Discussing the Power of the 360 GPU

[Everlost_MI]

TeamXbox (http://www.teamxbox.com/) has posted an interview (http://interviews.teamxbox.com/xbox/1458/The-Power-of-the-Xbox-360-GPU/p1/) with Bob Feldstein, the VP of Engineering at ATI, discussing the development and power of the 360 GPU.

[Borys]

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LMAO

ATI guy says his product is the best. What's next - nVidia guy saying RSX is a beast?
</style>

[Reanimated]

Interesting interview. The info on the SM3+ "features" and some of the WGF2 info was of particular interest.

[kokyunage]

If I remember correctly reading a few reviews of the ATI 1900 XTX (or whatever it's called) some of the features of the xbox360 gpu are creeping their way into PC's. Supposedly, the new ATI card has a larger memory buffer that handles AA and features similar to that are less GPU intensive. So, you can have AA enabled for obscenely high resolution (1600+) and not take as much of a performance loss. Kinda neat if you ask me. Shows that ATI made some good choices when developing the Xbox360 GPU.

[JediSanf]

I'm sorry, but interviews like this end up being useless to me. Yea, the technical information is interesting but I'd much rather see someone from tomshardware or hardocp ask challenging questions. And page 3 was nothing but a circle jerk.


When the Xbox 360 GPU features were unveiled, Nvidia expressed doubts about unified shader architecture, particularly about its performance. Do you think Nvidia’s comments are due to no Nvidia part, not even the RSX, having a unified shader architecture yet?

Bob Feldstein: Oh yes. Very much so.

In Windows Vista, WGF 2.0 will treat GPUs as having unified vertex and pixel pipelines, even if that’s not the case in the actual hardware. This suggests that eventually, all GPUs will have a unified shader architecture.
Does the design of the Xenos GPU give ATI the edge over the competition in the near future, since you have already developed a unified shader architecture?

Bob Feldstein: I have no idea what Nvidia is doing in the future, but ATI has a leg up on the research and development of Unified Shaders. This certainly seems like an advantage.


Does your competition suck?

Bob Feldstein: Oh yes. Very much so.

Given that you've bent over and taken it from Microsoft now, do you think they'll call you tomorrow?

Bob Feldstein: God, we hope so.

[Chalex]

I love this quote:

Now that Microsoft has announced that it is developing a HD-DVD external drive, we’d like to know if the Xenos GPU has any of this Avivo technology found in the Radeon X1800, such as hardware accelerated processing of HD video formats like H.264, VC-1. Or would Microsoft be required to use its three-core PowerPC processor to accelerate HD decoding?

Bob Feldstein: Better directed to Microsoft.

[Zanzibar]

I love this quote:

Now that Microsoft has announced that it is developing a HD-DVD external drive, we’d like to know if the Xenos GPU has any of this Avivo technology found in the Radeon X1800, such as hardware accelerated processing of HD video formats like H.264, VC-1. Or would Microsoft be required to use its three-core PowerPC processor to accelerate HD decoding?

Bob Feldstein: Better directed to Microsoft.

Yeah, I saw that too.

Translation: Those fucktards at Microsoft didn't mention ANYTHING about a HD-DVD peripheral to us. We could have designed that crap in our sleep, but now they're gonna make some half-assed software decompressor.

[Reanimated]

If I remember correctly reading a few reviews of the ATI 1900 XTX (or whatever it's called) some of the features of the xbox360 gpu are creeping their way into PC's. Supposedly, the new ATI card has a larger memory buffer that handles AA and features similar to that are less GPU intensive. So, you can have AA enabled for obscenely high resolution (1600+) and not take as much of a performance loss. Kinda neat if you ask me. Shows that ATI made some good choices when developing the Xbox360 GPU.




Eventually most of the features will make it over to PC parts because MS and ATI have collaborated heavily on this part and integration with future WGF2 features.

[mister_slim]

I love that bit at the beginning where they mention their first breakthrough was realizing the xGPU wasn't a PC card.

Anyway, doesn't look like the ArtX team was involved in the design at all.