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Xbox 720 Leaked spec

Saturday, June 23, 2012

The last couple of years has seen the rise of the gaming PC with consoles reaching there capabilities.  

PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 are great pieces of kit and have brought HD quality graphics to the masses.  The speculation that both console are due for new versions soon would not surprise many.

What we can expect is always the juice.  So in scanning the tech blogs it seems a leaked "discussion" document has some "possible" details.  

Lets take a look at a few "speculations";

The Xbox 720 offers up to six times the performance of its predecessor, 

True 1080p video, full native 3D, and improved video acceleration. 

Blueray support,

Five different power states - full power, media playback, idle, streaming, and standby. Varied power states and improved processing power would allow for multiple apps to run at the same time. 

Software upgrades would allow media to be streamed to any smart device, so a user could start playing a game or movie on a TV, move it to a tablet or phone, and then continue playing. A mentioned DVR feature would also allow live TV to be recorded and streamed in the same manner,

Windows 8 variant based,

Kinect would logically get an update to improve the voice recognition plus a HD camera on the device. An improved tracking system and dedicated processing just for the Kinect would actually allow for four players to use the Kinect simultaneously, 

There's also a possibility that we may see some force feedback-enabled peripherals like a steering wheel,

Possible release date in late 2013, a price tag of US$299, and even augmented reality glasses with 4G connectivity,

The US lawyers had the document removed from the Website it was published on.  The above all seem sensible and viable so we look forward to seeing the results. 

HDMI 1.4 stereo 3D arrives on Xbox 360

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

A while back, Eurogamer ran a report revealing that full-resolution stereoscopic 3D using the HDMI 1.4 standard was coming to the Xbox 360. Five months on, Batman: Arkham City is the first shipping game to utilise it.

Previously there has been some confusion as to whether the Xbox 360 hardware is physically capable of carrying the HDMI 1.4 stereoscopic 3D signal. There was some concern that the older HDMI 1.2 standard supported by the Xbox 360 couldn't be extended in the same way that the HDMI 1.3 controller in the PlayStation 3 was repurposed to support the new standard.

However, the release of Batman: Arkham City confirms that from a hardware perspective, any Xbox 360 with an HDMI port can offer the same level of support as the PlayStation 3. Our analysis of the game confirms that the two consoles are both outputting the same 1280x1470 60Hz signal. This comprises of two native 720p images, with 30 lines of blanking information between them.

So how is HDMI 1.4 output possible on older consoles? It turns out that the new standard is rather conservative. A 1280x1470 framebuffer actually requires less bandwidth than native 1080p - and both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 have supported that for ages. Even 3D Blu-Ray movies only run at with the equivalent bandwidth of 1080p at 48 frames per second - well below the 1920x1200/60Hz max of the interface. So HDMI 1.4 support on an HDMI 1.2 console boils down to making the hardware output a custom resolution and nothing more.

In terms of Arkham City itself, the game uses the same TriOviz technology as Gears of War 3 - though the Epic title was restricted to the half-res side-by-side functionality we've seen on other 360 stereo 3D games. Curiously though, while both games seem to be operating at native 720p on both platforms - as we would expect - the Xbox 360 version seems to have a one pixel wide blur across the whole image.

From EuroGamer

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