nVidia loses XBox-2 contract to ATi

  • Thread starter Thread starter NV55
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Let em have it, I'm sure while they made tons of money at it Nvidia got a
lot of headaches from Microsoft
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Well, I'm sure that after the honeymoon was over, M$ tried to screw
them in the wrong hole, like they do all their "partners".
 
Bill said:
Maybe its the other way around?:-)
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Microsoft want want is effectively a PC at the price of a gamestation. To
achieve this they expect the hardware supplier to subsedise the hardware and
recieve a porportion of the license game makers pay microsoft. I'm sure this
financial arrangement caused all kinds of headaches.
 
Well, I'm sure that after the honeymoon was over, M$ tried to screw
them in the wrong hole, like they do all their "partners".
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The impression I got was that there was considerable attempted
screwing by both parties. :) Microsoft by trying to arbitrate a
lower price for the chips, and Nvidia by trying to use their influence
to steer DX9 towards their hardware.


Crash7
remove x's from address to email
 
:: --
: Remember when real men used Real computers!?
: When 512K of video RAM was a lot!
:
: Death to Palladium & WPA!!

Funny sig. You should go to the URL listed in my sig below, if you want
the real skinny on Palladium and it's big sibling, TCPA.

J.
 
The XBox2 may not be 100% compatible... especially if the games hit
the hardware - which *IS* the point of a console.
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Hrum? All XBox games are DirectX. They will be as compatible as
games are now on Nvidia and ATI hardware on PCs.

jw
 
Hrum? All XBox games are DirectX. They will be as compatible as
games are now on Nvidia and ATI hardware on PCs.
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N-O no. Many XBox games use advanced features on the custom NVidia
chip that don't necessarily exist on ATI.

Even on PC it is quite possible to make Direct3D games which work
great on one 3D card and poorly or not at all on another, and I bet in
XBox games this is even more pronounced. So DirectX is not the answer
to cancer.
 
Hrum? All XBox games are DirectX. They will be as compatible as
games are now on Nvidia and ATI hardware on PCs.
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They are DirectX to a degree, but you can not, for example, take an
XBox game and run it on a PC without porting it. The reason being
that the XBox allows some direct hardware access for performance
reasons. Since every single XBox out there has essentially identical
hardware, they can do this, while on a PC this is not possible.

However, the next generation of XBox will be different. The DirectX
stuff will be fine, but the direct hardware access stuff could be
problematic. Microsoft will probably try to accommodate this in
software, and likely they will be successful for 99%+ of all games,
but there may be the odd XBox game that just won't play on the XBox2.
 
They didn't have to sell processors for a couple of bucks each to Microsoft
(literally).
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You have factual information on the price that Intel is getting from
M$ for the CPU's (PIII-733's, IIRC)?
 
You have factual information on the price that Intel is getting from
M$ for the CPU's (PIII-733's, IIRC)?
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No factual information, but I would doubt that it's much over
$20/chip, if even that. Fortunately for Intel, the chips used are a
rather low cost chip (it's a Celeron processor (PIII core with 128KB
of L2) running on a 133MHz bus speed), but I still don't expect that
Intel is making much money off the sale of these chips.
 
Hopefully, Intel's stock of P3-733 won't run out before Xbox 2,
since both the part and the process are now obsolete.
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I don't see how this is a problem. Intel still makes far more
"obsolete" products. Last I checked they still made '186/8
processors. The embedded market tends to lag several processes
behind. ...and there is money there.
 
I don't see how this is a problem. Intel still makes far more
"obsolete" products. Last I checked they still made '186/8
processors. The embedded market tends to lag several processes
behind. ...and there is money there.
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Gotta do something with those old machines... 8)
 
Gotta do something with those old machines... 8)
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Sure. The point is that the P3-733 isn't as antique as was
pretended. Nor is M$ likely to run out of processors for it's
crappy X-box. ;-)

If there is a dime to be made the process will go on. Embedded
processors live until there are no longer any customers. The
8051 is still one of the largest selling processors, and has been
for over 20 years, despite the fact that it's the Bizaro of
processors.
 
Actually I was pretty sure those were Celeron 733's. As far as the contract
it really didnt matter, nVidia wasnt making a ton of money on the deal and
they can now put those resources back into the PC market where they belong.
 
Tony Hill said:
They are DirectX to a degree, but you can not, for example, take an
XBox game and run it on a PC without porting it. The reason being
that the XBox allows some direct hardware access for performance
reasons. Since every single XBox out there has essentially identical
hardware, they can do this, while on a PC this is not possible.
Click to expand...

Do you know for a fact that Xbox games are directly accessing the hardware?
From what I know about it, the OS on Xbox is a variant of Windows 2000, so
it has a Hardware Abstraction Layer protecting all direct hardware access
channels. Even the DirectX API goes through HAL (albeit as a peer of HAL,
since they are both parts of the OS).

Yousuf Khan
 
Actually yes the Operating System on the Microsoft XBox is a stripped down
version of Windows 2000.
 
Do you know for a fact that Xbox games are directly accessing the
hardware?

I don't know if he does, but I do.
 
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