Unless they've added something to the video, my guess a comparison would just show that they're pretty much identicle, it's the same demonstration right? The "Ruby" character's been around in ATI's tech reels since the X800 right?

1. The Ruby, "The Assassin" demo was ported to the 360 in Augest/September. The port took 2 weeks and ran at a solid 30fps. Peter Moore ran this demo in realtime (this may even be available here at Xboyde.com, not certain though).

2. Freniger is correct. This is cinematic and has no physics, AI, game input, etc... so it is not comparable to ingame footage. It is best to compare it to a cut scene. The visual fidelity of the still shots is not lost, but in game you rarely get as good of an angle. You are almost always zoomed out for gameplay purposes and face the rear of a player. Further most games have animation that is significantly less smooth than a cut scene. All this tells us is that rendering wise Xenos/360 can do very nice graphics.

3. The reason so many Xbox 360 games do not live up to the hype is because they either began life as an Xbox1 title (Kameo, PDZ, etc), are an Xbox port (Gun, King Kong, etc) or are PC ports (Oblivion, CoD2, Quake 4, etc). The new GPUs on the market, like Xenos, spend much of their logic realestate in shaders. Yet many current games are limited in other areas like texture mapping or even CPU usage. In general it seems games that use more than 1 CPU core are the ones with better framerates which indicates the CPU, and not the GPU, is the issue. This is not a surprise due to the difficulty in multithreading and moving to an in-order processor.

4. The best looking Xbox 360 games, like PGR3 and Gears of War, are either designed for the Xbox 360 or designed for next gen GPUs in general.

5. The reason PC tech demo graphics don't appear in games for many years is because the PC market is dependant on legacy. Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Far Cry, Call of Duty, etc... all work on older hardware, specifically DX7 and DX8 class video cards. Basically the nice eye candy in those games is just extras--the game itself is not designed around those features because that would cut out the majority of the market. According to Steampowered.com's system specs gamers with nice DX9 cards are in the significant minority. It would be suicide to drop support of DX8 and DX7 cards.

Of course on a console this is not the case. The PS2 tech demos and the Xbox1 demos were matched/surpassed in game (sans Raven which was not realtime).

6. Developers got final Beta kits in Augest. There is no way for them to test the Xbox 360 and then design games with its hardware strengths and weaknesses in mind. The closest GPUs to Xenos (R580 and R600) wont be available until next year. Basically what we are getting are games design on Radeon 9800 and X800 series cards. We wont see games designed with the Xbox 360 in mind (in mind being knowing what it does well and what it does not do well, and then designed accordingly), from the ground up, until late 2006 at the earliest, and most likely not until 2007. Right now we are getting a lot of games that are throwing gobs of bumb maps, normal maps, specular highlights, bloom, etc... into the game.

You REALLY need to design your art assets with the hardware in mind and build and engine that accents that. No game so far does that.

7. The Toy Store video is actually not CPU-dependant. Further, it is a "Whole Scene" approach. That is, it is not a fly by but representative of what a game could look like within those confines. You can read about how they did all the graphics affects--almost ALL in shaders on the X1800 GPU--here: http://www.noticias3d.com/articulo.asp?idarticulo=...

In a nut shell: The effects are all GPU-side, meaning that a real game could use such effects.

8. Xenos, from a theoretical peak perspective, is faster than the X1800XT. Taking into consideration its additional architectural advantages (unified shaders, eDRAM bandwidth and no ROP slowdown, etc), feature advantages (very small performance hit with AA, FP10 for extremely fast HDR, hardware tesselation, HOS, 3Dc standard in all games, etc) and the fact the Xbox 360 is a "closed box" system it should achieve a lot better results. The fact the CPU, which can do 1 Dot Product per cycle, can stream 10.8GB/s of information directly to Xenos without touching system memory bandwidth is impressive. This means it can push geometry and information to the GPU much better than on a desktop PC, and if the content is procedural generated this leaves the 512MB of memory to hold more information and leave the bandwidth for texture accesses and so forth.

It really is unfortunate that Microsoft has not done a better job with PR. They have had some excellent tech demos and some really great looking games in the pipe yet the hype has been slightly muted by a lot of the ports. They really do not show what the console can do, which is sad because it really is an elegant system design.

Fixed.