whats the requirements

[Big_Dawg]

i know CXBX is in it's early stage but by guess whats the minimum requirements for a decent FPS after comercial games are playable god i can't wait for that day to come..

[Razor Blade]

well take x box specs and times by at least 2. its probably gonna be more than that. im guessing the radeon 9800 pro or gfx 5900 ultra will run games decent speed.

[Yeloazndevil]

your forgeting cpu speed probably 2 or 3 ghz once they optimize the emulator and other stuff

I don't think they will be THAT steep.... but don't expect them to be very low aswell. I would say (just a guess) a 2ghz CPU and a Radeon 9700 Pro.

[Razor Blade]

9700 pro is pretty steep. i mean pricewise. well thats what you get for next-gan emulators ...

[Exophase]

No, actually, you will only need a machine slightly more powerful than the XBox itself, possibly not as powerful in some aspects (memory bandwidth perhaps). This can be read right off the web page itself if I recall correctly. Now, before all of you say I'm a complete nutjob you have to understand that this is NOT your ordinary emulator. It's a software emulator much more than it is a hardware emulator; there's a software layer that passes through things to existing software, where drivers take care of the rest (and nVidia's drivers since might be even more optimized than those in the XBox. nVidia has constantly been optimizing their drivers). If anyone has ever used WINE, then this is pretty much the exact same concept, only Cxbx has even more efficiency goals than WINE.

Remember, unless you actually know about what the emulator itself is like then you have no way of predicting what kind of machine it'll require. And even then, you still can't really know for sure.

- Exo

[Razor Blade]

yea your right about that. if its more software oriented than youll need faster processor correct?

[Exophase]

In the way you're referring to software emulation, yes, it would require more CPU. But I don't mean using the CPU alone to emulate the hardware of the emulated machine. By "software emulation" I mean that cxbx doesn't intend to emulate hardware (as far as I know, at this point anyway) but intends to hook functions to wrappers, and otherwise directly execute x86 code. This means that it's emulating software more than it is hardware where it's actually doing any emulation at all. One example is HLE, but a better example are glide wrappers. But unlike glide wrappers, because the cxbx target hardware will be very similar to that of the XBox's, and will also have a very similar API, there won't be as much overhead.

- Exo

[gianpan]

Well my guess is a p3 1000mhz 256 ram and ge-force ti 4200 128 mb??

But i don't think a p4 3ghz will be needed.

Let's wait and see.

I don't know... I guess we will just have to wait and see.

[Chrono Archangel]

well i think i remember reading from caustik that it wouldnt be that high. i think the specs gianpan said are probably going to be around that....maybe caustik could come and tell us a little about that since he is now registered in the forums

[Myconid]

So then is Xbox slower than PS2,when it won't need such a strong PC too run,or is Xbox easier to emulate?

Xbox is waaaay easier to emulate than PS2 as it is more of a PC architecture...

[Chrono Archangel]

Originally Posted by Myconid

So then is Xbox slower than PS2,when it won't need such a strong PC too run,or is Xbox easier to emulate?

its definitly not slower, its just the way the Xbox manipulates its data, it resembles alot like a PC

[iwod]

NO! Xbox, in terms of hardware, may offer similar to PS2.

PS2 is a extremely powerful machine technically. But its archeticture is COMPLETELY different to a PC. And its design is not very efficent as well. Many programmer manger to squeeze >90% of ps1 power out. Company like squresoft.

But if i remember correctly so far no company has make a game that uterlise more than ~85% of PS2 power. When pS2 first came out, many games are only using 30-50% of ps2 power. And this is very low........

But now sony has updated their SDK and things have change. Upcoming games like GT4, programmer are also more used to it.

While in XBox, which is bascially a Intel Celeron 7xxMhz, and 64Mb Ram, And a Geforce 3.5 in it. So some may be asking why xbox with such low spec can play games so well.
Fist, Xbox games are only in 640x480 resolution, and resized back to tv resolution to archieve better image quality. It doesn't need full 32 bit colour ( not quite sure if i am correct )

And it has a cut down version of winxp kenerl with only 100K in size. I.e loading the whole OS in memory won't take you more than a few mB of ram includind overheads. The os is efficent since it doesn't have to be like a pc where many different purpose of protocol, driver, and software need to be supported. Games are written only for xbox, meaning unlike PC games where developer have to optimise for both ATI, Nvidia graphics, and INtel and AMD CPU, xbox developer only have to care about spcefic hardwares.

