Seite 3: Richard Huddy im Interview

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Inhaltsverzeichnis

1

Einleitung

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Interview Teil 2:

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Interview Teil 3:

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Interview Teil 4:

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Interview Teil 5:

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Interview Teil 6:

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Interview Teil 7:

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Interview Teil 8:

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Interview Teil 9:

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Interview Teil 3:

What are the features you're mostly proud of in the xbox 360 GPU? Did you made any compromises?

I think the three key features of Xbox 360 graphics technology are as follows:

First and foremost we have a "unified shader architecture". No other console or PC chip can boast this. And what, in short, it means is that the hardware is always able to run at 100% efficiency. All previous hardware has separate vertex and pixel shaders. That means that that previous hardware just had to hope that the vertices and pixels came in just about the right ratios. If you got too many pixels then the vertex engines would be idle, and if you got too many vertices then the pixel engines would starve instead. It's not uncommon for one part of the chip to be starved of work for a large majority of the time - and that's obviously inefficient. With a unified architecture we have hardware that automatically moulds its-self to the task required and simply does whatever needs to be done. That all means that the Xbox 360 runs at 100% efficiency all the time, whereas previous hardware usually runs at somewhere between 50% and 70% efficiency. And that should means that clock for clock, the Xbox graphics chip is close to twice as efficient as previous graphics hardware.

Next on my list is the hardware support for directly accessing memory from within the shader units. This makes the Xbox graphics chip work in a much more flexible way than has ever been possible before. Now it's relatively simple for a games developer to write code to do anything inside the graphics chip that they could do elsewhere. Accessing memory in arbitrary ways sounds like a very esoteric thing to do within a graphics chip, but actually it allows you to do some amazing things which mean that Xbox 360 games will be more like movies than you ever imagined. It's so powerful that I'd say that this feature alone makes the Xbox 360 technically superior to any other console planned for the next five years.

Last on the list, but also of great importance is the "intelligent memory". In cooperation with NEC we've designed some special memory that knows some of the key operations of 3D graphics. It's the memory it-self which understand anti-aliasing, Z buffering and stencilling. These are three operations which normally slow graphics chips down more than anything else. We designed related capabilities into the memory for The GameCube for Nintendo, but the Xbox 360 hardware takes this idea to its logical conclusion and means that the quality of image that you'll see from Xbox 360 games will always be mind-blowing.