrasing; much of the part that isn't quoted gives useful background info, sets up the developers' responses, etc. There may be reasons to hate IGN, but I don't think you can find many reasonable ones in this article.