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Xbox Architecture

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Re: Xbox Architecture

#51

Post by numpad0 »

vmception wrote: post #7
transpute wrote: post #2

Xbox One architecture talk (2019): https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/ > Every game console since the first Atari was more or less designed to prevent the piracy of games and yet every single game console has been successfully modified to enable piracy. However, this trend has come to an end. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have now been on the market for close to 6 years, without hackers being ab…

Well this is false. But I can say that I became disinterested in piracy when they made getting games more convenient than piracy. When they made using the hardware closer to its full potential part of the default experience. When they got the pricing right for these “premium” but pretty basic features. And of course, personally having the disposable income to afford the content because I would have never been a custo…

Also multiplayer. One does not simply go online with pirated games! This didn’t matter to pirates when games were mostly singleplayer with local multi as a bonus.

Re: Xbox Architecture

#53

Post by Aperocky »

TeaDude wrote: post #45

I know nothing about the actual underlying architecture but from the (credible) sources I've heard from apparently it's a really nice API hiding an absolutely unholy mess and that's why emulation has been so poor for so long.

> it's a really nice API hiding an absolutely unholy mess

Aint that universal.

Re: Xbox Architecture

#55

Post by snuxoll »

recursive wrote: post #23
4ec0755f5522 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought an Xbox just for gamepass. 200+ games, may not have everything I want to play but it always has something I fun I do want to play. (Also xbox sales are often very good. I'm ok paying $10-20 (sometimes less!) for games). I suppose it helps that my backlog is 6 years now; up until last week I was still playing games on 360/ps3.

I just can't get over the idea that a game I'm playing today might be removed from gamepass tomorrow. As a result, I don't want to play anything on gamepass, or subscribe. Although I think I might have somehow accidentally subscribed anyway. I'll stick to gold.

If it get pulled and you enjoy it that much take advantage of the discount (every game on Game Pass has a somewhat discounted price for members) and buy it. There’s been a handful of games here or there I didn’t want to lose when they were retiring, and others that I played but didn’t really miss. I still save a lot of money compared to buying every game I ever want to play - especially given many of them I enjoy but not enough to shell out full price on

Re: Xbox Architecture

#56

Post by vvanders »

phire wrote: post #18
saagarjha wrote: post #8

I'm just looking at the motherboard layout at the very top of the article, and it's really strange to my non-expert eyes. The CPU is off to one side, and the GPU is the thing in the middle. And the SDRAM is all split up and far away from the CPU! Is this some sort of game-console specific thing?

The xbox (like many consoles, n64, gamecube, xbox360, wii, wii u, xbox one, ps4, switch ps5, XSX) has unified memory, as in the CPU and GPU share the same sdram. The only way to do this is to have one chip (It's always the GPU. The GPU needs more memory bandwidth) connected directly to the dram, and the second chip (CPU) has to send memory requests to the second chip. Though, this console dates to a time when CPUs di…

One notable exception from that list is the PS3. That thing was a real bastard to write for but if you managed to vectorize things properly it did really go at a good clip.

One fun thing was optimizing for the SPUs meant that your code was really cache coherent and usually saw significant gains on all platforms. Of course most people at that time wrote for PC+360 first and entered a world of pain when PS3 came along.

If there's one lesson to take away it's always build for your most constrained platforms first. There's still a few funky architectures out there(RPi I'm looking at you[1]) so it's always worth understanding where the hardware constraints in your system can come back to cause havok.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/conf...

Re: Xbox Architecture

#57

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

zerr wrote: post #22
transpute wrote: post #2

Xbox One architecture talk (2019): https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/ > Every game console since the first Atari was more or less designed to prevent the piracy of games and yet every single game console has been successfully modified to enable piracy. However, this trend has come to an end. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have now been on the market for close to 6 years, without hackers being ab…

Why bother? Those who "pirate" will never convert to paid customers so why not let kids from some landlocked African country or rural India enjoy games?

> Those who "pirate" will never convert to paid customers

That's not true. Many people won’t pay for something if they can get it for free reasonably easy.

Re: Xbox Architecture

#58

Post by fulafel »

phire wrote: post #18
saagarjha wrote: post #8

I'm just looking at the motherboard layout at the very top of the article, and it's really strange to my non-expert eyes. The CPU is off to one side, and the GPU is the thing in the middle. And the SDRAM is all split up and far away from the CPU! Is this some sort of game-console specific thing?

The xbox (like many consoles, n64, gamecube, xbox360, wii, wii u, xbox one, ps4, switch ps5, XSX) has unified memory, as in the CPU and GPU share the same sdram. The only way to do this is to have one chip (It's always the GPU. The GPU needs more memory bandwidth) connected directly to the dram, and the second chip (CPU) has to send memory requests to the second chip. Though, this console dates to a time when CPUs di…

Why would it be impossible to have >1 chip access the SDRAM? Like Amiga did.

Especially if the GPU already had custom silicon for it.

Whether it would be good engineering (cost, time to market, risks) is of course another issue.

Re: Xbox Architecture

#59

Post by Causality1 »

vmception wrote: post #7
transpute wrote: post #2

Xbox One architecture talk (2019): https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/ > Every game console since the first Atari was more or less designed to prevent the piracy of games and yet every single game console has been successfully modified to enable piracy. However, this trend has come to an end. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have now been on the market for close to 6 years, without hackers being ab…

Well this is false. But I can say that I became disinterested in piracy when they made getting games more convenient than piracy. When they made using the hardware closer to its full potential part of the default experience. When they got the pricing right for these “premium” but pretty basic features. And of course, personally having the disposable income to afford the content because I would have never been a custo…

Personally I'd call myself a "hybrid consumer." I'll pirate a game as an offline demo if the only way to purchase it doesn't allow refunds. I'll also pirate a game if I already paid for it on a different platform. There are quite a few PC games still in their plastic wrap on my shelf because they required obnoxious add-on software like uPlay and pirating something I already bought was preferable to installing it.

Re: Xbox Architecture

#60

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

phire wrote: post #18
saagarjha wrote: post #8

I'm just looking at the motherboard layout at the very top of the article, and it's really strange to my non-expert eyes. The CPU is off to one side, and the GPU is the thing in the middle. And the SDRAM is all split up and far away from the CPU! Is this some sort of game-console specific thing?

The xbox (like many consoles, n64, gamecube, xbox360, wii, wii u, xbox one, ps4, switch ps5, XSX) has unified memory, as in the CPU and GPU share the same sdram. The only way to do this is to have one chip (It's always the GPU. The GPU needs more memory bandwidth) connected directly to the dram, and the second chip (CPU) has to send memory requests to the second chip. Though, this console dates to a time when CPUs di…

> The only way to do this is to have one chip (It's always the GPU. The GPU needs more memory bandwidth) connected directly to the dram, and the second chip (CPU) has to send memory requests to the second chip.

I don't think thats true, in embedded architectures its not uncommon to have dual-port RAM.

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