Game Stooge

Analyzing the Xbox 720 Rumors

• Scribbled on January 29th, 2012 by Jordan Lund
• Filed in Features, Industry News, Kinect, Microsoft Xbox 360, Rumor Mill

First let me say, I hate the rumor mill. Seriously. People get all wound up and excited over news that isn’t even official yet and typically when things are “reported” this far in advance, from unofficial “secret” sources they’re inevitably wrong.

That didn’t stop news organizations and bloggers last week from discussing ad infinitum all the details about the upcoming Xbox 720. To give you a hint, we don’t even know that “Xbox 720″ is even a name. Yes, it appeared on arena signs in Real Steel and that’s about as far as it goes officially.

So let’s take a look at what has everyone all in a tizzy:

1) Xbox 720 “Oban” CPU is in production:

Some 10,000 CPUs went into production at the end of 2011, presumably for dev kits. This means a couple of different things. No hardware spec is finalized and developers don’t currently have a single thing to work with. Folks hoping for a 2012 release are most likely out of luck. It takes more than 12 months to come up with a commercially viable game.

2) 720 Graphics weak?

This was reported by CVG, ZD Net and TechEye. The Oban CPU is purportedly a “System on a Chip” or SoC, with the GPU integrated into the CPU design. There are competing rumors as to exactly which GPU we’re talking about. Some sites say it’s a modified ATI 7000 series, others say it’s an ATI 6670.

This had PC gamers up in arms over the lack of technical specs on the GPU, after all, how could you possibly play Call of Duty on anything less than GeForce GTX 580?

What they forget is that the current Xbox 360, perfectly capable of playing things like Skyrim without a hitch, is running a much less powerful GPU. The Xenos chip in the 360 is just about equivalent to the Radeon X1800, a graphics card from 2005, with some added features from the R600 from 2006.

When you have a console platform you have less of an overhead so you get more punch from the hardware you choose to use. You don’t need a top of the line graphics board to produce 1080p images after all, we aren’t talking about a PC that’s trying to manage a desktop OS in addition to playing a game. That’s one of the big benefits to gaming on a console instead of a PC.

3) Xbox 720 will be a Blu-Ray device and won’t play used games.

This rumor goes back to a Sony patent filed shortly before the release of the PlayStation 3 where they claimed that the Blu-Ray protection scheme would allow them to lock down a disc and prevent it from being played on more than one system.

How that would work when it’s a common practice to, say, take a game over to a friend’s house or rent or buy used is beside the point. Even Sony recognized it as a terrible idea and scuttled it before the PS3 launch. In an era where consoles are more technical than ever and often need to be replaced it would be a colossal blunder to create one system only media.

Now, as far as Blu-Ray goes, there have only been a handful of games on the 360 that required the use of more than one disc and of them, really, only LA Noire has been worth playing. On the PS3 side most of the extra space on Blu-Ray has been used by either repeating data to decrease load times (’cause Blu-Ray is slow) or for alternate language tracks which take up large amounts of space.

For the next disc format it’s possible Microsoft could choose Blu-Ray, it’s also possible that they’ll go with some custom format the way Sega did with the Dreamcast and Nintendo did with the Gamecube. It’s impossible to say at this point since the next Xbox does not yet exist.

4) Kinect 2! Kinect 2!

Not only that, but the motion sensor will be so good it can lip read! Everyone better stay the hell away from the pod bay doors in that case.

Seriously though, of all the rumors this one is the most likely to be true. Microsoft re-invigorated the Xbox 360 by releasing the Kinect and bundling it in has been a huge success. The hardware continued to develop and a slightly beefier version for PC is about to unleash on the world. It’s not hard to think that a modified PC version of the Kinect will be included in the next Xbox.

In the end, please, please don’t get upset or excited over rumor and innuendo. It’s all going to change before you even come close to hearing an official word from Microsoft. Save your energy for that!

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