Xbox 360 confirmed at $299.

Nom Chompsky

Nom Chompsky

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Microsoft is announcing today at an event in Germany that it will sell two different versions of the Xbox 360. On top of that, Robbie Bach, Chief Xbox Officer, said that the system remains on schedule for launch in Europe, the U.S. and Japan this fall.

The company will sell a high-end Xbox 360 model that will come with a standard 20-gigabyte hard disk drive for $399. This box will be backward-compatible with the top-selling original Xbox titles and will come with a wireless game controller, a built-in Media Center Extender, a wireless remote control, and an Xbox Live headset. This version will be for the enthusiasts and the hard drive will come with DVD and music content preloaded.

For those who don't want to pay more, Microsoft will also sell an Xbox 360 core version without the hard disk drive. This version will have a wired controller and it will not have the head set, or the wireless TV remote. Players who buy this version will have to buy flash memory cards to store game data.

The moves will help Microsoft offset the higher costs of a hard disk drive in the box. It is a disappointment to game developers who wanted the hard drive on every machine so that they could have a more capable box to develop games for. The developers were told at the beginning that they had to create games that could exploit different kinds of storage options, such as a hard drive or a flash memory unit. For companies designing online console games such as Epic Games, that means they can't create the games on the assumption that a hard drive is on every box, as they could with the last machine.

But Microsoft figured out that the hard drive costs -- as much as $50 a machine -- prevented the company from being profitable in the first generation. Also, game developers didn't exploit the hard drive as much as the company expected.

"The point here is about choice,'' he said. "In the past, game console didn't offer much choice. You got what they said you got."

Regarding why Microsoft chose to do a version without a hard drive, Bach said, "You do a combination of things and triangulate on a solution. Cost certainly matters. The price the consumers will pay matters, and the value they get. You have to also look by territory."

In Europe, the Xbox 360 will cost 399 Euros, while the Xbox 360 Core will be 299 Euros. In the United Kingdom, the Xbox 360 will be 279 pounds and the Xbox 360 Core will be 209 pounds. Prices in Japan will be announced at the Tokyo Game Show in October.

Microsoft engineer Jeff Andrews said at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University that they had designed the Xbox 360 to operate with a hard drive or without one from the start. They left it to management to decide which business strategy to pursue.

"We have been talking about two SKUs as a possibility for a while," Bach said. "We hadn't locked in until we had a specific meeting. We did tell the game developers to be ready for it from the start."

Bach said the company wasn't ready to reveal launch dates yet. Microsoft has scheduled an event for Oct. 4-5 in Amsterdam to reveal more about its Xbox 360 games.

Bach said that wireless Internet will be an optional add-on for both versions. It will cost $99 to add the 802.11 a/b/g wireless networking capability. He said that the costs remained too high to include the feature in every box.

"You have to remember," he said, "if we double or triple the number of people on Xbox Live, it's still not the majority of customers today."

Every Xbox console will come with some common features such as support for 720 progressive scan digital TV, the Silver Edition of Xbox Live for free, progressive scan DVD, an Ethernet cable, and a Media Center Extender.
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Source: Mecury News Blog
 
Announcement by uber 3D whizz John Carmack from Id Software at recent QuakeCon that he has moved his primary development platform from the PC to the XBOX 360.

He can't sing enough praises of the development environment from Microsoft.

Sony must be sweating now ;).
 
Sony's gato release the ps3, they can't sit on it till 2007.
 
Clipse said:
well for $299, we might get it for R6000 in SA ;/
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My thoughts exactly, its gonna be damn expensive here and games are gonna be diffucult to get. :(
 
rburley said:
i hope that xbox 360 will kick ps3's ass
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I will support Sony's PS3 simply because it's not Microsoft. Much like i will support the nameless SNO because it's not Telkom. I do not like one company
controlling the market.

That and i still believe the PS3 is more 'next gen' than the XBOX 1.5
Bill has made enough dosh.
 
sony playstation has been raping the console scene for a while now and its time that some other company takes the throne... it is a pity that it has to be microsoft though
 
Imho PS3's E3 games look far superior to what microsft had to offer.
 
Vio said:
Imho PS3's E3 games look far superior to what microsft had to offer.
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Was it running on actual PS3 hardware or just movies spooled from a high end PC ???.
 
It was running on a cell clocked at 2.4 GHz with a lower end chipset than the one that’s going into the ps3. If I’m not mistaken the ps3's cells going to run at 3.4 GHz (or something like that capped, can’t do any searches right now). But what you saw at E3 was all in game footage being rendered; at least that’s what they said. I've also seen a demos of the games they showed at E3 where they pause the clip rotate zoom in and out etc/take control of some characters.

