Being as I am a console gamer this is all well and good but I could honestly have cared less (I bought my computer almost a year ago so of course I cant' play games on it anymore). Finally getting down to business Mr. Gates confirmed possibly the worse kept secret in the video game industry... Microsoft's long awaited/dreaded entry into the console gaming market.
While the announcement of a new console wouldn't ordinarily cause me to pause and jump for joy what was released regarding the power of the system is simply staggering...
DirectX API game development tools (easy to program for)
Intel Pentium III processor technology w/ streaming SIMD extensions (1000 mhz!!!)
Custom 3-d NVIDIA graphics processor (for those rich persons that have one for their computer ours will be better)
128mb of RAM (unified memory architecture, ha Sony!)
Custom 3-d audio processor
8GB Hard Drive (not a typo!)
4x DVD drive with movie playback
Four game controller ports
Expansion port
Proprietary A/V connector
100MBps Ethernet
So my friends I ask this, are we impressed yet? I know one thing, most of the developers in the known world are! To put these amazing hardware specs into english I'll give some performance measures of the system...
300 MILLION micro polygons/ particles per second
150 MILLION transformed and lit polygons per second (compared to about 30 million from the PS2)
Full scene anti aliasing (The entire gaming community pauses, thinks, erupts in laughter)
1,200,000,000,000 computations per second.
Microsoft has a new tagline for their system,
"Power is not a problem" I couldn't agree more.
Source: Microsoft
