ATI talks Xbox 360 in London

Written by Wil Harris

May 25, 2005 | 13:42

Tags: #360 #720p #ati-xbox #high-definition #microsoft-xbox #microsoft-xbox-360 #r500 #xbox-360

Companies: #ati #microsoft

ATI revealed this afternoon that every single Xbox 360 game will be required to run at a minimum of 720p resolution with 4x Anti-Aliasing.

Speaking at a press conference in London, ATI technology specialist Rene Froeleke told journalists that Microsoft had specified that games must run at the 1280x720 resolution at 4xAA with no slowdown. Every single game will be supported at this graphical specification, which we think is great news for gamers playing on big-screen TVs.

When questionned as to why the minimum wasn't 1080p, Rene responded that most of Europe hadn't even reached 720, let alone 1080.

Because of the embedded DRAM architecture of Xbox 360, the AA was described as 'Absolutely free'.

The technology fulfills all the criteria of Windows Graphics Foundation 1.0, aka DirectX 9.0c, which includes Shader Model 3.0. However, it lacks features which are required for WGF 2.0, most notably the ability to create vertices, rather than just shade and manipulate them.

Whilst the architecture of the 360 is not comparable to a PC design, Rene said that the raw performance would be roughly equivalent to a 32-pipeline PC graphics card.

The shared memory technology was 'Definitely not comparable to Hypermemory', ATI's shared memory technology for the PC.

The chip doesn't have an official ATI name, since ATI aren't marketing it. Whilst the codename is R500, we were told that the name meant 'As much as the code on my suitcase' in terms of relevance to existing architecture.

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