I'm really looking forward to the ps3 getting released, if what I’ve seen so far is the truth then it truly is the next generation of games. :)
 
Vio said:
Sony's gato release the ps3, they can't sit on it till 2007.
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Doubt they will - according to ps3land.com its supposed to be spring of 2006.
At the end of a promotional video played during the PlayStation 3 launch event, the words “Spring 2006” were displayed on the screen – thus implying the console will be released sometime during this period. When exactly, and to which countries, is currently unknown. The rumors, however, point to a worldwide launch in March 2006.
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I'm not wasting my money on an Xbox if its just going to be a few month wait for the PS3

According to a podcast I was listening too the PS3 can also run OsX. Might just be a rumor but its not inconceivable.
rburley said:
sony playstation has been raping the console scene for a while now and its time that some other company takes the throne... it is a pity that it has to be microsoft though
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Got a feeling the de-throning will be short lived.
 
Xbox 360, PS3, Nintendo's Revolution... all nice consoles to have but has anybody thought of the prices the games going to cost?

As for development tools the Xbox 360 is the easiest to work with as per J. Carmack's statements, Sony still has some rough edges but until i actually see the Killzone 2's CGI showing up as GAMEPLAY on the PS3 i will stick to the Xbox 360, thats coz i've seen video's of actual gameplay of some good games.

Dont get me wrong, the PS3 is nice too but it wont see daylight till 2007, why? Coz there aint any promises that the games for it wont be out for Xmas, unlike the Xbox 360 which has some promising titles lined up for November/December release.

Lets just see at how diabolical the SA prices are going to be for the Xbox 360 though... eish...
 
bwana v.3 said:
According to a podcast I was listening too the PS3 can also run OsX.
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Apple would never support or port OSX on non Apple branded/retailed hardware.

Also a Mac is much more than a box with a PowerPC processor and some memory but also custom IC's involved (their version of the Northbridge and Southbridge).

Most likely Sony meant the open sourced core of OSX without the GUI and frameworks i.e OpenDarwin.
 
I am impressed with the visuals that the PS3 delivers, IGN has a whole bunch of tech demo videos for download, pretty amazing stuff. This cell architecture disturbs me greatly; glancing at the specs it would seem that the PS3 is practically a super computer.

These are the "official specs" from www.ps3land.com:

Official PS3 Specs

Here are the official technical specifications for the PS3, taken directly from Sony:

CPU
Cell Processor
PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
1 VMX vector unit per core
512KB L2 cache
7 x SPE @3.2GHz
7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy
total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS

GPU
RSX @550MHz
1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines

Sound
Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell- base processing)
Memory
256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz 256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz

System Bandwidth
Main RAM 25.6GB/s
VRAM 22.4GB/s
RSX 20GB/s (write) + 15GB/s (read)
SB< 2.5GB/s (write) + 2.5GB/s (read)

System Floating Point Performance
2 TFLOPS

Storage
Detachable 2.5" HDD slot x 1

I/O
USB Front x 4, Rear x 2 (USB2.0)
Memory Stick standard/Duo, PRO x 1
SD standard/mini x 1
CompactFlash (Type I, II) x 1

Communication
Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) x 3 (input x 1 + output x 2)
Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 b/g
Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR)

Controller
Bluetooth (up to 7)
USB 2.0 (wired)
Wi-Fi (PSP)
Network (over IP)

AV Output
Screen size: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p
HDMI: HDMI out x 2
Analog: AV MULTI OUT x 1
Digital audio: DIGITAL OUT (OPTICAL) x 1

Disc Media
CD PlayStation CD-ROM, PlayStation 2 CD-ROM, CD-DA, CD-DA (ROM), CD-R, CD-RW, SACD, SACD Hybrid (CD layer), SACD HD, DualDisc, DualDisc (audio side), DualDisc (DVD side)
DVD: PlayStation 2 DVD-ROM, PlayStation 3 DVD-ROM, DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW
Blu-ray Disc: PlayStation 3 BD-ROM, BD-Video, BD-ROM, BD-R, BD-RE
 
so? if the SDK is a balls up for Sony's PS3 do you think that programmers will develop great games for it? i still see amazing games being pulled off the current PS2 hardware and thats coz the programmers know their stuff, that game is God of War by the way...

NASA's space shuttle also looked good on paper... :D
 
ps3 demos look awesome, just strange that ONLY killzone looks like that, while the rest look much paler.

xbox we know is gonna rock already, with ingame videos demonstrating unreal engine and ingame screens of Gears of War... looks totally awesome. ps3 wont be around for quite a while and thus will be playing catch up, even if it is technically better. and xbox games can be churned out at a faster rate, meaning it costs less to develop which might result in cheaper games than ps3.

i still wont mind buying both though. if killzone 2 looks like that i will druel myself to sleep everynigth, while enjoying some nice games on the xbox every other night

theres no need to go all FANBOY on this, get them both you stingy gits and THEN comment. it makes no sense to debate it while its not released yet. lets rather debate what flavours of Toilet Spray we would like to see, cause i do NOT think ORANGES and CR@P mix well...
 
there were PLENTY of issues with the Killzone demo footage... until i see it for REAL i wont think of it as gameplay footage but just CGI intro stuff... nobody will beat me to it since they wont have a PS3 to show it to me. So maybe only in 2006 they can prove me wrong. :D

Lets keep our guns holstered and ready until the hype dies down and we actually SEE these next-gen consoles in action in the next 6 months... only after that we can say mine is bigger and better than yours... :P
 
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