I am guessing a computer with PIII 1.3Ghz and Geforce 4ti will do. May be a P4 2 Ghz since the P4 is slower than P3 when executing x86 code.......

[Kane]

PS2 is a extremely powerful machine technically. But its archeticture is COMPLETELY different to a PC. And its design is not very efficent as well. Many programmer manger to squeeze >90% of ps1 power out. Company like squresoft.

Actualy, it's a very efficient architecture for games, it's merely not designed in the same way that other machines are, so developers have to change thier way of thinking when programming it. You can't cache shed loads of textures in the TMU as it has little vRAM, but it does have fook loads of bandwidth.

While in XBox, which is bascially a Intel Celeron 7xxMhz, and 64Mb Ram, And a Geforce 3.5 in it. So some may be asking why xbox with such low spec can play games so well.
Fist, Xbox games are only in 640x480 resolution, and resized back to tv resolution to archieve better image quality. It doesn't need full 32 bit colour ( not quite sure if i am correct )

The X-Box is an inefficient gaming machine. It's basicaly a PC (which is a multipurpose machine) in a box. The good thing is that developers are used to the way of thinking entailed in programming for the PC, so it effectively has all it's potential on hand.

As regards PS2 vs the X-Box in power, I wouldn't say either way, but what I will say is that the PS2 has far more untapped potential than that of the X-Box and Cube. Thus games on the PS2 (and PS3, which will have a similar architecture by many accounts) will get progressivly more impressive over its life span, much like the PSX (which although not as drastic, was far less PC in design than the Cube or Box), wheras the X-Box and Cube games, although they will improve, we won't see the massive improvements that we will from the PS2, or we did in the transition from FF7 to FF8 and 9.

As for the power that is needed.... from what I understand, CXBX is essentialy an API wrapper similar in style to that of WineX. The PS2 emulators are more like VMWare, which emulates the hardware itself. Now, try to run an app on VMWare, and compare its speed to that of WineX. Add to that the fact that the PS2's architecture is radicaly different to that of a PC.....
If I were to speculate, I'd suggest that a geForce 4 Ti and a 1.5GHz machine would emulate the Xbox more than happily wheras you might need double, perhaps even triple that power to emulate the top end games on the PS2. I hasten to re-itereate that this last paragraph is almost entirely speculation.

[Exophase]

XBox isn't an inefficient gaming machine just because it's built like a computer; pretty much all consoles are to some degree, XBox just happens to be like a Wintel PC. It has a decent amount of bandwidth and a general purpose CPU just like any other console. There's nothing about it that's particularly BAD for gaming, the real power lies in the XGPU which is very much designed for gaming.

BTW, VMWare, as far as I know, works on the same principles as Wine :P Try something like Bochs.

- Exo

[gameman733]

Originally Posted by Exophase

BTW, VMWare, as far as I know, works on the same principles as Wine

Actually, VMWare doesnt work like a wrapper. It actually emulates the
hardware. I believe it says that in its help file on how it works, or it could be on its website. Just thought you might want to know.

[Exophase]

Originally Posted by gameman733

Actually, VMWare doesnt work like a wrapper. It actually emulates the
hardware. I believe it says that in its help file on how it works, or it could be on its website. Just thought you might want to know.

I looked all over the website and all I could find is that it requires an x86 processor. Which indicates that it's not a complete interpretive emulator....

Furthermore:

"Each virtual machine created with VMware Workstation 4 provides a platform that includes the following devices that your guest operating system can see.


Processor

Same processor as that on host computer
Single processor per virtual machine on symmetric multiprocessor systems "

So the hardware being emulated is probably auxilary, with the CPU being directly executed as much as possible......

- Exo

[iwod]

The funny thing is.......... even, if technically PS2 is better than Xbox, PS2 games plotted to Xbox actually looks better. I think Kingdom Dynasty 3 will be ploted to xbox, which means you could just play the game on the xbox plotted version with a xbox emulator rather than getting a 3x powerful pc to play a PS2 game.......... Now... i really want more games ploted to xbox from ps2 so when there is a epsxe like cxbx i could play it on my pc. ^_^